Coming out of the notary’s office where I’d been summoned, I found myself in a wide, tree-lined street bordering on a large public garden. I’m not in a hurry today, so I decide to go on foot. I’d never been in this residential neighbourhood, and it seems a different city. Do people really live here? People who eat, sleep, yawn, work, cry, laugh, dirty and clean up, quarrel, screw.
The few passersby only strengthen the feeling of unreality. I come across a few proper-looking governesses. An elderly gentleman taking his constitutional sports a camel overcoat and a walking stick elegant as it is useless. A resident comes out of his house with the hurried air of someone who has urgent business to attend to. With a rapid gesture and a smile copied off a glossy magazine he greets another man who seems his perfect twin, like a Magritte painting.
From the garden children’s voices reach me, shouts, laughter. Here outside it’s dead as death, so I decide to walk through the park. An outsider, I move towards the central, more crowded area. A small boy is running towards a man I take to be his grandfather, with the air of someone who wants to tell an important friend about a new discovery.
A grandfather. He brings Anita to mind.
* * *
“If I want to go back to my origins, I have to stop at the generation before mine, my father and my mother”, Anita tells me one day, after a thoughtful pause. She tells me that she never knew her grandparents, except for the time when as a child she’d met her paternal grandmother. She was very small, maybe three years old, but she still remembers that faded stranger. With age, colours grow fainter. Of her father’s mother there remained the image of a glass grown opaque over time.
It must have been Christmas, or maybe Easter, on the two occasions when her family got together with her father’s relatives, who lived in another town in the furthest part of the country. Her father’s mother (that’s how Anita referred to her), who hadn’t shown her any sign of attention before, at a certain point took her on her lap and began playing at rocking her back and forth . To Anita her blandishments seemed out of place: “We’d never met before, even a three-year-old understands that”. Her grandmother had tried to kiss her, too, but she pushed her away. It was her grandmother, they had explained, but for her she was only her father’s mother. She never saw her again, the grandmother died the following year. Anita says she felt a sort of nostalgia when they told her she had passed away, who knows why. Her father didn’t talk about her much. The few times the word Mammà came to his lips , his eyes were veiled by a shine that a moment after grew languorous. Then it passed. “Who knows who she really was, that woman I remember as opaque”, says Anita.
Anita’s paternal grandfather died young, long before she was born. It seems that he had brought home a chronic disease, incurable at the time from the War, the first one,. His lungs? His bones? There’s a lot of vagueness about this, her father never told her anything and her mother limited herself to a few half-words. Or perhaps it is Anita who can’t really remember what this man she’s never met had died of.
She’s seen photos in the pile of family portraits. That’s what her mother called them, and she kept them all, Anita tells me. “Including my fathers’ relatives, even if she never looks at those photos”. She shows me a crowd of people she’d never met and who don’t look alike. Two different families, and maybe more than two, now lost and heaped up in tin boxes. Without knowing, or wanting, or even imagining it. Anita’s eyes have a lost look: “I look at them and I don’t know who they are”.
A smooth, round face, her father’s father. Anita sees one of her brothers’ features, as chance would have it the one who isn’t named for his grandfather. Features that, anyhow, have never been able to make the static face caught in those old snapshots seem familiar, nor rouse her curiosity. Her father’s father was a violin-maker, Anita knows little more about him. When she doesn’t imagine him as he is in the photographs, with a hint of a smile, motionless as though time had stopped and nothing would ever happen again, she sees him at his luthier’s table, wearing overalls, hard at work making a viola. “Why a viola, I don’t know”. Her father had never spoken much about him. But at times glimpses of him emerged from fragments of stories – And then I said to him “You, Papà…” – at Easter he did this or said that , and at Christmas he did that or said this. Anita’s father eyes grow a bit shiny then, and his look far-away and nostalgic. He talks about these few things at Christmas and Easter.
Anita never met anyone in her mother’s family, not her grandparents nor other relatives. Her mother’s father died quite young of intestinal cancer, shortly after the war, when her mother was still a girl. He was an army officer, he rode horseback, played chess and moved in high society . Anita knows little more. The photos are of a man almost always in uniform, dark-skinned and with thick, frizzy hair, wide-nosed and with fleshy lips and intense eyes. A face from another place. These are the only photos that rouse some curiosity in her, because this otherness underlines the vacuum she can’t fill in, it is what separates her from her ancestors. I’ve seen those pictures, too, and I still remember my friend’s look when she passed one to me. It was like a question. Anita doesn’t look like her grandfather, it seemed to me, but I can’t say that I didn’t find any similarity, either.
Of all her unknown grandparents, her mother’s mother is the for whom she has the strongest feeling of of extraneousness . She knows more about her, so she’s formed some ideas, perhaps wrong ones. She told me that her grandmother was a self-assured woman with the understandable wish to live the best life she could. Her first fiancé was a good match. And very handsome, adds Anita, looking at his picture. He died at the front, before the wedding, whose date may not have been set yet. So it happened that her mother’s mother married her fiancé’s brother. In short, she married a social position. It created a minor scandal, one of those that blow over soon enough. They let the required period pass, according to convention. Then they got engaged and married. The marriage put an end to the gossip. Absolved. “People who marry get more respect”, Anita comments, cuttingly. Fate? People died more here, too, in those days. She didn’t marry again: what was the use by then? But Anita doesn’t rule out the possibility that she had lovers. After the death of Anita’s grandfather, her mother had to interrupt her studies to go to work. For the family and for her twin brother who, being a boy, absolutely had to finish his university studies. Twins! How false words can be at times. Anita can hardly remember this uncle’s name. Franco? Federico? It is the name of an unknown person, after all. He phoned one time. Chance had it that it was Anita who answered. He asked her why she was so formal, and why she didn’t call him uncle. Anita answered almost without thinking, because she has the terrible habit of telling the truth. She finds it easier, less complicated. “Because we don’t know one another”. Then she said goodbye and passed the phone to her mother.
After setting himself up with a good job and a lovely wife Anita’s mother’s brother was transferred to Eritrea by the company he worked for. Some time later he was joined by his wife and mother. He must have earned a lot of money, since her family were able to enjoy a high standard of living. “I can see my grandmother playing the part of the white boss-lady!”, Anita once said to me , with her usual sharpness. The only cousin Anita had on her mother’s side, whom she’d never met and whose name she didn’t remember, was born there. She knows that she was beautiful, she’d seen picture of her. She looked like the grandfather, and she had never wanted to come to Italy. She stayed down there where she was born, and she died there, still young. Anita has no other information. I don’t think even her mother ever knew any more. An unpleasant story, clearly.
Anita’s grandmother didn’t die young. She was over ninety, maybe ninety-six, when she died. There is another reason why Anita never met her. For a long time – as she was led to believe – she thought that her mother’s family was already living far away, in Eritrea, before she was born, and that was why she’d never been able to meet them. Once she’d asked, with the innocence of a child, “Why don’t we take a trip to Eritrea?” The question caused embarrassed mockery. We make children think they’re talking nonsense when we don’t know how to answer them. In fact, her grandmother, her uncle and his wife had already returned by the time Anita was about ten. They settled in the capital, where she went for the first time many years later, when her grandmother had already been living there for a long time.
One fine day her mother, out of the blue, with no apparent reason, said: “You know, there’s something I have to tell you”. Anita was attending university, or maybe we had already graduated by then. Her mother began telling her, as though it was something perfectly normal, that her mother wasn’t dead and wasn’t in Eritrea. She’d been living Italy for many years now. First she’d lived in the capital, then her son – Anita’s mother’s brother – had moved to a big city in the North and “grandmother” (sometimes Anita’s mother used that term, but more often she said “my mother”) had been set up in an exclusive home for the elderly in a small town near the place where she was born, since she was quite on in years by then.
But why the devil was she learning about this only now? The long and the short of it was that her father and her grandmother never liked one another. They didn’t get along, they couldn’t stand one another. Anita’s grandmother, it seems, would have liked her mother to marry a man of her own social standing, the standing she’d gained through her marriage. Anita’s father and her grandmother were both difficult characters, neither was the sort to smooth things over. When things had reached a climax, something happened and there was a row, Anita doesn’t know exactly about what. It was a serious matter, it seems. Anita’s mother was forced to choose: either her mother or Anita’s father. Obviously, she chose her husband. Anita’s father and her grandmother never set eyes on one another again. At the time he declared: “I never want to see her again, she’d better stay away from my family, she’ll never know my children”. Maybe he didn’t realize that this meant the grandchildren would never know their grandmother. Or maybe he did, and thought it for the best. After that, Anita’s mother left to join her son in Eritrea.
So her maternal grandmother was alive and well, and only a few hours away by train. Anita’s mother had in fact kept in touch. She’d kept quiet about it, more secret than secret. “Would you like to meet her?” “No”, said Anita to her mother. No thank you. Why should she go to meet a person who was a complete stranger, whom she’d thought dead for a long time, in another continent? A woman who’d never written her a line, never sent a card or a souvenir. A woman who probably didn’t care a whit about her son-in-law’s children. Putting together what she knew, it didn’t take long for Anita to see a picture of herself as a sort of bastard, an illegitimate granddaughter, something to talk about as little as possible, or even to think about. But at first she couldn’t feel truly offended, she couldn’t really believe in this story that seemed so illogical and inhuman. She kept on thinking of her grandmother for a long time as an unreal being, and the whole story seemed absurd. But slowly the idea that this woman was still alive managed to find a space in some nook of her mind. Unseemly but indelible, like a yellow stain on an old cloth.
After that, Anita’s mother would talk about her own mother more often, about after every visit she paid her. She didn’t exactly keep these visits secret, but she never talked about them beforehand, either. She would disappear for a few days, and Anita would understand where she’d gone. “Where is mamma?” “She’ll be back in a few days”. But now she knew. The atmosphere was tense, and they all avoided meeting each other’s eyes. Once Anita’s mother stayed with her mother for a few weeks, with no explanation. When she came back, she took up the story as usual where she’d left it the last time. Her mother’s story was difficult to follow, like a film made up of flashbacks and Anita probably remembered best the parts that most satisfied the disappointment and resentment that had gradually substituted her indifference. She began to form a picture in her mind of a selfish, insensitive woman, vain and tyrannical. What reason could there possibly be for going to meet her?
Anita’s elder brother, whom I imagine shared similar thoughts and feelings, finally decided to go and meet his grandmother, before she died. Not that she was ill, but she was well over ninety; there wasn’t much time left. He told his mother. Not his father, that wouldn’t have been a good idea. When Anita found out, it seemed to her another absurdity at first. She thought it over for a long time – she found the idea repugnant, but she was curious at the same time. What would she say? How would she behave? She asked herself why not go and meet the only link in her life to her origins, a branch of her ancestry. The answer was simple: “I can’t consider myself her granddaughter”. Her grandmother was a stranger. Better that she should remain only a photo, a film, a ridiculous story!
Finally, months later, Anita decided to go there, too, she found the force, or better she forced herself to do it. She decided to fact that woman, her mother’s mother. But the old woman died a few days later, before Anita could carry out her plan. Should we call it fate? Anita was hurt, as though what had happened was done to spite her once again. But if we think about it, it’s clear that it was completely normal, she was almost a hundred by then. A hundred years old, and Anita had never met her.
Of all of Anita’s brothers and sisters, the eldest was the only one to have met his mother’s mother, but can we say he knew her? Who knows what he thinks of the whole story, we’ve never spoken about it, we two. I know that after the meeting, he described it very briefly, giving few details. The grandmother was just as he’d imagined her. The meeting was a pure pretence of relationship, in reality like having a cup of tea with a stranger. As if there was nothing special, as if there never had been.
Anita knows she looks like her mother, and her mother looks like her grandmother. But I’ve seen those photos, too. Anita is right, she looks like her mother’s mother only in her colouring. “What’s she’s stuck on me, like a curse, are these green eyes”, she said to me. On lineaments that tell another story, one that Anita doesn’t know.
* * *
I’ve walked across the whole park. Beyond the gate I find myself in an elegant avenue, with one shining shop window after another. The public gardens are empty by now, it’s time to go back to the warmth of home, to have dinner with fancy silverware, to sleep between silk sheets. The few latecomers hurry along. The windows will go on shining all evening and all night long, as if it were still daytime, showing nothing to nothing.
The notary had summoned me to read me Marcello’s will. I didn’t know, it was three years since I had last seen him. He, terminally ill with an inherited disease, had chosen to leave the villa to me, the non-mother of the children he hadn’t desired, though I was no longer his partner The family villa, as he always called it, that’s what was written in the will.
I turn a corner with relief and walk towards more human places. Where I live, people are normal. They smell bad if they don’t wash, they yawn when they’re tired, they get home with faded make-up, in the morning they leave home early and go to work by bus. They have neither pedigrees nor family villas, but they have great-grandparents and memories to hand down to their children and grandchildren.
It’s grown dark now. The passersby going home from work, who are more numerous here, glance at me as they would at someone come back from the beyond. Is it that my face still shows signs of the improbably place I’ve come from? Or maybe of Anita’s story, so hard to believe. A street hawker comes up to me. Smiling, he shows me some books: the legends and myths of his people, he says. I’d like to ask him “Where do you come from?” My mouth forms the words “Who are you?” He answers: “My name is Abdelkadir, sister”. I believe he’s right.
Giovanna Zunica lives and works in Bologna, where she attended university and took a degree in biology, followed by a Ph.D in cytomorphology. She teaches science, writes textbooks and translates from English. Recently she has published the short stories: Mi manca l'aria, dio che nostalgia (Bibliomanie n° 8, January (March 2007), Tre quarti di storie di luna (Sagarana, n° 25, October 2006), Ogni notte, ogni giorno (Bibliomanie, n° 7, October-December 2006), Sala d'attesa (Bibliomanie, n° 5, April-June 2006), Chika Unigwe, Sogni (trans., Sagarana, n° 25, October 2006), Chika Unigwe, Anonima (trans., El Ghibli, anno 3, n° 13, September 2006).