The House in Via Manno

by Milena Agus

  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.

  And what sort of a Hell was that anyway, if even as an old woman, when she thought back, she smiled at the image of herself and the Veteran and that kiss. Whenever she was sad, she’d be cheered up by that photograph she’d fixed in her mind.

  8

  I was born when Nonna was over sixty years old. I remember as a child I thought her so beautiful, and was always enchanted to see her comb her hair and put it into two old-fashioned buns, made of plaits that started from the part in the middle of her head and never turned white or thinned out. I was proud when Nonna, with her young smile, came to pick me up from school amongst all the other children’s mothers and fathers — my parents, being musicians, were always travelling around the world. My Nonna was entirely dedicated to me, just as my father was entirely dedicated to music, and my mother was entirely dedicated to my father.

  No girl ever wanted Papà, and Nonna suffered and felt guilty because maybe she’d passed on to her son the mysterious illness that made love flee. In those days there were clubs, and kids went dancing and intertwined love affairs with Beatles songs. But for my father, nothing. Sometimes at the Conservatorium he rehearsed pieces with girls — singers, violinists, flautists — and they all wanted him to accompany them on the piano for their exams since he was the best. But when the exam was over, that was that.

  Then one day, Nonna went to open the door and saw Mamma arrive with her flute over her shoulder, gasping, because here in via Manno there’s no lift. She had an air that was timid but sure — exactly the same air she still has — and she was beautiful, simple, fresh, and gasping for air, and as she gasped her way up the stairs she laughed about nothing, joyfully, as young girls laugh, and Nonna called Papà, who was busy practising, and cried out to him, ‘She’s arrived. The person you were waiting for has arrived!’

  Nor can Mamma forget that day, the day they were supposed to rehearse a piece for piano and flute and there were no free rooms at the Conservatorium and my father told her to come to via Manno. It had all seemed perfect to her: Nonna, Nonno, the house. Mamma lived in an ugly spot on the outskirts of town, in a big grey building like an army barracks, with her widowed mother, my other nonna, signora Lia, who was strict and inflexible and obsessed about order and hygiene, and waxed the floor so much you had to wear slippers to protect it, and was always dressed in black. Mamma had to phone her mother constantly to tell her where she was, but Mamma never complained — not at all. The only happy thing in Mamma’s life was music, which signora Lia, however, couldn’t stand, and she’d shut all the doors so as not to hear her daughter practising.

  Mamma had loved my father from a distance for ages. She liked everything about him, even the fact that he was completely potty and always turned up with his jumper on back to front, and never remembered what season it was and would wear summer shirts until he caught bronchitis, and everyone said he was crazy, and the girls, even though he was very handsome, didn’t want to go out with him because of all these things — above all because his craziness wasn’t fashionable at the time, and nor for that matter was classical music, at which he was a genius. But Mamma would have done anything for him.

  In their early days she made a point of keeping herself available and didn’t even look for work, because that was the only way to be close to Papà: accompanying him on tour all over the world, turning the pages of the few pieces he didn’t know from memory, sitting on a stool by his side. In fact, the only times she didn’t go away with him were when she couldn’t — for example, when I was born. The day of my birth he was in New York to play Ravel’s Concerto in G. Nonna and Nonno didn’t even phone him so as not to excite him, and for fear that he might play badly because of me.

  As soon as I’d grown a little bit, Mamma bought a second playpen, a second baby walker, a second high chair, a second set of food-warmers and brought them all here to via Manno so she could quickly put some baby clothes in a bag, leave me with Nonna, and go straightaway to catch the plane to join Papà.

  They never left me with my maternal grandmother, signora Lia; if they did I’d cry floods of tears. Because no matter what I did — a drawing, for example, or maybe if I sang her a little song with words I’d invented myself — that other nonna’s face would cloud over and she’d say that there were more important things to think about. I got the idea that she hated my parents’ music, and that she hated the history books I always carried around with me. To make her happy I tried to work out what pleased her, but she didn’t seem to love anything. Mamma told me that signora Lia was like that because her husband had died before Mamma was born, and because she’d argued with her very rich family and had left Gavoi, her village, which she’
d found ugly.

  I don’t remember my nonno; he died when I was very small, on the tenth of May 1978, the day that saw the passing of Law 180, closing mental asylums. My father has always told me that Nonno was an exceptional man and that everyone respected him greatly, and that the in-laws loved him from the bottom of their hearts because he’d saved Nonna from all sorts of things it was best not to talk about — only I needed to be careful with Nonna, not to trouble her or get her too agitated. There’s always been a veil of mystery around her; maybe even pity.

  Only as a grown-up did I learn that before meeting Nonno in that famous May of 1943, she’d thrown herself down the well and that her sisters, hearing the splash, had rushed into the courtyard and called the neighbours, and they had miraculously managed to pull her out, all of them holding the rope together. And that one time she’d slashed her face and hacked off her hair so it looked all mangy, and that she was always cutting the veins in her arms.

  I knew a different Nonna: a Nonna who laughed about the slightest thing. My father says the same: he, too, had always known her to be calm — except one time — and maybe it was all rumour.

  But now I know it was all true. Besides, Nonna always said that her life was divided into two parts: before and after the treatment at the baths, as if the waters that made her expel the kidney stones were miraculous in every sense.

  9

  My father was born in 1951, nine months after the baths. When he was just seven years old, Nonna went to work as a maid at the house of two ladies — donna Doloretta and donna Fannì — in viale Luigi Merello, keeping it secret from Nonno and everyone else because she wanted to send her son to piano lessons. The ladies felt sorry for her, and they thought this business with the music was crazy: ‘Tell me she’s not macca! She could have an easy life, and instead she’s working as a servant because her son’s got to learn the piano.’

  They were so fond of her, though, that she got special hours — she began work after dropping Papà at his school, the Sebastiano Satta, and she left early to go and pick him up and do the shopping, and if offices and schools were on holiday, then so was she.

  Nonno must have wondered why she always did the housework in the afternoon when she had the whole morning free, but he never asked her anything, nor did he tell her off if something was untidy or if lunch wasn’t ready. Maybe he thought his wife listened to records in the morning — they were better off financially now and she’d got this craze for music, for Chopin, Debussy, Beethoven, and she listened to operas and cried for Madame Butterfly or La Traviata — or maybe he thought she took the tram to Poetto to see the sea, or to have coffee with her friends donna Doloretta and donna Fannì.

  Instead, Nonna, having accompanied Papà to via Angioy, quickly went uphill along via Don Bosco to viale Merello, past the villas, and their palms and terraces with plaster balustrades and their gardens with fish ponds and fountains and little putti.

  The ladies were in fact waiting for her with coffee, and they served it to her on a silver tray before she started the housework, because Nonna was a true lady. They talked about the men in their lives, about donna Fannì’s fiancé who had been killed at Vittorio Veneto fighting in the Sassari Brigade, so the signorina was always sad on the twenty-fourth of October when everyone celebrated the victory.

  And Nonna talked, too; not about the Veteran, of course, or about the madness, or about the bordellos, but about those fleeing suitors and Nonno who, by contrast, had loved her at once and married her. The ladies would look at each other, embarrassed, as if to say that even a blind man could see he’d married her to repay her family, but they kept quiet and maybe even thought she was just a bit strange and simply didn’t realise, caught up in her macchiòri for music and the piano, which to them must have seemed pure madness, given that they themselves had a piano and never so much as touched it: they put doilies on it and various objects and vases of flowers, and Nonna would almost stroke it, and breathe on it before dusting and polishing it using a cloth she’d bought especially.

  One day, the ladies made her an offer: they’d been used to always having servants, but now they had no cash, so they couldn’t keep paying Nonna. Instead they could fix a price for the piano, and Nonna could pay it off day by day doing the housework, and she could tell Nonno that it was a gift from them, her friends. They also threw in the lamp that lit up the keyboard, but Nonna had to sell that straightaway to pay for the removal from viale Merello to via Manno, and for the tuning.

  The day the piano travelled towards via Manno, she had such an attack of happiness that she ran along viale Merello to via Manno ahead of the truck, reciting in her head the first lines of a poem that the Veteran had written for her, faster and faster, all in one breath without full stops or commas. If you have left a subtle sign in life as it rushes by If you have left a subtle sign in life as it rushes by If you have left a subtle sign in life as it rushes by. They put the piano in the big room full of light overlooking the port. And Papà was brilliant.

  And how. They even talk about him in the newspapers sometimes, and they say he’s the only Sardinian to have really made it in the music world, and they roll out the red carpet for him in the concert halls of Paris, London, and New York. Nonno used to have a bottle-green leather album especially for photographs and newspaper cuttings of his son’s concerts.

  The stories my father told me were mostly about Nonno.

  Papà loved his mother, but she felt like a stranger to him, and when she asked him how things were going, he would answer, ‘Normal, Ma, just normal.’ So then Nonna would tell him that things couldn’t just be ‘normal’, there had to be more to it than that, and it was clear that she was getting obsessed about it. Then, later in the evening, she would be jealous because when all three of them were together at the table, what she said was true — he really did have more to say. Now that his mother is dead, Papà can’t forgive himself, but he could never think of anything to say to her. She only ever went to one of his concerts, when he was still a boy, and she ran out because she was overcome by emotion. However, Nonno, who always protected her, even though he never knew what to say to her either, and was certainly not an affectionate man, didn’t follow her but stayed there and enjoyed his son’s concert. He was happy, and couldn’t stop complimenting him.

  Papà is glad that it’s been easier for me. It’s much better that way. Nonna basically brought me up. I always spent more time at via Manno than at my house, and when he and Mamma came to pick me up I never wanted to go home with them. As a child, I would make terrible scenes: I would yell and run under the beds, or lock myself in a room, and before coming out I would make them swear they’d let me stay longer. Once I even hid inside a big vase — an empty one — with some twigs stuck in my hair. The next day, it was the same old story. I refused to take my dolls and games back home. When I was older, it was my books. I said that I absolutely had to stay at Nonna’s to study because transporting my dictionaries was so inconvenient. Or if I invited friends over, I preferred Nonna’s place because she had a terrace. And so on. Anyway, maybe I loved her in the right way, with all my tragic scenes and weeping and tantrums and attacks of happiness. When I returned from trips, she would always be down in the street waiting for me, and I’d run towards her, and we’d hug and cry from the emotion as if I’d been away to war instead of off enjoying myself.

  After Papà’s concerts, because Nonna never came, I’d get straight on the phone from various cities in the world and describe everything to her in detail, and I’d even sing some of it for her, and I’d tell her what the applause was like and what feelings the performance had created. Or if the concert was nearby, I’d go straight to via Manno, and Nonna would sit down and listen to me with her eyes closed, smiling, and beating time with her feet inside her slippers.

  Signora Lia, on the other hand, couldn’t stomach Papà’s concerts. She said that her son-in-law didn’t have a real job, that his success could end at any moment, and that, if it weren’t for the pa
rents — who weren’t going to be around forever — he’d find himself begging for alms with Mamma and me. She knew what it meant to make do on your own and not to ask for help from anybody. She’d known life, unfortunately. My father didn’t hold it against her, or perhaps he didn’t notice the disdain of his mother-in-law, who never complimented him and threw out any newspapers that mentioned him or else used them to clean the windows or to put down on the floor if there were workmen in the house.

  Papà has always had his music, and has never cared about anything else.

  10

  The first night they spent together, risking ending up in Hell, Nonna told the Veteran about her fleeing suitors, the well, the mangy hair, the scars on her arms, and the bordellos. (Nonna said that there were only two people she had ever been truly able to talk with — him and me.)

  He was the thinnest, most handsome man she’d ever seen, and the love was the longest and most intense. Because the Veteran, before entering her over and over, got her to undress slowly, and he stopped to caress each part of her body, smiling and telling her she was beautiful. And he wanted to take out her hairpins and plunge his hands into that cloud of raven curls the way that children do, and unlace her clothes and gaze at her naked on the bed, full of admiration for her big firm tits, her soft white skin, her long legs, all the while caressing her and kissing her right there where she’d never been kissed. It was enough to make you faint with pleasure. And then Nonna undressed him and delicately rested his wooden leg at the foot of the bed and slowly kissed and caressed his scar.

  And in her heart, for the first time, she thanked God for letting her be born, for pulling her out of the well, for giving her nice breasts and nice hair and even — above all — kidney stones.