Free The House in Via Manno by Milena Agus Page B

son anything — after all, he already had her blood — but Mamma, a healthy girl, she needed to know. So, sitting on a stool in front of the Sardinian sweets and the coffee in gilded cups, my mother heard the story from her future aunts.
    To her parents, the asylum had seemed a nice place for Nonna; on the hill there was a large, dense forest of maritime pine, tree-of-heaven, cypress, oleander, broom, and carob, with pathways that Nonna would be able to walk up and down. And also, it wasn’t just a single, gloomy building block that might have been a bit frightening, but a whole series of early-twentieth-century villas, well looked after and surrounded by a garden.
    Nonna would be in the Quiet Ones section: a two-storey villa with a very elegant, glassed-in entrance hall, a sitting room, two refectories, and eight dormitories; if it weren’t for the staircases built into the wall, no one would have picked that crazy people lived there. Since Nonna was a ‘quiet one’, she would be able to go outside, and maybe even go to the building where management was, which had a library and a reading room where she would be able to write and read novels and poems as she pleased, but under supervision. And she would never have to have any contact with the other villas for the Semi-Agitated and the Agitated, and dreadful things, like being locked in an isolation cell or being tied to a bed, would never happen to her. She was worse off at home, really, because when she had her crises of desperation and wanted to kill herself, they had to save her somehow. And how else but by locking her up in the barn, where they’d had to put bars on the window, or tying her to the bed with rags? There were no bars on the windows of the asylum’s villas — they had the kind of windows selected by a certain Doctor Frank for the Musterlinger Asylum, which were fitted with a special security lock and had iron in the glass, but you couldn’t see it.
    They took away with them the Information Sheet on the Admission of the Insane into the Cagliari Asylum, though they’d still have to convince Nonna to be examined, and they’d have to give it some thought themselves. And then Italy entered the war.
    But they couldn’t keep her at home; even though she’d never hurt anybody, apart from herself and her things, and posed no danger, everyone in the village used to point out their street by saying, ‘Over there, where the macca lives.’
    Nonna had always embarrassed them, ever since that time in church when she’d seen a boy she liked and had started constantly turning around towards the pews where the men sat, smiling and staring at him, and the boy was giggling, too. Then she’d taken her hairpins out and let down her black, shiny cloud of hair, which looked like a seductive weapon of the devil — some kind of witchery. My great-grandmother ran out of the church dragging Nonna, who was, at that stage, her only daughter, and who was yelling, ‘But I love him, and he loves me!’ And as soon as they were inside the front door of the house, she beat her so hard with everything she could find — a horse’s bellyband, straps, pots, carpet-beaters, ropes from the well — that the girl was reduced to a rag doll that flopped around in her hands. Then she called for the priest to get the demon out of the child’s body, but instead the priest blessed her, and said that Nonna was a good girl, and he couldn’t see so much as a shadow of the devil.
    My great-grandmother would tell this story to everyone to excuse her daughter, to make them see that she was mad but good, and that there was no danger in their house. But, just to be sure, from time to time she did a bit of exorcism of her own on Nonna, until she married Nonno.
    Nonna’s sickness could be defined as a kind of love-craziness, in the following sense: a nice-looking man only had to cross the threshold of the house and smile at her, or just look at her — and this did happen, because she was