by Milena Agus
On one of the following nights the Veteran told grandmother that his father hadn’t died during one of the bombings of Genoa but had been tortured by the Gestapo. His body had been thrown into the street outside the Casa dello Studente, disfigured by brutal wounds. But he hadn’t told where his daughter-in-law was, or the partisans who had been telegraphing from his house to the Allies. He had insisted on staying in the house so that everything would seem normal to those who were watching them after the tip-off, and so the others had been able to escape into the Apennines. He wanted his son and daughter-in-law to have a family, he had told her as he said goodbye, and then he had sat down to wait for the Gestapo. The Veteran’s daughter was born in the mountains. But maybe it wasn’t true, he had heard that she was the daughter of a German. He couldn’t even imagine his wife in love with someone else, so he felt that the father of his daughter was a monster who perhaps had taken her violently, surely when she had tried to save her father-in-law. And he had never been able to touch that woman again, that was why they hadn’t had children. He, too, had become a habitué of the brothels. The Veteran burst into tears and then he was horribly ashamed, because he had been taught as a boy never to show grief. Then grandmother also began to cry, saying that she instead had been taught not to show joy, and maybe that had been right, because the only thing that had gone well for her, marrying grandfather, she was indifferent to, and she never understood why those suitors all fled, but anyway what do we really know about others, what did the Veteran know.
On the subject of not understanding, she had once got up her courage and, with her heart beating so hard she thought it would burst out of her chest, asked grandfather if, now that he knew her better—not that, for heaven’s sake, knowing her better was a great thing—but anyway if, having lived with her all this time and having no need to go to the brothel anymore, he loved her. And grandfather had sort of smiled to himself, without looking at her, and then he had given her a pat on the behind and hadn’t even dreamed of answering. Another time, during a service that she couldn’t tell the Veteran about, grandfather said she had the most beautiful ass he had ever had in his life. And so what can we know, truly, even about those closest to us.
11.
In 1963, grandmother went with her husband and papa to visit her sister and brother-in-law who had emigrated to Milan.
The house in the village had been sold to help the sisters, and my grandparents had given up their share, but still the others couldn’t make it, three families farming a property of less than twenty hectares. The agrarian reforms had been cautious and the Rebirth Plan was all wrong, as it was based on the chemical and iron and steel industries, and, having been initiated by people from the mainland with public funds, did nothing for us here, grandfather said; rather, the future of Sardinia would have been in manufacturing, which would have made use of the existing resources. For the other two sisters, who lived on the land, it made things easier, in the end, when one had left. Grandmother had suffered a lot and didn’t even go to San Gavino to see her youngest sister, her brother-in-law, and their children take the train for Porto Torres. And she had suffered for the house, too. The new owners had replaced the arched front entrance with an iron gate. The wooden pilasters, and the low wall separating her lolla from the courtyard, had been knocked down, and the lolla closed in by aluminum-frame windows. The low upper floor, which looked out over the roof of the lolla, and where the hayloft had been, had become a mansard, like the ones you see in postcards of the Alps. The stalls for the oxen and the woodshed made into a garage for cars. The flower beds reduced to a narrow perimeter along the wall. The well plugged up with cement. The tile roof, above the loft that was now a mansard, replaced by a terrace with a hollow-brick parapet. The multicolored terra-cotta tiles, which made kaleidoscopic designs on the floor, covered by outdoor tile. And the furniture was too much for the space of the rooms that the sisters now occupied in the houses of their husbands’ families, and no one wanted it—so old and cumbersome, from a time best forgotten. Only grandmother had taken the things from the bedroom she had had as a new bride, to re-create it in Via Giuseppe Manno.
By the time they made the trip to Milan she knew that the family had grown prosperous, because her sister wrote to her that Milàn l’è il gran Milàn, Milan is the great Milan, and there was work for everyone and on Saturday they shopped at the supermarket and filled carts with perfectly packaged food, and that idea they had always had of economizing, of cutting no more than the exact number of slices of bread, of turning their coats, jackets, suits, of unraveling sweaters to reuse the wool, of resoling their shoes a thousand times—all done with. In Milan they went to the big department stores and got new clothes. What she didn’t like was the climate, the smog that blackened the edges of the sleeves and shirt collars and the children’s school smocks. She was constantly having to wash everything, but in Milan there was lots of water—they didn’t offer it on alternate days, as in Sardinia, and you could let it run and run, without worrying about washing yourself first, then with the waste water washing the clothes, then throwing the dirty water into the toilet. In Milan washing and bathing were fun. And then her sister didn’t have much to do after the housework, which was soon done, because the houses were small; millions of inhabitants had to live in that space—it wasn’t like Sardinia, with its enormous houses that were of no use to anyone, since they had no conveniences. In short, she had soon finished the housework and then she wandered around the city looking in the stores, and shopping.
My grandparents didn’t know what to bring to the wealthy relatives in Milan. After all, they didn’t need anything. So grandmother proposed a poetic package, for old times’ sake, because it was true that they ate and dressed well, but Sardinian sausage and a nice Pecorino and oil and wine from Marmilla and a side of prosciutto and marinated cardoons and sweaters for the children hand-knitted by grandmother would bring them the fragrance of home.
They set off without letting the relatives know. It would be a surprise. Grandfather got a map of Milan and studied the streets and planned itineraries for seeing the best sights in the city.
They all three got new clothes in order not to make a bad impression. Grandmother bought some Elizabeth Arden cream, because now she was fifty and wanted the Veteran—her heart told her that they would meet—to find her still beautiful. Not that she was very worried by this. People always said that a man of fifty would never look at a woman the same age, but this reasoning was valid only for the things of the world. Not love. Love doesn’t care about age or anything else that isn’t love. And it was with that love that the Veteran had loved her. Who could say if he would recognize her right away. What sort of expression he would have. They would not embrace in the presence of grandfather, papa, or the Veteran’s wife or daughter. They would shake hands and gaze at each other. With unbearable intensity. On the other hand if she tried to go out alone and met him alone, then yes. And they would kiss and embrace to make up for all those years. And if he asked her, she would never go home. Because love is more important than anything else.
Grandmother had never been to the mainland, except to the small town where the spa was, and in spite of what her sister had written she thought that in Milan people would meet easily, as in Cagliari, and she was extremely excited because she thought she would see her Veteran on the street immediately. But Milan was very big, very tall, the buildings were massive, with sumptuous decorations; it was beautiful, gray and foggy, choked with traffic; bits of sky appeared amid the bare branches of the trees, and there were so many lighted shops, car headlights, traffic lights, clattering trams, crowds of people, their faces turned toward the collars of their coats in the rainy air. As soon as she got off the train in the Central Station, she looked closely at all the men to see if hers was there, tall, thin, the face gentle, carelessly shaved, the raincoat, because it was raining, and the crutch. There were so many men who got on and off those trains going everywhere, Paris, Vienna, Rome, Naples, Venice, and
it was impressive how big and rich the world was, but he wasn’t there.
Finally they arrived at the sister’s street and her building; they had expected it to be modern, a kind of skyscraper, but instead it was old. Grandmother found it beautiful, even though the façade was crumbling and around the windows the ornamental stucco putti were missing their heads and the flowers their stalks, and the slats of the shutters and many pieces of the balcony balustrades had been replaced by wooden boards, many windowpanes by sheets of cardboard. The entrance was full of notices and the cards showing the names weren’t under glass but pasted next to the only bell. Still, they were sure they had arrived, since the letters had gone back and forth for a year from that address in Milan. They rang and a woman leaned out from the balcony on the second floor. She said that the sardignoli women weren’t home at that time, but they could come in and go up and ask some other terún, some other worthless southerners. And who were they? Were they looking for a servant? The sardignole women were the most reliable.
So they all went in. It was dark and the air was close, smelling of toilets and cabbage. The stairway must have been beautiful once, because the well in the middle was vast, but the bombing in the war would have damaged it, since many of the steps seemed dangerous. Grandfather insisted on going first, keeping to the wall, and then papa, holding tight to his hand, and then grandmother, whom he told to put her feet exactly where he had put his. They climbed up, all the way to the roof. There were no apartments. There was a doorway opening onto a long dark corridor that went all around the stairwell, with doors leading to storerooms. But to these storeroom doors were attached the cards with the names, and at the end was their brother-in-law’s. They knocked, but no one answered; other people looked out into the corridor, and when they explained whom they were looking for, and who they were, the neighbors welcomed them warmly and invited them into their attic to wait. The brother-in-law was out with the rag cart, the sister at her cleaning job, the children stayed with the nuns all day. They sat on the bed, under the single window, through which a bit of gray sky was visible. Papa wanted to go to the bathroom, but grandfather glared at him, because it was clear that there was no bathroom.
Maybe they should have left right away. All they could bring those wretched people was shame. But it was late. They had already closely questioned the kind, affectionate neighbors, who were also from the south, and to leave now would have been to add insult to injury.
So they waited. The only one who was really sad was grandfather. Papa, at least, was enthusiastic, because in Milan he would find some scores that in Cagliari you had to order and wait months for, and grandmother didn’t care about anything except meeting the Veteran: she had been waiting for this moment since the autumn of 1950. She immediately asked her sister where the case di ringhiera were, the buildings where the balconies ran all around the inside of the courtyard, with apartments opening off them. She said she was curious because she had heard about them, and so she got the directions for the neighborhood where they were concentrated. She let grandfather take papa to see La Scala, the Duomo, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, the Castello Sforzesco, and to buy the scores that could not be found in Cagliari. Of course grandfather was disappointed, but he said nothing, as always, and did not hinder her in any way. In fact, in the morning he showed her on the map the streets she had to take to see the places that interested her, and told her which tram she was to take and left her telephone tokens and useful numbers and money in case she got lost. She must not get upset; she was to call a taxi from a phone booth and return home quietly. Grandmother was not insensitive or stupid or mean, and she realized perfectly what she was doing and that she was hurting grandfather. This she would not have done for anything in the world. For anything in the world—except her love. So, with her heart in her throat, she went to look for the Veteran’s house. She was sure that she would find it: a large, tall building with carved stone balconies, and a big door on the street and a passageway that formed a grand entrance and opened onto an enormous courtyard, facing which were the many stories of narrow balconies with railings. The Veteran was in that mezzanine apartment, with the door at the top of three or four steps, where his daughter waited for him in any weather, and windows with grates and two big rooms painted white, in which there was nothing of the past. Grandmother, with her heart in a turmoil, as if she were a criminal, went into a café and asked for a telephone book and looked for the name of the Veteran, but, even though he was from Genoa, there were pages of that name, and the only hope was to be lucky and find the right neighborhood and the right house. There were case di ringhiera on many long streets, and grandmother looked into the shops as well. They looked prosperous—the food shops resembled Vaghi, on Via Bayle, in Cagliari—and there were a lot of them, and they were crowded, but maybe the Veteran, coming home from work, was doing the shopping; maybe she would see him in front of her, handsome in his raincoat when the rain fell on him. He would be smiling at her and telling her that he had not forgotten her, either, and in his heart had been expecting her.
Papa, the cousins, and grandfather, on the other hand, had gone into the center of the city, holding one another by the hand in the increasingly thick fog, and grandfather had bought his son and nephews chocolate at Motta, sitting at a little table, and then had taken them to the best toy stores, where he had bought his nephews Lego sets and little airplanes that fly above the ground, and even a home table-soccer game, and then they had gone into the Duomo and to have an ice-cream cone in the Galleria. My father speaks of that trip to Milan as a wonderful time except that he missed his piano. If grandmother had found the Veteran, she would have run away with him, just as she was, taking with her only what she had on, her new coat, her hair gathered under a wool beret, and her purse and the shoes she had bought so that if she met him she would look elegant.
Never mind about papa and grandfather, even though she loved them, and they would miss her terribly. She consoled herself with the idea that the two of them were a unit: they were always talking, a little ahead of her when the three of them went out, and at the table they chatted to each other while she washed the dishes, and when papa was little he wanted his father to say good night, and read him a bedtime story and give him all the reassurances that children need before going to sleep. Never mind about Cagliari, about the dark, narrow streets of Castello that unexpectedly opened to a sea of light, never mind about the flowers she had planted that would flood the terrace of Via Manno with color, never mind about the laundry hanging out in the mistral. Never mind about the beach at the Poetto, a long desert of white dunes beside clear water that, no matter how far you walked, never got deep, while schools of fish swam between your legs. Never mind about summers in the blue-and-white striped bathing hut, the plates of malloreddus with tomato sauce and sausage after swimming. Never mind about her village, with the odor of hearth fires, of pork and lamb and the incense in church when they went to her sisters’ for holidays. But then the fog became denser and the top stories of the buildings seemed to be enveloped in clouds and you had to practically bump into people to see them, for they were mere shadows.
In the next days, in the city still shrouded in fog, grandfather took her by the arm, and on his other side held papa by the shoulders, who in turn gave his hand to the smaller cousins, so that, attached to one another, they would not get lost and could still enjoy the things that were close up and never mind those which the fog made invisible. A strange cheerfulness had come over grandfather, ever since grandmother had stopped looking for the case di ringhiera. He kept making jokes, and at meals they all laughed, and the attic didn’t seem so squalid and cramped anymore. And when they went out, tied together like that, even grandmother, if she hadn’t had that nearly heart-stopping longing for the Veteran, would have been amused by grandfather’s jokes.
On one of those days he became obsessed with the idea that he had to buy her a nice dress, one that was worthy of a trip to Milan, and he said something he had never said
before: “I want you to buy something beautiful. Really beautiful.”
And so they stopped to look in all the finest shop windows, and papa and the cousins grumbled because it was very boring to wait while grandmother tried this and that for the mirror, indifferently.
By now, in fog-wrapped Milan, there was less and less likelihood of meeting the Veteran, and grandmother didn’t care at all about the dress, but they bought it anyway, a paisley pattern in pastels, and grandfather insisted that she loosen her bun in the shop, to see what all those blue and pink moons and stars looked like with her cloud of black hair. He was so happy with the purchase that he wanted grandmother to wear the new dress every day under her coat, and before they went out he’d make her twirl around, and he’d say, “It’s beautiful,” but he seemed to mean “You’re beautiful.”
And for this, too, grandmother never forgave herself. For having been unable to seize those words out of the air and be happy.
