The Seamstress of Sardinia by Bianca Pitzorno

Author:Bianca Pitzorno
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

My Tin of Illusions

‘WE POOR FOLK need to help each other out,’ Nonna always used to say, ‘because if we wait for the rich to come to our aid in times of need, we’ll be in trouble.’ For her part, she never refused to share a piece of bread, even if it was the last we had, with a neighbour who was struggling, or to stay awake watching over a sick child while its mother finished a job that absolutely had to be done by the next morning. She had a large circle of friends in the neighbourhood, women on their own like her—elderly women who had lost their family in the epidemic, young widows with little children, or young mothers who had husbands they couldn’t count on because he drank or couldn’t hold down a job. There was nobody to whom she wouldn’t offer a shovelful of charcoal, a piece of advice, a bowl of soup, a scrap of fabric to patch a skirt that was falling to pieces. She was reluctant to seek help herself, because she knew their abject misery, and besides, she had her pride: ever since she was young, it had meant a lot to her to be able to look after herself and her own. I had picked up from her the same need for independence—I absorbed it from her example without ever realising it. If it was absolutely essential for me to ask a favour of somebody, I tried to repay them as soon as possible. For example, in the case of my neighbour who lived off what she could earn taking in ironing, when every so often I needed to ask her to cook me some soup, or clean the stairs on my behalf, or send her little girl to make a delivery, anytime I couldn’t pay her I tried to get her some work, or I would pass on to her an old piece of clothing that had been given to me by one of my clients.

Zita and Assuntina were truly poor. There had been no man on the scene since their husband and father, respectively, had been killed in a brawl between drunks. Mother and daughter lived in a basso, a damp hovel below street level with no windows, which you reached by going down three steps. In such a perpetually dark environment it was not easy to iron the linen of the upper classes and deliver it back to them immaculately white, unsullied by soot, and not burnt by the sparks that went flying when you took the hot iron out of the embers. Garments that also needed to be starched, like men’s shirts, were a real problem. Zita needed to have at least three irons always at the ready on the stove so that she wouldn’t waste precious time waiting for one that had cooled down with use to heat back up again. If she’d had a courtyard with a water source, where she could keep a washtub,

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