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

she had seen a boy she liked and kept turning toward the pews where the boys sat and smiled at him and stared at him and the boy giggled, too. She had taken the pins out of her hair, and let it loose, a shiny black cloud; it seemed the devil’s weapon of seduction, a kind of witchcraft. My great-grandmother ran out of the church dragging the girl who was then her only daughter, and who was shouting, “But I love him and he loves me!” As soon as they got home she thrashed her, using whatever she could find—saddle girths, belts, pots, carpet beaters, ropes from the well—reducing the child to a doll that went limp in her hands. Then she called the priest to get the devil out of her body, but the priest gave her a blessing and said that she was a good child and there was not a trace of the devil in her. My great-grandmother told this story to everyone to apologize for her daughter, to let people know that she was mad but good, and that there was no danger at their house. But, just to be safe, she practiced some exorcism on her until she married grandfather. In a certain sense, grandmother’s illness could be defined as a kind of love folly. An attractive man had only to cross the threshold of the house and smile at her, or simply look at her—and, since she was very beautiful, this could happen—and she would imagine that he was a suitor. She began to expect a visit, a declaration of love, a proposal of marriage, and she was always writing in that wretched notebook; they had looked for it in order to show it to a doctor at the asylum, but couldn’t find it. Obviously no one ever came to ask for her hand, and she would wait and stare at the door and sit on the bench in the lolla , dressed in her best things, looking beautiful, because she really was, and smile fixedly, as if she understood nothing, as if she had arrived from the land of the moon. Then her mother had discovered that she wrote letters or love poems to those men, and that when she realized they would never return the drama began, and she screamed and threw herself on the ground and wanted to destroy herself and all the things she had made, and they had to tie her to the bed with the rags. In reality, she had no suitors, because no one in the village would have asked for grandmother in marriage, and you could only to pray God that, with the shame of a madwoman in the family, someone would want the other sisters.
    In May of 1943, their brother-in-law, an evacuee, homeless, his grief for his wife still fresh, saw every side of her, and there was no need to explain anything to him, because for grandmother spring was the worst season. In the other seasons she was calmer: she planted seeds in the flower beds, worked in the fields, made bread and cross-stitch embroidery, scrubbed the tile floor of the lolla , fed the chickens and the rabbits, and petted them, and painted such beautiful decorations midway up the walls that she was called on to do them in other houses, to be ready by spring. My great-grandmother was so pleased to have her working for others all that time that she never asked them to pay her, and this the great-aunts thought was unfair. In the first days of the evacuation, grandfather, at dinner, with the soup in front of him, told them about the house on Via Manno, about the bombs and the death of his family, who had all gathered there on May 13th for his birthday. His wife had promised him a cake, and he was about to arrive when the air-raid alarm sounded. He had thought that he would find the family at the shelter under the Public Gardens, but none of them were at the shelter. That night, grandmother got up and ruined her cross-stitch embroideries, ripping them up; and her wall paintings, covering them with hideous splotches; and she scratched her face and body with prickly roses, so the thorns were everywhere, sticking even in her head. The next day, their future son-in-law had tried to talk to her, and, since she was locked in a stall reeking