The House in Via Manno

by Milena Agus

  That May of 1943, their brother-in-law, recently evacuated, homeless, and fresh with the pain of having lost his wife, had seen it all, and there was no need to explain anything to him, because spring was the worst season for Nonna. During the other seasons she was quieter; she planted seeds in the flowerbeds, worked in the fields, made bread, did cross-stitching, swept the terracotta floor of the lolla, fed and petted the chickens and rabbits, and painted such lovely decorative patterns halfway up the walls that people asked her to do them in their houses so they’d be ready by spring. My great-grandmother was so happy that people were getting her to do this work for them that she never even wanted them to pay, and my great-aunts didn’t think this was right.

  On one of the first days of the evacuation, at dinner, with his soup in front of him, Nonno told them about the house in via Manno, the bombs, and the death of his family who’d all gathered, on the thirteenth of May, for his birthday, and about how his wife had promised him a cake. As he was about to arrive home, the alarm had sounded, so he’d thought that he’d find them at the shelter in the caves of the public gardens. But there was no one from his family at the shelter.

  Nonna got up during the night and destroyed all her cross-stitching — she tore it all up — and destroyed her wall decorations by covering them with horrible scribbles, and she rubbed rose thorns all over her face and body — she had them all over her, even stuck on her head. The next day their future brother-in-law tried to talk to her. Because she was locked in the stable, with the manure, he spoke to her from the courtyard, through the wooden door, and told her that life was like that, that there were some horrible things, but also some very beautiful things — like, for example, the decorations and embroidery she’d done. Why had she destroyed them?

  Nonna, from inside, in the stink, replied strangely, ‘My things may seem beautiful, but they’re not. They’re actually ugly. I should have died. Not your wife. Your wife had the most important thing that makes everything beautiful. I don’t. I’m ugly. I belong here with the manure and the garbage. I should have died.’

  ‘And what, signorina, do you think is this most important thing?’ Nonno asked her. But nothing more was heard from the stable. And later on, too, when she lost babies in the first months of pregnancy, she would say the same thing: that she wouldn’t be a good mother anyway, because she lacked the most important thing, and her children weren’t born because they lacked it as well. And she’d lock herself up in that little moon-world of hers.

  When they finished telling this story, the future aunts accompanied Mamma to the bus stop and, after handing her packages of sweets, sausage, and civràxiu bread, and stroking her long, straight hair — which is how people wore it in those days — they asked her, as they waited for the bus, what she wanted to do in life, just to change the subject.

  ‘Play the flute,’ Mamma replied.

  Sure, but they meant in terms of work — real work.

  ‘Play the flute,’ my mother repeated.

  And my great-aunts looked at each other, and you could tell exactly what they were thinking.

  18

  Mamma told me all this after Nonna died. She’d always kept it to herself, and was never afraid of having me brought up by her mother-in-law, who she loved dearly. She thinks we need to be grateful to Nonna, because she took on all the disorder that otherwise might have struck Papà or me. In fact, Mamma thinks that someone in a family has to take on the disorder, because that’s how life is: there always has to be a balance, otherwise the world freezes up and stops. If at night we sleep without nightmares, if Papà and Mamma’s marriage has never been on the rocks, if I’m marrying my first boyfriend, if we don’t have panic attacks and don’t attempt suicide, or try to throw ourselves into the rubbish skip, or cut ourselves, it’s thanks to Nonna, who paid on behalf of us all. In every family, there’s always someone who pays their own price so that the balance between order and disorder can be respected, and the world can keep on turning.

  For example, my maternal grandmother, signora Lia, wasn’t a bad person. She did everything she could to bring order to her life, but, as it turned out, she did more harm than good. Because in truth, she wasn’t a widow at all. The reason Mamma’s surname was the same as signora Lia’s maiden name wasn’t that signora Lia and her deceased husband happened to be cousins with the same surname. And nor did signora Lia leave Gavoi because it was ugly and not by the sea. Since Mamma was a child, she had known everything, but in public signora Lia maintained her story about how she married her cousin who had the same surname. This meant that every time they had to present their papers they were terrified that whoever read them might talk — so they associated with as few people as possible, and never confided in anyone, and gave gifts to schoolteachers, or doctors, or anyone who knew the truth, so that they wouldn’t talk.

  And whenever someone told a story about a teenage mother, labelling her an egua — literally a horse, but used in the sense of a slut — signora Lia would join in and use the same word and later, back at home, Mamma would go and cry in her room.

  But then Mamma had her flute and my father, and didn’t care about anything else. As soon as she got together with Papà, she changed families, because his was a real family, and Nonno was the father she had never had. He gathered wild spinach and asparagus for her in the country; he cooked mussels for her because she was low in iron; and when he went to the spring at Dolianova, to stock up on water for Nonna, who had problems with her kidneys again, he went around to the farms collecting all the healthy foods you couldn’t get in the city, and returned with fresh eggs, wood-fired bread, and pesticide-free fruit. Sometimes Mamma went with Nonno, and one day she took a liking to a little chick with no mother or brothers and sisters, and Nonno and Nonna let her take it home. So the chicken, Niki, also became part of the family; it was the only pet that Mamma had ever had, because, well, can you imagine animals at signora Lia’s? When Papà wasn’t around — and Papà was never around — it was Nonno who took her everywhere by car, and if she was late and it was getting dark, he’d stay fully dressed, sitting in the armchair, ready to intervene if it became necessary.

  Signora Lia certainly didn’t leave Gavoi because it was ugly, and she didn’t ever quarrel with her family.

  Gavoi is a beautiful village, in the mountains. The houses are tall, two or three floors high, and often each one is attached to the next, and some are almost suspended between two others, supported by a horizontal beam, and underneath there are open courtyards that are just about dark, full of flowers, especially hydrangeas that need damp and shade. From some parts of the village you can see Lake Gusana, which changes colour several times a day — from pink to ash-blue, to red, to violet — and if you go up Monte Gonari and it’s clear, you can see the waters of Orosei Gulf.

  She’d run away at the age of eighteen, pregnant to a shepherd who had worked for her family and who had migrated to the Continent in the early fifties, but had returned as soon as he heard about the agrarian reform and the Revival Plan, in the hope that maybe you could live well in Sardinia after all. He’d come with a Continental wife completely out of her element, and a little sum of money to buy his own piece of land so he could keep his sheep without paying a lease.

  Signora Lia had fled during her last year of school at the liceo classico in Nuoro, where she’d always done well. In Cagliari, she worked as a maid and took Mamma, as a newborn, to the nuns. When her daughter had grown a little, she went back to study, to finish that interrupted year and to get her high school diploma. She studied at night, after returning from work and putting Mamma to sleep. She stopped working as a maid and got a job in an office, and even bought a house — ugly, but clean and tidy, and her own. Signora Lia was a rock. A piece of our own granite. And she never complained about her life that had turned to ashes, after that one spark, which she had recounted to her daughter many times, because since she was a child Mamma had wanted to know about her father.

  Instead of a fairytale, si
gnora Lia told her about that morning she’d missed the bus to Nuoro and Mamma’s father had left Gavoi at the same time, to go into the country, and he’d found her there, at the bus stop, in tears because she was a good student, even a bit of a swot. He was a man of intense and unusual beauty, good and honest and intelligent but, unfortunately, already married.

  ‘Buongiorno, donna Lia.’

  ‘Buongiorno!’

  And that dawn they emerged from their primitive solitudes, and it felt as though they were plunging into a whirl of madness, and that happiness might be possible. From then on, donna Lia often missed the bus. She ran away without telling him she was pregnant, because she didn’t want to ruin his world; that poor man with his Continental wife, out of her element, who didn’t even seem to be able to have children in Gavoi.

  For those at home, she left a letter asking them not to worry, to forgive her, and saying that she needed to go somewhere else, as far away as possible, because she’d had enough of Gavoi and of Sardinia; maybe to the Côte d’Azur, or the Ligurian Riviera — after all, they knew how she’d always liked going up Monte Gonari, hoping to see the sea.

  Early on, she phoned almost every day and wouldn’t say where she was. Her elder sister, who was like a mother to her because her real mother had died giving birth to her, wept, and said that their father was now ashamed to go out, and their brothers were threatening to go to the ends of the earth to find her and kill her. She stopped phoning.

  She said goodbye to love, to dreams, and — since she no longer needed to study after getting her diploma — to literature and, above all, to any artistic expression. When Mamma wanted to learn the flute, she agreed, but only so long as it remained a distraction, to take her mind off really important matters for a little while.

  After signora Lia died, still young, but with lymph glands as hard as rocks, and blood that had turned to water — she had even stopped going out because after the chemotherapy she was embarrassed to be seen with that scarf on her head — Mamma suddenly decided that she wanted to look for her father. Her mother had never wanted to tell her his name, but Mamma knew that if they came up with a plan they’d be able to find out about him. Papà told her it wasn’t a good idea, that you shouldn’t try to bring order to things, and that you should just give in to the universal havoc and play over the top of it.

  But she was stubborn as a mule; so one summer’s morning — early, to avoid the great heat — they set off in search of my maternal grandfather. During the trip, Mamma talked nonsense, saying she felt like a newborn in the arms of her daddy, and she kept laughing, and she said she thought Gavoi was beautiful and better than all the other places she’d been for Papà’s concerts — Paris, London, Berlin, New York, Rome, and Venice, none was more beautiful than Gavoi.

  They’d prepared a whole act: they were going to say that they were researchers, collecting accounts of the first migratory wave from Sardinia. Mamma had a notebook and a tape recorder, and she’d even prepared a card with a false surname to show people. They went into a bar, into a pharmacy, and into a tobacconist’s; everyone was wary, and kept asking why they were there, but their clean-cut appearance reassured people, and they were able to ask about the local landowning families, and about those who had had shepherds working for them. They learnt that the richest had always been, and still was, signora Lia’s family, and that the elder sister, her daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren all lived in the big house, where there was room for everyone.

  Mamma sat down on the steps of a house opposite and couldn’t stop staring. It was one of the nicest buildings in the village: a granite construction of three floors, with a central section facing the road, and two side wings on the other two streets that led uphill. The ground floor had twelve closed windows and a dark-green front door in solid wood with brass knockers. There were big glass doors on the first floor that were also closed, leading onto a central balcony, and the second floor was all big windows with thick, embroidered curtains that made it impossible to see inside.

  Mamma kept staring at the house; she couldn’t imagine her mother, poor as she’d always been, with half her pay going on the mortgage, in that wealthy setting. In one of the two side wings of the building, on the street going uphill, was the tradesman’s entrance, and, behind a gate, a garden with dog-roses, lemon trees, a sweet bay, ivy, and red geraniums in window boxes. On the steps lay some toys: a little tow-truck, a doll in a pram. Mamma remained hypnotised until Papà said to her: ‘Let’s go over.’

  My great-aunt had been notified by the pharmacist. The door was opened by a maid who was followed by two children, and who asked them to follow her upstairs, where the signora was waiting for them. The stairs were dark and made of polished stone, whereas the room where she was waiting for them was light; it was the one with the glass doors giving on to the balcony.

  ‘They’re my daughter’s children,’ she said. ‘They leave them with me when they go to work.’

  Mamma had lost the gift of speech. Papà acted out his role and said that he was working with his colleague from the Cagliari Historical Institute, writing a research project on the first migratory wave of the fifties, from Sardinia. Given that her family would surely have had shepherds in their service, would she be so kind as to indicate one who had left for the Continent during that period, and tell them his story?

  My great-aunt was an attractive woman, dark-haired, slender and elegantly attired — even though she was just at home — with regular facial features, her hair softly gathered together at the back of her neck. She wore Sardinian earrings, the ones that look like buttons. The maid brought them coffee and Sardinian sweets on a tray. She was still followed by the children, who showed the visitors their paraphernalia of buckets, floaties, and toy boats, and announced that the following week they were off to the beach.

  ‘Pizzinos malos,’ their nonna said, smiling tenderly. ‘You little rascals, leave the guests in peace, they’re here to study.’

  ‘Only one of our men went to work in Milan, in 1951 — a good lad who’d been with us since he was a boy. The others left later, in the sixties. The first one came back, though; he bought a piece of land, some sheep.’

  ‘And where is he now?’ My mother spoke up for the first time.

  ‘Addolumeu. Poor man,’ my great-aunt replied, ‘he threw himself into a well. He had a Continental wife — no children — who didn’t even mourn him, and who returned to the North after the tragedy.’

  ‘When was that?’ asked Papà, in a weak voice.

  ‘In 1954. I remember it clearly, because it was the year my sister Lia, the baby of the family, died.’

  And she pointed to a photograph, next to a vase of fresh flowers on the sideboard, of a young girl with a romantic air. ‘Our poet,’ she added. And she recited some lines from memory:

  I awake expectant, anxious, to the blue blows of spring,

  after cowering shamefully in the pale light of winter.

  My anxiety cannot understand you, and cannot be understood,

  in the sweet eager yellow of the brazen mimosa.

  A love poem kept in a drawer — who knows who she was thinking of, poor child?

  All the way back to Cagliari Mamma didn’t say a word. Finally Papà asked her, ‘Do you think he killed himself for your mother? Can you believe that as a girl she wrote poetry?’ Mamma shrugged her shoulders as if to say, What do I care? or How should I know?

  19

  Today I came here to via Manno to do the cleaning, because as soon as the workmen finish I’m getting married. I’m happy that they’re re-doing the façade, which was crumbling. The work has been entrusted to an architect who’s also a little bit of a poet, and respects what the building once was.

  This will be its third birth: in its first life, in the nineteenth century, it was narrower, with only two balconies with wrought-iron railings on each floor; those really tall double windows with three pieces of glass in the upper part, and shutters; and the front door surmounted by an archwa
y worked in stucco. The roof was partly a terrace, even then, and from down in via Manno you could only see the imposing eaves.

  The place has been empty for ten years. We haven’t sold it, or rented it out — out of love, and because we don’t care about any of that other stuff. But it hasn’t exactly been empty. Far from it.

  When my father comes back to Cagliari, he comes here to play his old piano, the one that belonged to donna Doloretta and donna Fannì. He did this even before Nonna died, because Mamma has to practise the flute — at their place, they always have to come to an arrangement about the schedule.

  Papà would take his music and come here, and Nonna would busy herself cooking all the things he liked. When it was time to eat, we’d knock on the door and he’d answer, ‘Thanks, later, later. You start.’ But I can’t ever remember him joining us later on. He’d leave the room only to go to the bathroom, and if someone was in there — me, for instance, who’s slow at everything, so you can imagine what I’m like in the bathroom — he’d get pissed off, even though he was such a quiet man, and say that he’d come to via Manno to play, and instead nothing was going the way it was supposed to.

  At any hour, when he was finally overtaken by violent hunger, he’d go into the kitchen, where Nonna was in the habit of leaving him a covered plate and a pot of water on the stove to heat up his meal. He would eat alone, drumming his fingers on the table as though he was playing a tune, and if, say, we looked in on the kitchen to ask him something, he’d answer in monosyllables so as to make us give up and leave him in peace. The best bit about it was that we were always in full concert — not everyone gets to eat, sleep, go to the toilet, do homework, and watch television with the volume down while a great pianist plays Debussy, Ravel, Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and the rest. And even though Nonna and I were more relaxed when Papà didn’t come around, it was beautiful when he was there. As a child, every time he came I wrote something in honour of his presence — a composition, a poem, a fairytale.