Grandma Tesoro

We had two grandmothers, Nonna Tesoro e Nonna Bellezza (Grandma Sweetheart and Grandma Beauty). That came from their habit of calling Marina, respectively, “my little sweetheart” and “my little beauty”. Marina decided those must be their names when she started to speak her first words, and the two grandmas were renamed ever after. Nonna Bellezza was just a grandma. Nonna Tesoro was “a housewife, a dreamer, a gambler, a sorcerer, and the best cook in the world”, as I wrote in Reckless.
    Nonna Tesoro was a real character. She had been a gorgeous young woman who turned heads. My grandpa was always telling us kids the story of how he got to marry her on a bet. Gradnpa Nico was a captain in World War I. Toward the end of it, he lost his left eye to a flying grenade and had to be recovered in the military hospital, wounded also in the other eye. Grandma Tesoro was a voluntary nurse then and there. She was the talk of the soldiers who were all day-dreaming about taking her home once the war was over. My grandpa could not see her through his bandage but he trusted his best friend’s judgment (“she’s a goddess”, he literally said). So the two men bet. Which one of them was going to propose her first, would marry her. My grandpa won the bet. He took home with him a gorgeous but also temperamental woman, who became both his goddess and his tyrant. In some strange way, though, they lived happily ever after.
    We spent time with Nonna Tesoro and Nonno Nico pratically only in summer. We were deported to their Villa Serenella, a huge country home on the shore of Lake Maggiore in Italy, and left there for three months after school was over by our busy parents who’d come to visit only on the weekend. “We” included not only Marina and I but also my cousins Manuela and Stefano, who were Marina’s age, born a few weeks apart form each other. I was the little one and they made a point to keep me out of their business. That did not leave me with many peer options since Nonna Tesoro totally forbade me to accept invitations to go play with other kids my own age, out of the villa.
    Not only. Nonna Tesoro, who adored Marina, really could not stand me. I was a “walking earthquake” in her eyes. A nuisance, since I could not “stay still for two minutes” and I was getting in troubles a lot. I was always climbing tall trees and rocks, jumping from the roof of the garage, jumping in the cave of the golden fishes she was so proud of, hanging upside down “like a bat” from the poles of the gazebo in the back, eating wild berries or mushrooms I would find “without checking with her” and getting sick, hammering my fingers instead of the nails I used to build myself what I thought was going to be my refuge from her authority: a platform so high in the big persimmon tree she could not even spot me.
    Her revenge was to blame me for whatever the other kids would do, and to scare me to death with her storytelling of spirits inhabiting the house. She realized that fear was what could freeze me still. She was threatening me to tell the spirits to come “get me”, or to transform me in one of the big toads I could hear in the darkness at night. I totally believed she could do it.She was a powerful witch and I was her prisoner. I was praying for Friday night to come so that my mom could arrive to defend me from her terrible power. I was terrified of her, yet fascinated in many ways.
    Why? I guess because she was an adult who still knew how to play. Not just solitary games of cards, cheating even on herself, since she could not bear to loose. She could play with her imagination. She could see behind the appearance of things and transform reality. And on that side, I was her confidant. “Look carefully”, she would tell me when some distant lady-relatives were coming to visit. “They want you to think they are good women but one is a vulture and the other is a spider. They’re just after my money”. I did not understand the last part but I did look carefully at the two women at the time of their visit, hidden in a tree, and I saw their “real” nature, just as Nonna Tesoro had said.
    She would tell me what she had dreamed and ask me “win or loose?” My answer was determining her mood for the next days until Saturday came. On Saturdays, finally freed from childcare, Nonna Tesoro and Nonno Nico would cross the border of Switzerland and go to the casino in Campione to play roulette. She would still go and play when I said “loose” but then she made me pay for my prediction dragging me to church the next Sunday to “confess my sins”. I think my rebellion to Catholicism comes exactly from my grandma’s idea of “sin”.  “I committed many love sins”, Nonna Tesoro would tell me years and years after, when I asked her why she had to suffer so much, getting ill with a series of rare and horrible diseases. Love sins??? Love could make you sick??? That had no part in my belief system even then.
    Anyhow, this post is getting very long, and I think I will tell you the rest of the story another time. But I still have to tell you how my grandma taught me to believe in the high power of visualization. That happened when my uncle Claudio (my brother is named after him), her youngest son, got sick with cancer at the age of twenty-eight. That was very hard to accept for everybody and particularly for my grandma. He was her baby. He was also my absolute hero. Uncle Claudio taught me how to drive on his red Porsche when I was nine, and how to shoot a rifle. Like me, he could not stay still for two minutes. He was very “physical”, a handsome man with plenty of girlfriends. My grandma hated them all until her son finally got married, one year before succumbing to cancer.
    When uncle Cluadio was in the hospital already since five months and I was told he was soon going to die, thin as a rail and weak to the point he could not turn his head in bed, he had a miraculous sudden burst of energy. I happened to be there that day while my grandma was visiting too. My uncle did not know he had cancer and was going to die. My grandma had decided to keep it from him and, as long as I thought a person should have the right to know the truth about herself, I could not do anything but just respecting my grandma’s orders. What could I do different at ten?
    So my uncle lifted his back up, hugged his knees, called for his wife and said: “I feel good today. I want to go shopping. Call the nurse and take this stuff out.”  He meant the various needles in his arms pumping strange concoctions in his blood. He wanted to go out and enjoy the spring sun driving his red Porsche around town. He wanted to go to a good restaurant and have a decent meal that tasted like actual food. Obviously, the doctors did not care about his wishes. They did not want to take responsibility allowing him to leave the hospital and maybe die on the street. Or that was what the chairman of the hospital tried to tell my grandma, when she pleaded for my uncle’s cry for freedom.
    “Young man”, I heard Nonna Tesoro yell at the doc, who was about fifty years old, in his office. “My son was under my responsibility much longer than yours, and he still is. I am the one who decides what’s best for him. If he says he feels better and he wants to get out, he will get out and be well. The only thing I can do for you is to promise you that he will be back here tonight, safe and sound, so that you will keep your job.”
   

    My dad picked up his younger brother an hour later in his red Porsche. He offered to drive he and his wife around so that they could enjoy more looking around. My uncle, who certainly knew how ill he was despite all the lies, allowed him. They went shopping and eating at a good restaurant. During that all time, my grandma remained quietly sitting in the hospital room with her eyes closed, murmuring some words nobody could hear. She was imagining him as healthy, vibrant and lively as he had always been before getting sick.
    My uncle died two days later. It was a terrible blow for me. I had believed that my grandma had the power to heal him. “I was not strong enough to beat such an advanced cancer”, she’d tell me later, “but I could give him some relief, at least. I could still make my baby-son happy for one day.”

Comments

[heathervescent]

Moki and I ate ragu (that I had to make myself) last night. And for some reason, I did not know why, I drank a glass of wine (out of a glass from Grammy Grace) and made a toast for and to Grandma Tesoro!

[subodh baral]

FIRSTLY, THANKS GIVE ME TO PUT MY LITTLE WORDS FOR THE RELIEF OF THE PAIN OF UR PRESENT CIRCUMSTANCES DON,T WORRY BE HAPPY LIFE IS NOT ENOUGH FOR EVERYONE ITS UPS N DOWNS BE PATIENCE DON'T NEGLECT UR LIFE ITS UR LIFE ONCE U REMISS THEN NEVER BLOSSOM FOR OTHER DAYS.