Sweet Dreams (5 page)

Every so often my father would threaten to send me away to boarding school—for example when I left my dental braces on my plate in a restaurant. Or whenever I asked him to sack Mita and replace her with a human being.

I became an avid reader of stories about orphans. I kept
Nobody's Boy
and
Oliver Twist
under my pillow—but they weren't any comfort. I even envied the main characters. They were desperate, but so too were all the characters around them. So they never felt themselves to be different in the way I did when I ended up in a Catholic secondary school for boys full of kids from families much better off than mine.

I needed the presence of someone like my primary school teacher—and instead I got Father Skullhead.

His nickname came from the bone-chilling shape of his skull. The religious order to which he belonged had demonstrated the wisdom it had accumulated over the centuries by packing him off to Libya from where, following Qaddafi's purges of the Italian community, he escaped back to Italy in order to purge me. Whenever I rebelled against some tyrannical exercise of power—and everything seemed tyrannical to me—his hard, square knuckles would come down on the nape of my neck. Baring his gums like Mita, he would hiss, “I know you don't like me . . .”

It was true: I didn't like him. I was the antihero in a novel Dickens had never had the guts to write: the story of a little boy's life in which all the women around him are inexplicably removed so he is forced to grow up with a dried-up nanny and a priest who liked walloping boys round the head.

Dad had enrolled me in a private school because it was the only one he could find which would keep me incarcerated until the evening, so that he didn't have to bother himself about me while he was at work. It was an advantage not to have to see Mita in daylight, but there was a price to pay: the evening meal in the school canteen.

This is how I picture to myself the seventh circle of Hell: a gloomy rectangular hall smelling of unwashed feet, where a serving assistant not overly conversant with the
rules of personal hygiene plonks potato croquettes down in the dishes with his bare hands; somewhere in the dark background outsized pans bubble away with a potion which has the magic powers of making hungry little boys willingly decide to fast.

The lids were taken off the pans and a new fragrance wafted through the room: the good old smell of unwashed feet was replaced by a filthy stink of rotting cheese. As the content of the pans was ladled into the tureens, Father Skullhead presided over the supreme rite by intoning the prayer with which we gave thanks to the Lord for our daily slops—risotto with chicken livers.

The first time I attempted to eat it I vomited it up, amazed to see there was no difference at all between the puddle of sick on the floor and the food which remained in the plate—a dark mush in the middle of which, floating about like the victims of a shipwreck, were the entrails of the animals that had been sacrificed in some terrifying ritual carried out by Father Skullhead in the inner sanctum of the kitchens.

For he it was who'd invented this exquisite dish: it was obvious from the zeal with which he patrolled the tables checking that we all had enough. Whenever he came across some delicate soul who'd just lost his appetite, down the knuckles would come.

I'd never called on my mother to help me out. It was as if I'd put her into deep freeze, in a dimension I couldn't reach. But the risotto with chicken livers forced me to make an exception.

“What should I do, Mommy? Give me a clue.”

Strange: I'd always hated that expression, “Mommy.”

A bright idea popped into my head when Father Skullhead was only two tables away. I needed to stay cool and move quickly. Holding my breath, I lifted the plate piled high with chicken livers and passed it over the heads of my neighbors to Rosolino, a boy capable of eating anything—he'd happily munch sweet wrappers and pen caps which had already been chewed by others.

Even Rosolino was disgusted by the chicken livers—but not enough to interrupt his continuous cycle of grazing. He greedily ladled up three huge spoonfuls into his mouth and handed the empty plate back to me just a second before old Skullhead bent over to give it, through his glasses, a beady-eyed examination.

Rosolino continued to empty my plate meal after meal, until on one occasion—one very dark day—he somehow dribbled back into the plate some black, half-masticated glob.

“Did your mother never teach you to wipe your plate clean?” Father Skullhead breathed over me.

He took a piece of bread, mopped the plate up with it and pushed it into my mouth.

I repelled the alien mouthful and spat it out: it landed on the cassock of the kindly provider. I was suspended for two days and Dad didn't speak to me until the summer break. We communicated by gestures.

Those were the years when students set fire to schools and attacked the police. I'd spat chicken-liver risotto over a priest, but no one regarded me as a hero.

Rosolino came from Sicily, and had arrived in Turin just at the right age to fall into Skullhead's clutches. If you believed his stories, his father made millions. But our classmates—fair-haired local boys—said he smelt. This, together with his southern accent, was enough to gain him admission to the school's “Rejects' Club.”

Our shared experience of disgrace gave rise to a friendship which would come to an end each evening when we returned home on the schoolbus. We used to play at flipping Panini cards of our favorite football stars on the soft leather seats. If you could flip a card over so it landed picture-side up again you won the right to keep it.

Rosolino cheated, and so did I—but not so skilfully. Insults flew between us.

“Southern peasant!”

“Bastard!”

I didn't know what the word meant, and when I found out my friend had already moved to another city.

I'd told Rosolino—as I'd told everyone—that my mother never came to fetch me from school because her work required her to travel a lot. She sold Indian cosmetics.

Top marks for originality, wouldn't you agree? There must have been an occasion when an agent selling beauty products had called on Mom. I vaguely remembered a lady painting her nails pink. The Indian connection, on the other hand, was my very own dash of poetic license, inspired by recent events.

The Christmas holidays were like one long Sunday, made worse by the ghosts of the past. We never spoke about Mom, even when we visited the cemetery, where Dad preferred to focus on practical matters: buying artificial flowers because they lasted longer, wheeling the mobile steps to the appropriate vertical row of burial niches and climb up to the topmost one, where the photograph of the departed smiled out, making sure not to spill water
from the vase (but what was the point of the water if the flowers were artificial?), then climbing back down again and wheeling the steps back to the exact spot from which he'd moved them.

We then stood there gazing upwards without speaking for a few minutes, before returning home to enjoy the rest of the holiday—my father in one room, me in another, and Mita in between watching television. At Christmas we turned down My Uncle's invitations—after all “we didn't need anyone's help”—both to dinner on Christmas Eve and lunch on Christmas Day. We didn't even need to find a separate set of excuses.

The football schedule took a break over the New Year, so we needed to find another way to while away the time. Dad was struck by the bright idea of going on a package holiday to India—from New Delhi to Benares, the holy city on the banks of the Ganges with its famous steps going down into the river, crowded with all the earth's outcasts. With our arrival, they could at last put up the “Fully Booked” sign.

There were lots of mothers in the holiday-tour group. Everywhere we went you'd hear their anxious instructions: don't touch this, don't go near that animal, stay clear of those beggars. Dad did his best to copy them, but he just didn't have their sharp eye or tenacity. The
result was I always ended up in scrapes. I was probably the envy of the other boys on the tour.

I wish I could say I brought back some glimmers of spirituality from this pilgrimage of a widower and an orphan to the land of mysticism—but the only snapshots in my mental travel album consist of a series of humiliations, all of them profane.

Dad offering to buy a round of drinks for the waiters in the hotel—it was New Year's Eve—wherewith a party of high-caste Brahmins got up and left the room, giving us dirty looks on the way out.

Dad in a pink turban like some fake maharajah clambering up onto an elephant while I, dying from embarrassment, hid behind the column of a Hindu temple.

One of Dad's friends turning on a compatriot of Astérix who had managed to stab him in the hand with a fork in the daily scramble for the buffet and declaring in Franglais:
“Vous, français, très rude. Je suis proud to be italien!”

Dad, again—I came across him in the hotel corridor planting noisy kisses on the cheeks of one of the women in the holiday group. She was blond and her short legs clothed in leopard tights poked out from her skirt like a pair of pythons.

At the time I pretended I hadn't seen anything, but as soon as we got home I wrote him a twenty-page letter—the gist of which was contained in the concluding sentence: “If you marry another Mommy, I'll leave home forever.”

I didn't get a reply. But the python woman disappeared into the jungle, never to return.

Real life had shown itself to be a bloodthirsty tyrant, so I asked for political asylum in the land of fantasy.

The sitting-room walls echoed with my radio football commentaries, improvised aloud while I flicked against their surface a blue headscarf with white spots that had belonged to my mother.

The flick produced a dry little noise, which led My Uncle to call the game
tick-tock
. He was the only person I'd initiated into the workings of this strange ritual enacted behind the closed doors of the sitting room.

As soon as I took hold of the miraculous scarf, my mind's eye would fill with pictures of a footballer who had my name and who managed to combine pure class and brute force. Each time he scored a goal, my double
would wave his arms in the direction of an area of the public stands, where a woman recognizable only for her blond hair responded to the tribute by elegantly clapping her hands.

Whenever there was someone else at home—normally Mita, who was in most of the time—I took care not to raise my voice or I put a record on to cover the sound. But sometimes she would burst in unannounced and find me red in the face and holding my mother's headscarf in my hands.

“You're crazy. Just wait till I tell your father.”

I used to sweat a lot. Day and night, summer and winter. Sweating was my way of crying.

Belfagor hated tears. Like all the monsters which attack our souls, he was convinced that everything he did was for my own good. He wasn't capable of giving me any love, but he could stop the world hurting me. All I needed to do was shut it out. He hated the truth: his mission in life was to show how I could escape from situations which might involve suffering. But even so he'd not quite given up on the idea of scraping together
whatever odds and ends of affection were available by encouraging my self-destructive tendencies in order to attract the attention of others.

The most harmless of my neuroses—looking at my knees all the time—ended the day I started to wear long trousers. But in the meantime another more dangerous one had emerged.

As a little child I had welcomed the arrival of all kinds of germs with enthusiasm. My mother was an indulgent nurse. There was nothing better than having to spend weeks in bed with my face all covered in spots while she sat by my bedside and read me fairy tales or hummed songs. But then the nurse had abruptly handed in her resignation and I'd realized that even being unwell would no longer be the same thing.

So Belfagor filled me with the terror I might become ill. He'd enter my head unannounced and hiss his peremptory orders.

“Do such and such a thing or else you'll catch a bug.”

The things I had to do were never the same. Stopping in the middle of crossing the road to take two steps backwards
and one step diagonally. Pinch a passerby's bottom and then make a run for it. Aim a ball at the small painting of the Madonna in the headmaster's office.

They were usually actions which involved skills of precise physical coordination. Acts of pure vandalism were less frequent, and in any case were always followed by immediate repentance: once I spread glue all over a bus seat, but then I sat down on it myself.

The situation got worse one summer day at the end of an excursion into the countryside with Giorgio and Ginetta. We'd eaten our packed lunches and Dad stretched out on the grass for a nap. He was snoring. The nape of his neck gleamed about two feet from a tree trunk.

I was lolling in the grass at a safe distance, flicking a stone, when Belfagor spoke.

“You've got to throw the stone between the tree trunk and your father's neck. If you don't, you'll get ill—really really ill.”

Too agitated to take aim with the proper consideration, I threw the stone: it hit my father right on the nape of his neck.

He reemerged from his snoozing limbo and lunged at me like some wounded animal.

I stumbled up a steep path with him in hot pursuit. With every step I took I was panting fit to burst.

“But, Dad, you don't understand. It was a test, and I've flunked it—and now I'm going to get ill!”

“You bet you will! Just wait till I catch you . . .”

But he didn't catch me, and the phobia of falling ill faded. It was replaced by a fear of burglars. Every evening I would go through the whole house inch by inch to see if they'd managed to get into the linen cupboard or were inside the washing machine. But perhaps I wasn't looking for thieves, but for what they'd stolen. Something that had been stolen from me.