The House in Via Manno Read Online Free PDF

tears. Because no matter what I did — a drawing, for example, or maybe if I sang her a little song with words I’d invented myself — that other nonna’s face would cloud over and she’d say that there were more important things to think about. I got the idea that she hated my parents’ music, and that she hated the history books I always carried around with me. To make her happy I tried to work out what pleased her, but she didn’t seem to love anything. Mamma told me that signora Lia was like that because her husband had died before Mamma was born, and because she’d argued with her very rich family and had left Gavoi, her village, which she’d found ugly.
    I don’t remember my nonno; he died when I was very small, on the tenth of May 1978, the day that saw the passing of Law 180, closing mental asylums. My father has always told me that Nonno was an exceptional man and that everyone respected him greatly, and that the in-laws loved him from the bottom of their hearts because he’d saved Nonna from all sorts of things it was best not to talk about — only I needed to be careful with Nonna, not to trouble her or get her too agitated. There’s always been a veil of mystery around her; maybe even pity.
    Only as a grown-up did I learn that before meeting Nonno in that famous May of 1943, she’d thrown herself down the well and that her sisters, hearing the splash, had rushed into the courtyard and called the neighbours, and they had miraculously managed to pull her out, all of them holding the rope together. And that one time she’d slashed her face and hacked off her hair so it looked all mangy, and that she was always cutting the veins in her arms.
    I knew a different Nonna: a Nonna who laughed about the slightest thing. My father says the same: he, too, had always known her to be calm — except one time — and maybe it was all rumour.
    But now I know it was all true. Besides, Nonna always said that her life was divided into two parts: before and after the treatment at the baths, as if the waters that made her expel the kidney stones were miraculous in every sense.

9
    My father was born in 1951, nine months after the baths. When he was just seven years old, Nonna went to work as a maid at the house of two ladies — donna Doloretta and donna Fannì — in viale Luigi Merello, keeping it secret from Nonno and everyone else because she wanted to send her son to piano lessons. The ladies felt sorry for her, and they thought this business with the music was crazy: ‘Tell me she’s not macca ! She could have an easy life, and instead she’s working as a servant because her son’s got to learn the piano.’
    They were so fond of her, though, that she got special hours — she began work after dropping Papà at his school, the Sebastiano Satta, and she left early to go and pick him up and do the shopping, and if offices and schools were on holiday, then so was she.
    Nonno must have wondered why she always did the housework in the afternoon when she had the whole morning free, but he never asked her anything, nor did he tell her off if something was untidy or if lunch wasn’t ready. Maybe he thought his wife listened to records in the morning — they were better off financially now and she’d got this craze for music, for Chopin, Debussy, Beethoven, and she listened to operas and cried for Madame Butterfly or La Traviata — or maybe he thought she took the tram to Poetto to see the sea, or to have coffee with her friends donna Doloretta and donna Fannì.
    Instead, Nonna, having accompanied Papà to via Angioy, quickly went uphill along via Don Bosco to viale Merello, past the villas, and their palms and terraces with plaster balustrades and their gardens with fish ponds and fountains and little putti .
    The ladies were in fact waiting for her with coffee, and they served it to her on a silver tray before she started the housework, because Nonna was a true lady. They talked about the men in their lives, about