In 1963, grandmother went with her husband and papa to visit her sister and brother-in-law who had emigrated to Milan.
The house in the village had been sold to help the sisters, and my grandparents had given up their share, but still the others couldn’t make it, three families farming a property of less than twenty hectares. The agrarian reforms had been cautious and the Rebirth Plan was all wrong, as it was based on the chemical and iron and steel industries, and, having been initiated by people from the mainland with public funds, did nothing for us here, grandfather said; rather, the future of Sardinia would have been in manufacturing, which would have made use of the existing resources. For the other two sisters, who lived on the land, it made things easier, in the end, when one had left. Grandmother had suffered a lot and didn’t even go to San Gavino to see her youngest sister, her brother-in-law, and their children take the train for Porto Torres. And she had suffered for the house, too. The new owners had replaced the arched front entrance with an iron gate. The wooden pilasters, and the low wall separating her lolla from the courtyard, had been knocked down, and the lolla closed in by aluminum-frame windows. The low upper floor, which looked out over the roof of the lolla, and where the hayloft had been, had become a mansard, like the ones you see in postcards of the Alps. The stalls for the oxen and the woodshed made into a garage for cars. The flower beds reduced to a narrow perimeter along the wall. The well plugged up with cement. The tile roof, above the loft that was now a mansard, replaced by a terrace with a hollow-brick parapet. The multicolored terra-cotta tiles, which made kaleidoscopic designs on the floor, covered by outdoor tile. And the furniture was too much for the space of the rooms that the sisters now occupied in the houses of their husbands’ families, and no one wanted it—so old and cumbersome, from a time best forgotten. Only grandmother had taken the things from the bedroom she had had as a new bride, to re-create it in Via Giuseppe Manno.
By the time they made the trip to Milan she knew that the family had grown prosperous, because her sister wrote to her that Milàn l’è il gran Milàn, Milan is the great Milan, and there was work for everyone and on Saturday they shopped at the supermarket and filled carts with perfectly packaged food, and that idea they had always had of economizing, of cutting no more than the exact number of slices of bread, of turning their coats, jackets, suits, of unraveling sweaters to reuse the wool, of resoling their shoes a thousand times—all done with. In Milan they went to the big department stores and got new clothes. What she didn’t like was the climate, the smog that blackened the edges of the sleeves and shirt collars and the children’s school smocks. She was constantly having to wash everything, but in Milan there was lots of water—they didn’t offer it on alternate days, as in Sardinia, and you could let it run and run, without worrying about washing yourself first, then with the waste water washing the clothes, then throwing the dirty water into the toilet. In Milan washing and bathing were fun. And then her sister didn’t have much to do after the housework, which was soon done, because the houses were small; millions of inhabitants had to live in that space—it wasn’t like Sardinia, with its enormous houses that were of no use to anyone, since they had no conveniences. In short, she had soon finished the housework and then she wandered around the city looking in the stores, and shopping.
My grandparents didn’t know what to bring to the wealthy relatives in Milan. After all, they didn’t need anything. So grandmother proposed a poetic package, for old times’ sake, because it was true that they ate and dressed well, but Sardinian sausage and a nice Pecorino and oil and wine from Marmilla and a side of prosciutto and marinated cardoons and sweaters for the children hand-knitted by grandmother would bring them the fragrance of home.
They set off without letting the relatives know. It would be a surprise. Grandfather got a map of Milan and studied the streets and planned itineraries for seeing the best sights in the city.
They all three got new clothes in order not to make a bad impression. Grandmother bought some Elizabeth Arden cream, because now she was fifty and wanted the Veteran—her heart told her that they would meet—to find her still beautiful. Not that she was very worried by this. People always said that a man of fifty would never look at a woman the same age, but this reasoning was valid only for the things of the world. Not love. Love doesn’t care about age or anything else that isn’t love. And it was with that love that the Veteran had loved her. Who could say if he would recognize her right away. What sort of expression he would have. They would not embrace in the presence of grandfather, papa, or the Veteran’s wife or daughter. They would shake hands and gaze at each other. With unbearable intensity. On the other hand if she tried to go out alone and met him alone, then yes. And they would kiss and embrace to make up for all those years. And if he asked her, she would never go home. Because love is more important than anything else.
Grandmother had never been to the mainland, except to the small town where the spa was, and in spite of what her sister had written she thought that in Milan people would meet easily, as in Cagliari, and she was extremely excited because she thought she would see her Veteran on the street immediately. But Milan was very big, very tall, the buildings were massive, with sumptuous decorations; it was beautiful, gray and foggy, choked with traffic; bits of sky appeared amid the bare branches of the trees, and there were so many lighted shops, car headlights, traffic lights, clattering trams, crowds of people, their faces turned toward the collars of their coats in the rainy air. As soon as she got off the train in the Central Station, she looked closely at all the men to see if hers was there, tall, thin, the face gentle, carelessly shaved, the raincoat, because it was raining, and the crutch. There were so many men who got on and off those trains going everywhere, Paris, Vienna, Rome, Naples, Venice, and it was impressive how big and rich the world was, but he wasn’t there.
Finally they arrived at the sister’s street and her building; they had expected it to be modern, a kind of skyscraper, but instead it was old. Grandmother found it beautiful, even though the façade was crumbling and around the windows the ornamental stucco putti were missing their heads and the flowers their stalks, and the slats of the shutters and many pieces of the balcony balustrades had been replaced by wooden boards, many windowpanes by sheets of cardboard. The entrance was full of notices and the cards showing the names weren’t under glass but pasted next to the only bell. Still, they were sure they had arrived, since the letters had gone back and forth for a year from that address in Milan. They rang and a woman leaned out from the balcony on the second floor. She said that the sardignoli women weren’t home at that time, but they could come in and go up and ask some other terún, some other worthless southerners. And who were they? Were they looking for a servant? The sardignole women were the most reliable.
So they all went in. It was dark and the air was close, smelling of toilets and cabbage. The stairway must have been beautiful once, because the well in the middle was vast, but the bombing in the war would have damaged it, since many of the steps seemed dangerous. Grandfather insisted on going first, keeping to the wall, and then papa, holding tight to his hand, and then grandmother, whom he told to put her feet exactly where he had put his. They climbed up, all the way to the roof. There were no apartments. There was a doorway opening onto a long dark corridor that went all around the stairwell, with doors leading to storerooms. But to these storeroom doors were attached the cards with the names, and at the end was their brother-in-law’s. They knocked, but no one answered; other people looked out into the corridor, and when they explained whom they were looking for, and who they were, the neighbors welcomed them warmly and invited them into their attic to wait. The brother-in-law was out with the rag cart, the sister at her cleaning job, the children stayed with the nuns all day. They sat on the bed, under the single window, through which a bit of gray sky was visible. Papa wanted to go to the bathroom, but grandfather glared at him, because it was clear that there was no bathroom.
Maybe they should have left right away. All they could bring those wretched people was shame. But it was late. They had already closely questioned the kind, affectionate neighbors, who were also from the south, and to leave now would have been to add insult to injury.
So they waited. The only one who was really sad was grandfather. Papa, at least, was enthusiastic, because in Milan he would find some scores that in Cagliari you had to order and wait months for, and grandmother didn’t care about anything except meeting the Veteran: she had been waiting for this moment since the autumn of 1950. She immediately asked her sister where the case di ringhiera were, the buildings where the balconies ran all around the inside of the courtyard, with apartments opening off them. She said she was curious because she had heard about them, and so she got the directions for the neighborhood where they were concentrated. She let grandfather take papa to see La Scala, the Duomo, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, the Castello Sforzesco, and to buy the scores that could not be found in Cagliari. Of course grandfather was disappointed, but he said nothing, as always, and did not hinder her in any way. In fact, in the morning he showed her on the map the streets she had to take to see the places that interested her, and told her which tram she was to take and left her telephone tokens and useful numbers and money in case she got lost. She must not get upset; she was to call a taxi from a phone booth and return home quietly. Grandmother was not insensitive or stupid or mean, and she realized perfectly what she was doing and that she was hurting grandfather. This she would not have done for anything in the world. For anything in the world—except her love. So, with her heart in her throat, she went to look for the Veteran’s house. She was sure that she would find it: a large, tall building with carved stone balconies, and a big door on the street and a passageway that formed a grand entrance and opened onto an enormous courtyard, facing which were the many stories of narrow balconies with railings. The Veteran was in that mezzanine apartment, with the door at the top of three or four steps, where his daughter waited for him in any weather, and windows with grates and two big rooms painted white, in which there was nothing of the past. Grandmother, with her heart in a turmoil, as if she were a criminal, went into a café and asked for a telephone book and looked for the name of the Veteran, but, even though he was from Genoa, there were pages of that name, and the only hope was to be lucky and find the right neighborhood and the right house. There were case di ringhiera on many long streets, and grandmother looked into the shops as well. They looked prosperous—the food shops resembled Vaghi, on Via Bayle, in Cagliari—and there were a lot of them, and they were crowded, but maybe the Veteran, coming home from work, was doing the shopping; maybe she would see him in front of her, handsome in his raincoat when the rain fell on him. He would be smiling at her and telling her that he had not forgotten her, either, and in his heart had been expecting her.
Papa, the cousins, and grandfather, on the other hand, had gone into the center of the city, holding one another by the hand in the increasingly thick fog, and grandfather had bought his son and nephews chocolate at Motta, sitting at a little table, and then had taken them to the best toy stores, where he had bought his nephews Lego sets and little airplanes that fly above the ground, and even a home table-soccer game, and then they had gone into the Duomo and to have an ice-cream cone in the Galleria. My father speaks of that trip to Milan as a wonderful time except that he missed his piano. If grandmother had found the Veteran, she would have run away with him, just as she was, taking with her only what she had on, her new coat, her hair gathered under a wool beret, and her purse and the shoes she had bought so that if she met him she would look elegant.
Never mind about papa and grandfather, even though she loved them, and they would miss her terribly. She consoled herself with the idea that the two of them were a unit: they were always talking, a little ahead of her when the three of them went out, and at the table they chatted to each other while she washed the dishes, and when papa was little he wanted his father to say good night, and read him a bedtime story and give him all the reassurances that children need before going to sleep. Never mind about Cagliari, about the dark, narrow streets of Castello that unexpectedly opened to a sea of light, never mind about the flowers she had planted that would flood the terrace of Via Manno with color, never mind about the laundry hanging out in the mistral. Never mind about the beach at the Poetto, a long desert of white dunes beside clear water that, no matter how far you walked, never got deep, while schools of fish swam between your legs. Never mind about summers in the blue-and-white striped bathing hut, the plates of malloreddus with tomato sauce and sausage after swimming. Never mind about her village, with the odor of hearth fires, of pork and lamb and the incense in church when they went to her sisters’ for holidays. But then the fog became denser and the top stories of the buildings seemed to be enveloped in clouds and you had to practically bump into people to see them, for they were mere shadows.
In the next days, in the city still shrouded in fog, grandfather took her by the arm, and on his other side held papa by the shoulders, who in turn gave his hand to the smaller cousins, so that, attached to one another, they would not get lost and could still enjoy the things that were close up and never mind those which the fog made invisible. A strange cheerfulness had come over grandfather, ever since grandmother had stopped looking for the case di ringhiera. He kept making jokes, and at meals they all laughed, and the attic didn’t seem so squalid and cramped anymore. And when they went out, tied together like that, even grandmother, if she hadn’t had that nearly heart-stopping longing for the Veteran, would have been amused by grandfather’s jokes.
On one of those days he became obsessed with the idea that he had to buy her a nice dress, one that was worthy of a trip to Milan, and he said something he had never said before: “I want you to buy something beautiful. Really beautiful.”
And so they stopped to look in all the finest shop windows, and papa and the cousins grumbled because it was very boring to wait while grandmother tried this and that for the mirror, indifferently.
By now, in fog-wrapped Milan, there was less and less likelihood of meeting the Veteran, and grandmother didn’t care at all about the dress, but they bought it anyway, a paisley pattern in pastels, and grandfather insisted that she loosen her bun in the shop, to see what all those blue and pink moons and stars looked like with her cloud of black hair. He was so happy with the purchase that he wanted grandmother to wear the new dress every day under her coat, and before they went out he’d make her twirl around, and he’d say, “It’s beautiful,” but he seemed to mean “You’re beautiful.”
And for this, too, grandmother never forgave herself. For having been unable to seize those words out of the air and be happy.
When the moment came for goodbyes, she sobbed with her cheek against the suitcase, not for her sister, her brother-in-law, her nephews, but because if destiny hadn’t willed her to see the Veteran, then it meant that he was dead. She remembered that in the autumn of 1950 she had believed she was in the Hereafter, and then he was so thin, and with his slender neck, his amputated leg, the childlike skin and hands, and that terrible eastward march and the concentration camp and the shipwrecks and the possibility that the father of his daughter was a Nazi—she felt that he was dead. If he hadn’t been he would have looked for her, he knew where she lived, and Cagliari isn’t Milan. Truly the Veteran must no longer be alive, and so she wept. Grandfather picked her up and sat her down on the only bed under the small attic window. He consoled her. He put a glass in her hand for a farewell toast and her sister and brother-in-law made a toast to meeting in better times, but grandfather didn’t want to toast better times—he wanted to toast that very visit, when they had all been together and had eaten well and had some laughs.
Then grandmother, with the glass in her hand, thought that maybe the Veteran was alive—after all, he had survived so many terrible things, why shouldn’t he make it in normal life? And she thought, too, that she still had an hour, with the tram ride to the Central Station, and the fog was lifting. But, when they reached the station, there was only a little time before the train left for Genoa, where they would get the boat and then another train; and life would begin again, where in the morning you water the flowers on the terrace and then make breakfast and then lunch and dinner, and if you ask your husband and son how things are going they answer, “Normal. Everything normal. Don’t worry,” and never tell you things, the way the Veteran did, and your husband never says that you’re the only one for him, the one he was waiting for, and that in May of 1943 his life changed—never, in spite of the increasingly refined services in bed and all the nights you sleep there together. So now if God didn’t want her to meet the Veteran let him kill her. The station was dirty, littered with trash and spit. While she sat and waited for her husband and son to get the tickets, because papa never chose to stay with her but preferred to stand in line with grandfather, she noticed a wad of gum stuck to the seat and smelled the odor of the toilets and felt an infinite disgust for Milan, which seemed to her terrible, like the whole world.
As she followed grandfather and papa, chattering to each other, up the escalator leading to the trains, she thought that if she turned back they wouldn’t even realize it. The fog had cleared now. She would continue to look for the Veteran throughout all the disgusting streets of the world, despite the winter cold that was approaching; she would beg and maybe even sleep on benches, and if she died of tuberculosis or hunger so much the better.
She let go of her suitcases and packages and rushed down, crashing into all the people going up, saying “Excuse me, excuse me!” But right at the end she stumbled, and the escalator swallowed up a shoe and a piece of her coat and tore the beautiful new dress and her stockings and her woolen cap, which had fallen off, and the skin of her hands and legs, and she had cuts and scrapes all over. Two arms helped lift her up. Grandfather had run down after her, and now he was holding her and caressing her as he would have done with a child: “Nothing happened,” he said to her, “nothing happened.”
When they got home she started to do the laundry, all the dirty clothes from the visit, shirts, dresses, undershirts, socks, underwear: all the new things they had bought for the trip to Milan. They were doing well now, and grandmother had a Candy washing machine with two settings, for normal clothes and for delicates. She separated the clothes: those that were to be washed at a high temperature and those to be done in warm water. But maybe her thoughts were elsewhere, who knows, and she ruined everything. Papa told me that she hugged him and grandfather, amid sobs and tears, and got the knives from the kitchen and put them in their hands so that they could kill her; she scratched her face and beat her head against the wall and threw herself on the floor.
Later, my father heard grandfather telephoning the aunts and saying that, in Milan, she hadn’t been able to stand seeing her younger, coddled sister reduced to such a state. Here in Sardinia the small landowners had been modest but dignified and respected, and now the failed agrarian reforms had ruined them, and they had had to emigrate, the women to be servants, which for a husband is the worst humiliation, the men to breathe the poisons of the factories, without protection and, above all, without respect, and in school the children were ashamed of their Sardinian last names, with all those “u”s. He himself had had no idea about this: the sister and brother-in-law had written that they were well and he had thought of surprising them by going to visit and instead it had been humiliating. The children had devoured the sausages and the prosciutto as if they hadn’t eaten for goodness knows how long, and his brother-in-law, when he cut the cheese and opened the bottle of mirto, was moved, and had told him he could never forget that when the property was divided grandfather hadn’t wanted grandmother’s part, but, unfortunately, that had been wasted; for, while it had seemed to them that one couldn’t live on the land, those who stayed had been right. Grandmother, who, as her sisters well knew, was made in her own way, couldn’t stand this, and then today she had also learned that President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, and had ruined a load of laundry. He didn’t care, money comes and goes, but there was no way to calm her and her son was upset. Could they please come to Cagliari, right away, on the first bus.
But then, for my great-aunt and uncle and cousins, things improved. They moved out of the attic to the suburb of Cinisello Balsamo, and my father, who always went to visit them when, as a musician, he was touring, said that they lived in a tall apartment building full of immigrants, in a complex of buildings for immigrants, but there was a bathroom and a kitchen and an elevator. At a certain point you couldn’t speak of immigrants anymore, because they considered themselves Milanese, and no one called them terún, because now the fight was between the reds and the blacks in San Babila, where the cousins beat up their rivals and were beaten up by them, while papa went to the Giuseppe Verdi with his bags full of scores and had no interest in politics. Papa told me that arguments broke out between him and the cousins. About politics and about Sardinia. Because they asked stupid questions like: “Is that sweater made from orbace?”—of a beautiful heavy sweater knitted by grandmother of the coarse Sardinian wool. Or: “What kind of transportation do you have down there?” Or: “Do you have a bidet? Do you keep chickens on the balcony?”
So at first papa laughed, but then he got mad and said, Fuck you, even though he was a quiet, well-brought-up pianist. It was that they couldn’t forgive his lack of interest in politics—he didn’t hate the bourgeoisie enough, he had never hit a Fascist and had never been hit. They, still boys, had attended Capanna’s rallies, had marched in Milan in May of 1969, had occupied the state school in 1971. But they all loved each other and always made up. They had become friends in that November of 1963, in the attic, when they wandered over the rooftops, climbing out through the little window unbeknownst to their parents: the uncle of Milan who was out selling rags, with the uncle of Cagliari helping him; the aunt of Milan off cleaning for her rich people, and the aunt of Cagliari, completely mad, studying the architecture of the case di ringhiera, with that unforgettable woolen cap kept on by her hair, braided and rolled into chignons in the Sardinian style.
Grandmother told me that later her sister telephoned her from Milan to say that she was worried about papa, he was so out of the world, so engrossed in his music. He had no girlfriends, while her sons, who were younger, already did. The fact is that papa was never very with it: he had short hair when everyone wore it long except the Fascists, and he, poor guy, was certainly not a Fascist—it was that he didn’t want his hair to get in his eyes when he played. She felt sorry for him, without a girlfriend, all alone with his scores. So grandmother, when she hung up, began to cry, fearful that she had transmitted to her son that kind of madness that puts love to flight. He had been a solitary child, whom no one invited anywhere, an unsociable child, at times awkwardly affectionate, whose company no one wanted. In the upper grades things had gone better, but not much. She tried to tell papa that other things existed in the world, and so did grandfather, though he laughed about it, and they couldn’t forget the night of July 21, 1969, when, while Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon, their son had not interrupted his practicing of the Brahms Paganini Variationen Opera 35 Heft I, for the concert at the end of the semester.