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one she couldn’t tell the Veteran about, Nonno told her that she had the best arse he’d done in all his life.
    So what can we ever really know — even about those closest to us?

11
    In 1963, Nonna went with her husband and Papà to visit her sister and brother-in-law who had emigrated to Milan.
    That was after the family had sold the house in the village to try to help this sister and brother-in-law out. Nonna and Nonno had even given up their share, but it became clear that it still wasn’t possible for the three other families to make a living from their land, which was less than twenty hectares in size. The agrarian reform had been timid and the Revival Plan all wrong, as it was based on chemical and iron and steel industries that didn’t belong over here, as Nonno said, established by Continentals with public funds, whereas the future of Sardinia lay in manufacturing industries that would take into account existing resources.
    Ultimately, it suited the other two sisters, who lived off the land, if one sister left.
    Nonna had suffered greatly, and didn’t even go to San Gavino to see her youngest sister, her brother-in-law, and the children onto the train to Porto Torres. Nonna had suffered over the sale of the house, too. The new owners had replaced the arched doorway with an iron gate. They’d knocked down the wooden pillars and the low wall that separated the lolla from the courtyard, and closed it off with an aluminium partition. The upper floor, which was very low and looked out over the roof of the lolla , where the barn used to be, had become a mansard like you see in postcards of the Alps. The tiled roof of this barn, now mansard, was replaced by a terrace with a parapet of air-bricks. The ox shelter and the woodshed had been transformed into car garages. The flowerbeds were reduced to a narrow perimeter along the wall. The well was blocked with cement. The paving stones in different colours of terracotta, which had formed kaleidoscopic patterns along the ground, were covered with ceramic tiles.
    And there was too much furniture to fit into the rooms that the sisters moved into in the houses of their husbands’ families; it was so old and cumbersome, from times best forgotten, that no one else wanted it. Only Nonna took her little bride’s room with her, so as to have it exactly the same in via Giuseppe Manno.
    She knew that after her sister and brother-in-law made the trip to Milan they’d got rich, because her sister had written and said that in il gran Milàn there was enough work for everyone, and on Saturdays everyone went shopping in the supermarket and filled their trolleys with perfectly packaged foods, and that the idea they’d always had of being economical — of cutting no more than a certain number of slices of bread; of turning overcoats, jackets, suits; of unravelling jumpers to save the wool; of getting their shoes resoled a thousand times — was a thing of the past. In Milan, they went to the department stores and bought everything new.
    The one thing they didn’t like was the climate — especially the smog that blackened the cuffs and collars of their shirts and the children’s little school smocks. She was constantly washing; but in Milan there was plenty of water, not just on alternate days like in Sardinia — you could let it run and run without worrying about first washing yourself, then washing the clothes in the waste water, then throwing the now-dirty water down the toilet. In Milan, washing yourself and your things was a form of entertainment. Besides, her sister didn’t have all that much to do after the housework, which was done in no time because the houses were small, since millions of people had to live in that space, not like in Sardinia where they had those huge houses that were no use because there were no conveniences. Well, anyway, she’d always finish the housework in no time and then go wandering around the metropolis looking in the shops and buying, buying,