Nonna Bambi

Wow. Two posts in as many days. I haven’t done this since I was an enthusiastic blogging newbie. I don’t really have much to say today (especially since my little sister wants me to hurry up—it’s yet to be seen whether or not I’ll comply with her wishes. Goodness, I sound so high and mighty. Anywho…)

I’m experimenting with my blogging backgrounds. It’s quite exciting. I’m not sure how long this green-ish background will last, though. Hmm. I really have very little to say this evening. So, I guess I’ll post something I wrote a few months ago. A short story. I don’t do short stories very often, but they’re really fun. Here it is.

“Nonna Bambi”
By Me


They walked down the Campo de Forno, side by side, the granddaughter laden with bags of groceries, the grandmother with age. Often they were forced to step around a tourist squinting at a camera held at arms length, complaining about the light, the angle, and the subject, oblivious to the Venetians they were encumbering.
“Giovanna,” her grandmother plowed through a gaggle of Americans clustered around a stand of trinkets, “tonight, after we make dinner, will you play your piano for me.” It was not a question. Her grandmother never asked questions because she knew everything. Neither was it a request. When you are as old as she, on the home stretch, you don’t make requests. Her plans were your plans, or if they weren’t, they very soon were going to be.
The granddaughter had figured out her grandmother long ago and she loved every wrinkle in the old woman’s personality. She didn’t answer her grandmother, because an answer was unneeded. Glancing over, Giovanna grinned at Nonna Bambi. “Nonna” meant grandmother, “bambi” meant child. Nonna Bambi often said that once, long ago, she had been a child, back when history had been the present. She had lived in a time of bare feet, black and white, and newfangled ideas. A time Giovanna thought of as very foggy and mystical, and yet, somehow more real than the time that they lived in now.
Leaving the Campo de Forno, they turned onto Strada Nova, and the Canal Grande came into view, taxi boats motoring across the water. Giovanna had seen a tourist fall in yesterday. She had told Nonna Bambi of how the man had been pulled from the water by two men, one strong and one weak. She had related how ridiculous the tourist had looked hanging lopsided from the pier when the weaker man was unable to lift him up far enough to scramble onto solid ground. He had been enormously embarrassed when, with the help of his tourist wife, he had finally been hauled from the water. Giovanna had told her grandmother how the tourist’s cell phone had sizzled and died, how he couldn’t speak a word of Italian, not even “ringraziarla”, “thank you”, how his shoes had squelched when he walked away.
It was her grandmother who had taught her to care about what was going on around her, to take in details, situations, and ideas and to find the humor in all of them. However, Nonna Bambi never taught with words. Words spoken aloud were useful for one thing: getting what you wanted. On the other hand, the ways you could utilize words written in ink were innumerable. If words were all there was to teaching, it could be argued that Nonna Bambi rarely taught. Nevertheless, Giovanna had learned much from her grandmother by watching.
The water was devoid of tourists today, although that is not to say that the Canal Grande was devoid of interest. On the opposite shore—on the west side—a group of men with an undersized crane were attempting to pull a huge strip of metal from the water. It was a slightly nonsensical effort, as the metal was somehow caught underneath a dock, and all the men were really accomplishing was knocking over one of the poles that held up the dock. Wondering whose wharf it was, Giovanna laughed as the giant strip of metal slipped from the crane’s grasp and fell back into the water. Her grandmother had been watching the action as well, and now her brown face was crinkled into the smile her granddaughter loved to see.
Nonna Bambi looked like a gypsy, or so Giovanna imagined; she had never seen a real gypsy. Bright black eyes straddled a sun-browned nose, which, if you looked closely, still boasted one or two freckles. Her hair was silver, not grey, and it was long and curly, though the curls were somewhat tired-looking. Nonna did not believe in short hair. “If God wanted us to have short hair, he would have made us boys,” she liked to say. Nonna did not appreciate boys with long hair. “If you marry a man whose hair goes past here,” she would declare sternly, her hand at her jaw, “I will disinherit you and give my money to your mother.”
It was just a joke, both knew that. Nonna Bambi would never disinherit Giovanna and never would she give her money to Giovanna’s mother. Nonna’s daughter was different from her mother and Giovanna. Costanzia did not look at life the way they did. Dressed in the fashions that came from France and America, Costanzia wore expensive makeup and worked away from Venice on the mainland. Giovanna’s mother’s hair was straight, silky, black, and short. Often, it was very difficult to communicate with her mother, who didn’t understand the power of actions and the weakness of words. Turning onto Calle Zotti, the pair walked until they crossed the bridge over the Rio di Santo Sofia. The canal was a boundary. Once they had crossed it, the throngs of tourists disappeared and the street unclogged and grew quiet.
“What will we make tonight?” Nonna Bambi took out her key and unlocked the door.
“Sfogliata. She’s eating out tonight.” Giovanna answered. Her mother had a date with a Russian. Costanzia disliked the stuffed bread which Nonna and Giovanna loved.
“Good.” They stepped into the narrow hallway, flipping on the light as they walked into the kitchen. Pulling out a chair, Nonna sat down and bent over to remove her shoes. She never wore shoes in the house. Giovanna set the two bags of groceries on the counter and began unpacking them. Standing up, the old woman padded over to the counter in her bare feet and, switching places with the young woman, began unloading the bags as Giovanna crossed the room to the refrigerator and took out the dough. There was always dough in Nonna’s house.
She liked to feel it, smell it, shape it. She loved it because it had potential. “This unassuming lump can become anything you want it to be. Pasta, pie, loaf, sweet, salty, coarse, smooth. This,” she had said holding up the pasty mass, “is the staple food of the world. On dough, we have built countries, empires, kingdoms. Be like dough, Giovanna. Be dependable, be needed, be the sweetness and salt the world looks for.”
“But I don’t want to be moldable.”
“No,” Nonna consented, “but you also don’t want to be stuck in one belief. I’m not telling you not to believe or disbelieve in certain things, because there are some things that are right and some things that are wrong and no amount of believing can change that; I just think that everyone should be more open and not so caught in their own ideas. You can’t be right every time.”
There was one thing Nonna believed Giovanna never got wrong. Music—Giovanna understood it. Music could never replace words, but that did not mean that its value was any less than spoken syllables. Both words and music could speak to the soul, but where words often crushed spirits, music—true music—was capable only of lifting them. More than sound, music could connect one heart to another, could join the past and the present, could link this world and the one that was to come. It was powerful, making the one who could produce it more powerful still.
Giovanna played for her grandmother on the old brown piano, its three legs planted solidly on the tile, its top always open. Schumann concertos, Beethoven sonatas, and Chopin etudes, were scattered across the bench and on the floor behind the instrument. The day passed and the night progressed. In the big blue chair by the open window, Nonna Bambi sat with her eyes closed, but Giovanna knew she was wide awake. Her eyes popped open at the sound of the key in the lock.
Giovanna stopped playing when the front door opened. The sound of Costanzia’s heels clicked across the tile, stopping at the coat rack, then continuing on, and a moment later she appeared in the doorway wearing a little black dress. “You’re up late.” She saw the music spread across the floor and sighed, bending over to scoop up a handful of scores, “You need to get out and do things with other people, Giovanna. Being alone so much isn’t good for you.” Crossing the room, Costanzia went to the open window and pulled it shut, tossing her handbag into the empty blue chair as she did so.
Then she leaned against the doorframe and stared at her daughter, “Why do you think so much? I’m starting to worry about you.” Tilting her head to the side, she asked, “Please go out and spend time with people tomorrow. I don’t want you sitting in here alone anymore.” She waited for Giovanna’s nod of consent, then frowned concernedly and clicked out of the doorway and up the stairs.
Giovanna gazed at the blue chair by the closed window. Tomorrow she would ask Nonna Bambi to define the word alone.

Oy. That was really long, even though it was a short story... I think I've set a new record for blog length, for me, anyways. Alright, Goodbye now.