The Move to via Del Corno: A Story

by VASCO PRATO LIN I

*

IN THE autumn of 1926 we moved from Via de’ Magazzini to Via del Corno. The two of us, Granny and I, had been left, as she said, “alone on the face of the earth.” With the years Via de’ Magazzini, in the center of town, had bestowed upon its houses new value, and one by one the apartments were being sold. Ours had been bought by a tradesman and his wife who came from Turin; they needed it for themselves and were in a hotel waiting. They planned to lay in a new floor and to put up a partition between the entry and kitchen for a bath. Hoping to hasten our departure, they offered us “key money” — which Granny refused. Our eviction was postponed another three months, but we felt as if we were under siege.

The other old tenants had all left — the tailor Masi, anarchist and eighty, had time to die of heartbreak and to make his peace with God - surrendering their places to the new owners. The engineer on the first floor was personally directing the installation of electricity and gas, as well as the renovations for the joint owners. We, alone and isolated, held out with our kerosene lamp and charcoal range. We were the object of reproving and ironic glances, and even threats, as we went up and down the stairway. We were accused of hindering — how, I can’t imagine — the construction of a modern, sanitary cesspool. And Granny, adamant, with false naïveté, kept repeating to the owners:

“My husband had the property appraised. Then, on second thought, you decided against selling. But if you’re willing now, here’s the thousand two hundred lire it was valued at.”

“That was thirty years ago,” they told her. “Today it would cost twenty thousand. You were the first to be approached and you let the offer go.”

“And I suppose I haven’t paid twenty thousand in all these years, in rent?”

“You’re going to lose the key money, you know, by resisting eviction. But if you took it, it would be enough for you and your grandson to get yourselves settled elsewhere.”

“We’re perfectly content where we are,” Granny replied. “I’ve been here for more than thirty years . . . I’ve brought up children here and . . . anyway, houses with rents within my means aren’t to be found. With the key money I’d be able to pay rent for a year, or two perhaps—and then what? But here there’s a ceiling on what you can charge me. Why, already I’ve had to sell the living room furniture, to put something aside in case of need.”

“Exactly. Don’t you see, then?” they said to her. “Actually, the two of you can make do with one large room and the use of a kitchen. And the key money is enough to give you that—a nice room with cooking facilities — for at least five years.”

“But living with other people, deprived of my freedom. And I daren’t think where, in what kind of a street, with what sort of people! I’ve lived here for over thirty years . . . my children were born here, died here, my husband died here . . .” And inevitably, by this time like a refrain, asrcsoluleas it was childlike: “It’s thirty years now that I’ve been hearing the Palazzo Vecchio strike the hour.”

So we held out with our kerosene lamp and ember pot, and the bellpull at the door which was useless now—they had installed push buttons on a panel by the main entrance. They had painted the doors that gave onto the stairway and put up brass name plates, whitewashed the staircase, replaced the panes in the skylight . . . And our door — with its scuffed-up baseboard, the little label on which I had hand-lettered CASATI, the grille dust-covered by time — was a false note: an offense to the new neighbors.

Then one morning when I went down the staircase scrawling on the wall with a nub of coal, the engineer caught me. Two days later, masons appeared and began demolition for a glass partition right in our living room, a court order from the magistrate having so empowered the new owner. We had to move the table and chairs into the bedroom.

2

AND now the second three months’ extension had passed. It was a bitterly cold November. Behind the closed shutters the bells of the Palazzo Vecchio gave out with a long sepulchral echo. And the silence of the street, those nights, was frightening. The sound of Granny’s breathing was like a stifled agony; I would lie awake, listening to her, fearful that as she slept, her lamentation ended, sleep would give her over to death.

Then it was the 24th of November.

The bailiffs arrived and gave us six days more. Since Granny again refused to accept the eviction order, they took out one of the tacks from our name label and fastened the notice to the door. The masons stood looking at it.

“If you’ll permit me,” one of them said, “I don’t think you really understand the situation.”

The man had a vernacular pronunciation; he was about forty, with moustache trimmed close to the corners of his mouth, and he wore his hat white working.

“Pretty soon you’re going to find yourself with your bed out in the street.”

Granny leaned her back against the window, gazing across the room. She looked at the demolished wall and where the floor had been taken up, sucking in her lower lip between her gums.

“I moved in here just after I was married . . .

It’s only because I’m an old woman now, alone with a small boy . . .”

“It’s because they happen to be in the right,” said the mason. “Have they or haven’t they bought the place?”

“My husband also wanted to buy it . .

“Yes,” said the mason, “back when one and one made two.”

But he offered to help us. He knew of a room with kitchen privileges where a relative of his was living. It was in Via del Corno, among fine people. “And not expensive, either,” he said. “They aren’t the grasping sort.” “But so out of the way,” said Granny.

The mason smiled. “Don’t tell me you’ve been living here all these years and don’t know where Via del Corno is! It’s just a couple of steps away. You go down Via de’ Gondi and there you are.”

“Oh, I know! ” Granny exclaimed. “Let me think about it.”

That night, suddenly breaking the silence between our two beds, she said, “Via del Corno isn’t a suitable street for us . . .” Then she added: “We must see that they aren’t left alone in the house any more, those bricklayers.”

But precautions weren’t necessary; having learned that we would be turned out within the week, they suspended work.

The next day I thought I’d like to see this Via del Corno myself, so near, but unknown to me as well. It was just a short dead-end alley, a tiny byway cut off from the traffic, but crowded with people and noisy — deafening compared to our Via de’ Magazzini. There were little workshops in it, and several wagon stables. It smelled of horses, and of drying wash strung overhead on windowlines. On the corner was a public urinal, and it struck me that was the only reason anyone might ever stop there.

In the end, as the mason had warned, our furniture was piled up on the sidewalk. The younger of the two bailiffs, a blond, said we could thank him for having spared us the expense of a porter.

“It looks uninhabited, the building,” he commented as he and I lumbered down the stairs with the clothes chest. He turned to Granny and told her, “It’s not us, you understand, it’s the Law.”

Granny gave him her hand. To the last she had hoped for another extension. “If we don’t sign, the eviction will never be carried out,” she had kept telling me.

Meanwhile she had left a deposit in Via del Corno, while we searched the neighborhood for something better. But we found nothing; we would have to adjust ourselves to the alley, “out of necessity.”

Now I returned with a rented pushcart. The two bailiffs helped us load our belongings onto it.

“This is the most we can do,” said the blond one. “We’re late.” And then they left us, alone in the middle of Via de’ Magazzini, with the cart piled high with our chattels, all it would hold. In her arm, Granny had “ t he enlargement ” of my mother, the photograph side turned to her breast. She seemed serene — too serene to be so really. Her eyes were dry, her gestures composed, as if once the moment had come her torment had broken off. Not even her voice betrayed a feeling out of the ordinary. She tugged at the ropes tying down our household things, making sure they were fast, that nothing was missing.

“It’s all here,” she said, “our two iron beds, the linen chest, the table, the clothes chest. We can make it in a single trip. I did well to sell the sofa; il never would have got into the room we have now. The chairs . . . we’ll put the chairs on top once we’re started. Your mother’s picture is here. Good. And now what?”

“Now We must leave,” I said.

“Yes,” she pursued, “the ropes will hold. In a few minutes we’ll be there. The money, I have the money in my pocket. And the cupboard . . . the cupboard’s on . . . But can you manage?”

“It’s balanced; the load’s light.”

“It’s even thing; we possess,” she said. “And now we go to live in a street . . . But remember: just good morning and good evening—that s all. They’re people we’ve nothing to do with. It’s misfortune that throws us in with I hem; but not for long —a month at the most. Within a month we’ll find something better, at least in a si reel that can be for us the way this has been for so many years, among decent people.”

It was ten in the morning. Via de’ Magazzini was silent, descried, its slice of sky blue between the houses, the air numbing my hands. Infrequent passers-by stared at us a moment and then went on. A cyclist came by, ringing his bell at us.

“I’ve never understood,” Granny said, “why so few people come this way, being in mid-town as we are, with a corner on Via Condotta, which is a regular thorough fare.”

“But it’s an inside street. You’d have to come this way on purpose. It wouldn’t shorten ihe way any, would it? It’s like Via del Gorno, kind of. Only, there it’s noisy, because of the stables, and the people are different. You said so yourself.”

“True. They can’t be educated like the people here. They live right out in the street, at all kinds of trades—and just imagine what trades! . . . Well, all our things are here.”

“Yes, they’re all here,” I said. “And we’re not going to the end of the world.”

“True, true,” she murmured. She looked up at the windows, speaking as if on return from a long absence. “You were born up there, do you see? There, where the window’s open, that one on the right toward the drainpipe. It was eleven in the morning, just about this hour . . . We’ve left both our windows open. The others are all closed, of course,” she said, making her own replies. “It’s already cold. I hadn’t noticed they’d hung curtains. It makes the rooms darker, in this season, with curtains up. And your mother simply refused to understand. ‘Do you think Signor Masi has them?' I said to her. ‘With the work lie does, in the winter he’d be lighting his lamp at two . .

“Whenever you say,”I said to her.

I had taken hold of the handles and pushed iho carl forward. It was light, as I had expected. Granny walked along beside me with the pie-lure against her breast. She did not look back again, only quickened her pace, and, once alongside the cart, laid a protecting hand on it. And thus we left. We left our street for the new one: down Via de’ Gondi, across a little stretch of Piazza della Signoria, staying close by the walls.

Just a few minutes before I had reminded myself that Via de’ Gondi was a downslopc and that I might not be able to hold back the cart alone. It would be better, even though lengthening the trip, to go around by way of the Proconsolo and Piazza San Firenze. Then, Granny’s behavior and the things she was saying distracted me. I started off I he short way, and it w as as if Via de’ Gondi appeared before me out of nowhere, quite unexpectedly, the moment I turned the corner.

Once it got rolling downhill the cart wrenched at my hands, the draw bars tore at my wrists. I slid but still succeeded in hanging on, my body bent over the chain joining the handles. In an instant it was a flight — absurd, but none the less conforming to some physical law. As the cart dragged me along, I managed somehow to hold if on course, and upright, tilting it so that we glided — there’s no other word — up Via dci Leoni which, miraculously, was free of pedestrians and vehicles, until the moment came, hack on level ground again, to try to make the sharp turn into Via del Corno. Here the left wheel got wedged between the log and the siding of the corner urinal and came off. The barrow overturned . . . the ropes gave . . . and the stuff of our misery spilled out onto the paving stones.

The people of Via del Corno came running up, lifting me to my feet, lending a hand with the cart. One man appeared with a bucket of water, while a woman made space around me by waving a bath towel all before Granny arrived and sank down beside me. Then someone thought to go for our two chairs, since we could find them useful now; and already the accident was begetting gaiety. Dazed, but unhurl, I was not immediately aware of all the bust le.

“The boy’s skinned — but no harm done to the old lady.”

“They’re t he Carresis’ new tenants.”

“Nothing serious—just derailed.”

And already our cart was righted again, with all the junk that had fallen out restored to the drawers of the chests. Already Granny was explaining that the lady in the photograph was her daughter, the mother of the litlle boy; already she was sipping a litlle vinsanta someone had brought to pull herself together again.

And a woman was saying to her:

“In your room, it’ll be like having the clock on the Palazzo Veechio right on your night table.”

Translated by Ben Johnson