by Milena Agus
For example, my maternal grandmother, Signora Lia, wasn’t bad. She had tried to put order into her life at all costs, without succeeding and in fact causing greater damage. She wasn’t a widow and the reason mamma had the same last name was not that her father was a cousin. And the reason she had never gone to Gavoi was not that Gavoi is ugly and has no seacoast. Mamma had known all this since she was a child, but with other people Signora Lia insisted on the business of the cousin with the same last name, and so whenever they had to show identification she was terrified that whoever was looking at it would talk, and so they mustn’t see too many people or be on friendly terms with anyone, and she had to give presents to the teachers, or the doctors, or anyone else who knew the truth, so that they wouldn’t talk.
And when someone would mention a teenage mother, calling her an egua, a whore, Signora Lia also expressed herself with the same word and, when they got home, mamma would go to her room and cry.
But then mamma had her flute music, and my father, and nothing else mattered to her in the least. As soon as she started going with papa she changed families, because that was a real family and grandfather was the father she had never had. He picked spinach and wild asparagus for her in the countryside, and cooked mussels for her because she had an iron deficiency, and when he went to the spring at Dolianova, to get a supply of water for grandmother, who had kidney stones again, he made the rounds of the farms and got all kinds of healthy foods you couldn’t find in the city, fresh eggs, bread baked in a wood-burning oven, fruit without pesticides. Sometimes mamma went with him and one day she got attached to a chick left without mother or brothers and sisters, and grandfather and grandmother let her take it home. So the rooster Niki also became one of the family: he was the only pet mamma ever had—just imagine animals in Signora Lia’s house. When papa wasn’t there, and papa never was there, grandfather took her everywhere in the car, and if she was late and it was dark, he sat, fully dressed, in the armchair, ready to go if necessary.
It wasn’t true that grandmother Lia had left because Gavoi is an ugly town and she had never quarreled with her family.
Gavoi is a beautiful town, in the mountains. The houses are two or three stories tall, and are often attached, and some look as if they were hanging between two others, supported by a horizontal beam; below them are open, nearly dark courtyards, full of flowers, especially hydrangeas, which like shade and dampness. From certain points in the town you can see the lake of Gusana, which changes color many times a day, shifting from pink to powder blue, to red, and purple, and if you climb Monte Gonari and it’s a clear day, you can see the Gulf of Orosei.
She had run away. At eighteen. Pregnant by a shepherd who had worked for her family. In the early fifties he had emigrated to the mainland, but he returned as soon as he learned of the agrarian reform and the Rebirth Plan, hoping that he might now be able to live well in Sardinia. He had a mainland wife, who was completely out of place, and some savings so that he could buy his own land and graze his sheep without paying rent.
The year of Signora Lia’s flight was her senior year at the classical high school in Nuoro, where she was a very good student. In Cagliari she found a place as a maid and she took mamma, as a newborn, to the nuns. When her daughter got a little older, she started studying, so that she could finish that interrupted year and get her diploma. She studied at night, after she came home from work and mamma was asleep. She stopped being a maid and got an office job and even bought a house, ugly but clean and orderly, of which she was mistress. She was an oak. A rock of our granite. And she never complained about her life of ashes after that one spark. She had often told her daughter about it, because from childhood mamma wanted to know about her father. Rather than a fairy tale, she told her the story of that morning when she had missed the bus for Nuoro. At that hour the shepherd was leaving Gavoi for the countryside, and had found her there, at the bus stop, in tears, because she was a good girl even if something of a grind. He was a man of an intense and particular handsomeness, good and honest and intelligent, but unfortunately already married.
“Hello, donna Lia.”
“Hello.”
At dawn they crossed the wild solitary places, swept up in a whirlwind of folly, in which it seemed that happiness was possible. From then on donna Lia often missed the bus. She ran away without telling him she was pregnant, because she didn’t want to ruin his world, that poor man with the mainland wife, so out of place in Gavoi that she seemed unable even to have children.
For her family Signora Lia left a letter in which she said not to worry, to forgive her, but she needed to go somewhere else, as far as possible, she couldn’t bear Gavoi and Sardinia any longer, maybe the Côte d’Azur or the Ligurian Riviera, they knew how she always climbed Monte Gonari hoping for a view of the sea. At first she telephoned almost every day but didn’t say where she was. The older sister, who had acted as a mother, because her mother had died when she was born, wept and said that her father was ashamed to go out and her brothers were threatening to search to the ends of the earth for her and kill her. She stopped telephoning. She closed off forever love, dreams, and especially—after getting her diploma, since she didn’t have to study anymore—literature and any other form of artistic expression, and when mamma wanted to play the flute she accepted it only on condition that it remain a diversion, a distraction from the truly important things.
After the death of Signora Lia—she was still young, but her lymph glands had become as hard as rocks and her blood had turned to water; she wouldn’t go out because she was ashamed of being seen with that kerchief on her head after the chemotherapy—mamma got it into her head to look for her father. Her mother would never tell her his name, but she came up with a plan so she could discover it for herself. Papa told her that it wasn’t a good idea, there was no need to put order into things, better to go along with the universal confusion and play on it. But she was stubborn as a mule, and so one summer morning, early, to avoid the heat, they set out in search of my maternal grandfather. During the journey mamma kept saying sciollori, stupid things, such as she felt like a newborn in her father’s arms, and she kept laughing, and she found Gavoi beautiful, better than all the places she had been for papa’s concerts, Paris, London, Berlin, New York, Rome, Venice. Nowhere more beautiful than Gavoi.
They had prepared a routine in which they would say they were researchers who were doing a study and gathering testimony about the first wave of migration from Sardinia; mamma had a notebook and tape recorder and had even made herself a card with a false surname. They went into a café, a drugstore, a tobacconist’s, where they asked a lot of suspicious-seeming questions, but their air of honesty was soothing and they were able to ask about the families of the landowners, the ones that had had shepherds. The wealthiest had been, and was still, grandmother Lia’s. Her oldest sister now lived in the big house with her daughter and son-in-law and grandchildren; there was room for all of them. Mamma sat down on the stoop of a house opposite and couldn’t stop gazing. It was one of the finest buildings in the town, a three-story granite structure, with a central section on the street facing her and two wings that faced upward-sloping side streets. The ground floor had twelve shuttered windows and a massive darkgreen wooden front door with brass hinges. The second floor had a grand French window, also closed, on the central balcony. The third was all windows, whose heavy embroidered curtains prevented one from seeing inside. Mamma continued to stare at the house and couldn’t imagine her mother—who had always been so poor, with half her salary going to mortgage payments—inside that house, in that wealthy environment. On one of the two side wings of the building, on the upsloping street, was the service entrance, a gate, and, inside, a garden of dog roses, lemon trees, laurel, ivy, and red geraniums at the windows. On the steps were some toys, a dump truck, a doll in a carriage. Mamma stood, hypnotized, until papa said, “Let’s go.”
My great-aunt had been warned by the pharmacist. A maid opened the door, followed by t
wo children, and she led them upstairs, where the mistress was waiting. The stairs were of dark polished stone, but the room where her aunt waited was luminous, with that French window opening onto the balcony. “These are my daughter’s children,” she said. “She leaves them with me when she goes to work.”
Mamma had lost the power of speech. Papa performed his part and said that he was working with his colleague, here, at the Historical Institute of Cagliari, who was doing research for her thesis on the first wave of migration from Sardinia, in the fifties. Could she be so kind, given that her family surely had had shepherds, as to let them know of any who had gone to the mainland in that period and who could tell their stories?
My great-aunt was a beautiful woman, dark, slender, with regular features, hair gathered softly and low on her nape; she was elegantly dressed even though she was at home, and wore Sardinian earrings, the kind that look like buttons. The maid, still followed by the children, who showed off a collection of pails, rubber water wings, and bathing suits, and announced that next week they would be going to the beach, brought them coffee on a tray, with Sardinian breakfast pastries.
“Pizzinnos malos, you little scamps,” the grandmother said, smiling tenderly, “leave the guests alone—they’re here to study.”
“One of our men went to work in Milan in 1951. He was a fine boy, who had been with us since he was a child. The others left later, in the sixties. However, he returned; he had bought some land and sheep.”
“And where is he now?” mamma spoke for the first time.
“Addolumeu, poor man,” my great-aunt answered. “He threw himself down a well. He had a wife from the mainland, who had no children, and didn’t even mourn him. After the tragedy she went back to the north.”
“When?” papa asked, in a faint voice.
“In 1954. I remember very well, because it was the year my sister Lia died, the baby of the family.”
And she pointed to a photograph on the credenza of a young girl with a romantic expression, next to a vase of fresh flowers.
“Our poetess,” she added. And from memory she recited some lines:
My hope wakens, anguished,
In the blue bursts of spring
After withdrawing, ashamed,
In winter’s pale light.
My hope can’t understand you
And can’t be understood
amid the sweet trembling yellow
Of the brash mimosas.
A love poem kept in the drawer, no one knows whom she was thinking of, poor child.
Mamma didn’t say a word until Cagliari and finally papa asked, “Do you think he killed himself for your mother? Isn’t it incredible that as a girl she wrote poems?”
Mamma shrugged, as if to say, “What do I care,” or “How should I know?”
19.
I came here to Via Manno today to clean up, because as soon as the work is finished I’m going to be married. I’m glad that the façade is being redone; it’s been crumbling. The work was entrusted to an architect who’s something of a poet and respects the building’s past. This is its third incarnation: the first time, in the nineteenth century, it was narrower, and had just two balconies on each floor, with wrought-iron balustrades, and very tall windows, with two rows of three panes in the upper part and slats below; the big front door was surmounted by a stuccoed arch, and the roof was partly a terrace, then, too, and from the street you could see only the imposing cornice. Our apartment has been empty for ten years; we haven’t sold or rented it, because we love it, and don’t care about anything else. But then it hasn’t really been empty. On the contrary.
When my father returns to Cagliari he comes here to play his old piano, the one that came from the Signorine Doloretta and Fanní.
He did that even before grandmother died, because mamma has to practice the flute, and so at home they always had to set a schedule. Papa took his scores and came here, and grandmother began cooking all the things he liked, but then, when it was time to eat, we’d knock at the door and he’d answer, “Thank you, later, later. You start.” But I don’t remember that he ever came to the table. He left the room only to go to the bathroom and if he found it occupied, for example by me—slow about everything, imagine in a bath—he would get angry, he who was such a quiet man, and say that he had come to Via Manno to practice and instead not a thing went as it should. When hunger, unscheduled, made itself felt violently, he went to the kitchen, where grandmother used to leave him a covered plate and a double boiler on the stove so he could warm up the food. He ate alone, drumming on the table with his fingers as if he were playing scales, and if, perhaps, we stuck our heads into the kitchen to ask him something, he responded in monosyllables, to make us go away, and be left in peace. The best was always to be in mid-concert; it’s not everyone who gets to eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, do homework, watch television without sound while a great pianist plays Debussy, Ravel, Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and the rest. And even if at grandmother’s we were more comfortable when papa didn’t come, it was wonderful when he was there, and as a child I always wrote something in honor of his presence—an essay, a poem, a story.
This house also didn’t stay empty because I come here with my boyfriend. I always think that it still has grandmother’s energy, and that if we make love in a bed in Via Manno, in this magical place with only the sound of the port and the cries of the seagulls, then we’ll love each other forever. Because in love, perhaps, in the end you have to trust magic—it’s not as if you can find a rule, something to follow to make things go well, like the Commandments.
And rather than do the cleaning, or read the news about the situation in Iraq, where it’s not clear if those Americans are liberators or occupiers, I wrote, in the notebook that I always carry with me, about grandmother, the Veteran, his father, his wife, and his daughter; about grandfather, my parents, the neighbors of Via Sulis, my great-aunts, paternal and maternal, grandmother Lia, and the Signorine Doloretta and Fanní; about music, Cagliari, Genoa, Milan, Gavoi.
Now that I’m getting married the terrace is a garden again, as it was in grandmother’s time. The ivy and the fox grape climb up the wall at the back and there are the groups of geraniums, red, violet, and white, and the rosebush and the broom, which is thick with yellow flowers, and honeysuckle and freesias, dahlias and fragrant jasmine. The workers have waterproofed it and the dampness in the ceilings no longer causes bits of plaster to fall down on your head. They’ve also whitewashed the walls, leaving intact grandmother’s decorations halfway up, of course.
That’s how I found the famous black notebook with the red border and a yellowed letter from the Veteran. In fact I didn’t find them. A worker gave them to me. A section of the living-room wall had flaked off, along with the decorations. Let’s give it up, I said to myself, replaster it and put a piece of furniture in front of it. Grandmother had dug a hole at that point and hidden her notebook and the Veteran’s letter, and then painted over it, but she didn’t do a good job and the decorations disintegrated.
20.
Dear signora,” the letter from the Veteran says, “I am flattered and perhaps slightly embarrassed for all that you imagined and wrote about me. You ask me to evaluate your story from the literary point of view, and you apologize for the love scenes that you invented and also, above all, for the true things you wrote about my life. You say it seems to you that you have stolen something from me. No, my dear friend, to write of someone as you have done is a gift. For me you needn’t worry about anything; the love that you invented between us moved me, and, as I read, excuse the audacity, I almost regretted that that love wasn’t really there. But we talked so much. We kept each other company, and even had some laughs, unhappy as we were, there at the baths, isn’t it true? You and those children who refused to be born, I and my war, the crutches, the suspicions. So many stones inside. You tell me that you became pregnant again as soon as you returned from the treatments, that you are hopeful again. I send you good wishes with al
l my heart, and I like to believe that I helped you get rid of the stones and that our friendship in some way helped you regain your health and the possibility of having children. You also helped me: my relations with my wife and child have improved, I’m managing to forget. But there is something else. And I imagine that you’ll laugh when you read what I’m about to tell you: I’m not so sloppy as I was a few months ago at the spa. I’m through with sandals and wool socks, T-shirts and wrinkled trousers. You invented me with that beautiful starched white shirt and the shoes that were always polished, and I was pleased by that. I was really like that once. In the Navy you’re in trouble if you’re not always in perfect order.
“But to return to your story. Never stop imagining. You’re not mad. Don’t ever believe anyone who tells you a thing so unjust and spiteful. Write.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Milena Agus was a finalist for the Strega and Campiello prizes, and was awarded the prestigious Zerilli-Marimò prize for Mal di pietre (From the Land of the Moon), which went on to become an international bestseller. Agus lives in Cagliari, Sardinia.
