From the Land of the Moon

by Milena Agus

  His daughter already had a Milanese accent, a doll she played mother with, a miniature kitchen and a set of china, and notebooks with the first letters of the alphabet and the Greek key design. She liked it when you were on the train to Genoa and the sea appeared suddenly at the end of a tunnel, and she had cried when, a year ago, they moved to Milan: she would sit on the balcony and call to the passersby, “Genoa! Give me back my Genoa! I want my Genoa!” If she was the daughter of a German he was a good German.

  Grandmother also had the idea, although she didn’t understand politics, that the German invaders of Italy couldn’t possibly all have been bad people. And then what about the Americans, who had destroyed Cagliari, had really almost razed it to the ground? Her husband, who did understand politics and read the newspaper every day and was a very intelligent Communist, and had organized the workers’ strike at the salt works, always said there was no strategic reason to damage the city so severely, and yet the pilots of the B17s, the flying fortresses, couldn’t all have been evil, right? There must have been some good people among them, too.

  And now the house on Via Manno and the piano would fill the hole, and the Veteran embraced grandmother and whispered in her ear the sounds of the bass, the trumpet, the violin, the flute. He knew how to do the whole orchestra. It might seem crazy, but during the long marches in the snow, or in the concentration camp when he had to fight dogs for food to amuse the Germans, poetry and those sounds in his mind had sustained him.

  He also told her, still whispering in her ear, that some scholars maintain that Paolo and Francesca were murdered as soon as they were discovered, while other Dantists think that they had the pleasure of one another for a while, before they died. “And that day we read no farther” has to be interpreted. He said also that if grandmother wasn’t too afraid of Hell they could love each other in that same way. And grandmother had no fear of Hell, imagine. If God was truly God, and knew how much she had longed for love, how much she had prayed at least to know what it was, how could he now send her to Hell.

  And then what a Hell if, even as an old woman, when she thought back to it she smiled at the image of herself and the Veteran and that kiss. And if she was sad she cheered herself with the photograph that she had fixed in her mind.

  8.

  My grandmother was over sixty when I was born. I remember that as a child I thought she was beautiful, and I’d watch, enthralled, when she combed her hair and made her old-fashioned crocchia, parting the hair, which never turned white, or thin, then braiding it and coiling the braids into two chignons. I felt proud when she picked me up at school, with her youthful smile, amid the mothers and fathers of the others; mine, being musicians, were always traveling around the world. My grandmother was all for me, at least as much as my father was all for music and my mother all for my father.

  Papa never had a girlfriend, and grandmother suffered and felt guilty thinking that she might have transmitted to her son the mysterious illness that caused love to flee. At that time there were clubs where boys and girls went dancing and embarked on love affairs along with Beatles songs, but not my father. Sometimes he rehearsed pieces with girls at the Conservatory, singers, violinists, flutists—they all wanted him to accompany them on the piano at their exams, since he was the best, but when the exam was over so was everything else.

  Then one day grandmother went to the door and there was mamma, with her flute over her shoulder, all out of breath, because here in Via Manno there’s no elevator. She had a shy but confident look, just as my mother has now, and she was pretty, simple, fresh, and, panting because of the steep stairs, she laughed for no reason, joyously, the way girls laugh, and grandmother called papa, who was shut in his room playing, and cried, “She’s here. The person you were expecting is here!”

  Mamma can never forget that day: they had to practice a piece for piano and flute and none of the practice rooms at the Conservatory were free, so my father told her to come to Via Manno. Everything seemed perfect to her, grandmother, grandfather, the house. She lived on the outskirts, in an ugly neighborhood of gray barracks-like apartments, with her widowed mother, my grandmother Lia, who was severe and rigid and obsessed with order and hygiene, who waxed the floors and made you put on felt slippers, and always wore black, and whom mamma had to telephone constantly to say where she was, but she never complained. The only happy thing in mamma’s life was music, which Signora Lia couldn’t bear: she closed all the doors in order not to hear her daughter practice.

  Mamma had loved my father silently for a long time; she liked everything about him, even the fact that he was utterly in another world, and always had his sweaters on backward and never remembered what season it was and wore summer shirts until he caught bronchitis, and everyone said he was crazy. So although he was very handsome, girls didn’t want to go with him for all those reasons, and especially because that kind of craziness wasn’t fashionable then, and, after all, neither was classical music, in which he was a genius. Mamma, however, would have sold her soul for him.

  At first she kept herself free on purpose and didn’t even look for a job, because that was the only way to stay with papa: turning the pages of the few scores he didn’t know by heart, sitting on the stool next to him, touring all over the world. Even if it was impossible for her to go with him, for example when I was born, he went. The day of my birth he was in New York, for Ravel’s Concerto in G. My grandparents didn’t telephone, because they didn’t want to excite him, fearful that he might play badly because of me. So as soon as I grew a little, mamma bought a duplicate playpen, duplicate baby walker, duplicate high chair, duplicate warming dish, and brought everything here to Via Manno, so that she could pack a bag of baby clothes, hand me over to grandmother, and immediately get the plane to join papa.

  But they never left me with my maternal grandmother, Signora Lia; if they tried, I’d cry desperately. Whatever I did, a drawing, for example, or maybe if I sang her a song with words I had made up, that other grandmother darkened and said there are more important things, one has to think of the important things, and I got the idea that she hated my parents’ music, hated the storybooks that I always had with me. To please her I tried to understand what might gratify her, but she didn’t seem to like anything. Mamma told me that Signora Lia was like that because her husband had died, even before mamma was born, and because she had quarreled with her wealthy family and had left Gavoi, her town, which to her was ugly.

  I don’t remember my grandfather; he died when I was too young, on May 10, 1978, the day Law 180 was passed, the law that closed down the insane asylums. My father always told me that he was an exceptional man and everyone respected him tremendously and grandmother’s relatives loved him dearly because he had saved her from so many things it was better to forget about it, except that I was to be careful with grandmother, I mustn’t upset her, or agitate her too much. There was always a veil of mystery over her, perhaps of pity.

  Only as an adult did I learn that before meeting grandfather, in May of 1943, she had thrown herself down the well, and her sisters, hearing the thud, had rushed into the courtyard and called the neighbors, and they had miraculously managed to pull her out, all holding onto the rope together; and that once she had disfigured herself by cutting her hair so she looked like a mangy dog; and she was always cutting the veins in her arms. I knew a different grandmother, who would laugh at a trifle, and my father said the same, that in his life, too, she was peaceful, except for once, and maybe those other things were only stories. But I know they’re true. Besides, grandmother always said that her life was divided into two parts: before and after the treatment at the thermal baths, as if the water that had enabled her to get rid of the stones had been miraculous in all senses.

  9.

  Nine months after she returned from the baths my father was born, in 1951, and when he was just seven grandmother went to work as a maid for two women, Donna Doloretta and Donna Fanní, in Viale Luigi Merello, in secret from grandfather and everyo
ne else, because she intended to have her son take piano lessons. The ladies felt sorry for her: to them this business of the music seemed crazy, “Narami tui chi no è macca una chi podia biviri beni e faidi sa zeracca poita su fillu depidi sonai su piano”—“You tell me she isn’t mad—a woman who could live comfortably and goes to work as a maid because her son has to play the piano.” But they liked her so much that they gave her special hours: she came to work after taking papa to school, the Sebastian Satta, and left early to pick him up and do the shopping, and if the offices and schools were on vacation she was, too. Grandfather must have wondered why she always did her household chores in the afternoon, when she had all the morning free, but he never asked her and never reproached her if he found things untidy or lunch wasn’t ready. Maybe he thought that his wife listened to records in the morning, now that they were doing better economically and she had developed this passion for music, Chopin, Debussy, Beethoven, and listened to operas, weeping at “Madame Butterfly” and “La Traviata”; or he supposed that she took the tram to the Poetto beach to see the sea, or maybe to have coffee with her friends Donna Doloretta and Donna Fanní. Whereas grandmother, having taken papa to Via Angioy, swiftly ascended Via Don Bosco to Viale Merello, where all the villas had palm trees and terraces with plaster balustrades, and gardens with fish ponds and fountains with putti. The ladies did expect her for coffee and they served it on a silver tray, before she started work, because grandmother was a real lady. They talked about the men in their lives: Donna Fanní’s fiancé had died at Vittorio Veneto fighting in the Sassari Brigade, and she was always sad on October 24th, when the victory was celebrated. Grandmother talked, too, not, of course, about the Veteran or the madness or the brothel, but about the suitors who fled, yes, and about grandfather, who had loved her right away and married her, and the ladies looked at each other in embarrassment, as if to say it was glaringly obvious that he had married her to repay his debt to the family, but they were silent. Maybe they thought that she was a little strange and wasn’t aware of things, certainly “su macchiòri de sa musica e de su piano,” her madness for music and the piano, must have been pure madness to them, since they had a piano and never touched it; they placed doilies on it with vases of flowers and various other objects, while grandmother practically caressed it before she dusted and polished it, using her breath and a cloth she had bought just for that purpose. One day the ladies made her a proposal: they were accustomed to having servants, but they had no money and could no longer continue to pay grandmother; however, a price could be set for the piano, and grandmother would pay for it daily, by doing the housework, and to her husband she would say that it was a gift from them, her friends. They also added the built-in lamp that illuminated the keyboard, but grandmother had to sell that right away, to pay for the transport from Viale Merello to Via Manno and the tuning. The day the piano traveled to Via Manno she felt such a rush of happiness that she ran from Viale Merello to Via Manno ahead of the truck, reciting in her mind the first lines of a poem that the Veteran had written for her, faster and faster, all in one breath without periods or commas: If you left a faint mark on life that moves like a snake If you left a faint mark on life that moves like a snake If you left a faint mark on life that moves like a snake. They put the piano in the big, light-filled room overlooking the port. And papa was good.

  He really is. At times the newspapers talk about him, saying he’s the only Sardinian who has ever really been successful in the music world, and they roll out the red carpet for him in the concert halls of Paris, London, New York. Grandfather had an album covered in bottle-green leather just for the photographs and newspaper clippings about his son’s concerts.

  My father always talked to me about grandfather in particular.

  He loved his mother, but she was alien to him, and when she asked him a question about how things were going he answered, “Normal, ma. Everything’s normal.” Then grandmother said that things couldn’t be normal, they had of necessity to be one way rather than another, and it was evident that she got upset and jealous when the three of them were sitting at the table and, in grandfather’s presence, the things of the world acquired that “way” which she had spoken of. Now that his mother is dead papa can’t forgive himself, but nothing ever came to mind. She went to a concert of his only once, when he was a boy, but she fled, overcome by emotion. Grandfather, who was always protecting her—although not even he ever knew what to say to her and he certainly wasn’t affectionate—didn’t follow her and stayed to enjoy his son’s concert. He had been very happy and couldn’t stop praising him.

  Papa is glad that for me, on the other hand, it’s been easy. Better. Better like that. Besides, grandmother brought me up. I was always in Via Manno more than in my own house, and I never wanted to leave when he and mamma came home. As a child I had terrible tantrums, screaming and crawling under the beds, or I’d lock myself in a room and make them swear to let me stay before I would come out. One day I even hid in a big empty flower vase and stuck some branches in my hair. And then the next day the same thing. I refused to take my dolls and games home. Then, when I was older, books. I said that I had to stay at grandmother’s to study because it was especially inconvenient to carry the dictionaries. Or if I invited friends over I preferred grandmother’s because there was the terrace. And so on. Maybe I loved her in the right way. With my scenes and tears and yelling and rushes of happiness. When I came back from a trip she was down in the street waiting and I ran to meet her and we hugged each other and wept from emotion as if I had been to war and not off having fun.

  Since grandmother never came to papa’s concerts, I got on the telephone afterward from the various cities of the world and described everything to her, in great detail, and even did a little of the music for her and told her what the applause had been like and what a sensation the performance had caused. Or, if the concert was nearby, I came to Via Manno right away, and grandmother sat down and listened to me with her eyes closed, and she smiled and beat time with her feet in her slippers.

  Signora Lia, however, couldn’t stand papa’s concerts and said that her son-in-law didn’t have a real job, that his success might end at any moment and there he’d be, with mamma and me, a beggar if it weren’t for his parents, but only as long as they were alive. She knew what it meant to manage on your own and not ask anyone for help. She, unfortunately, had known real life. My father wasn’t bothered by this, or maybe he wasn’t aware of the contempt of his mother-in-law, who never paid him a compliment and regularly threw out the newspapers with articles about him or used them to clean the windows or to put under the feet of workers who came to make repairs in the house.

  Papa has always had his music, and nothing else in the world matters to him.

  10.

  About the suitors who fled, about the well, about the hair like a mangy dog, about the scars on her arms, and about the brothel—grandmother told the Veteran all of this the first night they spent together at risk of ending up in Hell. And grandmother said that there were only two people she had really talked to in her life: to him and to me. He was the thinnest and the handsomest man she had ever seen, and it was the most intense and prolonged lovemaking. Because the Veteran, before he penetrated her, again and again, slowly undressed her, stopping to caress every part of her body, smiling at her and telling her that she was beautiful. He wanted to take the pins out of her hair himself and, like a child, sink his hands in that black cloud of curls, and unbutton her clothes and gaze at her lying naked on the bed, so he could admire her large firm breasts, her soft white skin, her long legs, and all the while he caressed her and kissed her where she had never been kissed. She could have fainted with pleasure. And then grandmother undressed him, carefully placing the wooden leg at the foot of the bed, and she kissed and caressed his stump for a long time. And for the first time she thanked God in her heart for having brought her into the world, for having pulled her out of the well, for having given her a beautiful bosom and beautiful
hair and even, in fact especially, kidney stones.

  Afterward he told her that she was very good and that he had never encountered anyone like her in any brothel at any price. Then grandmother proudly listed her services. The prey: the man captures the woman, naked, in a fishing net in which he makes one opening, just so he can penetrate her. She is his fish. He touches her everywhere, but feels only the shapes and not the skin. The slave: she gives him a bath and caresses him with bare breasts, and offers them to him to bite but doesn’t dare look at him. The geisha: he simply has her tell him stories that take him away from the problems of daily life; she is completely clothed and they don’t necessarily make love. The lunch: she lies down and the man spreads the food out as if on a table that has been set, for example a piece of fruit in her vagina or jam on her breast or ragù or custard, and eats everything. The girl: it’s he who gives her a bath in the tub, with lots of bubbles; he washes her all over and in gratitude she will take him in her mouth. The muse: he photographs her in the most indecent poses, with her thighs spread, while she masturbates and squeezes her tits. The dog-woman: she wears only a bra and brings him the newspaper in her mouth, while he pats her sex from behind or her hair or ears and says, “Good dog.” The servant: she brings him coffee in bed wearing an outfit that’s modest but reveals her breasts almost completely, and she lets him milk them, then she climbs the wardrobe to clean and isn’t wearing underpants. The lazybones: she is tied to the bed because she has to be punished with the belt, but grandfather never really hurt her. Grandmother always performed outstandingly and after every service her husband told her how much it would have cost at the brothel. They put that sum away for rebuilding the house on Via Manno, and grandmother insisted that a small amount be used for pipe tobacco. But they continued to sleep on opposite sides of the bed and never spoke about themselves, and maybe that was why grandmother couldn’t forget the emotion she felt on those nights with the Veteran, with his arm around her head and his hand sleeping but present, seeming to caress her hair. The Veteran said that in his view her husband was a lucky man, really, and not, as she said, unfortunate, cursed with a poor madwoman; she wasn’t mad, she was a creature made at a moment when God simply had no wish for the usual mass-produced women and, being in a poetic vein, had created her. Grandmother laughed heartily and said that he was mad, too, and so wasn’t aware of the madness of others.