Sweet Dreams (6 page)

Once, during my nightly inspection, the sight of a large box in my father's study awakened a memory from my earliest childhood. My godmother had come up to me looking perplexed.

“Where's your Mommy? I can't find her.”

“Silly, she's in the kitchen!”

“Are you sure? Go and check.”

I went through all the rooms calling for her, increasingly nervous and upset. I even looked to see if she was inside the cooker. I finally plucked up the courage to enter the holy of holies, strictly off-limits—my father's study—but all I'd found was a large box under his desk.

Then I started to cry, and my mother jumped out of the box and hugged me.

“Surprise, surprise!”

But I was furious. Children are serious-minded: they hate stupid jokes. They know that sooner or later they become real.

After my missile attack on him, my father decided to send me to see a psychiatrist. He was actually just a general practitioner who'd studied psychology in his spare time. For my father to have sent me to a genuine psychiatrist would have meant admitting that I was genuinely mad.

Dr. Frassino's monologues were punctuated with long, exhausting silences—and I would come out of those slow-mo sessions more jittery than when I went in. I don't remember anything else about him except for one of his declarations:

“One's personality is formed during the first three years of life. Losing your mother at the age of nine doesn't lead to deep-seated psychological deficiencies, though it may reinforce certain underlying tendencies.”

Let me translate: if the little one had lost his mom while still a toddler, he would go on throwing stones at his dad. But as he was a little older when she died, the worst thing that could happen is he'd tie one to his father's neck one day.

This was a time when everyone thought they had the right to pronounce on who I was. Father Skullhead had made us take a kind of crossword puzzle which he said was an aptitude test and declared that the secondary-school course best suited to the development of my talents was Accountancy. Even my father had to laugh.

I needed a factory producing good role models which could show me the way—and I found them in biographies. My passion for reading about the lives of others stems from the unconscious desire to discover how they managed to survive their first experience of grief.

I was obsessed with the idea that the loss of my mother when I was still a child would mark my existence forever and wanted to be reassured this was not the case. I remember reading that the Buddha and a Mafia godfather had both lost their mothers when they were children. But they'd taken different routes afterwards. Perhaps I too might come up with an acceptable compromise.

But I'd have been happy just to keep my feet on the ground. Instead I used to walk about on tiptoe like some kind of elf. The soles of my shoes were worn away only in front: my heels hovered in midair, quite uselessly.

I walked on the tips of my toes and kept looking down at them, since I was incapable of looking up, towards the sky.

I had good reasons not to. The sky frightened me—and so did the earth.

My Uncle came up with a piece of sensible advice: he told me to lift my chin while walking, as if I was trying to draw a line between my chin and my belly button.

I tried it out, making a real effort. I ended up walking straight into a lamppost.

In essence, the story of my life is the story of my attempts to keep my feet on the ground while looking up at the sky.

I may have gone around on tiptoe, but I could play football well enough with the other kids in the neighborhood. On summer afternoons I'd meet up with my acne-ridden peers from the area in the car park of an autoparts factory.

We divided up into teams of Toro and Juve fans; we tossed for the one Inter supporter. He was a few years older than the rest of us and took all the headers.

These were matches played until we dropped with exhaustion—and were almost invariably called off for reasons of “force majeure”: a workman confiscated the ball because we dented his car; an old lady averse to noise threw buckets of icy water down on us from her balcony.

One evening, I was returning home after a memorable game—play suspended at 15–all because the ball had been impounded—when I was surrounded by a gang of thugs on motorbikes—lots of them—all of them much bigger than me.

“What you been doing to my little sister?” the gang leader inquired, grabbing hold of my sweaty T-shirt.

“Me?”

“Yes, you, shitface. What you done to her, eh?”

“You're mixing me up. I don't know your sister. I don't know you either.”

Something long and black flashed out and turned into pain. I think they'd hit me with a chain.

I fell onto the pavement, and the bikers started a bizarre motocross, going round and round my body in ever decreasing circles.

“You want money? Take it!”

I threw them my wallet, but remembered too late it had nothing in it.

Their leader was not best pleased.

“My little sister was right. You're a real shitface.”

“Shitface,” “his little sister”—these were the only two concepts stuck in his head. Any effort to broaden the topics of our conversation seemed pointless.

His motorbike was poised to run over my legs when a man in a gray suit crossed the street. With a jerk of my torso I managed to lift myself up from the pavement and run towards him.

“Help, they're going to kill me! Take me home, please. I live near here.”

The man in the gray suit took hold of my hand and we started to walk, with the bikers at our heels. Their leader had immediately sensed the man was a coward.

“Beat it, my friend, we need to give shitface here a little lesson. He treated my little sister bad.”

“Don't listen to them!” I pleaded.

“What did you do to her exactly?”

Now the bikers had started spitting at him. He took a few more steps and then suddenly let go of my hand.

“I'm sorry, I've got a son too . . . I've got a son too . . .”

The sight of him escaping was so pitiful that my
torturers lost interest in hurting me. I scurried like a mouse into the safety of a baker's shop.

I soon forgot my attackers' faces. But the man in the gray suit often reappeared in my nightmares, together with an unanswered question: why did everyone abandon me—not only my mother, but even people I didn't know, when I most needed them?

The web of lies I wove to hide from the world what my life was lacking grew thicker. Until finally, a beam of light penetrated the rotten tangle.

On the morning of my thirteenth birthday, I woke up to find on my bedside table an LP of Barry White in wrapping paper.

“It's a gift from Sveva.” my father told me.

“Who's Sveva?”

“A colleague of mine.”

“She wears leopard tights?”

“Not that I'm aware of.”

“And why has she given me an LP of Barry White? Never heard of him.”

“Nor has she. She asked the shop assistant to recommend something.”

“And who recommended Sveva to you?”

“Are you being serious or just joking?”

“It's a serious joke.”

“I've never understood your weird sense of humor.”

Dad liked telling shaggy dog stories. There was a Frenchman, a German and an Italian . . . He was good at telling them. At the seaside, during the summer holidays, everyone roared with laughter—Frenchmen, Germans and Italians. Everyone except me. I was always ready to rebel against his authority, but it still filled me with shame to see him put it aside and play the clown.

Sveva liked listening to my father's stories. She liked my father too. And she didn't dislike me either.

She came round to take a look at where we lived. The hostile glances she exchanged with Mita earned her a lot more brownie points, as far as I was concerned, than the Barry White LP.

Months later, in the summer, we—just the two of us—were going out to get an ice cream. When we got to the crossing, she took hold of my hand. I froze. I wasn't used to that kind of contact.

“Are you scared you might like me?” Sveva asked, giving me a kiss on the cheek.

A kiss. On my cheek.

“You kiss like a mother,” I replied.

“I'll never be what your mother was. But I wish I'd known her, a lot.”

“You'd have been friends. But I don't think she'd have liked to see you kissing Dad.”

We laughed and laughed: we simply couldn't stop.

Sveva had a grown-up son whom she'd brought up on her own after her husband had died. Not even for Sveva was I ever going to be at the top of her list.

Despite this setback, our alliance produced some notable results. We persuaded my father to pack Mita off to retirement and send me to the more academically challenging liceo classico—so much for old Skullhead's aptitude tests.

I remained in the same institution, but by promising to improve my marks and retelling the famous epic of the Chicken-Liver Risotto, it was agreed that I needn't stay on each day after classes were over and would therefore also be exempted from the culinary delights of the school canteen.

As if by magic, my afternoons and my bedroom were mine again. I divided up the time between poring over my Greek homework and letting off steam with games of
tick-tock
.

I'd introduced a variation into the game. I was no longer a football champion, but a rockstar. I'd put an album by Genesis—they and Pink Floyd competed for first place as my favorite band—on the record player, take hold of the magic scarf and—hey presto—I was transformed into Peter Gabriel.

In my head, I was on perpetual tour. Millions came to watch me—but as soon as I'd identified the one person among them all who interested me, I'd breathe softly into the microphone (the scarf I was clutching): “The next song is for you . . .”

Then across my mind's eye pictures of my double would flow, bathed in light as he strutted up and down the stage singing “The Carpet Crawlers.” I didn't really understand the words, but Peter Gabriel's voice and the music were enough for me.

Meanwhile, thanks to the Toro, I also actually won the
scudetto
. It happened one Sunday afternoon in May. I was
there—along with seventy thousand other people—as Graziani crossed the ball towards the boots of one of Cesena's defenders.

A normal person would never have tried a diving header anywhere near the boots of a Cesena defender. You would need to be a cross between an angel and a hero to do that. Luckily, my Pulici was that angel.

He made his Serie A debut the year my mother had decided to retire. He looked like an underfed Pinocchio and had large, fearful eyes. He could run so quickly he'd arrive ahead of the ball. But whenever he managed to kick it, he always ended up sending it sky-high or banging it against the advertisement hoardings.

My father said his feet needed realigning. Someone must have passed the tip on to the team's coach, since he immediately got hold of my angel-hero Pulici and made him train all day in front of a wall. In order to get his feet realigned.

Everyone forgot about him for a time, except for us children. The adults would go and watch the regular starters training, but we would huddle round the clearing where the thin Pinocchio played all by himself kicking the ball against a wall.

On one occasion the wall had had enough and sent the ball back right on Pulici's nose. My Pulici sank to
his knees and buried his face in his hands, as if to hide the fact he was crying.

At this, I plucked up courage and shouted “Keep at it, Pulici!”

I don't think he heard me. Torino supporters shout softly—it's one of our peculiarities. But the fact was that from that day onwards his shots became more and more accurate, and his leg muscles more and more powerful. Until one Sunday the coach decided, without bothering to inform me, to select him again for the team for an away match in Cagliari.

I hadn't been able to go to Cagliari, as Dad was ill in bed with the flu, but when the radio commentator said that Pulici had taken the Toro into the lead I threw open the windows and yelled: “Keep at it, Pulici!”

I was so overjoyed I nearly fell out.

From then on he never stopped scoring. But all his feats were merely a long prelude to the Sunday afternoon when Graziani crossed the ball towards the boots of one of Cesena's defenders.

The angel swooped down to Earth as though he'd just spotted something he'd dropped a while ago. He buried his face in the defender's bootlaces and released the imprisoned ball, sending it on a journey which ended in the back of the net.

I opened my mouth to shout, but no sound emerged. My Pulici was running towards me with outstretched arms and closed fists. I saw the garnet-colored banners ripple like flying carpets and then lifted my gaze to the sky. They were all looking down: Gigi Meroni and “those great lads,” up there, waving massive banners. Behind them, standing just slightly apart, there was a woman recognizable only by her blond hair who joined in the general rejoicing by elegantly clapping her hands.

I was stupefied with happiness. I'd been down to the depths too often: now I wanted to coast along on the surface, under the illusion that I was just like all the others.

Belfagor might have had something to say about it, but he'd grown less pressing of late. Perhaps he too was stupefied.

But the empty space in the family portrait remained a problem. Sveva lived with her son, and each evening Dad and I would go and eat with them. In the winter it was a kind of torture to fall asleep in front of the TV only to be woken up to go back home in the icy nighttime streets.

No one called on us. And certainly not my classmates. I didn't want them to find out that my home was smaller
than theirs and with no sign of a mother. But there was always the risk that one day one of them might buzz at the intercom. I'd therefore taken down the photograph of my mother from the shelf and put it out of harm's way in the bottom drawer, underneath a pile of music magazines.