Free From the Land of the Moon by Milena Agus

could have signed it with a girl’s name—grandmother would have recognized his handwriting because of the poems she had kept. The Veteran didn’t want to see her again. He, too, thought she was mad and was afraid of finding her on the steps of his house one day, or in the courtyard, waiting in whatever weather, rain, fog, or dripping with sweat if it was one of those hazy windless summers in Milan. Or no. Maybe it really was love and he didn’t want her to commit the folly of leaving for him all the things of her world. And then why show up and ruin everything? Appear and say, “Here I am, I’m the life that you could have lived and didn’t.” Torture her, poor woman. As if she hadn’t suffered enough, up in the loft, cutting her arms and her hair, or in the well, or staring at the door on those Wednesdays. And to make a sacrifice of that kind, to stay away for the good of the other, you have to really love that person.

16.
     
     
    I wondered, without ever daring to say it to anyone, naturally, if the real father of my father was the Veteran, and when I was in the last year of high school and studying the Second World War and the professor asked if any of our grandfathers had fought, and where, my instinct was to say yes. My grandfather was a lieutenant on the heavy cruiser Trieste, III Division of the Royal Navy, and he took part in the inferno of Matapan in March, 1941, and was shipwrecked when the Trieste was sunk by the 3rd squadron of the 19th B17 Bomber Group, at the inlet of Mezzo Schifo, in Palau. That was the only time grandfather came to Sardinia, and he saw our sea when the waves were red with blood. After the Armistice the Germans imprisoned him on the light cruiser Jean de Vienne, captured by the Navy in 1942, and he was deported to the concentration camp of Hinzert and interned there until the Germans retreated to the east, in the winter of ’44, in the deep snow and ice, and if you didn’t march they shot you or split your head with a rifle butt. Luckily the Allies arrived and an American doctor amputated his leg. But my grandfather was still a very handsome man, as grandmother said, a man to look at secretly, in the first days at the baths, while he was reading, with that boyish neck bent over the book and those liquid eyes and that smile and those strong arms with the shirtsleeves rolled up and those hands, so large and childlike for a pianist—and to long for all the rest of your life. And longing is sad, but there’s a trace of happiness in it, too.

17.
     
     
    O ver 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