Sweet Dreams (12 page)

His solitude caught my attention. An ancient rubber pacifier protruded from his mouth, totally unsuitable for his age. A bloodstained piece of cloth on his chest rose and fell as he breathed. He was clutching a burst balloon in one hand.

I stroked his face. A shrill cry burst from him: “Mama! Dada!”

“He's calling for his mommy and daddy,” said Doctor Joza. He was actually a nurse, but everyone called him doctor. He'd won his promotion on the field.

“Salem is an orphan. His parents died in a bomb attack a month ago. And then he was shot in the stomach by a sniper.”

In other words, in that city there existed a human being who, because of some fatuous obsession with race,
had hidden behind a parapet and taken aim through his gunsight at a little boy in the street playing with a balloon and had shot him in the stomach.

“Is he on the list for London?” I asked.

Dr. Joza shook his head.

“He hasn't got a mother to fight to get him on it.”

It was as if a starting pistol for a hurdle race had fired in my head.

“I'm going to try and get him out of here.”

I went round tormenting UN officials and British diplomats, but all of them already had their own lists. Out of politeness they added Salem's name to the bottom.

My last hope was the wad of dollars hidden away in my bulletproof jacket. I had to pay out a hundred in order to get a name—Commander Chuka.

An interpreter took me to my appointment through spotlessly clean streets. In Sarajevo the street cleaners stole a march on the war.

Like everyone else in the besieged city, we walked along one side of the street only, the pavement which was out of aim of the besiegers' fire. Every other step we'd look up at the roofs to check for the presence of snipers. Continuous
bursts of rifle shots in the background accompanied us like sinister music. It was impossible to tell where they were being fired, or who was firing against whom.

Commander Chuka was waiting for us in a smoky bar. The walls were covered with student graffiti harking back to slogans of 1968. He'd been able to buy the bar from the proceeds of bank heists. In a previous existence he'd spent long periods in prison for armed robbery, but when the whole of Sarajevo turned into an open-air prison he'd dished out firearms to thirty youths in his neighborhood and proclaimed himself their leader.

What distinguishes the human from the inhuman is a sense of justice. Commander Chuka wasn't good. But he was just. He'd made sure the old people in the area got to safety and he'd fought a battle to get hold of a hundred kilos of flour which he'd then presented to a group of orphan children who'd taken refuge in a cave by the river. Every time he went to see them in his Mazda sports car, bright red and obviously stolen, the kids would kiss his hands, clasped to the machine gun he always carried round with him.

I told him about Salem and pushed a bundle of dollars across the table towards him.

“I'll take it, but not for myself,” he said. “It'll help to oil the wheels.”

I went back the following day, and he showed me a list with all the official stamps required. At number 11—my favorite number—was Salem's name.

Before I took my leave he handed me a red balloon.

“Give it to the little boy from me.”

So it was that I entered the saddest hospital in the world with a smile on my face and a balloon tied to my finger.

I crossed room 51 and saw a crowd round Salem's bed. For a moment I hoped they might be Salem's Muslim parents, but they were fair-haired like the little boy wearing braces who was lying on the bed and gobbling instant mash.

Dr. Joza plonked a hand down on my shoulder.

“We've done it!” I burst out. “Salem's on the list! By the way, which ward have you transferred him to?”

“Salem died this morning.”

I hugged the balloon so tightly to my chest it burst in my hands.

“Shall I take you to see him?” Dr. Joza asked.

“Thanks, but I can go on my own.”

I shut my eyes and saw him. As a teenager, in his prime, as an old man—all the things he would never be—and then again as the little boy in the hospital bed, with a hole in his stomach I'd not managed to fill in time.

Once more I'd deluded myself that life was a story with
a happy ending, while in fact it was just a balloon filled with my own dreams and destined always to burst in my hands.

In Sarajevo I spent a month in hotels with no water and no electricity, meeting children who had lost their mothers, and their limbs, stepping on a land mine.

My own childhood drama was reawakened by those sights. It was the drama of my adulthood that no longer stirred any emotion in me. What earthly use was this life of mine which I was so scared of losing?

Before I went back to Rome, I helped the interpreter move some books out of his bombed-out house. I saw a copy of Victor Hugo's
Les Misérables
in French and looked for a sentence which I knew must be somewhere towards the end.

The protagonist Jean Valjean is dying, and his adopted daughter, Cosette, is begging him to fight to get better. She doesn't want him to die, but Valjean, a just man if ever there was one, reassures her.

“Ce n'est rien de mourir. C'est affreux de ne pas vivre.”

“Dying is nothing. What's terrifying is not to live.”

Once I'd returned to my routine existence, I plunged back into my usual way of life. After a while I no longer kept looking up every few steps to see if I could spot snipers on the roofs of Trastevere. Even the memory of Salem began to fade. Belfagor had provided me with a shield of egotism and irony, and I hid behind it to avoid any sense of grief.

I forgot the promise I'd made to my mother. After a difficult year, my marriage broke down one evening, when my wife announced that her biological clock had sounded an alarm.

I stepped back against the doors of the wardrobe, as if to put a tangible distance between her impulse and mine. All my life I'd regretted not having a family. And now, when I could have had one, I realized I was terrified by the idea.

It's not really true that you desire what you've never had. When you're not well, you prefer what you've always had.

All victims have a tendency to repeat the old familiar formulas of the past. My past evoked Christmas dinners with Mita and Dad. Whenever I thought of a son, I never saw him as an heir, but as a potential orphan.

My protracted silence had worn My Uncle down, and he stopped trying to contact me. But while I was in the throes
of my marriage breakdown, he told my father he would like to see me again briefly. He was ill and didn't have much time left to live.

We met in my father's apartment, where we had spent so many afternoons talking about the Toro,
tick-tock
and the books which only he had really read.

He'd lost all his hair because of the treatment he had undergone, but his eyes were the same, bright blue, like Mom's.

I should have asked him to forgive me and shown him unstinting love. Perhaps if I'd made such a gesture all my problems would have dissolved away. As it was, my embarrassment prevented me from saying anything more than small talk. I'd grown used to frequenting the terraces of the powerful in Rome and regarded my relatives' simplicity with ill-concealed annoyance. Thinking back on it, my behavior was disgusting.

When My Uncle died in his bed like Jean Valjean, his wife sent, to my address in Rome, a matchbox my mother had used to light her last cigarette before her final collapse. Someone had found it on a windowsill, and he had preserved it like a relic.

So I found out that on the point of dying from a heart attack, my mother had lit a cigarette. She must have been mad. Like me. But, unlike me, she was also good.

It was women who helped me out of the problems I'd got myself tangled up in, perhaps to make up for their mass desertion of me during my childhood. Everywhere I turned I was met by a smiling female face: the friend who found me a place to rent in her block, the cleaning lady who resembled the kindly babysitter I'd longed for as a boy, the bed companion who accepted me for what I could give her—very little, to be honest.

The rapid blooming and fading of my marriage had had a subtle knock-on effect on my sexual appetites. Sudden arousal would be followed by an equally rapid loss of interest.

Detaching myself was complicated by my victims' dedication. They couldn't get their heads round my emotional
ups and downs. I was like those men who lack the willpower to leave the woman they no longer desire and allow themselves to be pushed out of the relationship as if it was she who was rejecting them.

After two years of getting myself into unspeakable messes, I made a decision to keep away from women in order not to ruin anyone's life. I drew strength from this voluntary abstinence. I began to feel I could survive on my own. One summer evening, convinced I was done with love for good, I accepted an invitation to a party on a Roman terrace. My life's soul mate happened to choose this occasion to come up behind me unannounced.

I was holding forth to a couple of friends on how not even the vulgarity of certain persons (I was referring to a colleague who had the habit of serving lasagna onto plates with his bare hands) could destroy my faith in human progress, when a glamorous voice sounded out somewhere just behind the nape of my neck.

“We're not evolved monkeys: we're fallen divinities!”

As I turned to see who'd spoken, I remember thinking: here's the usual crazy gate-crasher who's helped herself to a bit too much gin. Then I saw her and realized it wasn't only her voice which was glamorous.

After a silent appreciation of her fine cheekbones, I made the mistake of replying to her.

“How do you know you're right?”

“How do you know you are? The idea we've evolved from monkeys is just a platitude scientists have accepted because they can't come up with a better explanation!”

“And might that not be because a better explanation doesn't exist?”

“If you're using just your head and your five senses you're obviously not going to find a better explanation!”

“And what should I be using instead?”

“Your heart!”

My reader will no doubt have noticed that I was trying to advance through this philosophical jungle by waving feeble question marks in the air, while my interlocutor cut her way through with exclamations.

The girls I'd been talking to made off at the first sign that blood was about to be spilt. But in fact there was no clash between us. I merely greeted her revelations with a series of ironic grimaces and raised eyebrows.

Elisa told me about Atlantis, a civilization more developed than our own which had destroyed itself through excessive greed. Its ruin lay deep in the ocean, hidden from our eyes, but not from our consciences, if only we could use them.

I used mine and realized that this mixture of spirit and cheekbones had managed to dismantle the armor I'd worn so carefully all these years.

The friend who'd brought her to the party later told me she was his girlfriend. It took months for me to find out it wasn't true—when all I needed to do was ask her directly. When I finally did, by some kind of instinctive mutual agreement we immediately became a couple, almost as if we'd fallen in love with each other in some previous life—in an Atlantis attic perhaps.

I won Elisa over with an intimate supper at my place. She arrived under the kind of hat a silent-film diva might have worn, encased in a bright-orange woolen skirt which stopped at the knees to reveal a pair of jet-black tights disappearing into long boots.

She brought along two frozen organic pizzas, as if predicting what would happen to my ready-cooked veal roulades, which emerged from the microwave in a liquid state.

When a couple first gets together, you can see the purpose of the relationship in their gestures. Elisa came into my life to change the menu. But it wasn't clear what I was supposed to do for her. Amuse her perhaps? The
expression on my face as I extracted the roulades from the microwave had sent her into fits of laughter.

When we went into the sitting room, I felt so much at ease with her that I decided to tell her everything. I don't mean the usual lies, but something quite amazing for me: the truth.

I placed an album of family photographs in her lap and sat on the arm of the chair to guide her through it.

“Here's me when I was very little with my mother . . . Don't say what everyone says: you were so cute: what happened to you?”

“I prefer you as you are now. I wouldn't like you with puffy cheeks and a curly head.”

“But something really did happen to me. Look: my mother isn't in any of the later photographs. She died when I was nine.”

“I'm sorry.”

She brushed my hand with her long pianist's fingers and left them there.

“She was ill with cancer, but became so weak that she died of a heart attack on New Year's Eve.”

She gave me a certain look, the kind of look a woman gives you when she's decided to trust you.

I tried to touch her knee with my free hand, but ended up digging her in the thigh with my elbow.

“The fact I've got no mother . . . is that a problem for you?”

She recoiled slightly, but more because I'd just managed to elbow her than because I was motherless.

“I know lots of people who are orphans even though their parents are alive—they've never been loved or understood.”

“Are you scared of dying?”

Typical. I'm perched on the arm of a chair, waiting for the right moment to kiss the woman I might spend the rest of my life with, and I ask her if she's terrified of snuffing it.

However the question didn't seem to upset her—or startle her.

“I came quite close to dying when I was a girl. Since then I know what death is and I no longer think about it. I know it's a transition from one dimension to another, from the material to the immaterial. The ancient Egyptians called it emerging into light. When you think of it like that, it seems less scary, don't you think?”