The House in Via Manno

by Milena Agus

  THE HOUSE IN VIA MANNO

  Translated by Brigid Maher

  Scribe Publications Pty Ltd

  PO Box 523

  Carlton North, Victoria, Australia 3054

  Email: info@scribepub.com.au

  First published by nottetempo in Italy as Mal di pietre 2006

  Published by Scribe in Australia and New Zealand 2009

  Text copyright © nottetempo 2006

  English translation copyright © Brigid Maher 2009

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

  We acknowledge with gratitude the contribution given by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the translation of this book.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data

  Agus, Milena.

  The House in Via Manno

  9781921753534 (e-book.)

  853.92

  www.scribepublications.com.au

  If I never meet you in this life, let me feel the lack.

  — thoughts of a soldier in the film The Thin Red Line

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  1

  Nonna met the Veteran in the autumn of 1950. From Cagliari in Sardinia, she was arriving on the Continent for the first time. She was about to turn forty, and was childless because the kidney stones, su mali de is perdas, always made her miscarry during the first months. And so, with her loose overcoat and high-heeled lace-up shoes, and her husband’s suitcase from when he was evacuated to the village, she was sent to the thermal baths for treatment.

  2

  She had married late, in June 1943, after the American bombing of Cagliari. In those days, if you were thirty years old and still hadn’t settled down, you already seemed like a bit of a spinster. Not that she was ugly, or lacked suitors — far from it. It was just that, at some point, her admirers would begin to call less frequently, and then they’d stop turning up altogether, always before having officially asked my great-grandfather for her hand. Kind signorina, circumstances beyond my control prevent me from visiting you both this coming Wednesday, and the following Wednesday. Though it would greatly delight me, it is, alas, impossible. So Nonna would await the third Wednesday, but, every time, a young pipiedda would arrive with a letter that postponed things once more, and that would be the end of that.

  My great-grandfather and her sisters loved Nonna just as she was — a bit of a spinster — but my great-grandmother always treated her as though she wasn’t her own flesh and blood, and would only say that she knew exactly why.

  On Sundays, when the girls went to mass or strolled up and down the main street arm in arm with their sweethearts, Nonna would gather her hair into a bun — hair that was still thick and black when I was little and she was old, so you can imagine back then — and she’d go to church to ask God why, why was He so unjust as to deny her the knowledge of love, which is the most beautiful thing, the thing that makes it worth living a life in which you get up at four in the morning to do the housework and then you go out into the fields and then to boring old embroidery class and then to get drinking water from the fountain with the pitcher on your head and you have to stay awake for a whole night out of every ten to bake bread and you have to draw water from the well and you have to feed the chickens? So, if God wasn’t going to let her know love, He should just kill her, any old way. In confession, the priest said that these thoughts were a terrible sin and that there were many other things in the world, but Nonna didn’t care about those other things.

  One day, my great-grandmother was waiting for her in the courtyard with the zironia, a whip plaited from ox tendons, and started thrashing her until she had wounds on her head and a high fever. My great-grandmother had discovered from rumours going through the village that the admirers had left because Nonna had written them fiery love poems that even alluded to dirty stuff; her daughter was besmirching not only herself, but her whole family. She kept on hitting her, hitting her and shouting, ‘Dimonia, Dimonia!’ and cursing the day they’d sent her along to first grade where she’d learnt to write.

  3

  In May 1943, Nonno arrived in Nonna’s village. He was over forty and had been working in an office at the Cagliari saltworks. He’d owned a beautiful house in via Giuseppe Manno in Cagliari, right next to the church of San Giorgio and Santa Caterina; a house with views over the rooftops of the Marina district and right out to sea. After the bombings of the thirteenth of May, nothing remained of this house and the church and all the rest but a pile of rubble.

  Nonna’s family offered to take in this respectable man, who had not been called up because he was getting on in years. He was very recently widowed, and had been evacuated carrying only a borrowed suitcase and a few things rescued from the rubble. He turned up, and received free board and lodging.

  In June, he asked for Nonna’s hand, and married her. She cried nearly every day in the month leading up to the wedding. She knelt at the feet of my great-grandfather and begged him to say no, to pretend she’d been promised to someone who was away fighting in the war. If he really no longer wanted her in the house, she was prepared to do anything — she’d go to Cagliari, she’d look for work.

  ‘They’re coming here from Cagliari, my child, and you want to go there! There’s nothing left in the city.’

  ‘Macca!’, my great-grandmother shouted. ‘She’s mad, completely mad! She wants to go to the city to be a whore, because that’s all she can do, because she doesn’t know how to do anything the way it should be done. Her head’s full of air, like it has been ever since she was a child!’

  It wouldn’t have taken much to invent a fiancé at the front — the Alps, Libya, Albania, the Aegean — or away with the Royal Navy. It would have been nothing, but my great-grandparents didn’t want to know.

  So, she was the one who told him that she didn’t love him, and that she’d never be able to be a true wife. Nonno told her not to worry; he didn’t love her either. They both knew what they were referring to. As for being a true wife, he understood completely. He would continue going to the bordello in the Marina district, as he had always done since he was a lad, without ever catching any diseases.

  But they didn’t settle in Cagliari until 1945. So, in the family house in the village, Nonno and Nonna slept like brother and sister in the guest room — the high, narrow iron bed with mother-of-pearl inlay, the picture of the Madonna and Child, the clock under its glass dome, the washstand with a jug and bowl, the mirror with a painted flower, and the porcelain chamber pot under the bed.

  When this house was sold, Nonna took those things to via Giuseppe Manno, where she wanted her bedroom to be identical to that of her first year of marriage. Except that in the house in the village, the rooms got their only light from the terrace, the lolla, whereas here in via Manno, right up until sunset, there’s light from the south and from the sea that bursts through, impetuously, making everything sparkle. I’ve always loved this room; when I was little Nonna only let me come in if I’d been good, and even then never more than once a day.

  During that first year of marriage, Nonna got
malaria. Her temperature rose to forty-one degrees, and it was Nonno who looked after her, sitting there for hours and hours, checking that the cloth on her forehead didn’t get too hot. Nonna’s forehead was so boiling that you had to wet the cloth in ice water; he went back and forth, and you could hear the pulley of the well squeaking day and night.

  On one of those days, the eighth of September, they ran to tell him what they’d heard on the radio: Italy had asked for an armistice with the Allied Forces, and the war was over. But according to Nonno it wasn’t over at all, and you could only hope that Commander-General Basso would let the Germans leave Sardinia without any pointless heroics. Basso must have seen things exactly the same way as Nonno, because the thirty thousand men of General Lungerhausen’s panzer division left quietly without slaughtering anyone; later, he was arrested and tried for that, but in the meantime the Sardinians were saved. Not like on the Continent. And Nonno and General Basso were right, because you only had to listen to Radio London to hear about Badoglio’s protests that soldiers and officials taken prisoner by the Germans were being slaughtered.

  When Nonna got better, they told her that if it hadn’t been for her husband the fever would have consumed her, and that there’d been an armistice and a change in allegiances. But she, with a spitefulness she never forgave herself for, shrugged her shoulders as if to say, What do I care?

  In the high bed, Nonna curled up as far away from Nonno as possible, such that she sometimes fell on the floor, and on moonlit nights when the light broke through the shutters of the doors leading to the lolla and fell upon her husband’s back, she would almost feel frightened of him, this strange outsider. She didn’t know if he was handsome or not, since she never looked at him and he never looked at her. If Nonno was sound asleep she would pee in the chamber pot under the bed; otherwise, he had only to make an imperceptible movement and she would put on her shawl and leave the room and cross the courtyard, no matter what the weather, to use the toilet next to the well.

  But Nonno never tried to come close to her anyway — he, too, lay so hunched up on the other side that, being a stout man, he also fell a number of times, and the pair of them were always covered in bruises. When they were alone, which was only in their bedroom, they never spoke. Nonna would say her bedtime prayers; Nonno wouldn’t, because he was an atheist and a communist. And then one of the two would say, ‘Goodnight,’ and then the other, ‘Goodnight to you, too.’

  My great-grandmother wanted her daughter to prepare coffee for Nonno in the morning — in those days, the coffee was made from chickpeas and barley toasted in the fireplace with a special implement and then ground up. ‘Take your husband some coffee.’ So, Nonna would take the gilded purple cup on the glass tray with floral motifs, she’d place it at the foot of the bed and run away at once, as if she’d left a bowl for a rabid dog. And for this, too, she never forgave herself in all her life.

  Nonno helped out with the work in the fields, and he held up well for a city fellow who had spent all his time studying and doing office work. He often did his wife’s share, too, since she had ever-more-frequent problems with her kidney stones, and he thought it a terrible thing that a woman should have to do such heavy work in the fields, or return from the fountain with a full pitcher of water on her head. But, out of respect for the family who were hosting him, he only said these things in a general way, with reference to the society of the Sardinian interior. Cagliari was different: there, people didn’t take offence at the tiniest thing and didn’t find something to criticise in everything, mercilessly. Maybe it was the sea air that made people freer, at least in certain respects, though not in terms of politics, because the people of Cagliari were bourgeois and never wanted to fight for anything. The rest of the time they listened to Radio London, apart from Nonna who couldn’t have cared less about the world. During the spring of 1944, they learnt that in northern Italy six million people were on strike; that in Rome thirty-two Germans had been killed, and that in reprisal the Germans had rounded up and shot three hundred and twenty Italians; that the Eighth Army was ready for a new offensive; and that, in the early hours of the morning of the sixth of June, the Allies had landed in Normandy.

  4

  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 thirtee
nth 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.

  5

  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.