My Mother's Childhood – A Few Words...

“And only when He has forgiven me,
you will want to look at me.

You will remember that you have waited so long for me,
and you will have a quick sigh in your eyes.”
(Giuseppe Ungarettti – from “The mother”)

 

“Sardinia early 1900s”. Thomas Ashby

Sure, it's curious how for years I have listened to the personal stories of strangers or friends but I have never stopped to listen to my mother's childhood story. Perhaps there is also an exoticism of feelings. It seems more and more interesting what is far from us, which is not under our eyes from the first day we were born.

 

More than anything else it started all this pushed by the constant questions of my friends who live on the other side of the world, about the customs and traditions of my country – for this reason I asked my mother to tell me what her childhood was like in Sardinia.

Either because I honestly knew almost nothing about it, and because it was a way like any other to talk about a country in Italy in the early twentieth century. After all, I have always believed that, even if with differences in temporality, certain customs, life practices or simple games were the same even in countries that are totally distant for miles and culture.

You may be surprised to know that even in Italy, in the mid-twentieth century, 10-year-olds were already working in the fields, while it is not surprising to see it in children who work in brick factories in Bangladesh or in textile companies where 10 or 12-year-old girls work there.

Just as it does not surprise me to know that my father's favorite game, when he was a child in a town in southern Puglia, that is to hit another wooden stick on the ground with a stick and then hit it in flight, is the same as playing children in villages in Sumatra in Indonesia, called “Patok Lele”, in Malaysia they call it “Konda Kondi”, and in Italy it is "Lippa".

 

“Sardinia early 1900s”. Thomas Ashby

Moreover, recently I happened to see Thomas Ashby's splendid photographs of Sardinia between 1906 and 1912. Sardinia has an ancient cultural tradition, very particular, like all the islands, which are a part and at the same time apart of a nation.

I've only been to Sini twice, very young. I have very few memories of it, more than anything else I remember the courtyard with the animal cages, my mother tells me that I spent many hours there talking to rabbits.

I remember the wild horses that ran in the valleys of rugged rocks and green, And these little streets that went up and down through the village.

For many years it was not even marked on geographical maps.

My mother told me that it had a thousand inhabitants, but I went to look for the census of the country year by year and a thousand people never got there: when my mother was a child Sini reached its peak of 900 inhabitants, then it went decreasing, up to almost 500 now.

Families, these days, no longer have as many children as they did at the time and young people quickly run away to work or study in Cagliari or in other cities in Italy, as my mother did.

 

Sini – Panorama. Postcard from 1969

Sini is certainly not a well-known county, while its area is among the oldest in Sardinia, and not only: the ancient region of Marmilla.

From 1400 until 1839 in the hands of the Aragonese, but its history begins long before, in the famous Nuragic era, as it is written:

“The Nuragic civilization, born and developed in Sardinia, embraced a period of time ranging from the full Bronze Age (1800 BC) to the 2nd century AD. for a large part of the island, now in Roman times but, for the central-eastern part, later known as Barbagia, until the sixth century AD. in the early Middle Ages, when there still existed independent Nuragic culture communities and where Christianity would only be established later.

It was the result of the gradual evolution of pre-existing cultures already widespread on the island since the Neolithic, whose most evident traces that have come down to us are made up of dolmens, menhirs, and Domus de Janas, to which new stimuli and cultural contributions were added age of metals. It owes its name to the nuraghi, imposing megalithic constructions considered to be its most eloquent vestiges and whose actual function has been discussed for at least five centuries.”

 

Sardinian costumes:

Ossi (Sassari) \ Muravera (Cagliari)

Oliena (Nuoro)

Lotzorai (Nuoro)

 

I remember when my mother's family went to see the famous nuraghi, stone buildings that seemed to really come from prehistoric times.

Not much else I remember. Incomprehensible dialect, grannies all dressed in black, donkeys, and a calm typical of many small towns in Italy, which can become a suffocating nightmare or rest of the soul.

 

After all, both my grandmother and all my mother's sisters and brothers I met here in Rome. Of my grandfather, I only saw his photograph in the room where my grandmother slept before she died.

But I never imagined that that tender chat between mother and son, sitting on the sofa, looking at the old photographs that have come back to the surface, would have turned like a stab deep in my flesh.

And yes, popular culture says, until you move the stones the snake won't bite you.

I did not understand why my mother wanted to tell me the latest episode, that of the death of her father, when we were alone and in a predisposed mood. I had already written almost the whole main part thinking, in fact, how it was really absurd to have taken 50 years to ask and know about her childhood.

Listening to that story was traumatic for me because I learned for the first time how my grandfather died.

Not any death whatsoever. But a tumor.

Not just any tumor. But to the colon.

Just like me.

 

Listening to her voice deepen and her face red as she tells me that it was the greatest pain, that of loss and not being able to say goodbye for the last time has thrown me back in time.

To that 2004 when I fell ill with cancer.

 

How much pain, my poor mother.

All white hair like silver.

I was skewered in my anguish, pierced by fears.

With my uncle who operated on me that he told me how with this type of cancer you never know how it will go, if you don't open your belly first.

And I think he told my parents the same.

 

Like a circle, life proposes the same annihilation.

Only now can I understand in the deepest way how much pain I have given you.

Are you tired that I refer to you every time that phrase that you said to me several times:

“Going back, I wouldn't conceive you again.”

So, after confessing to you the wound that opened in me and bleeds from the moment of your story, you corrected the shot:

“It is I who would never have been born.”

As if this could console me.

 

I don't know how long it will take for this wound to close.

It's no longer your cross, you only told what I asked you.

To share a life story and also a pinch of Italian socio-anthropological history.

Now that cross that weighs on my back is mine.

Because if I turn back I see a trail of tears and pain.

 

I hope somehow I made you happy mother.

I was not the best of possible children, I know.

 

Eventually, you said to me, “the pain of a father's death is terrible but that of a son is unparalleled.”

I am still here.

Cut, stitched up, injected with poisons and radiation.

But I am there and I will always be there

...for you.

 

Me and my mother

• Number 100 
• Postcards from The Philippines 

 

Italian version