Free From the Land of the Moon by Milena Agus Page A

died did I learn that my great-grandparents had wanted to commit her to a mental institution, and that before the war they had come from the village to Cagliari on the bus, and that the asylum, on Monte Claro, had seemed to them a good place for their daughter. My father never knew these things. My great-aunts told mamma, when she was about to marry papa. They invited her to the village, to speak to her in great secrecy and let her know what blood ran in the veins of the boy she loved and with whom she would have children. They were taking on this embarrassing situation because their brother-in-law—even though he had always known everything and, arriving as an evacuee in that month of May, had seen her de dognia colori , in every guise—had not had the proper manners to tell his future daughter-in-law a thing. They didn’t want to criticize him, he was a fine man, and, though a Communist and an atheist and a revolutionary, for their family he had been sa manu de Deus , sacrificing to marry grandmother, who was ill de su mali de is perdas, sa minor cosa, poita su prus mali fiara in sa conca , with her kidney stones, the lesser evil—the greater was in her head. Because when grandmother was gone suitors came for them, too, poor women, and without that sister—who was often shut up in the hayloft, and cut her hair so she looked like a mangy dog—normal life had begun.
    They could understand that he hadn’t told his son, since the blood he had he already had, but she was a healthy girl, and it was right that she should know. So, sitting on the bench with the Sardinian sweets in front of her and coffee in the cups with the gilded edges, my mother listened to the story told by her future aunts.
    The asylum had seemed to the parents a good place for grandmother; it was on a densely wooded hill where maritime pines, ailanthus, cypresses, oleanders, broom, and locusts grew, and there were paths grandmother could walk on. And then it wasn’t a matter of a single large, grim structure that might frighten her but a series of villas built in the early years of the century, well tended and surrounded by gardens. The place where grandmother would have been was the ward for the Tranquil, a two-story villa with an elegant glass entrance, a living room, two dining rooms, and eight dormitories, and you wouldn’t have known that crazy people lived there, except for the stairs, which were enclosed between two walls. Since grandmother was Tranquil, she would have been able to go out and perhaps go to the Administration building, which had a library and a reading room where she could write and read novels and poetry at her pleasure, but under control. And she would never have contact with the other villas, where the Agitated and the Semi-Agitated were, and terrible things would never happen to her, like being locked in an isolation cell or being tied to the bed. All in all, at home it was worse, because, when she had her crises of despair and wanted to kill herself, they had to save her somehow. And how, except by locking her up in the hayloft, where they had had to put in a barred window, or by tying her to the bed with rags. In the cottages at the asylum, on the other hand, the windows had no bars. They were of a type adopted by a Dr. Frank in the asylum in Musterlinger: they were provided with an old spring lock, and there was wire mesh in the glass, but it was invisible. The parents had taken the information packet for admission to the Cagliari Asylum, although they would still have to persuade grandmother to be examined, and they themselves needed to think about it. And then Italy entered the war.
    But they couldn’t keep her at home, and even if she had never hurt anyone, except herself and her things, and wasn’t a danger, the people in the village always indicated their street by saying inguni undi biviri sa macca , there, where the crazy woman lives.
    Grandmother had always embarrassed them, ever since the time when, in church,