“Did you have fun, Virginia?” I asked, helping her into her coat.
“Yes, Papa. Will you make me pizza tonight?”
“There’s not enough time for the dough to rise tonight, but I’ll make it for you tomorrow, I promise.”
She smiled and we said goodbye to everyone and rushed up the stairs as Maria Carla looked at us as if to say, “Please take me with you, even if it’s in the trunk next to the body!” And the birthday girl’s mother was yelling at her husband, who had just eaten the last mortadella sandwich without asking.
Garrett (Or, on Common Sense)
I have two dogs. A few years ago I had four, but then, life happened.
The bigger of the two is called Garrett in homage to a friend of ours who, at the time, was at the Lucca Comics convention presenting a comic miniseries with that title.
Garrett is actually Tuscan, because we adopted him at the Lucca convention that year.
Paola was pregnant with Virginia, and she’d said she wanted to have lunch away from the comics crowd that day. We braved the outskirts of town, discovering that there was also intelligent life outside. We found a nice little place called ScusaAmeri—it’s still there, I checked—where Paola ordered a big plate of sausages and frankfurters with chips, since salad was off limits during pregnancy. Whereas I wasn’t pregnant, but you know, solidarity.
Behind me there was a bulletin board with announcements. Among the “1986 Tuareg dirt bike for sale, like new” and “does God exist or is he just pretending” announcements, a photo of a sweet fuzzy face stood out. It looked like a cross between a mushroom and Fozzie Bear from the Muppets. Paola took the flyer and started staring at it with sentimental, glistening eyes. The sheet with the photo of the little face read: “Three-month-old lost puppy in need of a forever home. If I don’t find anyone I’ll have to take him to the shelter, because I can’t keep him.” There was a phone number, followed by “ask for Eleonora.”
It should be mentioned that we already had three dogs at the time. For that very reason, we had just gone and rented a run-down old house because it had a giant yard.
Paola looked at me imploringly. I’d read somewhere that it’s better not to say no to pregnant women. I thought of the 1600-square-foot yard, the old pines. Of my parents, who would say indignantly, “What? You have three already!” Of the number of turds that were enough as it was and that I would have to pick up off the lawn every day. Of the coming daughter who would turn our lives upside down in a way that wasn’t possible to imagine yet, not even a little. Despite that, in a surge of love and tenderness I thought, “Why not, what’s a little more poop?”
“Okay, call,” I said.
“Are you serious?” Paola said.
“No, no, call, really,” I said. “Let’s at least see him, why not.”
Paola threw her arms around my neck and then called—maybe not in that order.
The girl arrived in her Ford Fiesta fifteen minutes later. The puppy from the photo leapt out of the back. Funny, sweet, and adorable. The only odd detail was his enormous paws, totally disproportionate compared with the rest of his body. I looked at Paola, perplexed.
“You said he should stay more or less this same size, right?” I asked.
“Um, yeah. Yeah. It’s a breed that stays pretty small . . .” Paola said.
“Okay,” I said.
We thanked the girl and left with a hug and an exchange of numbers and addresses. Suddenly we had a dog, in Lucca.
On the way back, Garrett was very good. He didn’t make a peep, didn’t bark once, didn’t pee in the car. He stayed curled up in the backseat, with a placid expression just like Fozzie from the Muppets.
Once he got home, after meeting his suspicious furry companions, he peed on the rug in welcome.
“He’s a puppy,” Paola said. “He’s still learning.”
“Okay,” I said.
The next day he took a shit in the office.
Aside from these early accidents, Garrett settled in quickly. Lana ignored him, Skippy also did, for the most part—he only acted out when Garrett sat on his head—whereas Lippa, our medium-sized dog, decided he was her playmate. Within two weeks, Garrett was as big as she was. After three months, he was a seventy-five-pound dog with a nocturnal passion for cats and pinecones and was notorious throughout the neighborhood.
He was constantly digging in the perennially tall grass in the yard, his ears in the wind, chasing anything that moved: blackbirds, bees, butterflies. The postman.
His favorite, can’t-miss time was around four in the afternoon, a few times a week.
Garrett set up camp in the corner where the fence ended, as if waiting for something to appear. After a while a little girl on her bike would show up. She must have been nine or ten, I never asked. Garrett would jump on the wall with his big paws and lean his whole upper body out as far as he could. The girl would throw her bike on the ground, climb up the wall, and hug him for several minutes.
I would look on from the office window, and in those moments I felt a strong awareness that, even if I died tomorrow, no one could deprive me of the fact that I’d saved at least one life in my life. Just by deliberately going against that thing that too many call “common sense.”
Using this tried and true technique, I quit my job one snowy day to devote myself to comics, the year after that we adopted Cordelia (after the anime Anne of Green Gables—if you’ve seen it, you’ll know what I mean—) then I agreed to have another child and then another since sleep, really, is overrated.
Karma
When I was working in public administration, I was able to plan several piazzas.
The significance of planning a piazza may be beyond some people. For them, just know that the empty spaces must be carefully thought out. Urban empty spaces are much more important than the crowded ones, because they’re what gives life to the architectural fabric of an area—in Italy it would make more sense to say structural fabric, but let’s not split hairs.
The planning started with initial brainstorming—“we have to make a piazza”—periodically interspersed with what the administrators (the equivalent of a city mayor, let’s say) loved to call by the English word “checks,” because they’d heard it on TV.
An example of a check:
“Everything okay?” they’d ask, peeking into my office.
“Everything’s okay,” I always replied.
When the project was finished, I had to face a whole series of inevitable, finicky objections, like:
“No, we can’t have a fountain there, the filter would get clogged with oleander leaves.”
“Then just cut the leaves every couple of weeks.”
“No, no, it’s better not to have one at all. Come to think of it, let’s scrap the oleander too.”
Stuff like that.
After these obstacles, I invariably had to deal with the planning commission jumping down my throat.
The problem wasn’t so much the initial meeting with the various administrators as much as the public assembly where residents had the opportunity to express their views on major projects.
In those cases, the greatest difficulty was always adapting the technical language and rationale for the audience. This was very important, because if I wasn’t able to make myself understood, there was no hope.
I remember one time I managed to win over a guy who was pissed off because according to him, too much funding was being allocated to culture.
“People can read books in their own homes!”
I managed to change his mind by explaining to him simply that the money wouldn’t be used only for books, but that, for example, the salami festival was also culture. I got lucky and my example was right on target, because he was especially a fan of risotto with salami and played in the darts tournament at the festival every year.
Back to the piazzas.
I recall one winter evening in particular when a guy in the public commission so politely explained to me during an assembly that “planning is bullshit! Things get done faster if you just do them! What does it take to put in a couple trees and a few benches?”
Now, to me, one of the three things in the world that really irritate the hell out of me is when, even indirectly, my profession or its utility is called into question. My profession, at the time, was urban planning.
I took the mic.
“What do you do?” I said.
“I own a bar,” he said.
“Great. How do you make a negroni?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“It’s just a question. How do you make a negroni? Do you know or not?” I insisted.
“Ehhh, boy!” he said. “I practically invented the negroni. It’s a third gin, a third Campari, and a third red vermouth.”
“Perfect. And the orange slice?”
“Yeah, that too, at the end. Goes without saying.”
“Wonderful. Thank you for just having illustrated to us the plan for a negroni.”
“Huh?”
The room laughed. The piazza was approved by an overwhelming majority.
I saw the bar guy in my office six months later when he came to protest the roundabout that had been created in front of his shop while he was on vacation. Without wasting any time to make a real plan, simply putting it on the books as ordinary maintenance.
The traffic circle was not too big, very green, and directly across from this guy’s bar.
The bar was called L’angolo—The Corner.
Still today, thinking about it makes me laugh uncontrollably.
A!
Melania is almost two but the only word she says is: “A!”
The oldest of the three, by contrast, debuted at one with: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet.”
The second, at thirteen months, quoted straight from Dante.
Melania, on the other hand, couldn’t care less. She’s also amazing for that reason, because she doesn’t even seem interested in speaking. Anyway, why should she, when she can command the entire universe with a single vowel? In fact, what’s incredible is that she makes herself understood anyway, perfectly, just by modifying the tone of her voice.
For example:
“A!” (Hi!)
“aA!” (Pick me up, now!)
“AaA!” (Pick me up, I said, you vicious imbecile!)
“AaaaaaaaaAAAA!” (I love it!)
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!” (Gross!)
“AaaaaaAA. A!” (I’m hungry!)
And so on.
The only exception to Vowel-land is water. Because Melania, to ask for water, snorts. She makes this hilarious sound with her nose and her eyes squint and she breathes in and out very quickly, like a bloodhound sniffing.
So that means: I’m thirsty.
The funny thing is that at her nursery school, where she goes every day, there are also older kids who speak pretty well. The hope was that Melania would be influenced by them and her language would evolve (not her powers of expression, I mean actual words). The result? All the kids at the school, even the ones who could talk perfectly well, snort when they want water.
Paola and I would never admit that it doesn’t really bother us at all. Because this “delay” cradles us in the illusion of still having a little baby and helps us feel young. And besides that, Melania runs like a fireball, eats like a dragon, climbs up on the shelves, manages to reach inaccessible objects, knows how to call her grandparents and my publisher, and last week she wrote all over the couch with a red felt-tip pen filched from her mother. The truth is that our daughter is Stewie from Family Guy in disguise.
The Camera
We gave Virginia a used digital camera.
I gave it to her barely half an hour ago. Since then, she has taken about thirty pictures of me and about twenty of Melania. After the fifth I’d already gone blind. Around the fifteenth she discovered how to turn off the flash. Now she’s figured out how to take videos and she’s recording me as I write on the iPad. The video is a sort of interview.
“Tell us, Mr. Bussola, do you like living in this house?”
“Yes.”
“And are you happy to have three daughters?”
“Very happy.”
“And are you happy to have the mom we have?”
“Definitely.”
“Good, good. Listen, now the most important question.”
“Yes?”
“Can we get pizza tonight?”
Heartbeats
It happens almost every morning. I go into her room to wake her up, wait for a moment listening in the dark, and if I don’t hear anything, not even breathing, and she’s not moving, I put my hand on her back, palm flat, and she doesn’t move, so I press softly, jiggle her a tiny bit, and after about a second she snaps to life in her crib like a spring. In that endless second, my heart skips a beat. It was the same with the other two—it’s something that lasts until they’re about three years old. If I add up all the lost heartbeats, it comes out to a week of life. A dad thing.
Come By
My phone rings, there’s no number.
“Hello?”
“Hello, good morning. Mr. Matteo Bussola?”
“Speaking, who’s this?”
“Oh, hi. This is Giacomo from UniCredit.”
“Good morning, Giacomo.”
“Good morning. I’m calling to ask if you might be able to come by the office next week, the Via dell’Artigliere branch.”
“Oh, Jesus. What for? Have you found me out?”
“Found you out?”
“Forget it, it was a joke.”
“Oh.”
“No, I mean, why do I need to come by?”
“Because if you do, we’ll be happy to show you all our wonderful new products, which I’m sure you’ll be interested in hearing about.”
“Products?”
“That’s right. Our new bonds, new line of credit cards, new reduced interest rate loans, and so on.”
“Oh, no, then I won’t stop by.”
“Sorry?”
“No, it’s just that, see, I’m poor. You won’t be giving me any credit cards and you definitely won’t be approving me for any loans.”
“What do you mean, Mr. Bussola? If you’ve been a longtime customer with us, I can guarantee you that generally speaking, and especially with these new offers, it should be no problem.”
“Look, Giacomo. You already barely gave me a loan once, eight years ago. And you only approved my application because I worked in public administration.”
“Oh, are you a government employee? Then I can personally guarantee that you’ll have no problem securing a loan.”
“Worked.”
“What?”
“Worked in public administration.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Damn budget cuts . . .”
“No, that’s not it. I quit.”
“You . . . quit? A permanent position?!”
“Yeah.”
“My Lord. And, if I may, what do you do now?”
“I draw comics.”
“What?
“Draw. Comics.”
“You draw?”
“Yes. Comics.”
“Whoa, really? That’s great. You know, I have the entire Mickey Mouse collection. Well, almost. And I have a few books of . . . um, what’s it called? My brother bought them. Mark Mister.”
“Martin Mystère.”
“That’s it. But go on. What comic do you draw?”
“I work for that same publisher, Sergio Bonelli Editore, and also for a French publisher.”
“French?”
�
�Yes. I realize it may be hard to believe, but they read comics over there too.”
“Well, what do you know, that’s so cool. And what do you draw for Binello Editrice?”
“I draw a comic set in Africa that’s called Adam Wild.”
“Oh, I don’t know that one.”
“I didn’t think so. What about Dylan Dog?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know that one! The one with the monsters. You draw that too?”
“No. My partner writes it.”
“No way!”
“I swear.”
“So what do you mean she writes it?”
“She writes the stories.”
“The stories?”
“She scripts them. She comes up with the plot and the dialogue and then she writes a detailed script that gets sent to an illustrator who draws it.”
“Oh. So she writes the words in the bubbles, basically.”
“No, that’s done by the . . . Actually, yes. Yes, she puts the words in the bubbles, yeah. Every day. A real pain, you can imagine.”
“I’m sure. Well, wow. What a couple!”
“Yep.”
“All right. Listen. As I was saying, I think you’ll have no problem.”
“Trust me, you won’t give me a loan.”
“That’s not true, Mr. Bussola! Why so negative? The conditions have changed completely, you know. All we need is a pay stub.”
“I don’t have one.”
“What?”
“I don’t have a pay stub. Comics artists work freelance. I’m not an employee, I get paid, minus withholding tax, on delivery.”
“Oh. That’s okay, if you can show us your average earnings over a certain period, two years, let’s say, and it’s consistent, I’m sure there’s no problem. And then maybe your estimated pension.”
“I don’t have one.”
“What?”
“Comics artists don’t have a pension.”
“You mean, you don’t get retirement?”
Sleepless Nights and Kisses for Breakfast Page 2