My great-aunt had been notified by the pharmacist. The door was opened by a maid who was followed by two children, and who asked them to follow her upstairs, where the signora was waiting for them. The stairs were dark and made of polished stone, whereas the room where she was waiting for them was light; it was the one with the glass doors giving on to the balcony.
‘They’re my daughter’s children,’ she said. ‘They leave them with me when they go to work.’
Mamma had lost the gift of speech. Papà acted out his role and said that he was working with his colleague from the Cagliari Historical Institute, writing a research project on the first migratory wave of the fifties, from Sardinia. Given that her family would surely have had shepherds in their service, would she be so kind as to indicate one who had left for the Continent during that period, and tell them his story?
My great-aunt was an attractive woman, dark-haired, slender and elegantly attired — even though she was just at home — with regular facial features, her hair softly gathered together at the back of her neck. She wore Sardinian earrings, the ones that look like buttons. The maid brought them coffee and Sardinian sweets on a tray. She was still followed by the children, who showed the visitors their paraphernalia of buckets, floaties, and toy boats, and announced that the following week they were off to the beach.
‘
Pizzinos malos
,’ their nonna said, smiling tenderly. ‘You little rascals, leave the guests in peace, they’re here to study.’
‘Only one of our men went to work in Milan, in 1951 — a good lad who’d been with us since he was a boy. The others left later, in the sixties. The first one came back, though; he bought a piece of land, some sheep.’
‘And where is he now?’ My mother spoke up for the first time.
‘
Addolumeu
. Poor man,’ my great-aunt replied, ‘he threw himself into a well. He had a Continental wife — no children — who didn’t even mourn him, and who returned to the North after the tragedy.’
‘When was that?’ asked Papà, in a weak voice.
‘In 1954. I remember it clearly, because it was the year my sister Lia, the baby of the family, died.’
And she pointed to a photograph, next to a vase of fresh flowers on the sideboard, of a young girl with a romantic air. ‘Our poet,’ she added. And she recited some lines from memory:
I awake expectant, anxious, to the blue blows of spring,
after cowering shamefully in the pale light of winter.
My anxiety cannot understand you, and cannot be understood,
in the sweet eager yellow of the brazen mimosa.
A love poem kept in a drawer — who knows who she was thinking of, poor child?
All the way back to Cagliari Mamma didn’t say a word. Finally Papà asked her, ‘Do you think he killed himself for your mother? Can you believe that as a girl she wrote poetry?’ Mamma shrugged her shoulders as if to say,
What do I care?
or
How should I know?
Today I came here to via Manno to do the cleaning, because as soon as the workmen finish I’m getting married. I’m happy that they’re re-doing the façade, which was crumbling. The work has been entrusted to an architect who’s also a little bit of a poet, and
respects what the building once was.
This will be its third birth: in its first life, in the nineteenth century, it was narrower, with only two balconies with wrought-iron railings on each floor; those really tall double windows with three pieces of glass in the upper part, and shutters; and the front door surmounted by an archway worked in stucco. The roof was partly a terrace, even then, and from down in via Manno you could only see the imposing eaves.
The place has been empty for ten years. We haven’t sold it, or rented it out — out of love, and because we don’t care about any of that other stuff. But it hasn’t exactly been empty. Far from it.
When my father comes back to Cagliari, he comes here to play his old piano, the one that belonged to donna Doloretta and donna Fannì. He did this even before Nonna died, because Mamma has to practise the flute — at their place, they always have to come to
an arrangement about the schedule.
Papà would take his music and come here, and Nonna would busy herself cooking all the things he liked. When it was time to eat, we’d knock on the door and he’d answer, ‘Thanks, later, later. You start.’ But I can’t ever remember him joining us later on. He’d leave the room only to go to the bathroom, and if someone was in there — me, for instance, who’s slow at everything, so you can imagine what I’m like in the bathroom — he’d get pissed off, even though he was such a quiet man, and say that he’d come to via Manno to play, and instead nothing was going the way it was supposed to.
At any hour, when he was finally overtaken by violent hunger, he’d go into the kitchen, where Nonna was in the habit of leaving him a covered plate and a pot of water on the stove to heat up his meal. He would eat alone, drumming his fingers on the table as though he was playing a tune, and if, say, we looked in on the kitchen to ask him something, he’d answer in monosyllables so as to make us give up and leave him in peace. The best bit about it was that we were always in full concert — not everyone gets to eat, sleep, go to the toilet, do homework, and watch television with the volume down while a great pianist plays Debussy, Ravel, Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and the rest. And even though Nonna and I were more relaxed when Papà didn’t come around, it was beautiful when he was there. As a child, every time he came I wrote something in honour of his presence — a composition, a poem, a fairytale.
Another reason this house hasn’t stayed empty is that my boyfriend and I come here. I always think it still has Nonna’s energy, and that if we make love in a bed at via Manno, in this magical place with only the sound of the port and the call of the seagulls, we’ll love each other forever. Because with love, in the end, maybe you just have to trust in magic, because it’s not like you can rely on some kind of rule, something to follow to make things go well — like the Commandments, for instance.
And instead of doing the cleaning, or reading the news about the situation in Iraq, where you can’t tell if the Americans are liberating or occupying the place, I’ve written, in the notebook I always carry with me, about Nonna, about the Veteran, about his father, his wife, his child, about Nonno, about my parents, about the neighbours in via Sulis, about my paternal and maternal great-aunts, about Nonna Lia, about donna Doloretta and donna Fannì, about music, about Cagliari, Genoa, Milan, and Gavoi.
Now that I’m getting married, the terrace is a garden once more, like it was back in Nonna’s day. The ivy and the Virginia creeper are climbing up the end wall, and there are groups of red, purple, and white geraniums, and a rose-bush, and broom thick with yellow flowers, and honeysuckle and freesias and dahlias and perfumed jasmine. The workmen have waterproofed the house, and the damp in the ceilings no longer causes flakes of plaster to drop on our heads. They’ve also whitewashed the walls — leaving Nonna’s decorations, of course.
That’s how I found the famous black notebook with its red border, and a yellowed letter from the Veteran. Actually, I didn’t find them. A workman gave them to me. A section of the decorations on the living-room wall was gone, and the wall was peeling.
Never mind
, I’d said to myself.
We’ll re-plaster it and put a piece of
furniture in front of it
. Nonna had dug out that spot, and hidden her notebook and the letter from the Veteran in there, and then painted over it. But her work wasn’t perfect, and the decorations were ruined.
Kind signora,
I am flattered and perhaps slightly embarrassed by
everything you have imagined and written about me. You
have asked me to evaluate your story from a literary point
of view, and you excuse yourself for the love scenes you
have invented and, above all, for the parts that were true
in what you wrote about my life. You say that you feel
you have stolen something from me. No, my dear friend;
writing about someone the way you have is a gift. You
must not worry about me at all. The love you invented
between us moved me. And, reading it — forgive my
impudence — I almost regretted that this love did not
really exist. But we talked a lot. We kept each other
company. We had a few laughs, even though we were sad,
there at the baths — isn’t that so? You with those babies
that didn’t want to be born, me with my war, my crutches,
my suspicions. So many stones inside.
You say you have fallen pregnant again upon your
return from treatment at the baths: that you have hope
once more. I wish you hope with all my heart, and I like
to believe that I helped you expel those stones, and that
our friendship contributed in some way to your return to
health and the possibility of your having children. You,
too, were a help to me: my relationships with my wife and
child improved — I’m managing to forget the past.
But there’s something else. And I expect you will laugh
when you read what I’m about to tell you. I’m no longer as
scruffy as I was a few months ago at the baths — no more
sandals and woollen socks, no more singlets and crumpled
trousers. You invented me with that nice starched white
shirt, and those well-shined shoes, and I liked myself. Once
I really was like that. In the Navy, you’d be in trouble if
you weren’t always perfect.
But let me return to your story. Don’t stop imagining.
You are not mad. Never again should you believe those
who say such an unjust and cruel thing. Write.