In November, Radio London announced that military operations on the Italian front would be suspended, and they urged the partisans of northern Italy to stall for a while and use their energies only for acts of
sabotage.
Nonno said that the war was going to continue and that he couldn’t be a guest of Nonna’s family forever, and so they came here to Cagliari.
They went to live in via Sulis, in a furnished room that looked out over a small lightwell, sharing a bathroom and kitchen with other families. Although she never asked any questions, it was from her female neighbours that Nonna learnt about Nonno’s family, who were all wiped out that thirteenth of May 1943.
Except for him, they were all already at home for his birthday that cursed afternoon. The wife, who was rather cold and a bit ugly and didn’t confide in anyone, had that very day, in the middle of the war, baked a cake and gathered them together. Who knows how long she’d been buying the ingredients on the black market — sugar by the gram, poor dear. Poor everybody. No one really knew how it came about, but they didn’t leave the house and run to the shelter under the public gardens when the alarm sounded. The most ridiculous bit about it, but in the end the only possible explanation, was that the cake was halfway through cooking, or the dough was rising, and they didn’t want to leave it behind, such a marvellous cake in a dead city.
Just as well they didn’t have children, the women said. You can forget a wife, a mother, sisters, in-laws and nieces and nephews, and Nonno had forgotten quickly. You could understand why — you only had to look at how beautiful the second wife was. He’d always been a cheerful fellow, hot-blooded, a ladies’ man; in 1924, when he was a boy, the fascists had made him drink castor oil to put him in his place, and he’d always made jokes and laughed about it — it seemed he could survive anything. A hearty eater, a hearty drinker, a hearty client of the bordello — his first wife knew that, too, poor dear. Who knows how she must have suffered? She’d get scandalised by anything — she would never have let her husband see her nude, which wouldn’t have been anything to write home about anyway. You really did have to wonder what those two were doing together in the first place.
Nonna, on the other hand, was a real woman, just the sort of woman he must always have desired, with those big firm tits and that mass of black hair and those big eyes. And she was affectionate, too; just imagine the passion between husband and wife. It must have been love at first sight — they’d got married within a month. Pity about those awful kidney stones, poor dear. The women were really fond of her, and she could even come and use the kitchen out of hours, whenever she felt up to it, even if they’d already cleaned up and put things away — it didn’t matter.
Nonna remained friends with the women from via Sulis for the whole of her and their lives. They never had an argument, nor did they ever really talk to one another, but they kept one another company, day after day, taking things as they came. Back in the via Sulis days, they’d all be in the kitchen washing up — one washing, another rinsing, another drying the dishes — and if Nonna was unwell, they’d wash hers, too, poor thing.
And so, it was with these neighbours and their husbands that Nonna followed the final phases of the war. In the icy kitchen in via Sulis, with two or three pairs of darned stockings on their feet, and their hands under their armpits, they’d listen to Radio London.
The husbands, all communists, were going for the Russians, who on the seventeenth of January 1945 occupied Warsaw, and on the twenty-eighth were a hundred and fifty kilometres from Berlin, while by early March the Allies had occupied Cologne. Their advance and the Germans’ retreat, Churchill said, was only a matter of time. At the end of March, Patton and Montgomery crossed the Rhine, hot on the heels of the routed Germans.
By Nonno’s next birthday, the thirteenth of May, the war was over and everyone was happy; but for Nonna those advances and retreats and victories and defeats meant nothing. In the city there was no water, sewerage, or electricity, there wasn’t even anything to eat, apart from American soups, and what little there was cost three times as much. But when the neighbours met up to wash the dishes, they laughed about any old nonsense; even in the street on the way to mass, at Sant’Antonio, or Santa Rosalia, or at the Capuchins’, they always laughed, three ahead and three behind, in their twice-turned dresses.
Nonna didn’t talk much but she was always there, and the days passed, and she liked the way the neighbours in Cagliari weren’t as dramatic as people in the country, so that if something went wrong they’d say, ‘
Ma bbai
! Go on!’; if, for instance, a plate fell on the ground and broke, even though they were so poor, they’d shrug their shoulders and pick up the pieces. Deep down, they were happy to be poor. It was better than having money like so many people in Cagliari who’d made a fortune from other people’s misery, whether on the black market or by looting through the rubble before the poor wretches arrived to look for their things. Besides, they were alive — what more could you ask? Nonna put it down to the blue sky, and the panoramic views standing on the Bastioni in the mistral wind: all so infinite that you couldn’t stop at your own little life.
But she never expressed these rather poetic ideas, because she was terrified that they, too, would discover she was mad. She wrote everything in her little black notebook with its red border, hiding it in the drawer for secret things, along with the envelopes of money for Housekeeping, Medicine, Rent.
One evening, before sitting down in the rickety armchair by the window overlooking the lightwell, Nonno went and got his pipe from his evacuee suitcase, took a little bag of newly purchased tobacco out of his pocket, and began smoking, for the first time since that May of 1943. Nonna pulled her stool
closer and sat down to watch him.
‘So, you smoke a pipe. I’ve never seen anyone smoke a pipe.’
And they sat in silence the whole time. When Nonno had finished, she said to him, ‘You shouldn’t spend money on women in the bordello. You should spend that money on tobacco so you can relax and have your smoke. Explain to me what you do with those women, and I’ll do exactly the same.’
Back in via Sulis days, the pain from her kidney stones was frightening, and it always seemed as if she might die. This is surely why she couldn’t have children, not even once they’d made a little bit of extra money and could take a stroll down via Manno to look at the bomb site where they hoped to rebuild their house — saving so hard to be able to do it. They especially liked going to look at the hole in the ground when Nonna was pregnant — only all the stones Nonna had inside always ended up turning her joy into pain, with blood everywhere.
Up until 1947, people went hungry, and Nonna later remembered how happy she used to be when she went to the village and returned all loaded up, and she would run up the stairs and into the kitchen where there was the smell of cabbage — because it’s not as though much air came in from the lightwell — and on the marble table she’d place two
civràxiu
loaves and fresh pasta and cheese and eggs and a chicken for broth, and delicious aromas would cover up the smell of cabbage, and the neighbours would shower her with attention and say that she was so beautiful because she was so good.
Those days she was happy, even though she didn’t have love; happy with the world, even though Nonno never touched her except when she performed the services of the bordello, and in bed they continued to sleep on opposite sides, careful not to brush against each other, and they would say, ‘Goodnight,’ and, ‘Goodnight to you, too.’
And the best moments were when Nonno lit his pipe in bed after these services, and you could see he felt good from the look he had about him, and Nonna would watch him from her side, and if she smiled at him, he’d say to her, ‘What are you laughing at?’
But it’s not like he ever added anything else, or drew her towards him; he kept her at a distance. And Nonna always wondered how love could be so strange, how it could be that if it didn’t want to come, it just wouldn’t come, not even in bed and not even with kindness and good deeds. It was strange that there was just no way to make it come — this most important thing of all.
In 1950, the doctors prescribed her treatment at the thermal baths. They told her to go to the Continent, to the most famous baths where many people had been cured. So, Nonna once again put on her loose grey overcoat with its three buttons, the one from her wedding that I’ve seen in her few photographs from those years. She embroidered two shirts, put everything in Nonno’s evacuee suitcase, and left on the boat to Civitavecchia.
The baths were in a spot that was not at all pretty, with no sun, and outside the bus that took her from the station to the hotel you could see nothing but earth-coloured hills with the odd tuft of tall grass around ghost-like trees, and even inside the bus all the people looked pale and sick. When she saw hotels and chestnut groves, she asked the driver to tell her
when she should get out.
She stood outside the entrance for quite some time, undecided about whether to run away or not. It was all so strange and dark, under that sky full of clouds, that she felt like she was already in the Afterlife, because this couldn’t be anything but death. The hotel was very elegant, with crystal chandeliers that were all switched on even though it was early afternoon.
In her room, a writing desk under the window immediately caught her eye, and maybe that was the only reason she didn’t escape back to the station and then back onto the boat and then home, even though Nonno would have been very angry, and rightly so. She’d never had a desk, nor had she ever been able to sit down at a table to write because she’d always written in secret, with her notebook in her lap, ready to hide it as soon as she heard anyone coming.
On the desk there was a leather folder with lots of paper with letterheads, a small bottle of ink, a pen with a nib, and blotting paper. So the first thing Nonna did, even before taking off her coat, was to take her notebook out of the suitcase and place it with great ceremony on the desk, inside the leather folder; then she carefully locked the door for fear someone might come in suddenly and see what was written in the notebook. Finally, she sat down on the big double bed to wait for dinnertime.
There were lots of square tables in the dining room, with white linen tablecloths and white porcelain plates and shiny cutlery and glasses and bunches of flowers in the middle, and above each one hung a crystal chandelier with all the lights on. Some tables were already occupied by people who looked like souls in Purgatory, with their sad pallor and subdued, confused voices, but many places were still free. Nonna chose an empty table and put her bag, coat, and woollen jacket on the other three chairs, and when someone passed she kept her head down, hoping they wouldn’t sit near her.
She didn’t want to eat, nor to undergo treatment, because she felt she wouldn’t be cured anyway, and she’d never have any children. Normal women — cheerful women with no bad thoughts, like her neighbours in via Sulis — had children. As soon as her children had realised they were in the belly of a madwoman, they had fled, like all those suitors.
A man entered the dining room carrying a suitcase; he must have just arrived, and hadn’t even been to his room. He had a crutch but he walked briskly and nimbly. Nonna liked this man as she’d never liked any of the admirers she’d written fiery poems to and had waited for, Wednesday after Wednesday. She was sure, then, that she wasn’t in the Afterlife, with the other souls of Purgatory, because these things don’t happen in the Afterlife.
The Veteran had a simple old suitcase but was dressed in a most distinguished way; and although he had a wooden leg and a crutch, he was a very handsome man. As soon as she got back to her room after dinner, Nonna sat down at the desk to write about him in every detail, so that if she never saw him in the hotel again there was no risk she’d forget him. He was tall and dark, with deep eyes and soft skin; a slender neck; strong, long arms and large hands that were as innocent as those of a child; a full and prominent mouth in spite of his short, slightly curly beard; and a gently curved nose.
Over the following days, she watched him from her table or on the veranda, where he went to read or smoke cigarettes — Nazionali with no filter — and she went to do boring old cross-stitch embroidery on napkins. She always set her chair up a little behind him so she wouldn’t be seen while, enchanted, she looked at the line of his forehead, his thin nose, his vulnerable throat, his curly hair with its first white flecks, his tormentingly thin form inside his spotless white, starched shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his strong arms and good hands, his rigid leg inside his trousers, his old shoes, perfectly shined: it was enough to make you cry for the dignity of that damaged body that was still, in spite of it all, inexplicably strong and beautiful.
Then, there were even some sunny days, and everything seemed different — the chestnuts golden, the sky blue, and there was lots of light on the veranda where the Veteran went to smoke or read, and Nonna went and pretended to embroider.
He would get up and go and look at the hills behind the glass, lost in thought, and each time he turned around to go and sit back down he would look at her and smile at her — a liquid smile Nonna liked so much it almost caused her pain, and the emotion would fill her whole day.
One evening, the Veteran passed by Nonna’s table and seemed undecided about where to sit, so she removed the overcoat and the bag to make room for him next to her, and he sat down and they smiled, looking in each other’s eyes, and that evening they didn’t eat or
drink anything.