How she liked Cagliari, and the sea, and her village with its smell a mix of wood, open fires, horse poo,
soap, wheat, tomatoes, and hot bread.
But not as much as she liked him. She liked him better than anything else. With him she was ashamed of nothing, even peeing together to expel their stones, and because all her life people had always told her she must have come here from the moon, it was as if, finally, she’d met someone from the same place, and that was the most important thing in life — what she’d always been missing.
And in fact, after the thermal treatment, Nonna no longer scrawled on the decorative patterns halfway up the wall, which are still here in via Manno, nor did she rip her embroidery, which is still on my school smocks from when I was a child, and which, if God wishes, and I truly hope he wishes, I will pass on to
my children.
And the embryo of my father didn’t miss out on that most important thing in life either.
She had given the little notebook to the Veteran
,
because she knew that she would no longer have time for writing. She had to begin living. Because the Veteran had been just a moment, and Nonna’s life was many more things.
Back home Nonna had fallen pregnant at once, and in all those months she never had problems with kidney stones. Her tummy grew, and Nonno and the neighbours wouldn’t let her touch anything and treated her like
nènniri
, the little newborn wheat plants. My father had a light-blue wooden rocking crib, and all his baby clothes were made at the last minute, out of superstition. When Papà turned one, Nonno wanted to hold a big party in the kitchen in via Sulis, with a hand-embroidered tablecloth, and he bought a camera, and finally, poor thing, he was able to enjoy a birthday cake — American-style, with layers of almost-solid custard, and chocolate, and sponge, and a little candle. Nonna’s not in the photos. She ran away to cry in the bedroom, overcome by emotion when they started singing, ‘Happy birthday to you.’ And when they tried to persuade her to come back out, she kept saying she couldn’t believe a child had come out of her, and not just stones. She continued weeping unrestrainedly, and her sisters, who had come especially from the village, and Nonno, must surely have expected some episode of
macchiòri
that would reveal to everyone that Nonna was crazy. But Nonna got up off the bed, dried her eyes, returned to the kitchen, and took her boy in her arms. She’s not in the photos because, with her eyes all swollen, she felt ugly, and for her son’s first birthday she wanted to be beautiful.
Nonna fell pregnant at other times, but the most important thing in life was evidently missing from those embryos that would have become my father’s siblings — they didn’t want to be born, turning back after the first few months.
In 1954, Nonno and Nonna came to live here in via Manno. They were the first to leave the shared house in via Sulis, and, even though via Manno is just nearby, they missed it. So, Nonno would invite the old neighbours around on a Sunday and cook fish or sausages on the grill on the terrace, and he’d toast bread with oil, and when the weather was nice they’d put out the picnic tables and chairs that they’d take to the hut at Poetto in the summer.
Actually, Nonna had loved via Manno straightaway, even before their building had been replaced, ever since they came to look at the big hole and the piles of rubble. The terrace soon became a garden. I remember the Virginia creeper, and the ivy climbing up the end wall, and the geraniums grouped by colour — purple, pink, and red. In spring, the little yellow forest of broom and freesias would flower; in summer, the dahlias and perfumed jasmine and bougainvilleas; in winter, the pyracantha was covered with red berries
that we used for Christmas decorations.
When the mistral blew, we’d put on scarves and run up to save the plants, placing the pots against the low walls or covering them with plastic, and bringing some of the more delicate ones into the house until the wind died down and stopped blowing everything away.
Sometimes I thought that the Veteran didn’t love Nonna. He hadn’t given her his address, and though he knew where she lived, he’d never even sent her a postcard. He could have signed a woman’s name; Nonna would have recognised his writing from the poems she’d kept. The Veteran hadn’t wanted to see her again. He, too
,
thought she was crazy, and had been afraid he’d find her on the steps of his house one day, or in the courtyard, waiting for him in any weather — in the rain, in the fog, or dripping with sweat if it was one of those sweltering, windless summers they get in Milan.
Or maybe not. Maybe it really was love, and he didn’t want her to be so foolish as to leave everything else in her world for him. Why get in touch and ruin everything? Why turn up in front of her and say: ‘Here I am, I’m the life you could have had and didn’t’? Torturing her, poor woman. As if she hadn’t suffered enough, up there in the barn, cutting her arms and her hair, or in the well, or staring at the front door on those famous Wednesdays.
And to make that kind of sacrifice, staying away for the other person’s wellbeing, you have to really love them.
I wondered, never daring to say this to anyone of course, if my father’s real father wasn’t perhaps the Veteran. When I was in my last year of school and we studied the Second World War, the teacher once asked if anyone’s grandfather had been in the war and
what they’d done, and I instinctively said, ‘Yes.’
My Nonno was a lieutenant on the heavy cruiser
Trieste
, I told him, in the Third Division of the Royal Navy. He participated in the hell that was Matapan in March 1941, and was shipwrecked when the
Trieste
was sunk by the Third Squadron of B-17s of the Ninety-Eighth Group in Mezzo Schifo harbour at Palau; that was the only time Nonno came to Sardinia, I said, when our sea was red with waves of blood. After the armistice between Italy and the Allied Forces, the Germans took him prisoner aboard the light cruiser
Jean de Vienne
(which had been captured by the Italian Royal Navy in 1942), and deported him to the Hinzert concentration camp, where he remained interned until the Germans retreated eastwards in the winter of ’44, amid high snow and ice; if you didn’t march, they’d shoot you or crack your skull with the butt of a rifle, and luckily the Allies reached them, and an American doctor amputated his leg.
But, as Nonna always said to me, he was still a handsome man when she secretly watched him reading in those first days at the thermal baths — that boy’s neck of his leaning over his book, and those liquid eyes, and that smile, and those strong arms with the sleeves of his shirt rolled up, and those big, child-like hands from being a pianist, and everything else that she yearned for all the rest of her life. And yearning is a sad thing, but it’s also kind of happy.
With age, Nonna fell ill with kidney problems again, and every two days I went to pick her up at via Manno and took her for dialysis. She didn’t want to inconvenience me, so she waited down in the street, with her bag that contained a nightdress and slippers and a little shawl, because after dialysis she was always cold, even in summer. She still had her thick black hair and her intense eyes and all her teeth, but her arms and legs were full of holes from the drips, and her skin had turned yellowish. And she was so emaciated that as soon as she got into the car and placed her bag in her lap, I always had the feeling that this object — which would have weighed, at most, three hundred grams — might squash her.
One dialysis day, she wasn’t waiting for me at the front door, and I thought she must have felt weaker than usual. I ran up the three flights of stairs so as not to be late, because there were set times for the treatment at the hospital. I rang the bell, and when she didn’t answer I was afraid she might have fainted, so I let myself in with my set of keys. She was lying peacefully on the bed, asleep, all ready to go out, with her bag on the chair. I tried to wake her, but she didn’t respond. I felt a desperation deep in my soul. Nonna was dead.
I got on the phone; all I can remember is that I wanted to call someone to come and revive her, my Nonna, and it took a lot to convince me that no doctor could do it.
Only after she died did I learn that they’d wanted to put her in an asylum, and that before the war my great-grandparents had come to Cagliari from the village, by bus, and had thought that the asylum on
Monte Claro would be a nice place for their daughter.
My father never knew these things. My great-aunts had told Mamma the story when she was about to marry Papà. They had invited her to the village to talk to her in great secrecy, to let her know what blood flowed through the veins of the boy she loved and with whom she would have children.
They took on this embarrassing task since Nonno, their brother-in-law, hadn’t done the proper thing and told his future daughter-in-law about it, even though he’d always known everything and, that May when he’d arrived as an evacuee, he had seen it all,
de dognia
colori
. They didn’t want to criticise; he was a great man, and even though he was a communist, an atheist, and a revolutionary, he’d been
sa manu de Deus
, the hand of God, for their family. He’d sacrificed himself and had married Nonna who was sick with kidney stones — the lesser ill really, because the greater ill was in her head — and with Nonna gone, suitors had arrived for them, too, poor things, and normal life had begun without that sister, so often locked up in the barn, who cut her hair so it looked all mangy. They could understand why Nonna had never told her son anything — after all, he already had her blood — but Mamma, a healthy girl, she needed to know. So, sitting on a stool in front of the Sardinian sweets and the coffee in gilded cups, my mother heard the story from her future aunts.
To her parents, the asylum had seemed a nice place for Nonna; on the hill there was a large, dense forest of maritime pine, tree-of-heaven, cypress, oleander, broom, and carob, with pathways that Nonna would be able to walk up and down. And also, it wasn’t just a single, gloomy building block that might have been a bit frightening, but a whole series of early-twentieth-century villas, well looked after and surrounded by a garden.
Nonna would be in the Quiet Ones section: a two-storey villa with a very elegant, glassed-in entrance hall, a sitting room, two refectories, and eight dormitories; if it weren’t for the staircases built into the wall, no one would have picked that crazy people lived there. Since Nonna was a ‘quiet one’, she would be able to go outside, and maybe even go to the building where management was, which had a library and a reading room where she would be able to write and read novels and poems as she pleased, but under supervision. And she would never have to have any contact with the other villas for the Semi-Agitated and the Agitated, and dreadful things, like being locked in an isolation cell or being tied to a bed, would never happen to her. She was worse off at home, really, because when she had her crises of desperation and wanted to kill herself, they had to save her somehow. And how else but by locking her up in the barn, where they’d had to put bars on the window, or tying her to the bed with rags? There were no bars on the windows of the asylum’s villas — they had the kind of windows selected by a certain Doctor Frank for the Musterlinger Asylum, which were fitted with a special security lock and had iron in the glass, but you couldn’t see it.
They took away with them the Information Sheet on the Admission of the Insane into the Cagliari Asylum, though they’d still have to convince Nonna to be examined, and they’d have to give it some thought themselves. And then Italy entered the war.
But they couldn’t keep her at home; even though she’d never hurt anybody, apart from herself and her things, and posed no danger, everyone in the village used to point out their street by saying, ‘Over there, where the
macca
lives.’
Nonna had always embarrassed them, ever since that time in church when she’d seen a boy she liked and had started constantly turning around towards the pews where the men sat, smiling and staring at him, and the boy was giggling, too. Then she’d taken her hairpins out and let down her black, shiny cloud of hair, which looked like a seductive weapon of the devil — some kind of witchery. My great-grandmother ran out of the church dragging Nonna, who was, at that stage, her only daughter, and who was yelling, ‘But I love him, and he loves me!’ And as soon as they were inside the front door of the house, she beat her so hard with everything she could find — a horse’s bellyband, straps, pots, carpet-beaters, ropes from the well — that the girl was reduced to a rag doll that flopped around in her hands. Then she called for the priest to get the demon out of the child’s body, but instead the priest blessed her, and said that Nonna was a good girl, and he couldn’t see so much as a shadow of the devil.
My great-grandmother would tell this story to everyone to excuse her daughter, to make them see that she was mad but good, and that there was no danger in their house. But, just to be sure, from time to time she did a bit of exorcism of her own on Nonna, until she married Nonno.
Nonna’s sickness could be defined as a kind of love-craziness, in the following sense: a nice-looking man only had to cross the threshold of the house and smile at her, or just look at her — and this did happen, because she was very beautiful — and she would think him an admirer. She would begin waiting for a visit, a declaration of love, a marriage proposal, and would write constantly in that damned notebook, which they’d looked for to take to the doctor at the asylum,
but it was nowhere to be found.