My friend Fabrizia’s Balia died last year. She was in her nineties and, although we never met, I knew her well. I knew her without even knowing her name. She was Balia, just “La mia Balia”, and I knew her from listening to hundreds of telephone calls. Calls that Fabrizia made while I was a passenger in her car. The calls were much the same and all they talked about was love. Love dressed up as conversation with concerns about each other’s health, about a cough that was improving, about how Balia was sleeping and what she had been eating. Sometimes they talked about the weather and sometimes about the past, about Fabrizia’s mother or her family home, but really all they were talking about was love. I was occasionally included in the calls as coughs are my forte, and so I was asked to confirm that this or that cough would soon get better. The words of these calls did not matter at all. Affection was shared and love exchanged until the two of them were warmed and reassured by love that would tide them over until the next car journey and the next call. The calls always ended slowly, neither wanting to stop: “ciao mia Balia, ciao Baliona, ciao, a presto, ti chiamo, ti chiamo”.
Balia is the Italian for a wet nurse who breastfeeds another mother’s baby. Her mother could not make milk, and so baby Fabrizia was dying until Balia, a poor woman, whose own baby had died at birth, saved her life. Balia continued to feed her, becoming part of Fabrizia’s family. After two years, the baby was reluctantly weaned and Balia returned to her own simpler home while continuing to work for Fabrizia’s family. In this way, Balia always kept close to Fabrizia, who was, in a way, her first-born child, a child well fed with milk and love. A year or so later, Balia had a baby girl of her own, named Anna Maria.
Many years passed. The two girls, Fabrizia, Balia’s milk-daughter, and Anna Maria, her blood-daughter, grew up in different worlds, sometimes sharing Christmas reunions, but otherwise they hardly met. When they were in their sixties and living alone, they resumed telephone contact due to Balia’s health issues. In her nineties, Balia was often poorly with occasional hospital stays, leading to her eventual death. A year after Balia died, Anna Maria fell ill and Fabrizia asked me to check that the illness was being properly handled, asking me to be tactful as there was a risk of jealousy between them, two milk sisters, a jealousy that might run deeper than their different backgrounds and lives, Fabrizia being a successful professional and Anna Maria an office cleaner.
We arrived at Balia’s family home in time for lunch, an unkempt house in a depressing suburb where she had lived for most of her 90 years. I shooed away a number of cats before entering a small room, damp with steam from two bubbling pots on the stove. The room was dark with a little light coming through the glass panels in the door and one tiny window. Further on was a darkened bedroom. There was a cooker, a wide shallow sink, a TV and a large rough wooden table laid for five. A strange painting of a dragon hung on the wall and scattered on shelves, the mantelpiece and windowsill were animal ornaments, some ceramic, some wood and others plastic. I particularly remember three knitted turtles and a grey mouse that squeaked when I pressed it. Anna Maria was wearing an apron over a tatty dress and was as warm, soft and welcoming as the delicious cooking aromas in the room.
She had made no effort with her clothes, hair or face, but her roundness, smile and total lack of social pretence put me immediately at ease. Human to human. She sat me down by the log fire beside the cooker and began to tell me about her illness. Such encounters are semi-formal question-and-answer negotiations with the doctor trying to gather scraps of information from a flow of events, all important to the patient, but many medically irrelevant. This time, the flow was interrupted again and again by the needs of the broth that had to be stirred, tasted, salted and strained. Then there was the issue of timing for the tagliolini, hand prepared that morning, and far more important than recalling a spasm of pain.
“Please tell me about the pain. Where was it?”
“Just here. No, a little bit further round, on the right just under my breast. Here…no perhaps…wait a moment…” She dropped the six tangled nests of pasta into the bubbling broth.
“Yes. What I was saying? About the pain. You asked where it was. I remember well. It was here in the kitchen. I was frying some onions, no, garlic…yes, it was onions. Anyway, it hurt a lot, so I went to the hospital. It was Thursday.”
Fabrizia interrupted. “No, it was Wednesday. I remember that you called me from the hospital and I was at the hairdresser, and I think your pain was on the left.”
“No, it wasn’t. It was on the right just here.” Again, she prodded herself under her right breast.
I tried to get into the conversation. “Can you describe the pain? Was it worse when you took a deep breath?”
“No, certainly not. You see, I couldn’t really take a deep breath because it hurt too much. It will be ready in a few minutes. Do you like cheese with your pasta? I made it especially… But it definitely hurt when I coughed. At the hospital, they told me to stop smoking… The food was disgusting, almost impossible to eat…and I was so hungry.”
She was right. It was ready in a few minutes and very good, too. She had made the pasta with eggs and wanted me to enjoy it and to have more and more. Afterwards came a wonderful display of boiled meats, all steaming and flaking easily off the bone. Did I want oil or perhaps mayonnaise? There was also mustard, but no wine. “I never drink wine.” How I enjoyed the warmth that she radiated across the table, the importance of the food, the unimportance of her medical history, the marginal relevance of the packet of cigarettes that she proudly showed me—only three remaining.
“I have stopped completely and only keep these in my bag just in case, but I will never smoke them. I have another six packets that I will not smoke either… Are you sure you don’t want some more meat? Would you like some orange juice? I will press it now. It will be good for you.” Then, turning to Fabrizia and nodding at me. “Lui è simpatico, no?”
I read through four detailed pages of the hospital report. As part of the ritual of modern medicine, she had undergone a vast number of tests, some of them necessary, but many just part of a thoughtless routine. When she entered the hospital, she was an overweight smoker who took no pills. When she left, she was a dieting ex-smoker with diabetes taking five different medicines, injecting herself with insulin and pricking herself daily to measure the sugar in her blood. One of her pills had the side effect of causing diabetes. I looked at the diary of blood sugar measurements she had kept meticulously since leaving hospital. Under-educated perhaps, but efficient, yes, capable, yes, and not stupid. She was unconvinced by all the treatments and thought they were not needed. I agreed. My only contribution was to suggest she throw away the reserve packets of cigarettes. I encouraged her to keep her hospital follow-up appointments, something she had wanted to avoid. Would she eat less and walk more? Only for a while. Can you—should you—interfere with a happy person and their food? Should she really stop eating? Food was something she was good at, eating and feeding other people made her happy. Cats too.
Later, an elegantly dressed woman with cascading ringlets and fine leather boots arrived with a boy, her 12-year-old son. Intelligent, professional and loving, she was Balia’s granddaughter come to check on me, the doctor, and make sure I was fully informed and did not interfere too much. All the time, while talking, she kept kissing her son, telling him how much she loved him. The three women, Fabrizia, Anna Maria, her milk sister, and Balia’s granddaughter, sat and talked about Balia and the past, while the boy squeezed the mouse to make it squeak and shone a torch in our faces to make us ask him to stop.
Eventually we left, disturbing the queue of cats at the door who were waiting for re-admission. The two sisters embraced, feeling closer than they ever had before. Like the telephone calls in the car, in a small way I had been useful, as a walk-on part in the theatre of Balia’s love, expressed through milk and still alive through four generations.
