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
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
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