Free The House in Via Manno by Milena Agus

in the bedroom, overcome by emotion when they started singing, ‘Happy birthday to you.’ And when they tried to persuade her to come back out, she kept saying she couldn’t believe a child had come out of her, and not just stones. She continued weeping unrestrainedly, and her sisters, who had come especially from the village, and Nonno, must surely have expected some episode of macchiòri that would reveal to everyone that Nonna was crazy. But Nonna got up off the bed, dried her eyes, returned to the kitchen, and took her boy in her arms. She’s not in the photos because, with her eyes all swollen, she felt ugly, and for her son’s first birthday she wanted to be beautiful.
    Nonna fell pregnant at other times, but the most important thing in life was evidently missing from those embryos that would have become my father’s siblings — they didn’t want to be born, turning back after the first few months.
    In 1954, Nonno and Nonna came to live here in via Manno. They were the first to leave the shared house in via Sulis, and, even though via Manno is just nearby, they missed it. So, Nonno would invite the old neighbours around on a Sunday and cook fish or sausages on the grill on the terrace, and he’d toast bread with oil, and when the weather was nice they’d put out the picnic tables and chairs that they’d take to the hut at Poetto in the summer.
    Actually, Nonna had loved via Manno straightaway, even before their building had been replaced, ever since they came to look at the big hole and the piles of rubble. The terrace soon became a garden. I remember the Virginia creeper, and the ivy climbing up the end wall, and the geraniums grouped by colour — purple, pink, and red. In spring, the little yellow forest of broom and freesias would flower; in summer, the dahlias and perfumed jasmine and bougainvilleas; in winter, the pyracantha was covered with red berries that we used for Christmas decorations.
    When the mistral blew, we’d put on scarves and run up to save the plants, placing the pots against the low walls or covering them with plastic, and bringing some of the more delicate ones into the house until the wind died down and stopped blowing everything away.

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    Sometimes I thought that the Veteran didn’t love Nonna. He hadn’t given her his address, and though he knew where she lived, he’d never even sent her a postcard. He could have signed a woman’s name; Nonna would have recognised his writing from the poems she’d kept. The Veteran hadn’t wanted to see her again. He, too , thought she was crazy, and had been afraid he’d find her on the steps of his house one day, or in the courtyard, waiting for him in any weather — in the rain, in the fog, or dripping with sweat if it was one of those sweltering, windless summers they get in Milan.
    Or maybe not. Maybe it really was love, and he didn’t want her to be so foolish as to leave everything else in her world for him. Why get in touch and ruin everything? Why turn up in front of her and say: ‘Here I am, I’m the life you could have had and didn’t’? Torturing her, poor woman. As if she hadn’t suffered enough, up there in the barn, cutting her arms and her hair, or in the well, or staring at the front door on those famous Wednesdays.
    And to make that kind of sacrifice, staying away for the other person’s wellbeing, you have to really love them.

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    I wondered, never daring to say this to anyone of course, if my father’s real father wasn’t perhaps the Veteran. When I was in my last year of school and we studied the Second World War, the teacher once asked if anyone’s grandfather had been in the war and what they’d done, and I instinctively said, ‘Yes.’
    My Nonno was a lieutenant on the heavy cruiser Trieste , I told him, in the Third Division of the Royal Navy. He participated in the hell that was Matapan in March 1941, and was shipwrecked when the Trieste was sunk by the Third Squadron of B-17s of the Ninety-Eighth