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amount be used for pipe tobacco. But they continued to sleep on opposite sides of the bed and never spoke about themselves, and maybe that was why grandmother couldn’t forget the emotion she felt on those nights with the Veteran, with his arm around her head and his hand sleeping but present, seeming to caress her hair. The Veteran said that in his view her husband was a lucky man, really, and not, as she said, unfortunate, cursed with a poor madwoman; she wasn’t mad, she was a creature made at a moment when God simply had no wish for the usual mass-produced women and, being in a poetic vein, had created her. Grandmother laughed heartily and said that he was mad, too, and so wasn’t aware of the madness of others.
    On one of the following nights the Veteran told grandmother that his father hadn’t died during one of the bombings of Genoa but had been tortured by the Gestapo. His body had been thrown into the street outside the Casa dello Studente, disfigured by brutal wounds. But he hadn’t told where his daughter-in-law was, or the partisans who had been telegraphing from his house to the Allies. He had insisted on staying in the house so that everything would seem normal to those who were watching them after the tip-off, and so the others had been able to escape into the Apennines. He wanted his son and daughter-in-law to have a family, he had told her as he said goodbye, and then he had sat down to wait for the Gestapo. The Veteran’s daughter was born in the mountains. But maybe it wasn’t true, he had heard that she was the daughter of a German. He couldn’t even imagine his wife in love with someone else, so he felt that the father of his daughter was a monster who perhaps had taken her violently, surely when she had tried to save her father-in-law. And he had never been able to touch that woman again, that was why they hadn’t had children. He, too, had become a habitué of the brothels. The Veteran burst into tears and then he was horribly ashamed, because he had been taught as a boy never to show grief. Then grandmother also began to cry, saying that she instead had been taught not to show joy, and maybe that had been right, because the only thing that had gone well for her, marrying grandfather, she was indifferent to, and she never understood why those suitors all fled, but anyway what do we really know about others, what did the Veteran know.
    On the subject of not understanding, she had once got up her courage and, with her heart beating so hard she thought it would burst out of her chest, asked grandfather if, now that he knew her better—not that, for heaven’s sake, knowing her better was a great thing—but anyway if, having lived with her all this time and having no need to go to the brothel anymore, he loved her. And grandfather had sort of smiled to himself, without looking at her, and then he had given her a pat on the behind and hadn’t even dreamed of answering. Another time, during a service that she couldn’t tell the Veteran about, grandfather said she had the most beautiful ass he had ever had in his life. And so what can we know, truly, even about those closest to us.

11.
     
     
    I n 1963, grandmother went with her husband and papa to visit her sister and brother-in-law who had emigrated to Milan.
     
    The house in the village had been sold to help the sisters, and my grandparents had given up their share, but still the others couldn’t make it, three families farming a property of less than twenty hectares. The agrarian reforms had been cautious and the Rebirth Plan was all wrong, as it was based on the chemical and iron and steel industries, and, having been initiated by people from the mainland with public funds, did nothing for us here, grandfather said; rather, the future of Sardinia would have been in manufacturing, which would have made use of the existing resources. For the other two sisters, who lived on the land, it made things easier, in the end, when one had left.