Grandmother met the Veteran in the fall of 1950. She had come from Cagliari to the mainland for the first time. She must have been around forty, and had no children, because su mali de is perdas—her kidney stones—always caused her to miscarry in the first months. So, with her sack-like overcoat and high, laced shoes and the suitcase her husband had brought as an evacuee to her village, she was sent to the thermal baths to be cured.