The House in Via Manno

by Milena Agus

  But then the fog kept getting thicker, and the upper floors of the buildings seemed to be shrouded in clouds, and you had to bump right into people to see them because they were just shadows.

  During the next few days, through the streets of Milan, which were still shrouded in fog, Nonno took Nonna by the arm and held Papà’s shoulder on his other side, and he in turn held hands with his smaller cousins, because that way they wouldn’t lose each other and would at least see all the things nearby — too bad about those things that the fog made invisible. In these last days, after Nonna stopped looking for case di ringhiera, Nonno had become strangely cheerful and couldn’t stop making jokes, and everyone at the table laughed, and the attic didn’t even seem that squalid and cramped any more. When they went out, all linked up like that, Nonna, too, would have enjoyed some of Nonno’s witty remarks, if only she hadn’t had that tormented yearning for the Veteran that made it hard for her to breathe.

  One of those days Nonno got into his head the idea that he had to buy her a dress, a really beautiful one that was worthy of a trip all the way to Milan, and he even said a thing he’d never said before: ‘I want you to buy yourself something nice. Something beautiful.’

  So they stopped and looked in the windows of all the most elegant shops, and Papà and the little cousins kept grumbling because it was so boring waiting for Nonna to try on this and that with her unenthusiastic air.

  By now, the chances of finding the Veteran in a Milan immersed in fog were diminishing, and the dress didn’t matter in the least to Nonna, but they bought one anyway — in cashmere, with pastel-coloured patterns — and Nonno asked her to undo her bun in the shop, to see how good all those blue and pink moons and stars looked with her cloud of black hair. He was so happy with the purchase that he wanted Nonna to wear the new dress under her coat every day, and before going out he’d make her turn around, and he’d say, ‘It’s beautiful,’ but it seemed like he wanted to say, ‘You’re beautiful.’

  And Nonna never forgave herself for that either — for not knowing how to catch those words in the air and be happy with them.

  When the time came to say goodbye, she sobbed, with her cheek resting on the suitcase. She wasn’t crying for her sister, her brother-in-law, or her little nephews, but because destiny hadn’t wanted her to meet the Veteran, so that must mean he was dead. She remembered how in that autumn of 1950 she had thought she was in the Afterlife; besides, he was so thin, with that slender neck, that damaged leg, the child’s skin and hands, and that terrible retreat eastwards and the concentration camps and the shipwrecks, and maybe a Nazi father for his child. Now she could feel that he was dead. Otherwise, he would have looked for her — he knew where she lived, and Cagliari’s not like Milan. The Veteran might really no longer exist and that was why she cried.

  Nonno picked her up and sat her down on the only bed, under the tiny window of the attic. They comforted her. They put a little glass in her hand for the farewell toast — to meeting again in better times, her sister and brother-in-law said, though Nonno didn’t want to toast to better times but rather to that trip, during which they’d all been together and had eaten well and had also had a bit of a laugh.

  Then Nonna, with the glass in her hand, started to think that maybe the Veteran was alive after all — he’d survived so many terrible things, so why wouldn’t he have coped with ordinary life? And then she told herself that she still had an hour left — there was all the tram trip to the station — and the fog was starting to clear.

  But by the time they arrived at the central station, there was little time left before the departure of the train to Genoa, where they’d get the ship, and then another train, and then resume that life where you water the flowers on the terrace and prepare breakfast and then lunch and dinner, and your husband and your son, if you ask them how things are, they reply, ‘Normal. All normal. Don’t worry,’ and they never tell you things properly like the Veteran used to do, and your husband never tells you that you’re the only one for him, the one he’d always been waiting for, and that in May of 1943 his life had changed — never, in spite of all the perfected bedroom services and all the nights sleeping together.

  And now, if God didn’t want her to meet the Veteran, He should just kill her. The station was dirty, with litter and spit on the ground. As she sat waiting for her husband and son to get the tickets — Papà never chose to stay with her, and clearly preferred to stand in line with Nonno — she noticed some chewing gum stuck to her seat, she could smell toilets, and she felt an infinite disgust for Milan, which seemed ugly, like the whole world.

  She followed Nonno and Papà, who were talking away together, onto the escalator that led up to the trains, and she thought that if she turned back they wouldn’t even notice. There was no fog now. She would keep looking for the Veteran on all the disgusting streets in the world, through the winter chill that was on its way. She’d even beg, and maybe sleep on park benches; and if she died of pneumonia or hunger, all the better.

  So then she dropped all her luggage and packages, and threw herself down the escalator, crashing into the people coming up and saying, ‘Excuse me! Excuse me!’ But at the very bottom the escalator tripped her up, swallowing her shoe and a piece of her coat, and ripping her beautiful new dress and her stockings and her little woollen hat that had fallen off, and the skin on her hands and legs. She had cuts all over.

  Two arms helped her up. Nonno had thrown himself down after her, and was now holding her and stroking her like a child. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said to her. ‘It’s nothing.’

  Back home, she set about washing all the dirty clothes from the trip: shirts, dresses, blouses, socks, underwear — they’d bought everything new to go to Milan. They were well off now, and Nonna had a Candy washing machine with a cycle for tough fabrics and a cycle for delicates. She divided everything up: those that needed to be washed in high temperatures, and those in warm water. Maybe she was thinking about something else — no one knows — but she ruined everything.

  Papà tells me she hugged them, him and Nonno, amid tears and sobs, and went to get knives from the kitchen, which she gave them so they could kill her, and she scratched her face and banged her head against the wall and threw herself on the ground.

  Then my father heard Nonno phoning the aunts and saying that in Milan she hadn’t coped with seeing her youngest and most indulged sister reduced to such poverty, because here in Sardinia landowners were humble but dignified, and were respected by everyone, but the failed agrarian reform had ruined them and they’d had to emigrate, the women becoming maids — which, for a husband, is the worst humiliation — and the men breathing in the poisons of industry, with no protection and, above all, no respect, and their children feeling ashamed, at school, of their Sardinian surnames with all those u’s. He hadn’t suspected any of this, because the sister and brother-in-law had written saying that they were doing well, and he and Nonna had thought they’d surprise them with their visit, and instead they’d just shamed them.

  The kids had thrown themselves on the sausages and the prosciutto like they hadn’t eaten in who knows how long; his brother-in-law, when he cut the cheese and opened the bottle of mirto, had been overcome, and had told them he could never forget that when they divided up the property, Nonno hadn’t wanted Nonna’s share, but unfortunately it had all been for nothing — they’d thought no one could live off that land, but the people who’d stayed on had made the right decision.

  Nonna, who was made a bit differently, as her sisters well knew, couldn’t handle all this, and also she’d found out today that President Kennedy had been killed in Dallas, and she’d destroyed laundry worth a month’s wages. This didn’t matter to him — money comes and goes — but there was no way of calming her down, and their son was shocked. Could they come to Cagliari, please, at once, on the next bus?

  Actually, though, things began to look up for my great-aunt and great-uncle and my cousins in Milan. They moved from the attic to Cinisello
Balsamo, and my father, who always went to visit them during his music tours, said that they lived in a big, tall building full of immigrants — a rabbit warren of a building with lots of other immigrants, but there was a bathroom and a kitchen and a lift. There came a time when you couldn’t really talk about immigrants any more, because they now considered themselves Milanese and no one called them terún any longer, because now the fights were between the reds and the blacks of Piazza San Babila, where his cousins bashed and were bashed, while Papà went to the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatorium with his bags full of music, and took no interest in politics. Papà tells me that arguments broke out between him and his cousins, about politics and about Sardinia, because they asked stupid questions, like, ‘So is that jumper made from Sardinian orbace?’ — talking about a beautiful coarse jumper Nonna had knitted for him — or, ‘So what form of transport do you use to get around down there?’ or, ‘Do you have a bidet? Do you keep chickens on the balcony?’

  First Papà would laugh, then he’d get pissed off and tell them to get fucked, polite and calm pianist though he was. The cousins couldn’t forgive him for his lack of interest in politics, or for the fact that he didn’t sufficiently hate the bourgeoisie, that he’d never beaten up a fascist and had never been beaten up. Even as kids they’d gone to Capanna’s student meetings, they’d marched in protest rallies in Milan in May 1969, and they’d occupied the university in 1971.

  But they all loved one another and they always made up. Their friendship began during that famous November of 1963, in the attic, when they’d slipped out the window and wandered over the roofs, keeping it a secret from their parents — the Milan uncle out selling rags, the Cagliari uncle coming along to help him, the Milan aunt working as a maid, and the Cagliari aunt, totally mad, off studying the architecture of case di ringhiera, with that unforgettable woollen cap held in place by her plaited Sardinian-style buns.

  Nonna told me that her sister used to phone from Milan to tell her that she was worried about Papà — a boy from another world, all music. He had no girlfriends, whereas her own sons, who were younger, were already dating. The fact is, Papà wasn’t fashionable; he had short hair when everyone else, apart from the fascists, had long hair; poor thing, he certainly wasn’t a fascist — he just didn’t like his hair going in his eyes when he played. She felt sorry for him, with no girlfriend, and all alone with his music.

  Then Nonna, when she hung up, would start crying, afraid she’d passed on to her son her madness that made love flee. He’d always been alone as a boy — no one had ever invited him anywhere. He’d been an unsociable boy, at times clumsily affectionate, whose company no one ever sought out. In high school, things had gone better, but not much. She tried to tell Papà that there were other things to life besides music, and so did Nonno, though he laughed about it. They could never forget the night of the twenty-first of July 1969 when, as Armstrong landed on the moon, their son wouldn’t stop practising Brahms’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini, Opus 35, Book 1, for the end-of-term concert.

  12

  When Nonna realised she’d grown old, she told me she was afraid of dying. Not of death itself, which must, she thought, be like going to sleep or going on a trip, but because she knew that God would feel hurt because He’d given her many beautiful things in this world and she hadn’t been able to be happy, and for this He would not forgive her. Deep down she hoped she really was mad, because if she was sane, she’d definitely be going to Hell.

  She’d argue with God before going to Hell though. She’d point out to Him that if He created a person a certain way He couldn’t then demand that she act like she was someone else. She had put all her energy into convincing herself that this was the best life possible, and not that other one for which she felt a yearning and desire that took her breath away. But there were certain things she would genuinely ask God’s forgiveness for: the cashmere dress that Nonno had bought her in Milan that she’d ripped on the escalator at the station; the cup of coffee, like a dog’s bowl, at the foot of the bed during her first year of marriage; her inability to enjoy so many days at the beach, when she’d been thinking that the Veteran might arrive at Poetto, walking nimbly on his crutch.

  And then there was that winter’s day, when Nonno had come home with a bundle of mountain gear he’d borrowed from who knows who, and had proposed a trip up to Supramonte, organised by his office for the staff of the saltworks, and she, even though she’d never been to the mountains, had felt only irrepressible annoyance and had just wanted to tear that ridiculous clothing from his hands. But he stubbornly kept telling her that true Sardinians needed to get to know Sardinia.

  They’d lent Nonno an ugly pair of sports shoes and a heavy jumper, also very ugly, while the nicest things were for her and the boy. In the end, Nonna unenthusiastically said, ‘Alright then’, and started preparing bread rolls, while Nonno, who usually would have helped her, for some reason made sad plin plin sounds on donna Doloretta and donna Fannì’s piano. They went to bed early because they had to meet the group at five in the morning and go to Orgosolo, up to Punta sa Pruna, across the Foresta Montes, and then continue as far as the Dovilino megalithic circle and across the mountains that join Gennargentu to Supramonte, up as far as Mamoiada.

  Everything was covered in snow. Papà was beside himself with excitement, but Nonno’s teeth were chattering, and others in the group recommended the warmth of a fireplace, and potato ravioli, pork on a spit, and fil’e ferru in a local restaurant. But, no, he was stubborn. They were people of the sea and the plains, and they had to get to know those Sardinian mountains.

  The Foresta Montes, one of the few old-growth forests in Sardinia — its ancient holm oaks have never been cut — was immersed in silence and in a soft white snow that came up to their knees. So Nonno’s shoes and trousers were immediately soaked, but he went on in silence, without stopping. And he marched along at the same speed as everyone else. Nonna had walked ahead for a good stretch, almost as though she had neither husband nor son, but when Lake Oladi appeared down in the valley, frozen like something out of a fantasy world in that immense solitude, she stopped to wait for them.

  ‘Look! Look how beautiful that is!’

  Later, when they went through the durmast woods, where slender trunks all crossed over one another and were covered in snowflake-shaped moss, she put one of those fantastic leaves in her pocket, and picked a bunch of thyme that she’d use in broth once they got back to Cagliari. And she kept watching her footsteps, comparing her nice, fur-lined shoes with Nonno’s ugly shoes, because she wasn’t annoyed with him, not at all — in fact, she felt very sorry that she didn’t love him. She felt very sorry, and it pained her, and she wondered why, when it came to love, which is the most important thing, God had organised things in such an absurd way: you do all the kindest things imaginable, and yet there’s no way of making it come, and maybe you act like a bitch, like she was right now — she hadn’t even lent him a scarf. And still he followed her in the snow, half frozen, even missing the chance, hearty eater that he was, to eat potato ravioli from that part of the world and pork on a spit.

  During the return journey she felt so sorry for him that, in the dark of the bus, she rested her head on his shoulder, and a sigh of resignation escaped her. And Nonno was so cold it was frightening; he looked like a frozen corpse.

  At home, she prepared a hot bath and dinner, and she was frightened by how much Nonno drank. It must have been the same amount as usual, but it was as though she’d never seen it before.

  That night, though, it was beautiful — more beautiful than all the other times. Having put Papà to sleep, Nonna sat in her old nightgown and petticoat, ready to go to bed, lost in thought and eating an apple. Nonno locked the door of the kitchen, to make sure the boy couldn’t come in, and started their bordello game, ordering her to take off her nightgown and petticoat and lie naked on the table, as if she were his favourite meal. He turned on the heater so she wouldn’t catch cold, and started eating
again, helping himself to all that goodness. He touched and squeezed her all over and, each time before tasting something, even the delicious Sardinian country sausage, he would put it in Nonna’s pussy — in bordellos, that was the word you used. She started to get really excited, and touched herself, and at that point she no longer cared about loving him or not loving him. She just wanted to continue the game.

  ‘I’m your whore,’ she moaned.

  Then Nonno poured wine over her whole body, and licked her and sucked her, especially her big butter tits, which were his passion.

  But he wanted to punish her, maybe for the way she’d behaved on the trip, or who knows why — with Nonno, you could never tell — so he took his belt from his trousers and forced her to walk around the kitchen like a bitch, hitting her, but being careful not to hurt her too much and not to leave any marks on her beautiful arse. From under the table, Nonna stroked him and gave him head, which by then she’d learnt to do expertly; but every so often she stopped to ask him if she was a good whore, and how much she’d earned so far, and she didn’t ever want to stop playing this bordello game.

  They played for a long time, and then Nonno sat down to smoke his pipe, so she curled up on the far side of the bed, and, as usual, she fell asleep.

  13

  At night with the Veteran, on the other hand, she was so excited about having finally, surely, discovered the most important thing, that she lay awake looking at how handsome he was, making the most of a faint light in the darkness, and when he gave a frightened start, as though he heard shooting, or bombs falling on the ship and breaking it in two, she gently brushed his skin with her finger. In his sleep, the Veteran responded by pulling her towards him; even asleep he was never far from her. Then Nonna took heart, and made herself a little nook in the curve of the Veteran’s body and put his arm around her shoulders and his hand on her head, and the feeling that this new position gave her was such that she just couldn’t resign herself to the idea — which was senseless, in her opinion — of falling asleep when you’re happy. So she had to ask herself if people in love lived this way, whether it was even possible, or if they, too, had to decide at some point to eat and sleep.