From the Land of the Moon

Milena Agus

FROM THE LAND
OF THE MOON

Translated from the Italian
by Ann Goldstein

“lf I never meet you in this life, let me feel the lack.”
—Soldier in
The Thin Red Line

G
randmother met the Veteran in the fall of 1950. She had come from Cagliari to the mainland for the first time. She must have been around forty, and had no children, because
su mali de is perdas
—her kidney stones—always caused her to miscarry in the first months. So, with her sack-like overcoat and high, laced shoes and the suitcase her husband had brought as an evacuee to her village, she was sent to the thermal baths to be cured.

S
he had married late, in June of 1943, after the American bombing of Cagliari, and in those days to be thirty and not yet settled was already to be something of an old maid. Not that she was ugly, or lacked suitors—on the contrary. But at a certain point the wooers called less frequently and then stopped, each time before they had officially asked my great-grandfather for her hand. Dear
signorina
, circumstances beyond my control prevent me from calling on you this Wednesday, and also next, which would be very enjoyable for me but, unfortunately, impossible. So grandmother waited for the third Wednesday, but a little girl, a
pipiedda
, always arrived with the letter that put off the visit again, and then there was nothing.

My great-grandfather and her sisters loved her just the same, though she was almost an old maid, but not my great-grandmother; she always treated her as if she were not her own flesh and blood and said that she knew why.

On Sunday, when the girls went to Mass or to parade along the main street with their young men, grandmother gathered her hair into a bun—it was still thick and black when I was a child and she already old, imagine what it was like then—and went to church to ask God why, why he was so unjust as to deny her the knowledge of love, which is the most beautiful thing, the only thing that makes life worth living, a life in which you get up at four in the morning to do the household chores and then you go to the fields and then to the school for boring embroidery and then to get drinking water from the fountain with the pitcher on your head, and then you’re up one whole night out of ten to make the bread and then you draw the water from the well and then you have to feed the chickens. So if God didn’t want her to know love he might as well kill her, any way he wanted. In confession the priest told her that such thoughts were a serious sin and that there are many other things in the world, but grandmother didn’t care at all about other things.

One day my great-grandmother waited for her in the courtyard with the whip, made of ox sinew, and began to hit her until even her head was bleeding and she had a high fever. She had discovered from rumors in the town that the suitors stopped coming because grandmother wrote them passionate love poems that alluded to obscene things and that her daughter was disgracing not only herself but her whole family. And she went on hitting her, hitting her and yelling “
Dimonia! dimonia!
” and cursing the day they had sent her to elementary school, and she had learned to write.

I
n May of 1943 my grandfather arrived in the town; he was over forty and was an employee of the salt works in Cagliari. He had had a beautiful house on Via Giuseppe Manno, just beside the church of San Giorgio and Santa Caterina, a house with a view over the rooftops to the harbor and the sea. After the bombing of May 13th, nothing was left of this house and the church and many other things, except a hole and a pile of rubble. Grandmother’s family welcomed this respectable gentleman, who had not been called up to fight because of his age, who was a very recent widower, an evacuee with only a borrowed suitcase and a few things pulled from the ruins. They took him in for nothing. By June he had asked for grandmother’s hand, and married her. She wept almost every day in the month before the marriage. She knelt at my great-grandfather’s feet and begged him to say no, to pretend that she was promised to someone away in the war. Otherwise, if they didn’t want her in the house anymore, she would go to Cagliari, she would look for a job. “
De Casteddu bèninti innòi, filla mia, e tui bòli si andai ingúni! Non c’esti prus núdda in sa cittàdi
”—“They’re coming here from Cagliari, child, and you want to go there! There’s nothing left in the city.”

“
Macca esti
,” my great-grandmother shouted. “
Macca schetta! In sa cittadi a fai sa baldracca bòliri andai, chi scetti kussu pori fai, chi non sciri fai nudda cummenti si spettada, chi teniri sa conca prena de bentu, de kandu fiada pitíca!”—
“She’s crazy. Completely crazy! She wants to go to the city to be a whore, that’s all she can do, because she doesn’t do anything the way it should be done, she’s had a head full of air ever since she was a child!”

It would have been simple to invent a fiancé at the front—the Alps, Libya, Albania, the Aegean—or at sea with the Royal Navy. It would have been nothing, but my great-grandparents wouldn’t hear of it. So she told him that she didn’t love him and could never be a true wife. Grandfather told her not to worry. He didn’t love her, either. Assuming that they both knew what they were talking about. As for being a true wife, he understood very well. He would continue to go to the brothel at the port, as he had done since he was a boy, and had never got a disease.

But they did not return to Cagliari until 1945. So my grandparents slept like brother and sister in the guest room: with the big, high iron bedstead inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the painting of the Madonna and Child, the clock under the bell jar, the washstand with pitcher and basin, the mirror with a painted flower, and the porcelain chamber pot under the bed. Those things grandmother brought to Via Giuseppe Manno, when the house in the village was sold; she wanted the room to be exactly the same as the one she had slept in for the first year of her marriage. But in the house in the village the bedrooms got light and air only from the
lolla
, the loggia; here in Via Manno, instead, there is light from the south and from the sea, which invades fiercely until sunset, and makes everything sparkle. And I’ve always loved this room; when I was a child grandmother let me come in only if I had been good and never more than once a day.

During her first year of marriage grandmother had malaria. The fever rose as high as a hundred and five, and grandfather nursed her, sitting for hours to make sure that the cloth on her forehead stayed cool; her forehead was so hot that the cloth had to be soaked in icy water, and he came and went and you could hear the pulley of the well squeaking day and night.

On one of those days, September 8th, they heard on the radio the news that Italy had asked for an armistice and the war was over. According to grandfather, however, it wasn’t over at all, and they had only to hope that the commanding officer, General Basso, would let the Germans leave Sardinia without vain heroics. Basso must have thought like grandfather, because the thirty thousand men of General Lungerhausen’s Panzer division left quietly, without slaughtering anyone, and Basso was arrested and put on trial for that, but the Sardinians were saved. Not as on the mainland. And grandfather and the general were right, because then you had only to listen to Radio London, which reported Badoglio’s repeated protests against the slaughter of the soldiers and officers who were taken prisoner by the Germans on the Italian front. When grandmother was better they told her that, if not for her husband, the fever would have consumed her, and that there had been the armistice and the change of alliances, and she, with a spitefulness for which she never forgave herself, shrugged her shoulders as if to say, “What do I care.”

In the high bed at night grandmother curled up as far as possible from him, so that she often fell on the floor, and when, on moonlit nights, the light came through the slats of the doors that opened onto the
lolla
and illuminated her husband’s back, she was almost frightened of him, of this alien stranger—she didn’t even know if he was handsome or not, since she didn’t look at him and he didn’t look at her. If grandfather was sleeping soundly, she peed in the chamber pot under the bed; otherwise, it was enough for him to make the slightest movement and she would put on her shawl and leave the room and cross the courtyard to the toilet next to the well. For that matter, grandfather never tried to approach her; he lay stiffly on the other side, though he was a large man, and he, too, often fell off, and they were both always covered with bruises. Alone—that is, in the bedroom—they never spoke. Grandmother said her prayers at night, grandfather didn’t, because he was an atheist and a Communist. And then one of them said, “Good night,” and the other, “Good night to you, too.”

In the morning my great-grandmother wanted her daughter to prepare coffee for grandfather. The coffee of that time was a mixture of chickpeas and orzo toasted in the hearth with a special utensil and then ground. “Bring your husband his coffee,” and so grandmother carried the gilt-edged violet cup on the glass tray with floral designs, placed it at the foot of the bed, and immediately ran away, as if she had left a bowl for a mad dog, and she never forgave herself for this, either.

Grandfather helped with the work in the fields and he held up well, even though he was from the city and had spent his life studying and working in an office. He often did his wife’s share, too; she now had kidney stones more and more frequently, and he found it shocking that a woman should have to do such heavy work on the land, or carry water from the fountain in a pitcher on her head, and yet, out of respect for the family that was his host, he spoke of these things generally, referring to Sardinian society of the interior. Cagliari was different; there people didn’t take offense at a little nothing and didn’t find evil everywhere, relentlessly. Maybe it was the sea air that made them freer, at least in certain respects, though not politically, because the Cagliaritani were bourgeois who had never felt like fighting for anything.

Apart from grandmother, who couldn’t care less about the world, they listened to Radio London. In the spring of 1944 they learned that in northern Italy six million workers had gone on strike; that in Rome thirty-two Germans had been killed and, in reprisal, the Nazis had rounded up and shot three hundred and twenty Italians; that the Eighth Army was ready for a new offensive; that in the early hours of June 6th the Allies had landed in Normandy.

I
n November Radio London announced that military operations on the Italian front would be suspended and recommended that the partisans of northern Italy stall for time and use their energies only for sabotage actions.

Grandfather said that the war would continue and he could not be a guest forever, and so they came to Cagliari.

They went to live in Via Sulis, in a furnished room that looked onto a light well and had a bath and kitchen shared with other families. Although she never asked, it was from the neighbors that grandmother learned about grandfather’s family, destroyed on May 13, 1943.

Except for him, they were all at home, that terrible afternoon, for his birthday. His wife, a cold, rather plain woman—
leggixedda
—who wasn’t friendly with anyone, had that very day, in wartime, made a cake and gathered the family. Who knows when she had bought the ingredients,
a martinicca
, on the black market, gram by gram of sugar, poor woman, poor all of them. No one knows how it happened, but when the alarm sounded they didn’t leave the house and hurry to the shelter under the Public Gardens; the most ridiculous reason, but in essence the only one possible, is that the cake was half baked, or was rising, and they didn’t want to lose it, that marvelous cake in a dead city. Luckily they didn’t have children, the neighbor women said—a wife, a mother, sisters, brothers-in-law, nephews and nieces can be forgotten, and grandfather had forgotten quickly, and it was obvious why, you had only to see how pretty the second wife was. He was a lighthearted man, full-blooded, a womanizer; the Fascists had made him drink castor oil as a boy, to put him in his place, and he had laughed about it later and made jokes, and it seemed that he could survive anything. A good eater, a good drinker, a good client of the brothels, and his wife knew it, poor woman, and surely she had suffered from it, she who was shocked by everything and never let her husband see her naked, though she couldn’t have been much to see and you had to wonder what those two did together.

Grandmother, on the other hand, was a womanly woman, as he had certainly always desired, with those big firm breasts and that mass of black hair and those big eyes, and then she was affectionate, and what passion there must be between husband and wife if it had been love at first sight and they married in a month. A pity about those terrible kidney stones, poor thing, they were very fond of her and let her come into the kitchen even at odd hours—whenever she felt well, it didn’t matter if maybe they had already cleaned up and put everything away.

Grandmother was a friend of the neighbors of Via Sulis for all her life and theirs. They never had sharp words, in fact they didn’t really talk much, but they kept each other company, day after day, come what might. In Via Sulis if they were in the kitchen washing the dishes, one soaped, another rinsed, yet another dried the dishes, and if grandmother was ill they did hers, too,
mischinedda
, poor creature. And it was with the neighbors and their husbands that grandmother followed the last phases of the war. In the cold kitchen of Via Sulis, with two or three pairs of darned socks on their feet and their hands under their armpits, they listened to Radio London.

The husbands, all Communists, cheered for the Russians, who on January 17, 1945, occupied Warsaw, and on the twenty-eighth were a hundred and fifty kilometers from Berlin; in early March the Allies occupied Cologne, and now, said Churchill, their advance and the German retreat was a small matter. At the end of March, Patton and Montgomery crossed the Rhine, pursuing the Germans in defeat.

The day of grandfather’s birthday, May 13th, the war was over and everyone was happy, but to grandmother those advances and retreats and victories and defeats meant nothing. In the city there was no water, sewers, electric light; there wasn’t even food except for American soup, and the price of everything went up by three hundred per cent, but the neighbors when they washed the dishes laughed at some
sciollorio
, any silly thing, and even when they went to Mass, at Sant’Antonio, or Santa Rosalia, or at the Capuchins, they were always laughing, in the street, three in front and three behind, in their turned dresses. And grandmother didn’t say much, but she was always there, too, and the days flowed by and she liked the way in Cagliari the neighbors weren’t so melodramatic as in the country, and if something went wrong they said, “
Ma
bbai!
” If for example a plate fell on the floor and broke, even though they were poor they shrugged and picked up the pieces. Basically they were content to be poor, better than having money like so many in Cagliari who had made fortunes off the misery of others, on the black market or stealing amid the ruins before the unfortunate people came in search of their things. And then they were alive
mi naras nudda!
—you’re telling me. Grandmother thought it was because of the sea and the blue sky, and the immensity you saw from the Bastioni—the ramparts—in the mistral: it was all so infinite that you couldn’t pause on your own little life.

But she didn’t express these rather poetic ideas, because she was terrified that these people, too, would discover that she was mad. She wrote everything down in her black notebook with the red border and then she hid it in the drawer of secret things, with the money envelopes marked “Food,” “Medicine,” “Rent.”