The House in Via Manno

by Milena Agus

  Later, he told her she was very good and he’d never met anyone like that in any bordello for any price. So Nonna proudly listed her services.

  The Prey: the man captures the woman, naked, in a fishing net in which he makes a cut through which to penetrate her. She’s his fish. He touches her all over but can only feel her shape and not her skin.

  The Slave: he gets her to bathe and caress him in the tub; her breasts are bare, and she offers them to him to bite without daring to look at him.

  The Geisha: he simply gets her to tell him stories that distract him from everyday problems; she is fully dressed, and they won’t necessarily have sex.

  The Meal: she lies down and the man spreads food on her like on a dinner table, for example, a fruit in the vagina or jam on the breasts, or ragù, or custard, and he eats her up.

  The Little Girl: he bathes her in the tub with lots of bubbles and washes her all over and out of gratitude she gives him head.

  The Muse: he photographs her in the most obscene poses, legs apart, as she masturbates and squeezes her tits.

  The Bitch Woman: she wears only suspenders and brings the man the newspaper in her mouth, and he caresses her sex from behind, or her hair or her ears, and says, ‘Good bitch.’

  The Servant: she brings him his coffee in bed, dressed in modest clothing but showing her boobs almost completely, and she lets him milk them, then she gets up onto the cupboard to dust and she’s not wearing any knickers.

  The Lazybones: she’s tied to the bed to be punished with the strap, but Nonno never really hurt her.

  Nonna had always done an excellent job. After every service, her husband would tell her how much it would have cost at the bordello and they would put that amount away for when they rebuilt the house in via Manno, and Nonna always wanted a small amount to be reserved for pipe tobacco. But they continued sleeping on opposite sides of the bed and never talking about themselves. Perhaps that’s why Nonna never forgot the emotion she felt on those other nights, with the Veteran’s arm across her head, his sleepy yet present hand seeming to stroke her hair.

  The Veteran said he thought her husband was a truly lucky man, and not, as she’d put it, a poor wretch who’d ended up with a madwoman. She wasn’t mad, he said; she was a creature made at a moment when God simply didn’t feel like making one of the usual style of women: He got a poetic urge and created her. And Nonna laughed a lot and said he was mad, too, and that was why he didn’t notice other people’s madness.

  One night later on, the Veteran told Nonna that his father had not died during one of the bombings of Genoa, but after being tortured by the Gestapo. They’d thrown his brutally disfigured corpse into the street outside the student residence. But his father had never revealed the whereabouts of his daughter-in-law and the partisans who’d been telegraphing the Allies from his house. He had stayed in the house so that everything would seem normal to those who were watching them after the tip-off, and because of this the others had been able to escape into the Apennine mountains. As he said goodbye and sat down to wait for the Gestapo, he told his daughter-in-law that he wanted her and his son to be able to have a family.

  The Veteran’s little girl had been born in the mountains. But maybe it wasn’t true. He felt she was the child of a German. He couldn’t even imagine his wife in love with another man; that’s why he felt that the father of his little girl must have been a monster who maybe took his wife violently, most likely when she was trying to save her father-in-law. And he was never able to touch her again; that’s why they had no children. He, too, had become a visitor of bordellos.

  The Veteran burst into tears. He was dying of shame because as a boy they’d taught him never to show pain. And then Nonna started crying, too, saying that they’d taught her not to show joy and maybe they’d been right, because the only thing that had gone well for her — marrying Nonno — had left her indifferent, and she didn’t understand why all her admirers had run away. But what do we really know about other people? What could the Veteran know?

  Once, speaking of not understanding, she got up some courage, and with her heart beating like it was going to leap out of her chest, asked Nonno if now, having got to know her better — not that knowing her better was any big deal, of course, but anyway, having lived with her all this time and not having needed to go to the bordello — he cared for her.

  Nonno had sort of smiled to himself without looking at her, and then given her a slap on the bottom, and not so much as dreamt of answering her. Another time, during one of her services, one she couldn’t tell the Veteran about, Nonno told her that she had the best arse he’d done in all his life.

  So what can we ever really know — even about those closest to us?

  11

  In 1963, Nonna went with her husband and Papà to visit her sister and brother-in-law who had emigrated to Milan.

  That was after the family had sold the house in the village to try to help this sister and brother-in-law out. Nonna and Nonno had even given up their share, but it became clear that it still wasn’t possible for the three other families to make a living from their land, which was less than twenty hectares in size. The agrarian reform had been timid and the Revival Plan all wrong, as it was based on chemical and iron and steel industries that didn’t belong over here, as Nonno said, established by Continentals with public funds, whereas the future of Sardinia lay in manufacturing industries that would take into account existing resources.

  Ultimately, it suited the other two sisters, who lived off the land, if one sister left.

  Nonna had suffered greatly, and didn’t even go to San Gavino to see her youngest sister, her brother-in-law, and the children onto the train to Porto Torres. Nonna had suffered over the sale of the house, too. The new owners had replaced the arched doorway with an iron gate. They’d knocked down the wooden pillars and the low wall that separated the lolla from the courtyard, and closed it off with an aluminium partition. The upper floor, which was very low and looked out over the roof of the lolla, where the barn used to be, had become a mansard like you see in postcards of the Alps. The tiled roof of this barn, now mansard, was replaced by a terrace with a parapet of air-bricks. The ox shelter and the woodshed had been transformed into car garages. The flowerbeds were reduced to a narrow perimeter along the wall. The well was blocked with cement. The paving stones in different colours of terracotta, which had formed kaleidoscopic patterns along the ground, were covered with ceramic tiles.

  And there was too much furniture to fit into the rooms that the sisters moved into in the houses of their husbands’ families; it was so old and cumbersome, from times best forgotten, that no one else wanted it. Only Nonna took her little bride’s room with her, so as to have it exactly the same in via Giuseppe Manno.

  She knew that after her sister and brother-in-law made the trip to Milan they’d got rich, because her sister had written and said that in il gran Milàn there was enough work for everyone, and on Saturdays everyone went shopping in the supermarket and filled their trolleys with perfectly packaged foods, and that the idea they’d always had of being economical — of cutting no more than a certain number of slices of bread; of turning overcoats, jackets, suits; of unravelling jumpers to save the wool; of getting their shoes resoled a thousand times — was a thing of the past. In Milan, they went to the department stores and bought everything new.

  The one thing they didn’t like was the climate — especially the smog that blackened the cuffs and collars of their shirts and the children’s little school smocks. She was constantly washing; but in Milan there was plenty of water, not just on alternate days like in Sardinia — you could let it run and run without worrying about first washing yourself, then washing the clothes in the waste water, then throwing the now-dirty water down the toilet. In Milan, washing yourself and your things was a form of entertainment. Besides, her sister didn’t have all that much to do after the housework, which was done in no time because the houses were small, since millions of people had to
live in that space, not like in Sardinia where they had those huge houses that were no use because there were no conveniences. Well, anyway, she’d always finish the housework in no time and then go wandering around the metropolis looking in the shops and buying, buying, buying.

  Nonno and Nonna didn’t know what to take to their rich relatives in Milan as they didn’t seem to need anything. So Nonna proposed a poetic package — a nostalgic package — because, sure, they ate and dressed well, but with Sardinian sausage and a good round of pecorino, and oil and wine from Marmilla, and a leg of prosciutto, and thistles in olive oil, and jumpers hand-knitted by Nonna for the children, well, they could breathe in the scent of home.

  They set off without telling them. It would be a surprise. Nonno sent away for a map of Milan, and carefully studied the streets and the routes for visiting the nicest parts of the city.

  They all dressed in new clothes so as not to be an embarrassment. Nonna bought Elizabeth Arden creams, because by now she was pushing fifty and wanted the Veteran — her heart told her that they would meet — to find her still beautiful. But she wasn’t all that worried about it. Everyone said that a fifty-year-old would never look at a woman his own age, but this kind of reasoning only applied to worldly things. Not to love. Love isn’t concerned with age or anything else that’s not love.

  And it was with this very kind of love that the Veteran loved her. Would he recognise her immediately? What sort of look would he have on his face? They wouldn’t embrace in the presence of Nonno, Papà, or the wife and daughter of the Veteran. They would shake hands and look, look, look at each other. To die for. But if she managed to go out alone and meet him alone, then, yes, they would kiss and hold each other tight to make up for all those years. And if he asked her, she would never go back home. Because love is more important than anything else.

  Nonna had never been on the Continent, apart from her trip to the village of the baths, and, in spite of what her sister had written, she thought that you could run into someone as easily in Milan as in Cagliari. She was very excited because she thought she’d see her Veteran straightaway in the street.

  But Milan was so big, so tall, with massive, sumptuously decorated buildings, so beautiful, so grey and foggy, with so much traffic, the sky in pieces between the bare branches of trees, so many shop lights, car headlights, and traffic lights, crowds of people with their faces in their coat collars, a constant rattle of trams, and an ever-present air of rain.

  As soon as she got off the train at the main station, she looked closely at all the men to see if her man was amongst them. She looked for him: tall, thin, his soft face badly shaven, his flowing raincoat hanging off him, his crutches. There were so many men getting on and off those trains that were going everywhere — Paris, Vienna, Rome, Naples, Venice (it was striking how big and rich the world was) — but he wasn’t there.

  In the end, they found her sister’s street and building, which they’d expected would be modern, some kind of skyscraper, but actually it was old. Nonna thought it beautiful, even though the façade was dilapidated and in the stucco decorations around the windows the putti were missing their heads and the flowers their stems. The shutters were broken, and many pieces of the balustrade on the balconies had been replaced by planks of wood, and in place of the window glass were sheets of cardboard. The door was covered in graffiti, and the labels with surnames weren’t under little pieces of glass but were all stuck alongside the only doorbell.

  However, they were sure they were at the right place because letters had been coming and going from that address in Milan for a year. They rang the bell, and a lady looked out from the balcony of the first floor. She said that the sardignoli weren’t in at that hour, but the family could come in and go up to the top and ask those other terún, which is what the Milanese call southerners. Who were they anyway? Were they looking for a maid? If they were, the sardignole women were the most reliable.

  Nonna, Nonno, and Papà entered. It was dark, and there was a smell of stale air, toilets, and cabbage. The stairway would have been beautiful once, because it had a huge open space in the middle, but the bombings of the last war must have damaged it, since many of the steps seemed treacherous. Nonno wanted to go first, keeping close to the wall, and he got Papà to follow him, holding his hand tightly, and told Nonna to put her feet exactly where he’d put his. They went up to the top, right up to the roof. But there were no apartments. There was an open door that led on to a long, dark corridor going all around the stairwell, and off the corridor there were lots of little cupboard doors. Except that on these cupboard doors were labels with surnames including, down at the end, their brother-in-law’s surname.

  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 w
ere 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.