Over the years grandmother began to have kidney problems again, and every two days I picked her up in Via Manno and took her to have dialysis. She didn’t want to cause me any inconvenience, so she waited down in the street with her bag, which held a nightgown and slippers and a shawl, because she was always cold after the dialysis, even in summer. Her hair was thick and black and her eyes bright and she still had all her teeth, but her arms and legs were full of holes, because of the intravenous tubes, and her skin had turned yellowish and she was so thin that as soon as she got in the car and put the purse on her lap I had the impression that that object, which couldn’t have weighed more than half a pound, might crush her.
One dialysis day she wasn’t at the door, and I thought she must be feeling weaker than usual. I ran up the three flights of stairs, so we wouldn’t be late, since the hospital had a strict schedule for the treatment. I rang but she didn’t answer, and I was afraid that she had fainted, so I opened the door with my keys. She was lying peacefully on the bed, asleep, ready to go out, with her bag on the chair. I tried to wake her, but she wouldn’t respond. I felt a desperation in my soul: my grandmother was dead. I picked up the telephone and I remember only that I wanted to call someone who would revive my grandmother, and it took a while to convince me that no doctor could do it.
Only after she died did I learn that my great-grandparents had wanted to commit her to a mental institution, and that before the war they had come from the village to Cagliari on the bus, and that the asylum, on Monte Claro, had seemed to them a good place for their daughter. My father never knew these things. My great-aunts told mamma, when she was about to marry papa. They invited her to the village, to speak to her in great secrecy and let her know what blood ran in the veins of the boy she loved and with whom she would have children. They were taking on this embarrassing situation because their brother-in-law—even though he had always known everything and, arriving as an evacuee in that month of May, had seen her de dognia colori, in every guise—had not had the proper manners to tell his future daughter-in-law a thing. They didn’t want to criticize him, he was a fine man, and, though a Communist and an atheist and a revolutionary, for their family he had been sa manu de Deus, sacrificing to marry grandmother, who was ill de su mali de is perdas, sa minor cosa, poita su prus mali fiara in sa conca, with her kidney stones, the lesser evil—the greater was in her head. Because when grandmother was gone suitors came for them, too, poor women, and without that sister—who was often shut up in the hayloft, and cut her hair so she looked like a mangy dog—normal life had begun.
They could understand that he hadn’t told his son, since the blood he had he already had, but she was a healthy girl, and it was right that she should know. So, sitting on the bench with the Sardinian sweets in front of her and coffee in the cups with the gilded edges, my mother listened to the story told by her future aunts.
The asylum had seemed to the parents a good place for grandmother; it was on a densely wooded hill where maritime pines, ailanthus, cypresses, oleanders, broom, and locusts grew, and there were paths grandmother could walk on. And then it wasn’t a matter of a single large, grim structure that might frighten her but a series of villas built in the early years of the century, well tended and surrounded by gardens. The place where grandmother would have been was the ward for the Tranquil, a two-story villa with an elegant glass entrance, a living room, two dining rooms, and eight dormitories, and you wouldn’t have known that crazy people lived there, except for the stairs, which were enclosed between two walls. Since grandmother was Tranquil, she would have been able to go out and perhaps go to the Administration building, which had a library and a reading room where she could write and read novels and poetry at her pleasure, but under control. And she would never have contact with the other villas, where the Agitated and the Semi-Agitated were, and terrible things would never happen to her, like being locked in an isolation cell or being tied to the bed. All in all, at home it was worse, because, when she had her crises of despair and wanted to kill herself, they had to save her somehow. And how, except by locking her up in the hayloft, where they had had to put in a barred window, or by tying her to the bed with rags. In the cottages at the asylum, on the other hand, the windows had no bars. They were of a type adopted by a Dr. Frank in the asylum in Musterlinger: they were provided with an old spring lock, and there was wire mesh in the glass, but it was invisible. The parents had taken the information packet for admission to the Cagliari Asylum, although they would still have to persuade grandmother to be examined, and they themselves needed to think about it. And then Italy entered the war.
But they couldn’t keep her at home, and even if she had never hurt anyone, except herself and her things, and wasn’t a danger, the people in the village always indicated their street by saying inguni undi biviri sa macca, there, where the crazy woman lives.
Grandmother had always embarrassed them, ever since the time when, in church, she had seen a boy she liked and kept turning toward the pews where the boys sat and smiled at him and stared at him and the boy giggled, too. She had taken the pins out of her hair, and let it loose, a shiny black cloud; it seemed the devil’s weapon of seduction, a kind of witchcraft. My great-grandmother ran out of the church dragging the girl who was then her only daughter, and who was shouting, “But I love him and he loves me!” As soon as they got home she thrashed her, using whatever she could find—saddle girths, belts, pots, carpet beaters, ropes from the well—reducing the child to a doll that went limp in her hands. Then she called the priest to get the devil out of her body, but the priest gave her a blessing and said that she was a good child and there was not a trace of the devil in her. My great-grandmother told this story to everyone to apologize for her daughter, to let people know that she was mad but good, and that there was no danger at their house. But, just to be safe, she practiced some exorcism on her until she married grandfather. In a certain sense, grandmother’s illness could be defined as a kind of love folly. An attractive man had only to cross the threshold of the house and smile at her, or simply look at her—and, since she was very beautiful, this could happen—and she would imagine that he was a suitor. She began to expect a visit, a declaration of love, a proposal of marriage, and she was always writing in that wretched notebook; they had looked for it in order to show it to a doctor at the asylum, but couldn’t find it. Obviously no one ever came to ask for her hand, and she would wait and stare at the door and sit on the bench in the lolla, dressed in her best things, looking beautiful, because she really was, and smile fixedly, as if she understood nothing, as if she had arrived from the land of the moon. Then her mother had discovered that she wrote letters or love poems to those men, and that when she realized they would never return the drama began, and she screamed and threw herself on the ground and wanted to destroy herself and all the things she had made, and they had to tie her to the bed with the rags. In reality, she had no suitors, because no one in the village would have asked for grandmother in marriage, and you could only to pray God that, with the shame of a madwoman in the family, someone would want the other sisters.
In May of 1943, their brother-in-law, an evacuee, homeless, his grief for his wife still fresh, saw every side of her, and there was no need to explain anything to him, because for grandmother spring was the worst season. In the other seasons she was calmer: she planted seeds in the flower beds, worked in the fields, made bread and cross-stitch embroidery, scrubbed the tile floor of the lolla, fed the chickens and the rabbits, and petted them, and painted such beautiful decorations midway up the walls that she was called on to do them in other houses, to be ready by spring. My great-grandmother was so pleased to have her working for others all that time that she never asked them to pay her, and this the great-aunts thought was unfair. In the first days of the evacuation, grandfather, at dinner, with the soup in front of him, told them about the house on Via Manno, about the bombs and the death of his family, who had all gathered there on May 13th for his birthday. His wife had promised him a cake, and he was about to arrive when the air-raid alarm sounded. He had thought that he would find the family at the shelter under the Public Gardens, but none of them were at the shelter. That night, grandmother got up and ruined her cross-stitch embroideries, ripping them up; and her wall paintings, covering them with hideous splotches; and she scratched her face and body with prickly roses, so the thorns were everywhere, sticking even in her head. The next day, their future son-in-law had tried to talk to her, and, since she was locked in a stall reeking of manure, he spoke to her from the courtyard, through the wooden door, and told her that life is like that, that there are terrible things but also beautiful ones, such as, for example, the decorations and the embroidery she had done—why had she destroyed them? Grandmother, from inside, in the stench, had answered, strangely, “My things seem beautiful, but it’s not true. They’re ugly. I’m the one who should have died. Not your wife. Your wife had the principal thing that makes everything beautiful. Not me. I’m ugly. I’m meant to stay in the manure and the rubbish. I’m the one who should have died.”
“And what, in your view, signorina, is this principal thing?” grandfather had asked. But nothing more was heard from the stall. And later, when she lost the babies in the first months of pregnancy, she said that she would not have been a good mother because she lacked the principal thing, and that her children were not born because they, too, lacked that thing, and so she shut herself up in her world of the moon.
At the end of the story, the future aunts accompanied mamma to the bus. As they waited for the bus, after handing her bags filled with sweets, sausages, and loaves of civraxiu, and caressing her long, smooth hair, which was the style then, they asked, just to change the subject, what she wanted to do in life.
“Play the flute,” mamma answered.
Of course, but they meant as work, real work.
“Play the flute,” my mother repeated.
My great-aunts looked at one another, and it was obvious what they were thinking.