Sweet Dreams (7 page)

One evening in winter, when outside the snow was falling, my father called me into his study.

“What's happened to the photograph?”

I avoided his gaze.

“What photograph?”

“The one which matches that.”

He pointed to the photograph of my mother enthroned behind the glass doors of the bookcase, standing like a sentinel in the midst of the serried ranks of biographies of Napoleon.

“I don't remember where I've put it.”

“You're ashamed of your mother?”

I didn't say anything for some time, I'm not sure how long—but nothing compared to the seven years he'd never said anything to me. Then I said: “Tell me what happened when she died.”

Just before the summer, Mom found out she had cancer. She was operated on too late: the tumor had spread.

All those months when I grew convinced she no longer loved me, radiotherapy was wearing her body down, but she still made an effort to hide anything which might have alarmed me. She was always sad, but not on her own account. She was sad for us. She didn't want to leave us on our own.

On New Year's Eve, at dawn, my father woke up with a start and found she had gone into my room and was sitting on the bed. She was tucking in the blankets.

She'd reassured him: go back to bed, I'll stay here a little bit longer. The last image he had of Mom was of her head bent close to mine, while outside the window snow was falling.

Probably she'd suddenly felt unwell while she was in my room. A violent pain must have led her to take her dressing gown off. She crossed the corridor to reach the sofa in the sitting room, but she didn't manage to get there.

Dad had woken up again, almost immediately, as if he'd sensed something had happened, and he'd found her body huddled on the carpet.

He thought she might be still alive, but that illusion vanished when the ambulance arrived and the emergency doctor gave his verdict: my mother had suffered a massive heart attack.

She'd always had a weak heart, and the radiotherapy treatment, together with the spreading cancer, had weakened her resistance. But she'd fought to the very end in order not to leave us on our own.

“You should never be ashamed of a mother who did all that,” my father said.

I went to look out of the window at the stadium across the road, covered in snow.

Perhaps she would have seen the snow falling. As the day of her death dawned, it was everywhere: in heaven as on earth.

I wondered if she liked snow. I didn't know. I knew nothing about her. This was the ideal prerequisite for turning her into a myth.

Mom became my angel “without fear and without reproach,” while the devil was the mother of one of my rich classmates. I would always see her at the end of the school day, draped with studied elegance against the boot of her jeep. Her hair was tinted blond, her lips painted an aggressive red, and her close-fitting jeans disappeared into long boots as black as her evil sunglasses.

I had a kind of nightmare. Over the Christmas holidays I would wake up at dawn and find that my room had been locked from the outside. I looked through the keyhole and managed to see a throne in the hallway and, sitting on it, the jeep blonde. She had attacked and killed my mother and invaded our house.

Two strangers were holding my father under the arms
and dragging him in front of her. The blond woman spoke. Her voice was icy.

“Give me the keys of the boy's bedroom, or I'll kill you too.”

At this point Mita appeared, baring her gums and clutching a key.

“I've got a copy of the key, Countess!”

The blonde got down from the throne and marched towards my room.

I sneaked into the Submarine and through the spyhole of the sheet kept my eye on the door.

It opened. Across the threshold a pointed black boot appeared, and then . . . my mother with her kindly smile holding the teatime tray.

The same smile she had in the photograph I'd hidden away in the drawer.

Her portrait now took pride of place among the posters of Pulici and Peter Gabriel. I was sorry it couldn't speak to me: I would have asked her advice on a mysterious phenomenon which was beginning to intrigue me more than Genesis or even the Toro. Girls.

As a happy little boy, when life seemed like an endless
visit to the sweetshop and like some playboy I was always surrounded by women, the feminine held no mysteries for me.

My first love affair occurred one summer when we were staying at a hotel in the mountains. She had plaits and was called Cristina. She was seven years old and had an elderly lover—Antonello, aged ten.

One day Cristina came running up to me, squealing. Antonello had pushed her off the swing.

To punish him, I head-butted him in the stomach—he was tall and I couldn't reach any farther—and he repaid the kindness by beating me to a pulp with methodical precision. But it was more painful when I saw Cristina and Antonello together again on the swing. Now I think back on it, perhaps I wasn't such an expert on women then as I thought.

But Mom was there, and my wounded pride was soon forgotten. After a week of frenetic swinging, an irrevocable crisis occurred in Cristina and Antonello's relationship.

On the night when the first man landed on the moon, Cristina burst into the TV lounge, walked straight past the armchair where Antonello was sitting, as if he didn't exist, and came to speak to me.

“Let's go outside and look at the moon.”

“But you can see the moon here!” Antonello's mother
objected, pointing to the gray grainy images flickering on the small screen.

Leaving aside the fact that Cristina had asked me and not her son, how could anyone prefer to watch television rather than the sky?

Mom seemed to read my thoughts.

“That's all right, just remember to put a pullover on.”

And she gave me one of her famous hugs.

“Go and have nice dreams. Both of you have nice dreams. When you dream together dreams are even nicer.”

Cristina and I stretched out on the hotel lawn looking up at the sky. The moon was three-quarters full and shone in the middle of a circle of stars, looking far closer here than it had done on the TV screen.

I pointed out to Cristina a mark darkening the wrinkled surface.

“Look, there's the spaceship!”

“That's not the spaceship. That's Arrosto,” she replied, wincing in disgust at my ignorance. “Can you keep a secret?” she whispered. “Mommy told me that a long time ago an Italian went to the moon. He was called Arrosto, and he was riding on a hipposniff.”

“Your mother doesn't know anything about it. My mother told me that Johnny Nose-snatcher lives on the moon.”

“Johnny Nose-what?”

“If you tell a lie, he comes and cuts off your nose and takes it up there.”

“Why?” the startled Cristina quavered, touching her nose to make sure it was still there in place.

“To eat it, obviously. He's eaten mine a dozen times.”

I thought I'd managed to reassure her. But she suddenly screamed. A second mark had appeared on the moon's surface.

“Johnny is going to eat Arrosto's nose!” she exclaimed.

“I told you the story about the hipposniff was a lie.”

“Shush!”

She grabbed hold of my hand, which made me feel peculiar.

From the half-open windows of the hotel you could hear the voices of the TV commentators quarreling about the exact moment of the landing.

“It's touched down! . . .” “No, it hasn't touched down yet!”

Cristina shook her head.

“Poor Arrosto! By the time the spacemen arrive, Johnny will have eaten his nose.”

“Don't worry. It'll grow back.”

You see, I've always had a weakness for happy endings.

Since those days of the moon landings, I'd only been going backwards. I dragged my gloomy and clumsy self around a stage overcrowded with men. I was approaching the season of first love without knowing the slightest thing about women.

Dad's contribution was to send me back to Dr. Frassino, the pseudo-psychiatrist. He asked me to drop my pants and checked the size of my penis to make sure my childhood trauma hadn't shrunk it.

“Everything in order,” he said, “you'll get a lot of joy from it.” Here endeth the lesson of sex education. As for my sentimental education, Father Nico's maxims took care of that: “When a woman looks at a horse, she sees only a horse. But men perceive the horseness of a horse.”

Father Nico taught Greek, Latin, religion—in short, most things. He regarded women as decorative objects, like the swirls of icing sugar on a cake. He used to say that before we got married we should make our fiancées write an essay. But it wasn't clear who would mark it. Father Nico himself, probably.

Had he been born in the Middle Ages, he would have been a Knight Templar—but he was happy enough being the Catholic version of the Übermensch. He slept three hours a night and read continuously, even while eating and walking, busily cultivating implacable obsessions.

“I am all for freedom of choice. If you're right wing, then vote for a right-wing Christian Democrat; if you're left wing, then vote for a left-wing Christian Democrat. The important thing is to vote for a Christian Democrat: against divorce and against abortion.”

The year we took our school-leaving exams, on the eve of our first electoral vote, we organized a mock election in the classroom and wrote the results up on the blackboard.

When Father Nico saw that almost everyone had voted for the RP, he gave us an impassioned speech. As far as economic matters were concerned, he was in full agreement with the Republican Party—yet, it was still a secular movement, and it was his duty to warn us of the possible
risk that it might take the wrong path in ethical matters. No one had the heart to tell him the initials stood for the fervidly anticlerical Radical Party, which in Father Nico's view was an unassailable proof of the Devil's existence.

In order not to take time away from the lessons, he subjected us to oral tests between seven and eight in the morning. I loved Greek—the dance of the gods—but hated the study of Latin—a march of soldiers. I developed a genuine passion for Homer, even though it was he who'd inflicted Polyphemus on me as a little boy, whereas I considered Virgil to be an overrated court sycophant.

One winter morning at seven o'clock Father Nico asked me about Book VIII of the
Aeneid
, which I had proudly disdained even to open. The pages were still uncut, and I had to tear them apart using my fingers as a paperknife.

“Translate from line 26 onwards.
Nox erat et terras animalia fessa per omnis
.”

“
Nox erat . . .
It was night . . .”

“Go on.” And he spat out a piece of one of his fingernails: he had the habit of biting his nails and then distributing them freely in the vicinity.

“
It was night
 . . . Does that even scan?”

“What did Horace say?
Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus
. Every now and then even Homer nods.”

“Please leave Homer out of it, Father. He's in another class. Virgil doesn't just nod, he snores and splutters . . . An illiterate gladiator could have written ‘It was night.' Or the Met Office.”

“Go on with the translation!”

“I've never understood why Dante in the
Divine Comedy
chose Virgil as his guide instead of Homer. Yes, I know, Homer was blind. But even so he could have had Plato, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides . . .”

“A bold but interesting theory. I'll give you half a mark extra, two and a half instead of two.”

“Just because I didn't like a line of Virgil's?”

“No. Because you didn't even make an effort to read the following lines. And because you deliberately started an argument, thinking I'd forget to ask you about them.”

I assumed my classic madman's posture (closed fists, staring eyes, jutting lips) and jumped down from the teacher's platform, pursued by one of Father Nico's flying fingernails.

“Come back here!” he shouted.

And, in a lower voice, “I know life was harsh on you when you were little.”

“Really? And who told you that?”

It certainly hadn't been me, since I was still sticking to the story about the agent for the Indian cosmetics firm.

“You think you can pay life back by refusing to grow up. But you only succeed in hurting yourself. You're always ready to start an argument, always on the attack.”

“If once in a while someone would bother to give me—rather than Virgil—a bit of support . . .”

“Yes, that's right, you've got your excuses all ready! The poor victim surrounded by a hostile world.”

“It's not an excuse. If I . . .”

“Only failures use the word ‘if '! You achieve greatness in life
in spite of
. ”

But he still increased my marks: he gave me a 3–.

Amid the rustle of cassocks, the only form of female life was the daughter of a colleague of my father's who gave me drawing lessons (I'd not progressed much beyond the depictions of giant bunches of grapes). She had a vast wardrobe of miniskirts and black tights. I was always bending
down pretending to tie up my shoelaces in order to get a glimpse of her legs under the desk. She disappeared the day she found out I was wearing loafers.

I used to dream about an ideal sister wearing a miniskirt and black tights who would bring some relief to my solitude. Perhaps she wasn't a sister: more a girlfriend, or a mother. All three of them combined. I never understood why some of my classmates and their girlfriends were continually quarreling. Instead of rowing with them, they could have lent them to me.