Free The House in Via Manno by Milena Agus Page A

Group in Mezzo Schifo harbour at Palau; that was the only time Nonno came to Sardinia, I said, when our sea was red with waves of blood. After the armistice between Italy and the Allied Forces, the Germans took him prisoner aboard the light cruiser Jean de Vienne (which had been captured by the Italian Royal Navy in 1942), and deported him to the Hinzert concentration camp, where he remained interned until the Germans retreated eastwards in the winter of ’44, amid high snow and ice; if you didn’t march, they’d shoot you or crack your skull with the butt of a rifle, and luckily the Allies reached them, and an American doctor amputated his leg.
    But, as Nonna always said to me, he was still a handsome man when she secretly watched him reading in those first days at the thermal baths — that boy’s neck of his leaning over his book, and those liquid eyes, and that smile, and those strong arms with the sleeves of his shirt rolled up, and those big, child-like hands from being a pianist, and everything else that she yearned for all the rest of her life. And yearning is a sad thing, but it’s also kind of happy.

17
    With age, Nonna fell ill with kidney problems again, and every two days I went to pick her up at via Manno and took her for dialysis. She didn’t want to inconvenience me, so she waited down in the street, with her bag that contained a nightdress and slippers and a little shawl, because after dialysis she was always cold, even in summer. She still had her thick black hair and her intense eyes and all her teeth, but her arms and legs were full of holes from the drips, and her skin had turned yellowish. And she was so emaciated that as soon as she got into the car and placed her bag in her lap, I always had the feeling that this object — which would have weighed, at most, three hundred grams — might squash her.
    One dialysis day, she wasn’t waiting for me at the front door, and I thought she must have felt weaker than usual. I ran up the three flights of stairs so as not to be late, because there were set times for the treatment at the hospital. I rang the bell, and when she didn’t answer I was afraid she might have fainted, so I let myself in with my set of keys. She was lying peacefully on the bed, asleep, all ready to go out, with her bag on the chair. I tried to wake her, but she didn’t respond. I felt a desperation deep in my soul. Nonna was dead.
    I got on the phone; all I can remember is that I wanted to call someone to come and revive her, my Nonna, and it took a lot to convince me that no doctor could do it.
    Only after she died did I learn that they’d wanted to put her in an asylum, and that before the war my great-grandparents had come to Cagliari from the village, by bus, and had thought that the asylum on Monte Claro would be a nice place for their daughter.
    My father never knew these things. My great-aunts had told Mamma the story when she was about to marry Papà. They had invited her to the village to talk to her in great secrecy, to let her know what blood flowed through the veins of the boy she loved and with whom she would have children.
    They took on this embarrassing task since Nonno, their brother-in-law, hadn’t done the proper thing and told his future daughter-in-law about it, even though he’d always known everything and, that May when he’d arrived as an evacuee, he had seen it all, de dognia colori . They didn’t want to criticise; he was a great man, and even though he was a communist, an atheist, and a revolutionary, he’d been sa manu de Deus , the hand of God, for their family. He’d sacrificed himself and had married Nonna who was sick with kidney stones — the lesser ill really, because the greater ill was in her head — and with Nonna gone, suitors had arrived for them, too, poor things, and normal life had begun without that sister, so often locked up in the barn, who cut her hair so it looked all mangy. They could understand why Nonna had never told her