The Red Sari: A Novel

by Javier Moro

  The joy of the Maino family would have been complete if it had not been for the difficulties Stefano encountered to bring up his growing family. In those years it was very difficult to escape from the clutches of poverty. They had enough to eat, to clothe themselves, but little more. The Mainos had no lands, just a few cows and a stone house that Stefano had built himself with his own hands, the last one in the Via Maino, the street where generations of his relatives, who had come originally from Germany, had built their homes. They were spartan, but they had magnificent views over the valley. Low stone walls separated the meadows where the cows grazed, and stockbreeding was the main resource of the area because the land was poor for agriculture since there were too many stones and too many steep slopes. Sonia and her sisters grew up with the sublime spectacle of the Lusiana valley, which changed colour with the seasons. All the hues and tones of green and brown paraded in front of their eyes, from the emerald green of the trees in spring to the yellow of the fields in summer, passing through the copper of autumn and the white of winter. For the children the first snow of the year was like a celebration which they enjoyed enormously; they played at making snowmen and throwing snowballs at each other in the white streets. But the mixture of physical exercise and cold set a tiredness in Sonia’s chest which soon forced her home. She liked to take refuge in the warmth of the iron stove in the kitchen, while the wind whistled through the cracks in the windows.

  On Sunday mornings, the tinkling of the cowbells mixed with the ringing of the church bells, while the family in their Sunday best headed for the Mass they never once missed. They prayed that Stefano would find work, that Sonia’s asthma would let up, that the general situation might improve, that the girls should have everything they needed and grow up healthy and happy. In the early 50’s, Stefano finally found a job, but not in their village. It was on the other side of the mountains, in Switzerland. His experience as a mason and his seriousness merited his being given a contract several seasons. He went off for a minimum of two months and returned with his pockets full of liras that always lasted less than he had expected.

  In 1956, Stefano took the decision to emigrate, as three of his brothers and so many of his countrymen were doing. The industrial centre that Turin was becoming and which had grown up around the Fiat works, was like a magnet for millions of Italians who wanted to flee the poverty of the countryside. The Mainos crossed the whole of the north of Italy by train and settled in Orbassano, an industrial town in the outskirts of Turin. They did that because Giovanni, one of Stefano’s brothers whom they called “Moro” because of the sallow colour of his skin, had married a girl from a village nearby and assured them that the construction boom needed lots of strong arms. Furthermore, Stefano knew the region because in the 30’s he had worked as a labourer for the army in the restoration of military forts on the border with France, in the Alps. He liked people from Piedmont, perhaps because they were mountain folk too: direct, sincere people who did not waste their time on self-indulgence.

  Work, work and more work—that was Stefano’s recipe to prosper quickly. He did nothing else; he was not known to have any hobbies and he was not fond of sports, although he liked to go to Pier Luigi’s bar to watch Juventus in the finals on television. His daughter Sonia also visited the same bar assiduously because Pier Luigi sold the best ice creams in the area. “Era molto vivace, molto biricchina” , he would say about the little girl.

  When he arrived in Orbassano, Stefano was by then a skilled worker and from there he came to set up his own construction company. He began with renovations, then built detached houses, small palazzi and later on terraced houses. “He was a very honest man,” his friend Danilo Quadri, a mechanic who repaired the breakdowns of his concrete mixers and other machinery and who ended up becoming a great friend of his, said of him. They saw each other every day at coffee time in Nino’s Bar, in the square opposite the Town Hall, a building with two stories and arcades, a clock on the façade and an Italian flag flying from the balcony. Next to it was the church of St John the Baptist, with its characteristic tower and its turquoise- coloured pointed little roofs where they went to Mass on Sundays with their respective families. Stefano was a man of fixed times, a lover of routine. After the daily meeting with Danilo, he would walk home along the Via Frejus, lined with graceless buildings, where a block of flats could stand next to an old villa in the very characteristic post-war mixture of popular urbanism. His house was at number 14, Via Bellini, a distance of about one and a half kilometres from the village square. That three-storied villa surrounded by a little garden had been the dream of his life. When he had paid off the debts he contracted when he started up his business, he looked for a piece of land at a good price that was near the trenino and bus stations and bought it on the nail. Stefano built his house in record time, with the typical taverneta that took up the whole of the ground floor. There was not a single house worth its salt that did not have its well-cared for taverneta, with its bar, its counter and its fireplace, which the parents used to for meeting with their friends or celebrating anniversaries, and the children for their parties. He made the house large with the idea of dividing it up between his daughters when they were older. Apart from work, the other fundamental value in the life of Stefano Maino was the family, like any good Italian. And, naturally, religion. All values he shared with his wife Paola, and which they tried hard to instill in the girls.

  Sonia was ten when she came to Orbassano. The change from a mountain village to the suburbs of a large city like Turin was a shock. It was a much easier way of life, more fun and with many more possibilities. The only shadow over that new life was connected with their origins. They were paesane, as immigrants from the countryside were known insultingly in the north of Italy. A stigma that made them feel less than others and which gave them a complex that would last throughout their lives. In the village they had never felt different; here they did, especially at first, at school, where the other girls called them paesane because they dressed in an old-fashioned style in “village” clothes. Orbassano was not untouched by the class-conscious atmosphere of Turin, a conservative city where you have lunch at twelve, drink a cappuccino at five in big art deco patisseries and have dinner at seven. Where the ladies always have smart hairdos and the men are fashionably dressed. Where the workers want to live like their bosses and imitate them, where the bosses like the rich bourgeois of whom they would love to be part, and the bourgeois like the aristocrats they secretly admire. At that time, there was no hint of rebellion; no one wanted to hang their bosses, they all wanted to be like them. The prosperity seemed endless and allowed everyone to follow their dream of social mobility. Gradually, as their father prospered, the social status of the Maino family rose. From being the daughters of a “bricklayer”, the girls became the daughters of a builder who lived comfortably. From daughters of an immigrant peasant to daughters of an entrepreneur. Paola, their mother, a woman more sensitive than her husband’s to the social environment, immediately picked up the tastes of the Turin bourgeoisie—their way of dressing, their manners, etc…—and passed them on to her daughters, who rapidly became conscious of their new station in life. Never to the point that they denied their origins, since they were too honest for that. But they always knew they would never attain the status of pure-blood Turinese because they had not been born there.

  After finishing primary school at the girls’ school in the town of Sangano, Sonia would have liked to continue her studies in the school in Orbassano, but her father was opposed to the idea. “No public schools for my daughters. For them, always the best.” The best, according to the Mainos, was the Maria Auxiliadora convent school in Giaveno, a beautiful mediaeval town about twenty kilometres from home, known as a place of leisure for many Turinese. There they would have the chance to mix with girls of “better class” than in the state school in Orbassano. Apart from the fact that they valued religious education highly, the Mainos also wanted to remove the paesane label. So they left the g
irls on Monday mornings and picked them up on Fridays. It was not a harsh boarding school, quite the opposite: it was full of kind Salesian nuns who immediately took to Sonia. “The eldest had a bad temper and was difficult, but Sonia was goodness itself,” Sister Domenica Rosso, assigned as her tutor, would say of her. “Che bel carattere, sempre gioviale,” Sister Giovanna Negri remembers, before adding, “She only studied enough to keep out of trouble, but she was always smiling and helpful.” Sonia was already showing a quality that would become of great importance in her adulthood: she was a peace-maker. “She had a special talent for stopping two classmates squabbling, or for getting a group to agree and do an activity together. She was a very calm girl, even when she was little, perhaps because of her problem, which made her mature before her time…” The problem Sister Giovanna referred to was asthma. She remembers that the fits of coughing were so intense that they had to put her in a single room. She was the only boarder that slept alone, and she did so with the windows open even in winter, in spite of the icy wind that blew down from the Alps. The boarding school, with two hundred girls, was on a hillside that looked over the town: the towers of its mediaeval churches emerged from a mosaic of old rooftops, and on the other side of the river there was a huge crag whose top was usually covered in snow. When the coughing fits passed, Sonia lay under her feather quilt, looking at that mountain, dimly lit by the reflection of the lights of the town, which reminded her of Lusiana where she was born.

  Sonia learned to ski, like all the local people, for whom skiing is the king of sports. But she was never a great fan, of that or of any other sport either, because she was worried that the exercise might set off an attack of asthma. In compensation, she developed a love of reading, a passion that would last all her life. At first, as was required in Catholic schools, she read the lives of the saints. She especially liked stories about the missionaries who gave their all to the poor in faraway countries. Being a missionary seemed to her a heroic way of life, full of meaning, because you had to give yourself for others, and exciting, because it was full of adventure. The nuns at the school regularly showed films that told the great epics and myths of Christianity—such as the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, for example—and left the girls, especially Sonia, full of emotion. But the pleasure of books lasted longer than that of films, and she could re-read them and enjoy herself at the same time as she learned from the experiences and thoughts of the characters. Reading opened the doors of the world to Sonia. Thanks to her reading and to her innate curiosity, the adolescent Sonia developed a feeling that the nuns called amor mundi, love for the world, according to the exquisite description Saint Augustine had made of it.

  In class she had to learn the lives of the great heroes of modern Italian history, such as the philosopher and politician Mazzini, who contributed to Italy becoming a democratic republic; or the exploits of the peculiar Garibaldi, an idealist and fighter who struggled for the unification of the country. She learned about the Risorgimento, the nationalist movement in the 19th century, but the nuns taught her little about the rest of the world. For example, she never even heard about India and its struggle for independence and its emergence as a modern State. The vague figure of Gandhi rang a bell, but she could not have said who he was, like the vast majority of Italian students, and European students too. On the other hand Nehru was more familiar. She glimpsed the profile of that elegant gentleman, with his characteristic cap on his head, on the evening news her parents were watching on television as she made her way up to bed in her nightdress. In any case, Sonia was not particularly interested in history, or the sciences either, or anything to do with politics. She had always liked languages, for which she had a certain facility. Her father had encouraged her to learn Russian and had paid for a private teacher for her. Sonia understood Russian and spoke it, although she had difficulty reading it. She also learned French at home. In addition, languages were useful if you wanted to travel, for getting to know other people, other customs, other worlds, to discover those places that she had been able to glimpse in the lives of the missionaries.

  Later, when she had left the boarding school in Giaveno and was registered at a high school in Turin to take pre-university courses, her childhood dreams gradually changed. They began to adapt to reality. The idea of becoming an Alitalia stewardess, of earning her living travelling round the world, began to seduce her. It did not require an excessive amount of work and, when she had finished her high school studies she would have almost all the requirements: she was nice-looking, well-mannered, the right height, she knew Russian and French, she had it all … All she needed was to perfect her English.

  “Daddy, I want to go to England to learn English properly …”

  “No way.”

  Stefano did not in the least like the idea that his daughter might make her living on planes and in hotels, and it did not seem like a proper job either. If she wanted to learn English, he would pay for her classes in a language school, she did not need to leave home. She had learned Russian with a private teacher, hadn’t she? She had learned French without ever having been to France, hadn’t she? Well knowing how stubborn her father was, Sonia avoided a confrontation with him, but deep down she was just as stubborn when she was convinced about what she wanted. It was in her blood …

  So she won her mother’s support and while she finished her studies, she worked from time to time in Fieratorino, the organization that set up conventions and industrial fairs, such as the famous Automobile Show. Sonia took her first steps as a hostess, and even as an interpreter for Russian at a golf championship. She liked the contact with different people. The same curiosity she felt for languages she now felt for culture and the spirit of the people who spoke them. The world was definitely larger than tiny Orbassano, and those little jobs widened her horizons. Her dream of becoming an air- hostess gradually changed into becoming a foreign language teacher or, even better, an interpreter in some international organization such as the United Nations.

  Like any good highlander, Stefano was authoritarian and inflexible, but not so obstinate that he did not realize that his daughters had needs. He was trapped in a dilemma common to people of his generation: on one hand he felt the need to keep them under control and educate them in a traditional manner (girls could only do certain things, but boys could do anything they liked), and on the other hand he could see that times were changing and it was no longer a matter of just waiting for them to find a husband. And even so, better that they should be economically independent so that they would not have to live under the iron rule of a man. So in view of the pressure from his wife who was determined that her daughters should have a profession, he gave way, and agreed to pay for Sonia’s journey and studies in England. But they were not prepared for their daughter to be an au pair and live with just any family in any city. They chose Cambridge, the home of the most prestigious universities and colleges. At Sonia’s age, it was better to place her in the best possible environment … She thanked him by hugging him and kissing him just like when she was small, getting tickled by his moustache.

  On January 7th, 1965, she said goodbye to her sisters and gave Stalin, the old dog, who had been her playmate throughout her childhood, a big squeeze. Her parents went with her to Milan airport, just one oretta away. The morning mist lifted and gave way to a cold, sunny day. Sonia was excited about travelling alone for the first time and also afraid of the unknown. She was 18 years old and had her life in ahead of her. A life that she could not have imagined in her wildest dreams.

  5

  “For my girls always the best …” Stefano never stinted on his daughters. The Lennox Cook School was one of the best and most expensive language schools in Cambridge, located in a nice street a little out of the centre. It boasted of having had the famous writer E.M. Forster among its teachers of literature, although in those years he was too old and only went in from time to time to give a talk. For the cost of registration, the school also took charge of finding an English family
for each student that requested it, so that they could live with them as paying guests.

  Compared with Turin, the climate in Cambridge seemed depressing to Sonia: the cold froze her bones because of the damp, it drizzled constantly and got dark at four in the afternoon. Besides, it was a penetrating kind of cold because the radiators in the house were kept off most of the day to save money. To her surprise, the one in her room only worked with coins. She had thought that living with an English family would be like living with any Italian family, where they shared everything. But that was her ignorance of local customs. Taking in a paying guest was just another way of making money and, as such, everything counted. She discovered to her horror that she had to pay every time she wanted to have a bath and that it was going to cost her a lot to keep up her usual level of daily hygiene. But worst of all were the meals. She had never eaten boiled cabbage or meat with jam or potato omelette with … potatoes. Getting up in the morning and finding herself face to face with a piece of toast with baked beans in tomato sauce put the brakes on her appetite. And the toast with soft, sticky spaghetti that they gave her one day seemed like a joke in poor taste, although when she saw that everybody else got stuck in with gusto, she realized that that was the way things were in this strange country. Added to this was the difficulty she encountered in expressing herself: she was incapable of holding a fluent conversation with her host family. In fact she knew less English than she had thought.

  At first she thought she would never get used to it. Her shyness was an obstacle to her making friends with people. She avoided being with other Italians because she was there to study and not to have fun. She spent the first days getting to know the city. The Gothic chapel at King’s College and the river full of punts with tourists were two of her favourite spots. But there were many interesting places such as Trinity College chapel with its statues and plaques in honour of the great figures who had studied or researched there, like Isaac Newton, Lord Byron or Nehru himself; the “mathematical bridge”, the first bridge in the world designed according to the analysis of the mathematical forces that acted on the structure … It did not seem strange to her that Cambridge should be considered as one of the most beautiful cities in England, but that was still poor consolation for her loneliness. When she left class she used to go out walking in the streets in the city centre. From time to time she would go into one of the numerous bookshops, especially those that had foreign press, to flick through an Italian magazine or newspaper. That fleeting contact with her country was like a balm. She felt so homesick and missed her family so much that when she went back to her freezing room she was very downhearted. How the Hell did I get the idea of coming to study in a place like this? she asked herself as she took a deep breath through her inhaler.