The House in Via Manno

by Milena Agus

  The black notebook with the red border was now with the Veteran, who read through it and was a very demanding teacher, because for every spelling mistake, repetition of a word, or other error, he gave her a smack on the bum and ruffled her hair and wanted her to rewrite the whole thing. ‘It’s no good, non mi va bééne,’ he’d repeat, with that closed e sound they use in Genoa and Milan, and Nonna wasn’t in the least offended; she enjoyed it enormously.

  And she was mad about his music. He would sing classical pieces for her, doing all the different instruments, and then some time later he’d do them again and she’d get the title and the composer right, or he’d sing opera with the men’s and women’s voices. Sometimes he’d recite poems, like those by someone he’d gone to school with — Giorgio Caproni — which Nonna liked a great deal because they made her feel like she was in Genoa, where she’d never been, even though the places in the poem resembled Cagliari. Everything was vertical, so that when you came into port — this had happened to her once on the boat returning from Sant’Efisio — the houses seemed to be built one on top of the other. Just like the Genoa described by the Veteran and by that poet friend of his, or by that other poor fellow, that Dino Campana who died in a mental asylum — dark and labyrinthine and mysterious and damp, then opening onto sudden and unexpected views of the great Mediterranean light, blinding, so that even if you were in a hurry, you couldn’t help but look out over a wall, or over an iron railing, and enjoy the rich sky and sea and sun. And if you looked down, you saw the rooftops, the terraces with geraniums and washing hanging out, and the agaves on the rocky slopes, and the lives of all the people, who seem really small and fleeting, but also joyful.

  Of all Nonna’s services, the Veteran’s favourite was the Geisha, the most difficult one. With Nonno, she could get away with just talking about what was for dinner, whereas the Veteran wanted more sophisticated services, like the description of Poetto beach, and Cagliari, and her village, and stories about her daily life and about her past and about the emotions she had felt down the well. He asked her a whole lot of questions, and he wanted detailed answers.

  So, my Nonna came out of her shell, and started enjoying it. She would go on and on about the pure white dunes at Poetto, and their blue-and-white striped beach hut, and she described how, if you went there after the winds in winter to check if it was still standing, mountains of white sand blocked the entrance and, looking from the water’s edge, it really seemed like a snow-covered landscape, especially if it was intensely cold and you had on gloves and a woollen hat and an overcoat, and the windows of all the huts were closed. Except that these huts had blue, orange, and red stripes, and you couldn’t really forget that the sea was there, even if it was behind you.

  In the summer, they would go there on holiday — even the neighbours and their children would come along — and they took everything they needed in a little cart. She wore a special beach dress that buttoned up at the front, with big embroidered pockets; whereas the men, when they were there on a Sunday or on a holiday, wore pyjamas or terry towelling bathrobes, and they all bought themselves sunglasses — even Nonno, who’d always said that sunglasses were ta gan’e cagai, a load of shit.

  How she liked Cagliari, and the sea, and her village with its smell a mix of wood, open fires, horse poo, soap, wheat, tomatoes, and hot bread.

  But not as much as she liked him. She liked him better than anything else. With him she was ashamed of nothing, even peeing together to expel their stones, and because all her life people had always told her she must have come here from the moon, it was as if, finally, she’d met someone from the same place, and that was the most important thing in life — what she’d always been missing.

  And in fact, after the thermal treatment, Nonna no longer scrawled on the decorative patterns halfway up the wall, which are still here in via Manno, nor did she rip her embroidery, which is still on my school smocks from when I was a child, and which, if God wishes, and I truly hope he wishes, I will pass on to my children.

  And the embryo of my father didn’t miss out on that most important thing in life either.

  She had given the little notebook to the Veteran, because she knew that she would no longer have time for writing. She had to begin living. Because the Veteran had been just a moment, and Nonna’s life was many more things.

  14

  Back home Nonna had fallen pregnant at once, and in all those months she never had problems with kidney stones. Her tummy grew, and Nonno and the neighbours wouldn’t let her touch anything and treated her like nènniri, the little newborn wheat plants. My father had a light-blue wooden rocking crib, and all his baby clothes were made at the last minute, out of superstition. When Papà turned one, Nonno wanted to hold a big party in the kitchen in via Sulis, with a hand-embroidered tablecloth, and he bought a camera, and finally, poor thing, he was able to enjoy a birthday cake — American-style, with layers of almost-solid custard, and chocolate, and sponge, and a little candle. Nonna’s not in the photos. She ran away to cry in the bedroom, overcome by emotion when they started singing, ‘Happy birthday to you.’ And when they tried to persuade her to come back out, she kept saying she couldn’t believe a child had come out of her, and not just stones. She continued weeping unrestrainedly, and her sisters, who had come especially from the village, and Nonno, must surely have expected some episode of macchiòri that would reveal to everyone that Nonna was crazy. But Nonna got up off the bed, dried her eyes, returned to the kitchen, and took her boy in her arms. She’s not in the photos because, with her eyes all swollen, she felt ugly, and for her son’s first birthday she wanted to be beautiful.

  Nonna fell pregnant at other times, but the most important thing in life was evidently missing from those embryos that would have become my father’s siblings — they didn’t want to be born, turning back after the first few months.

  In 1954, Nonno and Nonna came to live here in via Manno. They were the first to leave the shared house in via Sulis, and, even though via Manno is just nearby, they missed it. So, Nonno would invite the old neighbours around on a Sunday and cook fish or sausages on the grill on the terrace, and he’d toast bread with oil, and when the weather was nice they’d put out the picnic tables and chairs that they’d take to the hut at Poetto in the summer.

  Actually, Nonna had loved via Manno straightaway, even before their building had been replaced, ever since they came to look at the big hole and the piles of rubble. The terrace soon became a garden. I remember the Virginia creeper, and the ivy climbing up the end wall, and the geraniums grouped by colour — purple, pink, and red. In spring, the little yellow forest of broom and freesias would flower; in summer, the dahlias and perfumed jasmine and bougainvilleas; in winter, the pyracantha was covered with red berries that we used for Christmas decorations.

  When the mistral blew, we’d put on scarves and run up to save the plants, placing the pots against the low walls or covering them with plastic, and bringing some of the more delicate ones into the house until the wind died down and stopped blowing everything away.

  15

  Sometimes I thought that the Veteran didn’t love Nonna. He hadn’t given her his address, and though he knew where she lived, he’d never even sent her a postcard. He could have signed a woman’s name; Nonna would have recognised his writing from the poems she’d kept. The Veteran hadn’t wanted to see her again. He, too, thought she was crazy, and had been afraid he’d find her on the steps of his house one day, or in the courtyard, waiting for him in any weather — in the rain, in the fog, or dripping with sweat if it was one of those sweltering, windless summers they get in Milan.

  Or maybe not. Maybe it really was love, and he didn’t want her to be so foolish as to leave everything else in her world for him. Why get in touch and ruin everything? Why turn up in front of her and say: ‘Here I am, I’m the life you could have had and didn’t’? Torturing her, poor woman. As if she hadn’t suffered enough, up there in the barn, cutting her arms and her hair, or in the
well, or staring at the front door on those famous Wednesdays.

  And to make that kind of sacrifice, staying away for the other person’s wellbeing, you have to really love them.

  16

  I wondered, never daring to say this to anyone of course, if my father’s real father wasn’t perhaps the Veteran. When I was in my last year of school and we studied the Second World War, the teacher once asked if anyone’s grandfather had been in the war and what they’d done, and I instinctively said, ‘Yes.’

  My Nonno was a lieutenant on the heavy cruiser Trieste, I told him, in the Third Division of the Royal Navy. He participated in the hell that was Matapan in March 1941, and was shipwrecked when the Trieste was sunk by the Third Squadron of B-17s of the Ninety-Eighth Group in Mezzo Schifo harbour at Palau; that was the only time Nonno came to Sardinia, I said, when our sea was red with waves of blood. After the armistice between Italy and the Allied Forces, the Germans took him prisoner aboard the light cruiser Jean de Vienne (which had been captured by the Italian Royal Navy in 1942), and deported him to the Hinzert concentration camp, where he remained interned until the Germans retreated eastwards in the winter of ’44, amid high snow and ice; if you didn’t march, they’d shoot you or crack your skull with the butt of a rifle, and luckily the Allies reached them, and an American doctor amputated his leg.

  But, as Nonna always said to me, he was still a handsome man when she secretly watched him reading in those first days at the thermal baths — that boy’s neck of his leaning over his book, and those liquid eyes, and that smile, and those strong arms with the sleeves of his shirt rolled up, and those big, child-like hands from being a pianist, and everything else that she yearned for all the rest of her life. And yearning is a sad thing, but it’s also kind of happy.

  17

  With age, Nonna fell ill with kidney problems again, and every two days I went to pick her up at via Manno and took her for dialysis. She didn’t want to inconvenience me, so she waited down in the street, with her bag that contained a nightdress and slippers and a little shawl, because after dialysis she was always cold, even in summer. She still had her thick black hair and her intense eyes and all her teeth, but her arms and legs were full of holes from the drips, and her skin had turned yellowish. And she was so emaciated that as soon as she got into the car and placed her bag in her lap, I always had the feeling that this object — which would have weighed, at most, three hundred grams — might squash her.

  One dialysis day, she wasn’t waiting for me at the front door, and I thought she must have felt weaker than usual. I ran up the three flights of stairs so as not to be late, because there were set times for the treatment at the hospital. I rang the bell, and when she didn’t answer I was afraid she might have fainted, so I let myself in with my set of keys. She was lying peacefully on the bed, asleep, all ready to go out, with her bag on the chair. I tried to wake her, but she didn’t respond. I felt a desperation deep in my soul. Nonna was dead.

  I got on the phone; all I can remember is that I wanted to call someone to come and revive her, my Nonna, and it took a lot to convince me that no doctor could do it.

  Only after she died did I learn that they’d wanted to put her in an asylum, and that before the war my great-grandparents had come to Cagliari from the village, by bus, and had thought that the asylum on Monte Claro would be a nice place for their daughter.

  My father never knew these things. My great-aunts had told Mamma the story when she was about to marry Papà. They had invited her to the village to talk to her in great secrecy, to let her know what blood flowed through the veins of the boy she loved and with whom she would have children.

  They took on this embarrassing task since Nonno, their brother-in-law, hadn’t done the proper thing and told his future daughter-in-law about it, even though he’d always known everything and, that May when he’d arrived as an evacuee, he had seen it all, de dognia colori. They didn’t want to criticise; he was a great man, and even though he was a communist, an atheist, and a revolutionary, he’d been sa manu de Deus, the hand of God, for their family. He’d sacrificed himself and had married Nonna who was sick with kidney stones — the lesser ill really, because the greater ill was in her head — and with Nonna gone, suitors had arrived for them, too, poor things, and normal life had begun without that sister, so often locked up in the barn, who cut her hair so it looked all mangy. They could understand why Nonna had never told her son anything — after all, he already had her blood — but Mamma, a healthy girl, she needed to know. So, sitting on a stool in front of the Sardinian sweets and the coffee in gilded cups, my mother heard the story from her future aunts.

  To her parents, the asylum had seemed a nice place for Nonna; on the hill there was a large, dense forest of maritime pine, tree-of-heaven, cypress, oleander, broom, and carob, with pathways that Nonna would be able to walk up and down. And also, it wasn’t just a single, gloomy building block that might have been a bit frightening, but a whole series of early-twentieth-century villas, well looked after and surrounded by a garden.

  Nonna would be in the Quiet Ones section: a two-storey villa with a very elegant, glassed-in entrance hall, a sitting room, two refectories, and eight dormitories; if it weren’t for the staircases built into the wall, no one would have picked that crazy people lived there. Since Nonna was a ‘quiet one’, she would be able to go outside, and maybe even go to the building where management was, which had a library and a reading room where she would be able to write and read novels and poems as she pleased, but under supervision. And she would never have to have any contact with the other villas for the Semi-Agitated and the Agitated, and dreadful things, like being locked in an isolation cell or being tied to a bed, would never happen to her. She was worse off at home, really, because when she had her crises of desperation and wanted to kill herself, they had to save her somehow. And how else but by locking her up in the barn, where they’d had to put bars on the window, or tying her to the bed with rags? There were no bars on the windows of the asylum’s villas — they had the kind of windows selected by a certain Doctor Frank for the Musterlinger Asylum, which were fitted with a special security lock and had iron in the glass, but you couldn’t see it.

  They took away with them the Information Sheet on the Admission of the Insane into the Cagliari Asylum, though they’d still have to convince Nonna to be examined, and they’d have to give it some thought themselves. And then Italy entered the war.

  But they couldn’t keep her at home; even though she’d never hurt anybody, apart from herself and her things, and posed no danger, everyone in the village used to point out their street by saying, ‘Over there, where the macca lives.’

  Nonna had always embarrassed them, ever since that time in church when she’d seen a boy she liked and had started constantly turning around towards the pews where the men sat, smiling and staring at him, and the boy was giggling, too. Then she’d taken her hairpins out and let down her black, shiny cloud of hair, which looked like a seductive weapon of the devil — some kind of witchery. My great-grandmother ran out of the church dragging Nonna, who was, at that stage, her only daughter, and who was yelling, ‘But I love him, and he loves me!’ And as soon as they were inside the front door of the house, she beat her so hard with everything she could find — a horse’s bellyband, straps, pots, carpet-beaters, ropes from the well — that the girl was reduced to a rag doll that flopped around in her hands. Then she called for the priest to get the demon out of the child’s body, but instead the priest blessed her, and said that Nonna was a good girl, and he couldn’t see so much as a shadow of the devil.

  My great-grandmother would tell this story to everyone to excuse her daughter, to make them see that she was mad but good, and that there was no danger in their house. But, just to be sure, from time to time she did a bit of exorcism of her own on Nonna, until she married Nonno.

  Nonna’s sickness could be defined as a kind of love-craziness, in the following sense: a nice-looking man only had to cr
oss the threshold of the house and smile at her, or just look at her — and this did happen, because she was very beautiful — and she would think him an admirer. She would begin waiting for a visit, a declaration of love, a marriage proposal, and would write constantly in that damned notebook, which they’d looked for to take to the doctor at the asylum, but it was nowhere to be found.

  Naturally, no one came to ask for her hand in marriage, and so she waited; she sat on a stool on the lolla and she stared at the front door, dressed in her best, and wearing her earrings — she truly was beautiful — with a fixed smile as though she didn’t understand a thing, as though she’d arrived there from the moon. Then her mother discovered that she was writing letters or love poems to these men, and when Nonna would realise that they’d never be coming back, the tragedy would begin, and she’d scream and throw herself on the ground and want to destroy herself and everything she’d made, and they’d have to tie her to the bed with rags. In reality, she never had any suitors, because no one in the village would ever have asked for Nonna’s hand. They just had to pray to God that someone would want the other sisters, who carried the shame of having a madwoman in the family.