by Milena Agus
How she loved Cagliari and the sea and her village, with its odor of wood, hearth, horse manure, soap, grain, tomatoes, warm bread.
But not as much as the Veteran. Him she loved above all else.
With him she felt no embarrassment, not even if they peed together to get rid of the stones, and since her whole life she had been told that she was like someone from the land of the moon, it seemed to her that she had finally met someone from her own land, and that was the principal thing in life, which she had never had.
In fact, after the thermal cure, grandmother never again scrawled over the decorations on the wall, which are still here in Via Manno, or tore the embroidery, which is still on the pockets of the smocks I wore as a child, and which, God willing, and I hope very much that he is, I will pass on to my children. My father’s embryo did not lack the principal thing.
She had given the little notebook to the Veteran, because she wouldn’t have time to write now. She had to begin to live. Because the Veteran was a moment and grandmother’s life was many other things.
14.
As soon as she came home she got pregnant, and in all those months she never had a kidney stone, and her stomach swelled, and grandfather and the neighbors wouldn’t let her touch anything and treated her cummenti su nènniri, like a shoot of grain just emerged from the earth. My father had a cradle of blue-painted wood and a layette put together at the last moment, superstitiously, and when he was a year old grandfather wanted to have a big celebration in the kitchen at Via Sulis, with the hand-embroidered cloth on the table. He bought a camera, and finally, poor man, he tasted a truly happy birthday cake—American style, sponge cake with layers of custard and chocolate, and a candle. Grandmother isn’t in the pictures. She had fled in tears to the bedroom, overcome by emotion, because they had begun to sing “Happy Birthday.” And when they tried to persuade her to return, she kept saying she couldn’t believe that a child had come out of her, and not just kidney stones. And she continued to weep uncontrollably, and her sisters, who had come from the village for the occasion, surely expected some macchiòri, some craziness, that would reveal to all those people that grandmother was mad. Instead, grandmother got up from the bed, dried her eyes, and went back to the kitchen and took her child in her arms. She isn’t in the photographs because, with her eyes swollen, she felt ugly, and she wanted to be pretty for her son’s first birthday.
Grandmother became pregnant other times, but all my father’s possible siblings evidently lacked the principal thing, and turned back after the first months, unwilling to be born.
In 1954 they came to live on Via Manno. They were the first to leave the common house on Via Sulis, and even though Via Manno is just around the corner, they felt regret. So on Sundays grandfather invited the old neighbors and he grilled fish or sausages on the terrace and toasted bread with oil, and when the weather was good they put out picnic tables and chairs, which in summer they brought to the bathing hut on the Poetto. Grandmother loved Via Manno right away, even before it was built, ever since she had gone to see the hole and the mounds of rubble. The terrace soon became a garden. I remember the fox grape and ivy that climbed up the back wall, the geraniums grouped by color, violets, pinks, reds. In spring a little yellow forest of broom and freesias bloomed, in summer dahlias and fragrant jasmine and bougainvillea, and in winter the pyracantha had so many red berries that we used them as Christmas ornaments.
When the mistral blew we put on bandannas and hurried up to save the plants, setting them against the walls or covering them with plastic, while some of the more delicate ones we brought into the house until the wind stopped blowing, sweeping everything away.
15.
Sometimes I thought that the Veteran hadn’t loved grandmother. He hadn’t given her his address, and he knew where she lived and had never sent even a postcard; he could have signed it with a girl’s name—grandmother would have recognized his handwriting because of the poems she had kept. The Veteran didn’t want to see her again. He, too, thought she was mad and was afraid of finding her on the steps of his house one day, or in the courtyard, waiting in whatever weather, rain, fog, or dripping with sweat if it was one of those hazy windless summers in Milan. Or no. Maybe it really was love and he didn’t want her to commit the folly of leaving for him all the things of her world. And then why show up and ruin everything? Appear and say, “Here I am, I’m the life that you could have lived and didn’t.” Torture her, poor woman. As if she hadn’t suffered enough, up in the loft, cutting her arms and her hair, or in the well, or staring at the door on those Wednesdays. And to make a sacrifice of that kind, to stay away for the good of the other, you have to really love that person.
16.
I wondered, without ever daring to say it to anyone, naturally, if the real father of my father was the Veteran, and when I was in the last year of high school and studying the Second World War and the professor asked if any of our grandfathers had fought, and where, my instinct was to say yes. My grandfather was a lieutenant on the heavy cruiser Trieste, III Division of the Royal Navy, and he took part in the inferno of Matapan in March, 1941, and was shipwrecked when the Trieste was sunk by the 3rd squadron of the 19th B17 Bomber Group, at the inlet of Mezzo Schifo, in Palau. That was the only time grandfather came to Sardinia, and he saw our sea when the waves were red with blood. After the Armistice the Germans imprisoned him on the light cruiser Jean de Vienne, captured by the Navy in 1942, and he was deported to the concentration camp of Hinzert and interned there until the Germans retreated to the east, in the winter of ’44, in the deep snow and ice, and if you didn’t march they shot you or split your head with a rifle butt. Luckily the Allies arrived and an American doctor amputated his leg. But my grandfather was still a very handsome man, as grandmother said, a man to look at secretly, in the first days at the baths, while he was reading, with that boyish neck bent over the book and those liquid eyes and that smile and those strong arms with the shirtsleeves rolled up and those hands, so large and childlike for a pianist—and to long for all the rest of your life. And longing is sad, but there’s a trace of happiness in it, too.
17.
Over the years grandmother began to have kidney problems again, and every two days I picked her up in Via Manno and took her to have dialysis. She didn’t want to cause me any inconvenience, so she waited down in the street with her bag, which held a nightgown and slippers and a shawl, because she was always cold after the dialysis, even in summer. Her hair was thick and black and her eyes bright and she still had all her teeth, but her arms and legs were full of holes, because of the intravenous tubes, and her skin had turned yellowish and she was so thin that as soon as she got in the car and put the purse on her lap I had the impression that that object, which couldn’t have weighed more than half a pound, might crush her.
One dialysis day she wasn’t at the door, and I thought she must be feeling weaker than usual. I ran up the three flights of stairs, so we wouldn’t be late, since the hospital had a strict schedule for the treatment. I rang but she didn’t answer, and I was afraid that she had fainted, so I opened the door with my keys. She was lying peacefully on the bed, asleep, ready to go out, with her bag on the chair. I tried to wake her, but she wouldn’t respond. I felt a desperation in my soul: my grandmother was dead. I picked up the telephone and I remember only that I wanted to call someone who would revive my grandmother, and it took a while to convince me that no doctor could do it.
Only after she died did I learn that my great-grandparents had wanted to commit her to a mental institution, and that before the war they had come from the village to Cagliari on the bus, and that the asylum, on Monte Claro, had seemed to them a good place for their daughter. My father never knew these things. My great-aunts told mamma, when she was about to marry papa. They invited her to the village, to speak to her in great secrecy and let her know what blood ran in the veins of the boy she loved and with whom she would have children. They were taking on this embarrassing situation beca
use their brother-in-law—even though he had always known everything and, arriving as an evacuee in that month of May, had seen her de dognia colori, in every guise—had not had the proper manners to tell his future daughter-in-law a thing. They didn’t want to criticize him, he was a fine man, and, though a Communist and an atheist and a revolutionary, for their family he had been sa manu de Deus, sacrificing to marry grandmother, who was ill de su mali de is perdas, sa minor cosa, poita su prus mali fiara in sa conca, with her kidney stones, the lesser evil—the greater was in her head. Because when grandmother was gone suitors came for them, too, poor women, and without that sister—who was often shut up in the hayloft, and cut her hair so she looked like a mangy dog—normal life had begun.
They could understand that he hadn’t told his son, since the blood he had he already had, but she was a healthy girl, and it was right that she should know. So, sitting on the bench with the Sardinian sweets in front of her and coffee in the cups with the gilded edges, my mother listened to the story told by her future aunts.
The asylum had seemed to the parents a good place for grandmother; it was on a densely wooded hill where maritime pines, ailanthus, cypresses, oleanders, broom, and locusts grew, and there were paths grandmother could walk on. And then it wasn’t a matter of a single large, grim structure that might frighten her but a series of villas built in the early years of the century, well tended and surrounded by gardens. The place where grandmother would have been was the ward for the Tranquil, a two-story villa with an elegant glass entrance, a living room, two dining rooms, and eight dormitories, and you wouldn’t have known that crazy people lived there, except for the stairs, which were enclosed between two walls. Since grandmother was Tranquil, she would have been able to go out and perhaps go to the Administration building, which had a library and a reading room where she could write and read novels and poetry at her pleasure, but under control. And she would never have contact with the other villas, where the Agitated and the Semi-Agitated were, and terrible things would never happen to her, like being locked in an isolation cell or being tied to the bed. All in all, at home it was worse, because, when she had her crises of despair and wanted to kill herself, they had to save her somehow. And how, except by locking her up in the hayloft, where they had had to put in a barred window, or by tying her to the bed with rags. In the cottages at the asylum, on the other hand, the windows had no bars. They were of a type adopted by a Dr. Frank in the asylum in Musterlinger: they were provided with an old spring lock, and there was wire mesh in the glass, but it was invisible. The parents had taken the information packet for admission to the Cagliari Asylum, although they would still have to persuade grandmother to be examined, and they themselves needed to think about it. And then Italy entered the war.
But they couldn’t keep her at home, and even if she had never hurt anyone, except herself and her things, and wasn’t a danger, the people in the village always indicated their street by saying inguni undi biviri sa macca, there, where the crazy woman lives.
Grandmother had always embarrassed them, ever since the time when, in church, she had seen a boy she liked and kept turning toward the pews where the boys sat and smiled at him and stared at him and the boy giggled, too. She had taken the pins out of her hair, and let it loose, a shiny black cloud; it seemed the devil’s weapon of seduction, a kind of witchcraft. My great-grandmother ran out of the church dragging the girl who was then her only daughter, and who was shouting, “But I love him and he loves me!” As soon as they got home she thrashed her, using whatever she could find—saddle girths, belts, pots, carpet beaters, ropes from the well—reducing the child to a doll that went limp in her hands. Then she called the priest to get the devil out of her body, but the priest gave her a blessing and said that she was a good child and there was not a trace of the devil in her. My great-grandmother told this story to everyone to apologize for her daughter, to let people know that she was mad but good, and that there was no danger at their house. But, just to be safe, she practiced some exorcism on her until she married grandfather. In a certain sense, grandmother’s illness could be defined as a kind of love folly. An attractive man had only to cross the threshold of the house and smile at her, or simply look at her—and, since she was very beautiful, this could happen—and she would imagine that he was a suitor. She began to expect a visit, a declaration of love, a proposal of marriage, and she was always writing in that wretched notebook; they had looked for it in order to show it to a doctor at the asylum, but couldn’t find it. Obviously no one ever came to ask for her hand, and she would wait and stare at the door and sit on the bench in the lolla, dressed in her best things, looking beautiful, because she really was, and smile fixedly, as if she understood nothing, as if she had arrived from the land of the moon. Then her mother had discovered that she wrote letters or love poems to those men, and that when she realized they would never return the drama began, and she screamed and threw herself on the ground and wanted to destroy herself and all the things she had made, and they had to tie her to the bed with the rags. In reality, she had no suitors, because no one in the village would have asked for grandmother in marriage, and you could only to pray God that, with the shame of a madwoman in the family, someone would want the other sisters.
In May of 1943, their brother-in-law, an evacuee, homeless, his grief for his wife still fresh, saw every side of her, and there was no need to explain anything to him, because for grandmother spring was the worst season. In the other seasons she was calmer: she planted seeds in the flower beds, worked in the fields, made bread and cross-stitch embroidery, scrubbed the tile floor of the lolla, fed the chickens and the rabbits, and petted them, and painted such beautiful decorations midway up the walls that she was called on to do them in other houses, to be ready by spring. My great-grandmother was so pleased to have her working for others all that time that she never asked them to pay her, and this the great-aunts thought was unfair. In the first days of the evacuation, grandfather, at dinner, with the soup in front of him, told them about the house on Via Manno, about the bombs and the death of his family, who had all gathered there on May 13th for his birthday. His wife had promised him a cake, and he was about to arrive when the air-raid alarm sounded. He had thought that he would find the family at the shelter under the Public Gardens, but none of them were at the shelter. That night, grandmother got up and ruined her cross-stitch embroideries, ripping them up; and her wall paintings, covering them with hideous splotches; and she scratched her face and body with prickly roses, so the thorns were everywhere, sticking even in her head. The next day, their future son-in-law had tried to talk to her, and, since she was locked in a stall reeking of manure, he spoke to her from the courtyard, through the wooden door, and told her that life is like that, that there are terrible things but also beautiful ones, such as, for example, the decorations and the embroidery she had done—why had she destroyed them? Grandmother, from inside, in the stench, had answered, strangely, “My things seem beautiful, but it’s not true. They’re ugly. I’m the one who should have died. Not your wife. Your wife had the principal thing that makes everything beautiful. Not me. I’m ugly. I’m meant to stay in the manure and the rubbish. I’m the one who should have died.”
“And what, in your view, signorina, is this principal thing?” grandfather had asked. But nothing more was heard from the stall. And later, when she lost the babies in the first months of pregnancy, she said that she would not have been a good mother because she lacked the principal thing, and that her children were not born because they, too, lacked that thing, and so she shut herself up in her world of the moon.
At the end of the story, the future aunts accompanied mamma to the bus. As they waited for the bus, after handing her bags filled with sweets, sausages, and loaves of civraxiu, and caressing her long, smooth hair, which was the style then, they asked, just to change the subject, what she wanted to do in life.
“Play the flute,” mamma answered.
Of course, but they meant a
s work, real work.
“Play the flute,” my mother repeated.
My great-aunts looked at one another, and it was obvious what they were thinking.
18.
Mamma told me these things after grandmother died. She kept them to herself and wasn’t afraid of letting her mother-in-law, whom she loved, bring me up. In fact, she thinks we should be grateful to grandmother, because she took on herself all the disorder that might have touched papa and me. According to mamma, in fact, someone in a family has to take on the disorder, because life is like that, a balance between the two; otherwise, the world would grow rigid and stop. If at night we sleep without nightmares, if papa and mamma’s marriage has always been free of bumps, if I’m getting married to my first boyfriend, if we don’t have panic attacks and don’t try to kill ourselves, or throw ourselves into garbage bins, or slash ourselves, it’s thanks to grandmother, who paid for everyone. In every family there’s someone who pays the tribute, so that the balance between order and disorder is maintained and the world doesn’t come to a halt.
