O
ne evening, grandfather, before sitting down in the dilapidated armchair near the window on the light well, went and got his pipe from his evacuee’s suitcase, took out of his pocket a pouch of tobacco he had just bought, and began to smoke, for the first time since that May of 1943. Grandmother brought over her chair and sat looking at him.
“That’s how you smoke a pipe. I’ve never seen anyone smoke a pipe.”
And they sat in silence the whole time. When grandfather finished she said to him, “You shouldn’t spend any more money on the women in the brothel. You should spend that money to buy tobacco, and relax and have your smoke. Explain to me what you do with those women and I’ll do the same.”
I
n the days of Via Sulis her kidney stones were frightening, and every day it seemed as if she would die. Surely that was the reason she couldn’t have children, even now, when they had a bit more money, and they’d take the short walk to Via Manno to see the devastated place where they hoped to rebuild their house, which they were steadily saving for. They especially liked to look at the pit when grandmother got pregnant, except that in the end all the stones she had inside her always turned the joy into sorrow, and blood everywhere.
Until 1947 people were starving, and grandmother remembered how happy she was when she went to her village and came back all loaded down. She’d run up the stairs and into the kitchen, which always smelled of cabbage because not much air came in from the light well, and place on the marble tabletop two loaves of
civraxiu
and fresh pasta and cheese and eggs and a chicken for broth. Those good smells covered up the odor of cabbage and the neighbors welcomed her warmly and told her she was so pretty because she was good.
In those days she was happy, even if she didn’t have love, happy with the things of the world even if grandfather never touched her except when she performed the brothel services; and in bed they continued to sleep on opposite sides, taking care not to touch, and saying, “Good night.”
“Good night to you, too.”
The best moments were when, in bed after her services, grandfather lighted his pipe and it was clear from his expression that he felt good. Grandmother would look at him from her side and if she smiled at him he said, “Does this amuse you?” But it wasn’t as if he ever added anything else, or drew her to him; he kept her distant. And grandmother always thought how strange love is, if it doesn’t want to come it won’t, with bed or even with kindness and good deeds, and it was strange that here was the most important thing, and there was no way to make it happen, by any means.
I
n 1950 the doctors prescribed thermal treatments for her. They instructed her to go to the mainland, to a well-known spa, where many people had been cured. So grandmother again put on her gray sack overcoat with three buttons, the one from her wedding, which I’ve seen in the few photographs of those years, embroidered two blouses, put everything in grandfather’s evacuee’s suitcase, and left by ship for Civitavecchia.
The spa was in a place that was not at all beautiful; there was no sun, and from the bus that went from the station to the hotel all she could see was earth-colored hills with a few tufts of tall grass around spectral trees. Besides, everyone on the bus seemed ill and pale. When the chestnut allées and the hotels began to appear, she asked the driver to let her know which was the stop for her hotel. She stood for a while at the entrance wondering whether to run away or not: it was all so alien and grim, under that cloudy sky, that she thought she was already in the Hereafter, because this could only be death. The hotel was very elegant, with crystal-teardrop chandeliers that were all lighted, even though it was early afternoon. In her room she immediately noticed a desk under the window, and maybe it was only because of that that she didn’t flee to the station and then to the ship and home again, though grandfather would have been very angry if she had, and with reason. She had never had a desk, nor had she ever been able to sit at a table to write, because she always wrote secretly, with the notebook on her lap, and she hid it whenever she heard someone coming. On the desk there was a leather folder with sheets of letterhead, an inkwell, a pen and nib, and blotting paper. So the first thing grandmother did, even before taking off her coat, was to get her notebook out of the suitcase and place it ceremoniously on the desk, in the leather folder; then she locked the door, out of fear that someone might enter and see what was written in the notebook; and finally she sat down on the big double bed and waited for dinnertime. The dining room was filled with square tables with white linen tablecloths and white porcelain plates and sparkling glasses and silverware and, in the middle, a vase of flowers, and over each hung a beautiful glowing crystal chandelier. Some of the tables were already occupied by people who seemed to her like souls from Purgatory, because of their melancholy pallor and the indistinct, low murmur of their voices, but there were still many places free. Grandmother chose
an empty table and on the three other chairs placed her purse, her coat, and her wool jacket, and when someone passed by she looked down, hoping that the person wouldn’t sit next to her. She had no wish to eat, or to have the treatments, because she was sure she wouldn’t get better and would never have children. Normal women had children, cheerful women without ugly thoughts, like the neighbors of Via Sulis. Children, as soon as they realized they were in the belly of a madwoman, fled, as all those suitors had.
A man with a suitcase entered the dining room; he must have just arrived and not yet been to his own room. He carried a crutch, but he walked quickly and easily. That man attracted grandmother, unlike any of the suitors to whom she had written passionate poems and waited for Wednesday after Wednesday. She was sure, then, that she wasn’t in the Hereafter, with the other souls of Purgatory, because such a thing doesn’t happen in the Hereafter.
The Veteran had a modest suitcase, but he was dressed with great refinement, and although he had a wooden leg and a crutch he was a handsome man. In her room after dinner, grandmother sat down at the desk right away to describe him in detail, so that, if she never saw him again in the hotel, there was no danger of forgetting him. He was tall, with dark, deep eyes, smooth skin, a slender neck; he had strong, long arms and large, innocent hands, like a child’s; he had a full mouth, prominent in spite of the short, slightly curling beard, and a gently curved nose.
In the following days she looked at him from her table or on the veranda, where he went to smoke unfiltered Nationals or read, and she did her boring cross-stitch embroidery on napkins. She always arranged her chair a little behind him, in order not to be seen as she gazed, spellbound, at the line of his forehead, the thin nose, the defenseless throat, the curly hair with its first white threads, the poignant thinness of the chest in the starched pure-white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the strong arms and the good hands, the leg rigid in the trousers, the old but perfectly polished shoes—all to make you weep for the dignity of that body, injured but still inexplicably strong and handsome.
Then came days of sun and everything seemed different, the gilded chestnuts, the blue sky, and the veranda, where the Veteran went to smoke or read and grandmother pretended to embroider, was flooded with light.
He rose and went to look at the hills beyond the windows and stood there thoughtfully, and when he turned to go and sit down again he looked at her and smiled a melting smile that almost made my grandmother ill she liked it so much, and that emotion filled her day.
One evening as the Veteran passed grandmother’s table he seemed uncertain where to sit, so she took away her coat and purse to make room for him next to her. He sat down and, smiling, they looked into each other’s eyes, and that evening they ate and drank nothing. The Veteran suffered from the same illness, and his kidneys, too, were full of stones. He had fought the whole war. As a boy he was always reading novels by Salgari and had volunteered for the Navy; he loved the sea and literature, especially poetry, and this had sustained him in the most difficult moments. When the war was over he got his degree and had recently moved from Genoa to Milan, where he taught Italian, making every effort not to bore the students. He lived on the mezzanine floor of a
casa di ringhiera
, where the apartments opened onto a balcony overlooking a courtyard, in two white rooms that contained nothing of the past. He had been married since 1939 and had a daughter in the first year of elementary school; she was drawing the letters of the alphabet and Greek key patterns, which was the custom then, making designs like the ones embroidered by grandmother on the napkins, but in a notebook with graph paper, and these Greek key patterns framed the pages. His daughter loved school, the smell of books and stationery. She loved rain and had a fondness for umbrellas, and they had bought her one that was striped like a beach umbrella; in that season it was always raining in Milan, but the child would wait for him in any type of weather, sitting on the steps or skipping in the big inner courtyard, which the less elegant apartments faced. And then in Milan there was the fog, which grandmother had no idea about: from the description she imagined a situation like the Hereafter. Grandmother on the other hand had no children. Certainly because of those stones in her kidneys. She, too, had loved school, but her parents had taken her out in fourth grade. The teacher had come to their house to ask them to send her to high school, or at least have her enroll at a trade school, because she wrote well. Her parents were afraid that they would in some way be obligated to let her continue her studies, and they had kept her home and told the teacher that he didn’t understand their problems and not to come back. But by then she had learned to read and write and had been secretly writing all her life now. Poems. Maybe thoughts. Things that happened to her, but partly invented. No one was to know, because they might think she was crazy. She was confiding in him because she trusted him, even though she had known him scarcely an hour. The Veteran was keenly interested and made her promise solemnly not to be embarrassed and to let him read the poems, if she had them with her, or recite them, because to him the others seemed mad, not her. He, too, had a passion: playing the piano. He had loved it since he was a child—it was a passion that came from his mother—and whenever he was home on leave he played for hours and hours. His highest accomplishment was the Chopin Nocturnes; but when he returned from the war the piano wasn’t there, and he hadn’t had the heart to ask his wife what had happened to it. Now he had bought another one and his fingers were starting to remember.
Here at the baths he missed the piano, but that was before he began talking to grandmother, because talking to grandmother and watching her laugh or even feel sad, and seeing how her hair came loose when she gestured, or admiring the skin of her slender wrists and the contrast with her chapped hands—that was like playing the piano.
From that day grandmother and the Veteran were inseparable, parting only reluctantly, when they went to the bathroom. They didn’t care about the gossip, he because he was from the North, and grandmother, though she was Sardinian, hardly.
In the morning they met in the breakfast room: the one who got there first ate slowly, to give the other time to arrive. Every day grandmother was afraid that the Veteran might leave without telling her, or that he was tired of her company, or maybe would change tables and pass her by with a cold nod of greeting, like all those men of the Wednesdays so many years before. But he always chose the same table, and if it was she who arrived later she knew that he was waiting for her, since he was having a cup of coffee, and nothing else, and she would find him sitting there with the now empty cup in front of him. The Veteran would instantly grab his crutch and stand up as if to salute his Captain, bow his head slightly, and say, “Good morning Princess,” and my grandmother would laugh, moved and happy.
“Princess of what?”
Then he invited her to come with him to buy the newspaper, which he read every day, like grandfather, except that grandfather read it to himself, in silence, while the Veteran sat on a bench with her beside him and read articles aloud to her and asked her opinion and it didn’t matter that he had a degree and grandmother had only gone to fourth grade: it was clear that he gave great consideration to her ideas. For example, he asked her about the Fund for the South, what did the Sardinians say about it? And about the Korean War, what did grandmother think? And what about what was happening in China? Grandmother would have him explain the matter carefully and then she expressed her opinion, and she couldn’t imagine giving up the news of the day, her head touching the Veteran’s during the reading, so close that in an instant they might have kissed.
Then he said, “And what streets shall we take back to the hotel today? Suggest a route you’d like to follow.”
So they always went a different way, and when the Veteran saw that grandmother had suddenly stopped in the middle of the street, distracted, her attention caught by the façade of a hotel or the leaves of a tree, or who knows what, as was her habit all the way into old age, he placed a hand on her back and, pressing lightly, guided her to the side of the street. “A princess. You act like a princess. You don’t worry about the world around you; it’s the world that should worry about you. Your job is merely to exist. Isn’t that true?”
And grandmother was amused by this fantasy—the future princess of Via Manno and now of Via Sulis and before that of Campidano.
Without making a precise appointment they arrived at breakfast earlier and earlier, and so they had more time for reading the newspaper side by side on the bench, and for the walk, where it always turned out that the Veteran had to put his hand on her back and make her change direction.
One day the Veteran asked grandmother if he could see her whole arm, and when she pulled up the sleeve of her blouse he ran his index finger intently over the veins on the surface of the skin.
“Beauty,” he said, and then, “You are a true beauty. But why all these cuts?”
Grandmother answered that it was from working in the fields.
“But they seem to have been made with the blade of a knife.”
“We cut so many things. It’s like that in farm work.”
“Then why your arms and not your hands? Those are clean cuts—they look intentional.”
She didn’t answer and he took her hand and kissed it and with his finger touched the lines of her face. “Beauty,” he repeated, “beauty.”
Then she touched him as well, that man she had observed for days from her chair on the veranda, as delicately as she would have touched the sculpture of a great artist: the hair, the soft skin of the neck, the fabric of his shirt, his strong arms and nice childlike hands, the wooden leg and the foot inside the freshly polished shoe.
The Veteran’s daughter wasn’t his. In 1944 he was a prisoner of the Germans, who were retreating eastward. His daughter was in fact the daughter of a partisan, whom his wife had fought alongside, and who had been killed during an action. The Veteran loved his daughter and had no wish to know more.
He had left in 1940, embarking on the cruiser Trieste, had been shipwrecked two or three times, had been captured in 1943, off Marseilles, interned in the concentration camp at Hinzert until 1944, and had lost his leg during the retreat of the winter of ’44-’45: the Allies had arrived when he was still able to drag himself along, and an American doctor had amputated the leg to save his life.
They were sitting on a bench and grandmother took his head in her hands and placed it on her heart, which was beating wildly, and unbuttoned the top buttons of her blouse. He caressed her breast with his smiling lips. “Shall we kiss our smiles?” grandmother asked, and so they kissed, an endless, liquid kiss, and the Veteran told her that in the fifth Canto of the Inferno Dante had had this very idea of the smiles that kiss, for Paolo and Francesca, two who loved each other and could not.
Grandmother’s house, like the Veteran’s piano, was to be reborn from the ruins: a building was planned for the large hole left by the church of San Giorgio and Santa Caterina and grandfather’s old house. She was sure that her house would be beautiful, full of light, with a view of the ships from the rooms and the orange and purple sunsets and the swallows that would leave for Africa, and on the floor below a room for parties, the winter garden, and a red runner on the stairs, and a gurgling fountain on the terrace. Via Manno was beautiful, the most beautiful street in Cagliari. On Sundays grandfather brought her pastries from Tramer and on other days when he wanted to give her pleasure he bought octopus at the market of Santa Chiara, which she boiled with oil and salt and parsley. The Veteran’s wife, on the other hand, now made cutlets and risotto, but the best things still were Genoese: pesto with
trenette
, stuffed veal breast, and Easter cake. The Veteran’s house in Genoa was near the Gaslini hospital and had a garden with fig trees, hortensia, violets, and a chicken coop; he had always lived there. Now he had sold it to some nice people who, whenever he came as a guest, gave him fresh eggs and, in summer, tomatoes and basil to take back to Milan. It was a damp old house, but the garden was lovely, inundated by the plants. The only valuable thing in the house had been the piano, from his mother. She was from a very wealthy family, but had fallen in love with his father, a
camallo
, a dock worker, and so the family had turned her out, and the only thing they let her have, and this was long afterward, was her piano. When he was a child, his mother, especially in the summer, after dinner—because in Genoa it was the custom to eat early and then go out—would take him to see his grandparents’ villa from the outside: the high wall all along the street up to the big gate and the gatehouse next to it, and the allée of palm trees and agave, and the lawn, with flowers in geometric patterns, that rose up and up to the grand milk-white three-story structure, which had terraces with plaster balustrades, and ice-colored stuccowork around the rows of windows, many of them illuminated, and, at the top, four towers.