They knocked, but no one came. Some people looked out into the corridor from another door, and when Nonno told them who they were looking for and who they were, these people made a big fuss over them and invited them into their garret to wait. It turned out that Nonna’s brother-in-law was out with the cart selling rags, her sister was working as a maid, and the children spent the day with the nuns. They were asked to sit down on the bed, under the only window, from which you could see a small piece of grey sky. Papà wanted to go to the bathroom, but Nonno frowned at him because it was obvious that there was no bathroom.
Perhaps they should have left immediately — they could only bring infinite shame upon those poor wretches. But it was too late. The affectionate and kind neighbours,
terún
themselves, had already inundated them with questions, and to run off would have meant adding insult to injury.
So, they waited, and the only really sad one was Nonno. Papà was enthusiastic because in Milan he’d be able to find music that in Cagliari you had to order and wait months for, and to Nonna nothing mattered except meeting the Veteran; she’d been waiting for this moment since that autumn of 1950.
The first thing she asked her sister, when she came in, was what part of the city the
case di ringhiera
were in — she said she was curious because she’d heard about these big houses with their apartments and their shared balconies. She got an indication of which part of town had the greatest number, and it was left up to Nonno to take Papà to see La Scala, the Cathedral, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, the Castello Sforzesco, and to buy music that you couldn’t find in Cagliari
.
You could tell Nonno was upset, but he didn’t say anything, as usual, and didn’t do anything to stop her. In fact, each morning he showed her on the map which streets she had to take to see the areas she was interested in, and told her which tram she needed to get, and left her some coins for the phone and useful numbers, and money in case she got lost. She mustn’t get flustered; she just needed to call a taxi from a phone booth, and she’d be safely back home.
Nonna was not insensitive, stupid, or cruel; she was perfectly aware of what she was doing and that she was hurting Nonno. She didn’t want that for anything in the world. Not for anything in the world, except for her love. So, with her heart in her mouth, she went off to look for the Veteran’s house. She was sure she’d find it: she knew it was in a massive, tall building with stone balconies, and that outside there was a big door and a tunnel that formed a monumental entrance to a huge courtyard, overlooked by floor after floor of narrow, shared balconies with railings all around. The Veteran was on the mezzanine floor, with three or four steps up to the door, where his little daughter sat to wait for him in any weather; his place had windows with bars on them, and two large rooms painted white that contained nothing from the past.
With her heart thumping as though she was a criminal, Nonna went into a bar, asked for a phone book, and looked for the Veteran’s surname. But even though he had a Genoese name there were pages and pages of them. Her only hope was that she would be lucky, that she was in the right area and would find the right house.
But there were
case di ringhiera
along many very long streets. Nonna also looked for him in the shops, which were expensive — the food shops looked like Vaghi in via Bayle in Cagliari — but there were so many of them and they were all so crowded. Still, maybe the Veteran did the shopping on his way home from work; perhaps she’d run into him, handsome, with his flowing raincoat hanging off him, and he would smile at her and tell her that he’d never forgotten her, either, and that in his heart he’d been waiting for her.
Meanwhile, Papà, his little cousins, and Nonno had gone into the city, all holding hands in the fog, which just kept getting thicker and thicker
.
Sitting down at a table at Motta, Nonno had bought his son and nephews hot chocolate, and then he’d taken them to all the best toy shops where he’d bought his nephews Lego, and little planes that flew up from the ground, and even a home table-soccer set, and then they’d gone into the Cathedral, and off to get an ice-cream cone with cream at the Galleria. My father says that their trip to Milan was the most beautiful thing, apart from the fact that he missed his piano.
If Nonna had found the Veteran she’d have run away with him, just as she was, taking with her only what she was wearing — her new overcoat, the woollen cap covering her hair, and the handbag and shoes that she’d bought especially so she would look elegant if
she met him.
Too bad about Papà and Nonno, even though she loved them and would miss them terribly. She consoled herself with the fact that the two of them were perfectly matched — always talking to each other in a huddle a few steps ahead of her when they went out together, and entertaining each other at the table while she washed the dishes. As a boy, it was from his father that Papà wanted his goodnight kiss, along with a story to help him sleep, and all the other reassurances that children need before going to bed.
Too bad about Cagliari: the narrow, dark streets of Castello that suddenly opened out onto a sea of light; too bad about the flowers she’d planted that would fill the terrace in via Manno with colour; too bad about the clothes hanging out to dry in the mistral
.
Too bad about Poetto beach: the long desert of white dunes on clear water, where you could walk and walk and it was never deep, and shoals of fish swam around your legs. Too bad about summers at the blue-and-white striped beach hut, and plates of
malloreddus
with tomato and sausage after a swim. Too bad about her village, with the smell of chimneys and pork and lamb and church incense when they went to visit her sisters on feast days.
But then the fog kept getting thicker, and the upper floors of the buildings seemed to be shrouded in clouds, and you had to bump right into people to see them because they were just shadows.
During the next few days, through the streets of Milan, which were still shrouded in fog, Nonno took Nonna by the arm and held Papà’s shoulder on his other side, and he in turn held hands with his smaller cousins, because that way they wouldn’t lose each other and would at least see all the things nearby — too bad about those things that the fog made invisible. In these last days, after Nonna stopped looking for
case
di ringhiera
, Nonno had become strangely cheerful and couldn’t stop making jokes, and everyone at the table laughed, and the attic didn’t even seem that squalid and cramped any more. When they went out, all linked up like that, Nonna, too, would have enjoyed some of Nonno’s witty remarks, if only she hadn’t had that tormented yearning for the Veteran
that made it hard for her to breathe.
One of those days Nonno got into his head the idea that he had to buy her a dress, a really beautiful one that was worthy of a trip all the way to Milan, and he even said a thing he’d never said before: ‘I want you to buy yourself something nice. Something beautiful.’
So they stopped and looked in the windows of all the most elegant shops, and Papà and the little cousins kept grumbling because it was so boring waiting for Nonna to try on this and that with her unenthusiastic air.
By now, the chances of finding the Veteran in a Milan immersed in fog were diminishing, and the dress didn’t matter in the least to Nonna, but they bought one anyway — in cashmere, with pastel-coloured patterns — and Nonno asked her to undo her bun in the shop, to see how good all those blue and pink moons and stars looked with her cloud of black hair. He was so happy with the purchase that he wanted Nonna to wear the new dress under her coat every day, and before going out he’d make her turn around, and he’d say, ‘It’s beautiful,’ but it seemed like he wanted to say, ‘You’re beautiful.’
And Nonna never forgave herself for that either — for not knowing how to catch those words in the air and be happy with them.
When the time came to say goodbye, she sobbed, with her cheek resting on the suitcase. She wasn’t crying for her sister, her brother-in-law, or her little nephews, but because destiny hadn’t wanted her to meet the Veteran, so that must mean he was dead. She remembered how in that autumn of 1950 she had thought she was in the Afterlife; besides, he was so thin, with that slender neck, that damaged leg, the child’s skin and hands, and that terrible retreat eastwards and the concentration camps and the shipwrecks, and maybe a Nazi father for his child. Now she could feel that he was dead. Otherwise, he would have looked for her — he knew where she lived, and Cagliari’s not like Milan. The Veteran might really no longer exist and that was why she cried.
Nonno picked her up and sat her down on the only bed, under the tiny window of the attic. They comforted her. They put a little glass in her hand for the farewell toast — to meeting again in better times, her sister and brother-in-law said, though Nonno didn’t want to toast to better times but rather to that trip, during which they’d all been together and had eaten well and had also had a bit of a laugh.
Then Nonna, with the glass in her hand, started to think that maybe the Veteran was alive after all — he’d survived so many terrible things, so why wouldn’t he have coped with ordinary life? And then she told herself that she still had an hour left — there was all the tram trip to the station — and the fog was starting to clear.
But by the time they arrived at the central station, there was little time left before the departure of the train to Genoa, where they’d get the ship, and then another train, and then resume that life where you water the flowers on the terrace and prepare breakfast and then lunch and dinner, and your husband and your son, if you ask them how things are, they reply, ‘Normal. All normal. Don’t worry,’ and they never tell you things properly like the Veteran used to do, and your husband never tells you that you’re the only one for him, the one he’d always been waiting for, and that in May of 1943 his life had changed — never, in spite of all the perfected bedroom services and all the nights sleeping together.
And now, if God didn’t want her to meet the Veteran, He should just kill her. The station was dirty, with litter and spit on the ground. As she sat waiting for her husband and son to get the tickets — Papà never chose to stay with her, and clearly preferred to stand in line with Nonno — she noticed some chewing gum stuck to her seat, she could smell toilets, and she felt an infinite disgust for Milan, which seemed ugly, like the whole world.
She followed Nonno and Papà, who were talking away together, onto the escalator that led up to the trains, and she thought that if she turned back they wouldn’t even notice. There was no fog now. She would keep looking for the Veteran on all the disgusting streets in the world, through the winter chill that was on its way. She’d even beg, and maybe sleep on park benches; and if she died of pneumonia or hunger, all the better.
So then she dropped all her luggage and packages, and threw herself down the escalator, crashing into the people coming up and saying, ‘Excuse me! Excuse me!’ But at the very bottom the escalator tripped her up, swallowing her shoe and a piece of her coat, and ripping her beautiful new dress and her stockings and her little woollen hat that had fallen off, and the skin on her hands and legs. She had cuts all over.
Two arms helped her up. Nonno had thrown himself down after her, and was now holding her and stroking her like a child. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said to her. ‘It’s nothing.’
Back home, she set about washing all the dirty clothes from the trip: shirts, dresses, blouses, socks, underwear — they’d bought everything new to go to Milan. They were well off now, and Nonna had a Candy washing machine with a cycle for tough fabrics and a cycle for delicates. She divided everything up: those that needed to be washed in high temperatures, and those in warm water. Maybe she was thinking about something else — no one knows — but she
ruined everything.
Papà tells me she hugged them, him and Nonno, amid tears and sobs, and went to get knives from the kitchen, which she gave them so they could kill her, and she scratched her face and banged her head against the wall and threw herself on the ground.
Then my father heard Nonno phoning the aunts and saying that in Milan she hadn’t coped with seeing her youngest and most indulged sister reduced to such poverty, because here in Sardinia landowners were humble but dignified, and were respected by everyone, but the failed agrarian reform had ruined them and they’d had to emigrate, the women becoming maids — which, for a husband, is the worst humiliation — and the men breathing in the poisons of industry, with no protection and, above all, no respect, and their children feeling ashamed, at school, of their Sardinian surnames with all those
u
’s. He hadn’t suspected any of this, because the sister and brother-in-law had written saying that they were doing well, and he and Nonna had thought they’d surprise them with their visit, and instead they’d just
shamed them.
The kids had thrown themselves on the sausages and the prosciutto like they hadn’t eaten in who knows how long; his brother-in-law, when he cut the cheese and opened the bottle of
mirto
, had been overcome, and had told them he could never forget that when they divided up the property, Nonno hadn’t wanted Nonna’s share, but unfortunately it had all been for nothing — they’d thought no one could live off that land, but the people who’d stayed on had made the right decision.
Nonna, who was made a bit differently, as her sisters well knew, couldn’t handle all this, and also she’d found out today that President Kennedy had been killed in Dallas, and she’d destroyed laundry worth a month’s wages. This didn’t matter to him — money comes and goes — but there was no way of calming her down, and their son was shocked. Could they come to Cagliari, please, at once, on the next bus?