Sweet Dreams (10 page)

Emma came to meet me at the airport wearing a headscarf and dark glasses like a spy, as if to remind herself that our love affair was a secret one. But as soon as she saw me she forgot all her precautions and ran to meet me in front of the cameras of a local TV channel who were there to record for posterity the Toro's arrival. Our kiss was broadcast over the entire island.

Two days later Miss Sardinia took me back to Departures. She was no longer wearing her dark glasses and her headscarf. She told me she considered herself my girlfriend and planned to join me in Milan in the autumn. She added that, on his return from his world tour, The Hulk was definitely going to split up with her.

She didn't say she would split up with him. But by now ignoring uncomfortable truths was part of my way of life. I wrote the classic Hollywood screenplay and played it out to myself inside my head: The Hulk comes back from his trip unchanged, Emma realizes she no longer loves him and sets sail for her new life with me.

Instead, The Hulk came back from his trip and offered Emma everything she'd ever hoped for from him: a house, marriage, children.

We argued endlessly over the phone, but it was an unequal battle—and I wasn't fighting it on home turf.

One morning in November, my legs like jelly, I entered the Palazzo dell'Informazione in Milan to sign my new contract with
Il Giorno
. I'd just hung up my coat when the telephone on my new desk rang.

“Hi. I just wanted to wish you good luck. You're beginning a new chapter—and so am I. I'm getting married in three months' time. Please don't get in touch again—you'd only hurt me and yourself.”

I felt the same pain I'd felt in the Cubs' meeting room when Baloo had broken the news: an icy spoon turning in my stomach and hollowing it out—the looming shadow of death I'd spent all my life trying to escape from.

I went out into the street so my colleagues wouldn't see me. I walked across Piazza Cavour and along Via Turati as far as Piazza della Repubblica. A bench facing the traffic offered a refuge. I sat down and hid behind a newspaper. Tears trickled down my face, like drips from a faulty tap.

It was a pity the newspaper was a tabloid—too small to hide me entirely.

Some difficult literary moments followed, alternating between romantic despair and rhetorical posturing.

From this period in Milan I've kept a couple of written mementos. The first is Jay McInerney's novel
Bright Lights, Big City
, with its electrifying first sentence: “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.”

That “you” could easily have been me: a young man who's been dumped by the woman he thought he'd spend his life with gets lost in the Big City's nocturnal streets in search of himself, until he discovers that the real missing love he's never been able to come to terms with is the one for his mother, who had died of cancer.

The second piece of evidence belongs to the following
year and is the draft of a letter I wrote to Emma. Here's what I wrote, with some later remarks added in brackets:

Milan, 11th October

Hi Emma,

It's four o'clock, in the middle of the night—or rather in the morning—and I no longer know what sleep means.
(McInerney's influence, all too obvious.)

I'm writing this from the landing outside my small flat. The colleague I share the place with has gone to bed leaving the key inside the lock. I keep ringing the bell but he must be sleeping with cement earplugs in his ears.
(Did I want to make her feel sorry for me or make her laugh? I was describing some hapless wretch who couldn't even manage to get into his own flat.)

We left the editorial offices at midnight, copies of the paper hot off the press under our arms (as well as some nice female colleagues).
(A pathetic fib to try to make her jealous. In reality all ten of us were men, high on adrenaline and ravenously hungry.)

One of us had been invited to go for dinner by a rival newspaper but didn't have the courage to tell the others, so he just suggested that we go on ahead and he would join
us later in his car. Pity we spotted him at Porta Venezia heading in the opposite direction.

The restaurant was still packed and by the time we eventually managed to order our steaks it was already one o'clock. The food finally arrived at 1:30. On the bone and with all the trimmings. At two o'clock our Judas strolled in. He'd smeared his hands with grease to make out his car had had a breakdown. So we said to him: “You must be so hungry! But don't worry, you're in luck—there are two steaks left and a whole plate of chips.” He tried to protest he had a stomachache, but ended up having to eat again from start to finish—even a meringue cake for dessert—at which point I thought he was going to explode.
(The gall in trying to dress up coarse schoolboy pranks as examples of the “dolce vita.”)

I miss you, Emma. Not so much for what you've already given me, but for what you could have given me later, when I arrived in Milan on my own, lived and struggled on my own, had to do all my own cooking and rely on the kindness of the concierge to patch up my trousers.
(What I was really angry with her for was that she hadn't moved to Milan in order to cook my meals and mend my trousers.)

I've just had my birthday—my twenty-seventh, as you know. What you don't know is that
La Stampa
—that's
right, the leading newspaper in Turin—has offered me a job in its Rome offices. I'd like to talk this over with you. I've always wanted a lover who'd also be a friend and an adviser. I thought I'd found all three in you, Emma.

I honestly thought I deserved you, after the kind of childhood I'd had. Do you remember I told you my mother lived in America, as the head of a multinational cosmetics company?
(Since leaving school, I'd given my mother a series of high-flying promotions.)

Things weren't exactly like that—one day I'll explain. But I still thought you were meant for me. And that you too needed me. But perhaps I don't believe that anymore.
(She'd chosen to marry another man, after all.)

I'm sorry, I'm writing a load of crap, and it's nearly five in the morning. The thing is—I thought you might need someone who'd write you a load of crap at five in the morning.
(McInerney, again.)

I thought I could give you a world full of bright amusing people. As well as another world, smaller but also larger: just the two of us. A world called happiness, Emma.

Happiness is being able to make love at any hour of the day, so long as it's with you. Happiness is learning
to grow together, being stubborn and quarreling, but still being able to move on, despite the knocks to our pride, to another higher phase of our love for each other. Happiness is agreeing to meet in a café and turning up late.
(A strange notion of happiness.)
It's you being worried about something but the two of us solving it together. It's a bracelet I give you as a present, a shirt of mine you wash.
(After mending it, I imagine.)

Forgive me for these idiotic ramblings. I just wanted to tell you that I'm not missing the company of a woman. I miss you. You, who are a woman—and what a woman. But you're something more than that: you're the other part of me.

It's unfair perhaps to make fun of my old self. There's a dignity about real feelings which protects them from ridicule.

I wrote dozens of letters like this one. I even posted some of them, but never received even a postcard in reply—and there are a lot of nice postcards you can send from Sardinia. I've got one which shows the beach where we first made love. I had sent it to myself. Every evening I'd look at it and, after committing every detail
to memory, I'd close my eyes so I could smell the sea and taste our kisses.

The idealized vision of Emma's face gradually faded, but never entirely. It took me two years to get over it—in other words to get back to feeling as bad as I did before I met her. Grief can open up windows into the self. It's just that I insisted on looking in the wrong direction.

The experience of losing love once again was bad for me. I was driven by a fierce desire to deny the past. I never replied to a letter—the last I ever received—from Sveva. Moved by a kind of self-destructive urge, I even stopped answering phone calls from My Uncle, the only person who made me feel I still belonged to someone or to something.

So I left to take up the new job in Rome—Rome, the great bitch who licks all our wounds.

I keep a round box in one of the bottom drawers of my desk. In its glory days it housed three layers of Danish biscuits, but a long time ago it was converted into a safe for a lifetime's worth of souvenirs.

Working up from the bottom, there's my first school exercise book, with the picture of a panther on the cover and on the first page the incipit which marks the beginning of my literary career: “Its autum and the leves are faling.” Then my mother's frayed headscarf, the one with the white spots I used to flick against the walls when I played
tick-tock
. Then the worn pipestem I used to keep in my mouth after I'd given up smoking Camel Lights, whistling through it like a referee or a locomotive whenever I felt the need to inhale.

There's more: a photo of the vain Alessia at a fancy-dress party (she's dressed as an Egyptian queen); the note a girlfriend sneaked into one of my course books for Private Law: “However boring the lecture you're listening to might be, just think that this evening we'll be together”; the letter I never sent to Emma; her face in a Polaroid photograph: her fiery red hair has faded to a gentler rosé blur.

The objects from the time I spent in Rome are at the top of the pile: the first item is a cover from
Playboy
magazine with the photocopy of a Buddhist prayer stapled to it.

The Buddhists of Rome met every Thursday evening near St. Peter's Square, in a house which ironically looked out onto the bastion of Christianity.

It was a large gloomy palazzo which had belonged to an old noble Roman family. The lift didn't work, and the steps of the staircase were very shallow to allow carriages to drive up them.

There wasn't a horse-drawn carriage in sight when I first went (the service had been suspended some centuries ago), so I had to sweat my way up the stairs to the sixth floor. But climbing is good for the soul. After all, I
consoled myself, not even Moses had taken delivery of the Ten Commandments down in a cellar.

As I slipped off my shoes outside the door, an organ-like sound took me back to the church services I'd been to as a boy. Here it was produced by voices chanting a mantra in unison.

Feeling suitably abashed in spirit, I made my way into the prayer room and, like the others, sat down on the floor in the lotus position, until a very unspiritual cramp in my calf muscles forced me to disentangle my legs and stretch them sideways, making me recline like a bayadère.

The leader of the group declared the meeting open. He had an unkempt beard resembling Che Guevara's and had probably been one of his followers in his youth, later channeling his revolutionary fervors on himself rather than society at large.

Each of those present then told the others about the benefits Buddhist practices had brought to their lives. The room contained a full spectrum of human types: the only thing which had brought them together was the experience of grief.

I was struck by their refusal to play the victim. A young woman who'd been a drug addict told us how at the nadir of her existence she'd taken to thinking that even the trees moved away from her to deprive her of shade. But
prayer had restored her energy to live. She knew now that the causes of her troubles were to be found within her.

After each confession, there was a round of applause. There was also applause when a beaming university student told us that reciting a mantra had helped him solve the problem of where to park his car.

The applause, how to park your car—it was all a bit too much for me. But just as I was thinking this, Agnese decided to introduce me to the assembled company.

“He's got a problem with the father figure . . .”

I'd met Agnese among the alleyways of Trastevere, the winter after I'd arrived in Rome. After finishing work at the newspaper late at night, I would saunter off to join the company of the Eternally Hopeful—actors looking for a director, directors looking for producers, producers looking for money. Their tribe would move from party to party, terrace to terrace, succeeding only in eliciting a vague promise of “we must meet up for dinner sometime.”

Agnese acted for a living but, more than that, she was an actress through and through. She was blond, sensual, unintentionally comic. She'd been in a successful film,
had inspired adolescent fantasies by appearing once on a cover of
Playboy
wearing only a leather bikini and had tried out a whole range of thrills, with a marked preference for the most dangerous ones. She was about to turn thirty when an encounter with Buddhism saved her from the bonfire of the vanities and turned her into a soldier for truth.

It was the first time my bedroom has been used also for religious practices. Each evening Agnese would kneel in front of a small portable temple to recite her mantra. She always emerged completely refreshed from these intimate encounters with herself. She'd awoken my interest in the Buddha using that irresistible technique—a mixture of indirect allusions and doleful looks—women adopt when they want you to do something without asking you explicitly.

I took my time to say yes, coming up with nonexistent religious scruples, until I finally agreed I'd go along with her to a meeting.