The Veteran suffered from the same trouble as she did; his kidneys, too, were full of stones. He’d been in the war, all of it. As a boy, he was always reading Salgari’s novels and he had enlisted in the Navy — he liked the sea and literature; it was poetry, above all, that had kept him going during the most difficult times. After the war ended he graduated, and recently he had moved from Genoa to Milan, where he was teaching Italian, trying in every possible way not to bore the students. He lived on the mezzanine floor of a
casa di ringhiera
with a shared balcony with railings all the way around, in two completely white rooms that contained nothing from the past.
He had been married since 1939, and had a little girl in first grade who was learning the letters of the alphabet and Greek frets — those geometric patterns they used to do in those days, like the ones Nonna embroidered on napkins; in the child’s little squared notebook, though, these frets formed a border around the page. His girl loved school, and the smell of books, and stationery shops. She loved rain and liked umbrellas — they’d bought her a coloured one like a beach umbrella — and during that season it rained all the time in Milan, but the girl waited for him in any weather, sitting on the front steps of the house or jumping around in the big internal courtyard overlooked by the less fancy apartments. And then there was the fog in Milan, and Nonna had no idea what it could be — from the Veteran’s description she imagined it as something along the lines of the Afterlife.
No kids for Nonna, though. Surely it was the fault of those kidney stones. She, too, had liked school a lot, but in fourth grade they’d taken her out. The teacher had gone to their house to ask them to send her to high school, or at least technical school, because she wrote well, and her parents had become terribly afraid of somehow being obliged to let her continue studying; they’d kept her at home, and told the teacher that he didn’t have any idea about their problems and not to bother coming again.
But, by then, she’d learnt to read and write, and she’d been writing in secret all her life. Poems. Some thoughts, perhaps. Things that happened to her, but also made-up things. No one must know because maybe they’d think she was mad. She was confiding this to him because she trusted him, even though she’d only known him for an hour. The Veteran was enthusiastic and made her solemnly promise not to be embarrassed and to let him read them, if she had them with her, or to recite some, because he reckoned everyone else was mad, not her.
He, too, had a passion: playing the piano. He’d had a piano since he was a child — it was his mother’s — and every time he came home on leave he would play for hours and hours. Chopin’s nocturnes were his favourites. But then, after returning from the war, the piano was no longer there and he hadn’t had the heart to ask his wife what had happened to it. Now he’d bought a new one, and his hands had begun to remember.
At the baths, he’d really missed the piano, but only before talking to Nonna, because talking to her and watching her laugh or even become sad, and seeing the way her hair fell when she gesticulated, or admiring the skin of her thin wrists and the contrast with her chapped hands, was like playing the piano.
From that day on, Nonna and the Veteran were never apart, except unwillingly to go to the toilet. The gossip didn’t worry him, being from the North, much less
her, even if she was Sardinian.
In the mornings, they met in the breakfast room, because whoever arrived first ate slowly to give the other time to arrive, and every day Nonna was afraid that the Veteran might have left without letting her know, or that he might have tired of her company and might change tables and pass by her with a cold nod, like all those Wednesday men from so many years earlier. But he always chose the same table, and if she was the one to arrive late, it was clear that he was waiting for her, since he only drank a little cup of coffee with nothing else, and Nonna would find him there, still sitting in front of the empty cup. And the Veteran would snatch up his crutch and stand, as if to salute his Captain, gently bow his head and say, ‘Good morning, Princess,’ and Nonna would laugh, excited and happy.
‘Princess of what?’
Then he’d invite her to come with him to buy the paper, which he read every day, like Nonno, only Nonno read it by himself, in silence, whereas the Veteran would sit down on a bench with her beside him and read the articles aloud to her and ask her opinion, and it didn’t matter that he had a degree and Nonna had only gone as far as fourth grade; you could see that he considered her ideas very important. For example, he asked her about the Fund for the South: what did Sardinians have to say about it? And about the war in Korea: what were Nonna’s thoughts on that? And what was happening in China? Nonna would get him to explain the issues to her properly and then express her opinion, and nothing would induce her to give up the daily news, with her head touching the Veteran’s during the reading, such that it would only take a moment, they were so close, to exchange a kiss.
And he would say, ‘And which way shall we walk back to the hotel today? Please suggest the route you’d like to take.’
So each time they went a different way, and when the Veteran saw that Nonna was distracted and stopped suddenly in the middle of the road to look at the façade of a hotel, or the tops of the trees, or who knows what, as was her habit right into old age, he would put a hand on her shoulder and, pressing gently, direct her to the side of the road.
‘A princess. You have the attitude of a princess. You don’t worry about the world around you, the world must worry about you. Your task is simply to exist. Isn’t that so?’
And Nonna would enjoy this fantasy — future Princess of via Manno, currently of via Sulis, and formerly of the Campidano plains.
Although they made no specific arrangement, they kept arriving at breakfast earlier and earlier so as to have more time to read the paper up close on the bench and for their walk, during which the Veteran always had to place a hand on her shoulder and make
her change direction.
One day, the Veteran asked if he could see Nonna’s arms, and when she pulled up the sleeves of her shirt he intently ran his finger lightly along the veins.
‘Beautiful,’ he said, becoming suddenly less formal, ‘you’re a true beauty. But why all these cuts?’
Nonna told him that they were from working in the fields.
‘But they look like they’re from a knife blade.’
‘We cut lots of things. That’s what it’s like in farm work.’
‘But why your arms and not your hands? They’re clean cuts, they look like they’ve been done on purpose.’
She didn’t answer, and he took her hand and kissed it and kissed all the cuts on her arms and ran his finger along the lines of her face, repeating, ‘Beautiful, beautiful.’
So then she touched him, too, this man she had watched for days from her chair on the veranda, as delicately as you might touch the sculpture of a great artist — his hair, the soft skin of his neck, the fabric of his shirt, the strong arms and the good, childlike hands, the wooden leg and foot inside his newly shined shoes.
The Veteran’s daughter was not his own. In 1944 he’d been a prisoner of the Germans who were retreating eastwards. His daughter was actually the child of a partisan his wife had fought alongside who had been killed in action. The Veteran loved his little girl and
didn’t want to know any more.
He had left in 1940 on the cruiser
Trieste
, was shipwrecked two or three times, taken prisoner off the coast of Marseilles in 1943, interned in a concentration camp in Hinzert until 1944. He’d lost his leg in the retreat of the winter of ’44 and ’45: the Allies had reached them when he was still able to drag himself along and an American doctor had amputated it to save his life.
They were sitting on the bench and Nonna took his head in her hands and rested it on her heart, which was beating like crazy, unbuttoning the top buttons of her shirt. He caressed her breasts with smiling lips. ‘Shall we kiss our smiles?’ Nonna asked, and so they shared an infinite liquid kiss and the Veteran told her that in Canto V of the
Inferno
Dante had the same idea about kissing smiles, for Paolo and Francesca, two who loved each other and could not.
Nonna’s house, like the Veteran’s piano, would be reborn from the rubble: a building was being planned in the great empty space left by the church of San Giorgio and Santa Caterina and Nonno’s old house. She was sure it would be beautiful, this house of hers, full of light, with views of the ships and orange and violet sunsets and swallows leaving for Africa and a room for entertaining on the lower floor, a winter garden, red carpet on the stairs, and a fountain with a water jet on the veranda. Via Manno was lovely, the loveliest street in Cagliari. On Sundays, Nonno bought her pastries from Tramer and on other days, when he wanted to please her, he went to the Santa Chiara market to buy octopus which she boiled up and served with oil and salt and parsley.
The Veteran’s wife now cooked Milanese cutlet and risotto, but for him, the best foods would always be Genoese
trenette
and pesto, stuffed veal roll, Easter pie.
In Genoa, the Veteran’s house had been near Gaslini hospital; it had a garden with lots of fig trees, hydrangeas, violets, a chicken coop, and he’d always lived there. Now he’d sold it to some good people who had them come to stay and gave them fresh eggs and, in summer, tomatoes and basil to take back to Milan. It was an old, damp house, but the garden was beautiful and the plants had taken it over completely. The only precious thing there had been the piano, from his mother’s side; she’d been extremely rich but had fallen in love with his father, a
camallo
, which is what they call dockers at the port in Genoa, and so they’d thrown her out and the only thing they’d sent on to her long afterwards was her piano.
When he was a child, his mother, especially in summer after dinner — because in Genoa you eat early and then go out — often took him to see his grandparent’s villa from the outside, with a tall wall the whole length of the street, leading up to a big gate with the caretaker’s house alongside, and a drive lined with palms and agaves, and a field with patterns of flowers that rose all the way up to the grand milk-white building, with three storeys of terraces with plaster balustrades, and ice-coloured stucco decorations around the rows of windows, many of which were illuminated, and, on top, four little towers.
But his mother told him that none of that mattered to her, she had her two loves — her husband and her
figeto
, her little boy — and she hugged him tight; on summer nights in Genoa there were lots of fireflies, and that’s how he remembered his mother.
She’d died when the Veteran was not yet ten years old, and his father had never remarried. He would go to the women at the bordello in via Pre, and they’d always been enough for him until he died during the bombings, when he was still working at the port.
Maybe the Veteran’s little girl wasn’t the child of a partisan. Maybe she was the child of a German and his wife hadn’t wanted to tell him for fear that he’d hate the child of a Nazi. Maybe she’d had to defend herself. Maybe a German soldier had helped her out. What was certain was that in 1943 his wife, who worked in a factory, had joined a strike for bread, peace, and freedom, and she had never forgiven him the military uniform, even though everyone knew the Royal Navy was loyal to the King and in fact barely tolerated fascism, and as for the Germans, let’s not even talk about the Germans — a bunch of highlanders — because really our allies should have been the English, and the men who went to sea had none of that delirium of the period: they were serious, reserved men, with a strong sense of sacrifice and honour.
His daughter already had a Milanese accent, a little doll that she played mummy with, a toy kitchen and porcelain tea set, and her notebook with the first letters of the alphabet and the Greek frets. She liked the sea that suddenly appeared at the end of a tunnel when they took her to Genoa on the train, and she’d cried a lot when they moved to Milan a year ago, standing on the balcony and calling out to passers-by, ‘Genoa! Give me back my Genoa! I want my Genoa!’ If she was the child of a German, he must have been
a good German.
Nonna’s feeling, too, although she didn’t understand politics, was that it wasn’t possible that all the German invaders of Italy were bad people. Besides, what about the Americans who had destroyed Cagliari, almost totally razed it to the ground? Her husband, who did understand politics and read the paper every day and was a highly intelligent communist — he’d even organised the strike at the saltworks — always said that there was no strategic reason to wreck the city like that. And yet the pilots of the B-17 Flying Fortresses, they couldn’t all have been bad, could they? Amongst them, too, there must have been some good people.
And now, the emptiness would be filled by the house in via Manno, and by the piano, and the Veteran hugged Nonna and whispered in her ear the sounds of the bass, the trumpet, the violin, the flute. He could do the whole orchestra. It might seem crazy, but during the long marches in the snow, or in the camps when to entertain the Germans he had to fight dogs for food, it was those sounds in his mind, along with poetry, that kept him going.
He also told her, still whispering in her ear, that some scholars maintained that Paolo and Francesca were killed as soon as they were discovered, while other Dante experts thought they took pleasure in each other for a while before they died. It depended how you interpreted the line,
We read no further
. He also said that if Nonna was not so afraid of Hell, they, too, could love each other in that same way. And Nonna wasn’t afraid of Hell in the least; no way. If God was really God, knowing how much she’d wanted love, how much she’d prayed to at least know what it was,
how could He send her to Hell now.