Read Online The House in Via Manno by Milena Agus - Free Book Online Page A

their bordello game, ordering her to take off her nightgown and petticoat and lie naked on the table, as if she were his favourite meal. He turned on the heater so she wouldn’t catch cold, and started eating again, helping himself to all that goodness. He touched and squeezed her all over and, each time before tasting something, even the delicious Sardinian country sausage, he would put it in Nonna’s pussy — in bordellos, that was the word you used. She started to get really excited, and touched herself, and at that point she no longer cared about loving him or not loving him. She just wanted to continue the game.
    ‘I’m your whore,’ she moaned.
    Then Nonno poured wine over her whole body, and licked her and sucked her, especially her big butter tits, which were his passion.
    But he wanted to punish her, maybe for the way she’d behaved on the trip, or who knows why — with Nonno, you could never tell — so he took his belt from his trousers and forced her to walk around the kitchen like a bitch, hitting her, but being careful not to hurt her too much and not to leave any marks on her beautiful arse. From under the table, Nonna stroked him and gave him head, which by then she’d learnt to do expertly; but every so often she stopped to ask him if she was a good whore, and how much she’d earned so far, and she didn’t ever want to stop playing this bordello game.
    They played for a long time, and then Nonno sat down to smoke his pipe, so she curled up on the far side of the bed, and, as usual, she fell asleep.

13
    At night with the Veteran, on the other hand, she was so excited about having finally, surely, discovered the most important thing, that she lay awake looking at how handsome he was, making the most of a faint light in the darkness, and when he gave a frightened start, as though he heard shooting, or bombs falling on the ship and breaking it in two, she gently brushed his skin with her finger. In his sleep, the Veteran responded by pulling her towards him; even asleep he was never far from her. Then Nonna took heart, and made herself a little nook in the curve of the Veteran’s body and put his arm around her shoulders and his hand on her head, and the feeling that this new position gave her was such that she just couldn’t resign herself to the idea — which was senseless, in her opinion — of falling asleep when you’re happy. So she had to ask herself if people in love lived this way, whether it was even possible, or if they, too, had to decide at some point to eat and sleep.
    The black notebook with the red border was now with the Veteran, who read through it and was a very demanding teacher, because for every spelling mistake, repetition of a word, or other error, he gave her a smack on the bum and ruffled her hair and wanted her to rewrite the whole thing. ‘It’s no good, non mi va bééne ,’ he’d repeat, with that closed e sound they use in Genoa and Milan, and Nonna wasn’t in the least offended; she enjoyed it enormously.
    And she was mad about his music. He would sing classical pieces for her, doing all the different instruments, and then some time later he’d do them again and she’d get the title and the composer right, or he’d sing opera with the men’s and women’s voices. Sometimes he’d recite poems, like those by someone he’d gone to school with — Giorgio Caproni — which Nonna liked a great deal because they made her feel like she was in Genoa, where she’d never been, even though the places in the poem resembled Cagliari. Everything was vertical , so that when you came into port — this had happened to her once on the boat returning from Sant’Efisio — the houses seemed to be built one on top of the other. Just like the Genoa described by the Veteran and by that poet friend of his, or by that other poor fellow, that Dino Campana who died in a mental asylum — dark and labyrinthine and mysterious and damp , then opening onto sudden and unexpected views