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 everyone 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.