Padria

The clock read eight and the pigeons were cooing in the bright summer morning light. The old persiennes did a poor job at keeping out the sun and the heat, and even with them closed I could still make out every item around my bedroom perfectly. I opened the persiennes and looked out onto the still half-asleep streets. Eight in the morning was not particularly early for any of the locals, but the oppressive August heat made everyone want to stay inside their stone-chilled houses for longer. Everything was still quiet, the only sounds coming from the pigeons and a few dogs which had been let out of their homes. They were running and barking under the watchful eyes of their owners and brave early risers already out on their errands. 

I got out of bed and went to the kitchen where Giàja and Giàju were naturally up and about, Giàja preparing coffee and Giàju somehow reading his newspaper and watching the TV simultaneously. They were my only company, the house being shared between the three of us. Since then, Giàju has died and Giàja has not returned to the house since we fed his body to the sea. When I settled down for breakfast I was allowed to change the TV channel and switched it to Braccio di Ferro (those were some of the only Italian words I knew, along with ‘ciao’ ‘grazie’, ‘acqua’, ‘Sardegna’ and ‘non parlo italiano’). Most channels were only available in Italian, especially those that played children’s programmes, so every morning for the first eight years of my life I had resigned myself to watching TV in a foreign language. A part of me hoped it would help me learn, but another part of me did not understand why I had to try, out of stubbornness more than laziness, out loyalty to my island and to my limba sarda, the only language that had served me until then. Even at a young age, I already felt a degree of resistance towards the Italianisation of every aspect of our lives, being constrained to neglect our own languages and education under the threat of pauperisation; sacrificing and conforming without ever getting anything in return. But in spite of this language barrier, I felt I understood everything on the screen, in the same way one would understand a silent film. The vivid imagery, the music and sound effects and the expressive characters made the on-screen action comprehensible even for a child who could not understand the dialogue. These qualities made it one of my favourite cartoons, and I always did my best not to miss it every morning. 

In and this episode, Braccio di Ferro and his rival Bruto are running competing taxi services — a long-running gimmick throughout the show involves the two characters’ rivalry materialising in the form of competitive capitalising through a variety of different businesses, attempting to get the interest of potential customers through all means necessary. When Olivia waves for a taxi, both men notice her and take turns snatching her from the other’s vehicle; at this point, Olivia is not only a customer, she is an object of sexual desire, to consume and in turn be consumed. She is thrown out of Braccio di Ferro’s car and flies into a traffic light, her head getting lodged and stuck, taking her breath away. Her hair is disheveled, her long tongue sticks out of her mouth, her face turns bright red, her left arm sticks out, then her right as her face turns green, then back again. The monetary and sexual greed of the male characters have turned Olivia from an object of desire to an object meant for public use, serving the purpose that the traffic light once did. The men brutally pull her out of the traffic light and she is standing in between the two cars as the drivers continue to race ever faster through the streets, pulling on each of her legs as she screams out – I could only guess this based on her facial expression: no sound was coming out of her mouth as far as I, the viewer, was concerned, and the scene was instead filled only by music and a melodic whistling which I only now recognise as unsettling. As the odd musical accompaniment continues, the colours on the screen become less and less saturated, as if an unimaginably bright light had been cast on the set of the action. As Olivia continues to be pushed up and down and up and down and up and down by the two men, her nose is caught on an electrical line. The simple touch of her nose triggers the current to be shot and spread through her entire body as she continues to scream, but to her fear has been added perfect agony. Bruto’s car is smashed against the wall of a train tunnel, allowing Braccio di Ferro to once again get Olivia into his car. As Bruto catches up to them, the men get into a spat and Olivia, annoyed, attempts to walk away but Bruto snatches her: as we know by now, walking away is not an option that the narrative of this episode makes available to her, after all, she was the one who signalled for a taxi in the first place. But as Bruto drives away with Olivia, his car is hit by a train. Bruto and Olivia fly up into the sky together before Braccio di Ferro catches Olivia and runs off with her. He has left his taxi behind, instead opting to carry her on his shoulders to finally take her to her destination. At last, they are both smiling. He has won. The end. Although I loved this show as a child, I also felt unsettled at the thought of Olivia, which I carried into adulthood. I had thought it was her long, skinny, noodlish body and her occasionally shrill, whiny voice, but I know now that it had nothing to do with her physicality.

There was hardly anything to do here during the summer. Whenever we walked around the village, many men who were around the same age as Giàju would recognise and approach him, only him, while Giàja and I would stay back. There were not many children in our village, and the few I occasionally saw did not speak Sardinian. On one occasion, I had been playing outside by myself when two girls of around twelve approached and greeted me. I told them I did not speak Italian but they didn’t leave, although it was clear that they did not speak Sardinian. The three of us miraculously stood there, in some kind of conversation, but I cannot remember if I understood them or whether they understood me (this was before everyone had google translate on their phone, before twelve and eight year-olds even had phones, and at this age it didn’t occur to me to use a dictionary). Still, they stayed and talked with me, perhaps only for a minute, before leaving. I do not recall ever seeing them again. Another time, a young mother and her son, younger than me, approached me while I was outside with Giàja. The son did not speak Sardinian but the mother did. She asked Giàja if I could come get ice cream with them. Giàja said yes – I thought nothing of it at the time, but I find it odd now that she let me go alone with two strangers – and so I went. We went to one of the town’s bars where the mother bought me ice cream. I spoke with the mother more than the boy, and after they took me home, I did not see the boy again. Even if I had, how would I ever befriend him if I had to go through an intermediary? Why couldn’t his mother simply teach him Sardinian? 

Our house was quite smaller than it looked from the outside. It was tall, really, it was plenty for the three of us, but during the war, while Giàju was a child, nine people had been living in it at one time, having to share rooms and sometimes beds. If I close my eyes, I can still picture the view from my window with mountains in the far distance. Our little town is isolated on the island – around us are only mountains, hills, caves, our country’s beloved nuraghes, and kilometres and kilometres of dry grass. To the west, although not visible from here, is the Mediterranean sea. An eight-year old accompanied by an elderly couple would have had to walk for over an hour to reach the nearest village on foot. We were surrounded by nature and history. If I stepped onto my balcony and looked to the left, beyond the streets, all I could see was an endless array of trees over the hills, overlooking the fields. At this time of year when the sun was shining bright and warm in the cloudless blue sky, it was the most beautiful sight I believed I had ever seen. To the south of us were the former convent, the communal park, the communal pool, and the elementary school, which I had attended for a few months before it was decided I should be homeschooled. If we walked up the street to the north, passing the orange trees on the streets, we would stumble upon the central piazza where Giàju was stopped so often. It was common for older men (and it felt, at least at the time, as though the population of Padria was made up almost entirely of older men) to sit on benches all day and call out to whoever they recognised. This was where the bar that the mother took me to was, and where everyone wanted to go any day of the week, any time of the day. If we kept going we would find the only restaurant in town, the old bank, the old pharmacy and the archeological museum, until we would arrive at one of the two churches. Once I grew up, I realised that most small towns did not have more than one church, especially those with less than eight hundred inhabitants. The churches in Padria were small, perhaps that was why they had built two so close to one another. I don’t recall ever going inside either one – in spite of the countless Mary and Jesus effigies in our house, which had belonged to Giàju’s mother, we were not a religious family. 

To the east of our village is, perhaps strangely, one of the places I remember best: the cemetery. We would walk there on occasion to visit my great-grandmother’s grave, yet what I remember is not this one grave, but the grave of two boys whose names have evaded me. On this particular day, I had Giàja translate the inscriptions for me: it said they were two young brothers – possibly around my age – who had died during the war while playing around with a grenade they had mistaken for a toy. My initial reaction to learning the cause of their death had been confusion, even contempt at how they could possibly not have recognised that what they had found was a weapon of war. It only took me a few seconds to realise that, if someone had asked me at the time to describe a grenade, I would not have been able to. My confusion turned to sadness and I made sure to visit them every time we came to the cemetery after this. 

I open my eyes. Almost twenty years have gone by and I am in a place I barely recognise. Not Padria, not even Sardinia. My Italian has gotten better since then, not by choice but by necessity. Yet, it is not the words I speak that strike me, not my slow, rustic speech. The Italian language that matters to me is the one I would see in Padria, keywords telling me where I was going and where I had come from: piscina, parco, museo, piazza, ristorante, strada, farmacia, banco di Sardegna, chiesa, scuola, cimitero. When I return to Padria these days, it looks just the same as the day I left it, yet it feels different. I can still sense the history around me, I can still smell the oranges and feel the sun on my skin. But Giàju is gone, and only one of his siblings remains. Giàja is alive but she no longer lives here. Our house is still standing, but it belongs to no one. I can feel its strength when I stand before it, unable to enter. The old windows were never replaced, and the deterioration of the wood over the years means I can just about have a peak at the inside. It is as we left it. The furniture is still in the same place, only the TV has gone. It is dark and difficult to see in there, but I can tell that the dining room is not in a good state. We hadn’t boarded up the chimney when we left, and now dozens of pigeon corpses are lying on the floor amid their own droppings. They look thin and miserable. I imagine that they found their way in through the chimney and, not being able to find their way out, died scared and hungry. I wonder how long they were alive in there and how long they have been dead for. Some of them look newly dead, still wearing their feather coats, but some look mummified, as if they have been preserved by the coldness of the stone walls. Since I  left, some people have set up shop in Padria. There is a new bakery, a new restaurant, a florist, a furniture shop, but everything I have known is still here and I am glad to see that my beloved town has resisted the changes that many others have succumbed to. I like to walk the same route I have walked so many times with my grandparents. No one stops me on the piazza. The mother and her son are not at the bar. I reach the cemetery and say hello to my great-grandmother before heading over to the boys’ graves. I silently apologise for my long absence.