Sweet Dreams (11 page)

“He has a problem with the father figure . . .”

“With the father figure? More with the mother figure,” I objected.

“With the mother or the father?” the woman who took care of the incense (and who owned the flat) asked.

“I've got problems with both the mother figure and the father figure,” a young woman, whom I thought I might have seen on TV, remarked.

“Me too!”

“And me!”

“You see? Here you're never alone,” Agnese summed up, her photogenic face beaming with a wide beatific smile.

“But I haven't any issues with my father. I mean, I've got a few, but not important ones.”

“Is that so? Then why do you always forget to pay bills and don't know how to change a lightbulb?”

“Do you have to tell everyone my personal stuff? What's my father got to do with paying bills and changing lightbulbs?”

“Haven't you always told me he's a very practical man? Your refusal to be practical is a way of criticizing him. It's your way of showing you're different from him.”

“My problem is that I'm in love but I'm not happy.”

I don't know how that remark came out. Perhaps it was Belfagor who inspired it—he'd seen the topic of conversation was bothering me and I wanted to change it.

Everyone's eyes turned on Agnese with a questioning
gaze. Except for Che Guevara's, who was looking at me instead.

“You've made an important discovery. Love isn't enough to make people happy. Happiness doesn't come from the world but from the way we relate to the world. It doesn't depend on wealth or health or even the affection another person feels for us. It depends only on us. We can all experience happiness. Let's repeat now: I can be happy.”

A chorus of voices intoned: “I can be happy.”

Che turned back to me. “You agree?”

“In theory, yes. But life isn't a mantra for people who are out to have a good time. We all have an intimation of the injustice that has been inflicted on us, which we cannot accept. It shows there's no such thing as Providence, because if there were it wouldn't have allowed it to happen. In order to endure the pain we've had to arm ourselves with cynicism to protect ourselves from the truth.”

“How old are you?”

“Nearly thirty.”

“It's the age when you first take stock. I know what you're feeling: I've been there myself. You feel as if you've been living on a downwards slope which has brought you to where you are now. As if you're the product of choices you've had nothing to do with but were made by the people
around you. Was your mother difficult to deal with when you were growing up?”

“Yes, she was . . . quite difficult,” I lied (but not much).

“My mother is a complete nuisance too!” said the student with the beaming face who'd solved his parking problems.

“You must learn to accept your mothers,” Che Guevara continued in a subdued tone that made his words seem less peremptory. “Only by accepting your mothers will you learn to accept yourselves and to approach life without a sense of persecution, but with that vigilant nonchalance which is the secret of a life well spent.”

“But how do you learn to accept yourself?” I asked.

“Each time you kneel down to recite the mantra you must try to reconcile yourself with your mother. Only then will you be able to see the truth as it really is, without the mists which conceal it from the eyes of the weak in spirit. If you want to change the effects, you must change the causes. Life will respond. It always does.”

After that evening, all the questions which had been stored away in the loft came down out of their packing
cases. Why did my mother have to die so young? Would I have been a different person, a better person, if I'd grown up as part of a loving family? Given that your mother is the first person who teaches you what love is about, was I destined to go on having to learn for the rest of my life?

Pray and you'll find the answers, Che Guevara had said. I prayed in Japanese, but the answers didn't come. So I started to look for them in books, in songs, in endless wearisome conversations with myself.

One night, after we'd made love, Agnese curled up inside my arms. I tried to synchronize my body to the rhythm of her gentle breathing. Before I spoke to her I wanted to make sure she was asleep.

“I want to be brave and tell you something—you, at least,” I whispered into her armpit. “My mother died when I was nine years old. She did all she could to stay alive until the end, but she couldn't. And I still can't accept she died, you see? It's unfair, and I've still got to understand why. In those Greek tragedies you love so much there's always someone who takes revenge and restores the equilibrium that has been destroyed. But who can I take revenge on? On God who killed her and took her away from me? How can I, if I don't know where he lives or what he's like? And
in any case your Buddha says that revenge doesn't restore equilibrium, it just creates new imbalances.”

The morning after I woke up to a smell of coffee and Agnese's face smiling over me.

“I had a strange dream last night,” she began. “There was a liar in my bed who was telling me the truth.”

“Did you have a soft spot for him, a little?”

“I told him to stop thinking over things all the time and to start feeling.”

“Good advice. And what does the chef recommend for breakfast this morning?”

“Something to set you on the right path again.”

She handed me a tray. On it there was a cappuccino, a croissant and the photocopy of a Buddhist prayer.

We need to learn how to control our own minds rather than letting them control us.

My friends, let a new faith fill you. Keep polishing your lives like a mirror, day and night, never pausing to rest.

Learn to dominate your self, learn how to control with skill the reins of that wild horse, the mind. And then you will be free to run with the wind . . .

But I'd never learnt to ride, and the mind kept unsaddling me. I was too accustomed to trying to work everything out in my head to be able to surrender to the spiritual.

I sought refuge in the familiar world of work: that circle of journalists, politicians and intellectuals who choose to frequent the privileged milieu of Rome's airiest, most elegant terraces. If you want to avoid any possibility of self-examination, exchanging tidbits of gossip with the powerful is a sure-fire method for doing so.

And yet not even there did I ever feel I was one of them. I specialized in feeling ill at ease wherever I went. Among those interested in the spiritual life, my sense of the comic would surface, like a petulant little voice which prevented me from taking them seriously. Among intellectuals, I
would feel trapped in their arid conversations, my soul parched and thirsting for the infinite.

There's nothing from this period in my biscuit tin. What can be found there, though, are the remains of a burst balloon wrapped round an old passport, the one with the visa stamp of Maybe Airlines.

A unique train of events resulted in my finding myself, in the summer I turned thirty-three, in the phone box of a military airport, wearing a bulletproof jacket and talking to my wife at the other end of the line. I'd got married four months earlier—but not to Agnese. Our love affair was more of a bridge than a landing point. No angry scenes accompanied our separation: we left each other with a sense of mutual gratitude and exhaustion.

I'd been rescued by a colleague who behaved abrasively with the people around her but was very sweet to me. She had read all my favorite foreign authors—in her case she had not needed translations—and at that moment was giving me a speed course in autogenic training on the phone.

“You're the most courageous man in the world!”

“I'm sorry, I think you've got the wrong number.”

“Do you want me to call you a coward?”

“At least you'd be right. I'm pissing myself—and believe me, I am not speaking metaphorically . . . Look, I can't go to Sarajevo. It's under siege. There's no light, no water, no gas. People are shooting each other in the streets.”

“I know, and I'm really scared too. But I also know you can do it!”

“And what have I got to do with this war? Three years ago I was still a sports journalist. And when I started to write about politics the greatest risk I ran was having coffee with some minister.”

“That's just it: other people see you as just a humorist, only capable of seeing the funny side of things.”

“I don't give a damn about what others think of me.” I lied.

“Get on that plane and prove them all wrong!”

So with my goddess of war pushing me on, I adjusted the bulletproof jacket round my belly and climbed aboard a UN bomber plane full of food provisions. I dug out a space for myself at the back from among piles of tinned tuna.

The emotional high only lasted until takeoff, and was already running low when we approached Sarajevo, as the German pilot pointed out to me the Serbian antiaircraft artillery camouflaged in the scrub.

“If they shoot us down, tomorrow the United Nations
will issue a sharp protest,” he told me in stilted English.

To which my reply, screamed in Italian, was: “What the hell am I doing here?”

The bulletproof jacket didn't protect me from a shameful fear of dying. I tried to fight it back by talking aloud to my mother:

“I'm a coward . . . Don't you think I am? Believe me, I'm a coward. The real problem is that it was cowardly of me to get married.”

My tone had all the sincerity which comes at decisive moments.

“It's not my wife who's the problem. She's committed and determined—you heard her on the phone. It's me. I should have taken a climb, but instead I've taken a shortcut. I tried to change my life without changing myself. I told myself the fable of love between kindred spirits and the union of two solitudes. Then there's her family, which is stable and welcoming: a real family. Have I ever had anything similar, since you left us? But if I continue like this, Mom, I won't grow up. Even at our wedding I wasn't a bridegroom: I was the usual motherless child. I felt weighed down by shame during the ceremony. I feared the reactions of the guests when they found out you only existed in the lies I'd fed them over the years. Even though I have to admit your absence didn't seem to
upset them—they seemed more interested in the buffet.”

This self-examination session was carried out at altitude under the threat of antiaircraft fire: I was really pushing the boundaries of psychoanalysis.

“I'm still the same depressed elf who walks on tiptoe keeping his head down . . . Yet when I placed the ring on her finger, I thought I was looking at heaven.”

The pilot and copilot didn't understand Italian and were giving me strange looks. Perhaps they assumed I was talking into a portable recorder? I doubt it. From the way they grinned, it would seem they thought I was mad.

“But perhaps, Mom, I only got married because I was scared. Yes, that's it. I was scared of losing something which I realize now I could easily do without—that illusion of stability and safety which is just a pale imitation of the sweet dreams you used to wish me when I was a child. Please let me land alive in Sarajevo and I promise you I'll make my marriage take off . . . I'll shake off all the old habits, immediately. I'll start again from the simplest feelings.”

For example, by being nice to Matt, the Scandinavian UN soldier with a horned helmet who welcomed me to the airport, among dilapidated hangars and ghostly warehouses.

Well, “welcomed” is not the right word. He actually grabbed me by the scruff of my neck, dragged me heavily
along the runway, out of range of the snipers and into customs, a mud trench with what remained of a battered desk standing in it.

Matt sat on the table and stamped the first empty page in my passport—Maybe Airlines.

“It's the entry visa,” he chuckled. “Do you like the name? I invented it.”

I gave him a cigarette in exchange.

“You don't want one?” he asked, taking a greedy drag.

“I've just given up.”

It was true. I'd smoked my last cigarette during my honeymoon, on top of a hill we renamed Mount Respiration in honor of the occasion.

All the same I'd brought with me a multipack, on the assumption that in wartime health concerns take less of a priority. But the idea came to me of inaugurating my new life with a generous gesture. I turned my backpack upside down and a pack of ten Camel Lights tumbled into Matt the Viking's arms. He thanked me in his unintelligible language, but his smile was very eloquent.

Another example: being nice to Salem.

The hospital in Sarajevo floated like some phantom ship enveloped in clouds of dust, among blackened buildings and torn-apart streets. A nurse persisted in cleaning the floors with an inevitably dry mop, while a horde of mothers hardened by desperation pursued the doctors along the corridors and seized hold of their white coats, with pleas and threats.

It was one of those situations where even charitable organizations are forced to choose their priorities. The United Nations had arranged for an airplane to fly to London with forty children in desperate medical conditions. The doctors were going through the wards drawing up priority lists, which changed all the time because each day some of the patients died. A place had just become
available, and all the mothers were fighting like lionesses, prepared to do anything to get their children to make progress on this absurd waiting list.

Room 51 in the pediatric ward looked directly onto the street since a bomb had made a hole in the walls and smashed out the glass in the windows. There were no more drips or clean sheets or food. Families crowded round the narrow beds. There was a bed in the far corner which had no visitors in attendance: in it lay a little boy with hair so black it seemed blue.