I have always known my grandmother. It seems a silly thing to say. But then the opposite statement is true, too. For the first 33 years of my life, I didn’t really know her at all. Or, rather, I knew one version of her, as smoothed by repeated handling as the “special stones” my sister and I used to collect from the dried-up riverbed near her house in northeastern Italy, where vast corn fields meet the Alps. We had fossilised her and carried her around in our pockets since childhood, never questioning the solidity of the image: the quintessential nonna; a benign nonagenarian, whose soft hands could cover my entire face, whose apron pocket contained more than seemed possible (sweets, scissors, thimbles, needle and thread, reading glasses, the TV guide…), and whose stories we had all heard 10,000 times. We tended to think of them as monologues, requiring nothing of us, as much a part of the family diet as the modest but delicious meals she cooks.
I’d be exaggerating if I said all this changed one summer a few years ago, although the seams did start to fray (an analogy apt for this woman who spent her life running up clothes on her trusty Necchi machine). That’s what happens when you start asking questions.
It started with dandelions, whose leaves we have always eaten, warm and wilted, slicked with olive oil and a splash of lemon. They punctuate our meals and our conversations, never failing to elicit the story of Nonna rousing the suspicion of the locals in Manchester, where she had emigrated after the Second World War, as she combed urban wastelands gathering the dark, fortifying greens. “The English never knew how good dandelions taste!” One man’s weeds are another’s treasure.
“Where would you put them?” I asked one night at dinner, as the dandelion bowl passed from hand to hand, bobbing and weaving past steaming dishes of polenta and a rich stew of wild boar.
Nonna looked at me blankly.
“In your apron? In a bag? A plastic bag? Did they even exist in the ’50s…?”
“I don’t remember,” she said eventually. “Che importa?” What does it matter?
I decided that, after decades of letting this story wash over me, it did matter – they all did. The next morning, we sat down together, the blinds dropped against the oppressive heat of the plains. Around us were scattered yellowing photographs and other items – a votive candle, an address book, a postcard from a dear old cousin, a lock of hair – usually confined to the chaos of the cupboard above the TV (where you’ll also find biscuits and an obscene amount of paracetamol).
“So tell me,” I said. “Start at the beginning…”
I meant her birth in 1926 in Mussolini’s Italy, but she seemed not to hear me. I had worried that her awareness of my phone, propped up on a packet of biscuits, recording our conversation would make her clam up; in fact, it seemed to have the opposite effect. Like an excited schoolgirl, she started on three things at once, the stories beginning and ending abruptly in mid flow. I heard again about the earthquake, the secret heart attacks, the nervous breakdown, the lost child. And the one about being serenaded by the man who would become her husband; about a bike ride and all the young men in swastika armbands; about the time she didn’t kiss her father goodbye because “he didn’t look like himself” (he died soon after); and the night she had a vision that the family’s bad luck would change. Details were left hanging like loose threads, sometimes accompanied by a gesture, a shake or nod of the head, a shrug or sigh. She had been inviting our questions all along.
The intensity of Nonna’s talk made me worry about what I had started – what could this great opening-up do to someone so advanced in her years? – and I felt a frightening sense of responsibility. I had never seen her cry and now I saw it in the knowledge that my own questions (“And then what happened?”; “And what became of him?”) had provoked it. I think we both knew, for different reasons, that we had to talk until the talking dried up, to make it count. When I returned to England, I phoned her every Friday at 10am – an appuntamento scheduled so as not to clash with her two most sacred hours: the televised mass and lunchtime – to continue “our project”.
It was as though I was meeting Nonna for the first time. I asked countless questions – general, first-date type ones like: “Who was your favourite author?”, and personal ones like, “What did your dad smell like?” Some made her laugh, others brought anguish, still fresh after half a century or more.
I think she intuited before me that I would write a book. Perhaps she had known all along. On my next visit, she gave me her diary and pointed out that my work as a writer/editor and hers as a seamstress were not so different. It’s true that I “nip” and “tuck” and “tweak” sentences as if altering a dress. She was feeding me in this respect, too, then – handing me fragments, urging me to stitch them together. She wanted to see what my hands could do.
While she revisited and reclaimed the elements of her past, rekindling lost familiarities – happy memories of her beloved father alongside bitter ones of her mother – my own sense of familiarity began to unravel. The fixed image of Nonna receded; an archetype was replaced by a breathing woman, whose complicated thoughts, feelings and experiences wouldn’t be tidied away in the cupboards of the past. She was as much alive as I was, or – insofar as life is the sum of all our loves and losses, pleasures and pains – more so.
I suppose what I’m saying is: ask questions, especially about something you think you know off by heart. And then listen like you’ve never listened before. Gobble it all up.
Dandelions by Thea Lenarduzzi is out now
