by Milena Agus
‘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.’
6
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.
7
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.
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.