Perhaps my mother too had been replaced? This woman was no longer the mother I knew, and what happened that evening proved it. It was the last time I saw her.
* * *
She’d called me to her bedside to apologize for her behavior over the Bond film. She’d hugged me in the old way, with her scented hair tumbling over my head.
I thought the mother I knew had come back, but all it took was a sudden bout of coughing and she started to behave like a feeble invalid again. In a plaintive tone of voice, she urged me once again to be good and kind towards everyone—to which my reaction was: “Yes, Mom, OK. Sleep well. Can I go now?”
“Sweet dreams, little one.”
“I’m not little. I’ll soon be taller than you.”
“Of course you will be, taller and stronger. Promise me you will be?”
I couldn’t put up with it anymore. I fled back into my room and, in protest, got straight into bed without brushing my teeth and fell immediately into a deep and dreamless sleep.
* * *
Madamìn solved the mystery of the dressing gown left in my room. “Terrible Thing” had come to wake my mother during the night, but she’d asked him to be so kind as to wait while she came to tuck me up in bed . . . Afterwards, she’d forgotten to take her dressing gown and left it in my room. At this point the story always ended, as Madamìn started to cry.
I had no idea what my mother might have been feeling like when she was confronted with “Terrible Thing”—pretty bad, I guessed, even though mothers had always inexhaustible resources to draw on. But I knew it wasn’t possible that only my mother had been able to persuade this thug to let her come and tuck me in.
It was clearly a tall story invented by someone with no imagination—in other words, Dad. He was trying to make me believe that my mother had gone on loving us right up to the moment she’d disappeared, whereas it was evident to me that if she’d run off with “Terrible Thing” it was because she’d had enough of us both. I could just about manage to understand how she might have grown tired of him—but of me? How could she have stopped loving me?
We suffer when we’re not loved, but it’s a greater pain when we’re loved no longer. In one-way infatuations the objects of our love deny us their love in return. They take something away from us, which in fact they’ve only given to us in our imaginations. But when a reciprocated feeling ceases to be reciprocated, a shared flow of energy is suddenly and brutally cut off. The person who has been abandoned feels like a sweet that tastes bad and is spat out. We’ve done something wrong—but what?
That was how I felt. I hadn’t been able to make her stay with us. Perhaps she’d gone off to find a son who could do better drawings of her?
And yet I went on thinking she would come back, perhaps with the other son in tow. Never mind. I’d put up with any humiliation, just so long as she’d return.
five
In the meantime, while waiting, a spare mother would have come in useful. Unfortunately, as destiny would have it, none of the leading candidates for the role were still available.
Grandmother Emma, my father’s mother from the Romagna, was one of those women who become the stuff of legends. The most scintillating story told about her was that as a girl she’d landed a wallop on the nose of a fellow Romagnolo—the future Duce—when he’d tried to take advantage of her on top of a haystack. The source of this piece of braggadocio was my socialist grandfather, but anyone who’d been on the receiving end of my grandmother’s fists was inclined to believe the tale.
On another occasion—and this time there was evidence—she’d forced a local builder who kept his workmen on starvation wages to pay them decently by bursting onto the building site near her home and brandishing a rolling pin still covered in flour over the man’s head. She then threatened to use the same weapon on the workmen if they so much as thought of going off and spending the money in the local tavern rather than taking it home and handing it over forthwith to their wives.
At the age of thirty, she and my grandfather upped sticks and moved to Turin. During the day she worked as a concierge and in the evenings supplemented the family income in a pizzeria, baking piadine al prosciutto and farinata.
Her most prized possession was a tin box. On my grandfather’s paydays, my grandmother would requisition his entire tram-driver wages by “de-wine right”—meaning he would otherwise have gone and spent them drinking with his chums—and stashed them away in the box together with her own earnings.
The accumulated hoard was divided up into three piles. One went to pay the bills, another was for daily expenses, but the last and most important one was set aside for my grandmother’s own wishes. She would make a wish for something—a washing machine, a refrigerator, a sewing machine—and then started watching the pile grow week by week. Only over her dead body—which, like her personality, was on the large scale—would the rest of the family have dared to come near the tin box.
When the pile of money set aside for her dreams reached the set target, my grandmother would put on her Sunday best and take herself down to the shop, as proud as the Emperor of Cathay. Once the shop assistant suggested she buy something on a hire-purchase scheme: my grandmother fixed him with a stare as though he were a piece of pastry ready for her rolling pin. “Do you really think I’d go on paying for something I already own?”
That was my grandmother. I recall her sudden bouts of sulking, her hands like blades working the pasta dough, and her famous cremigi pudding, all yellow and black, which she would turn out onto an oval dish, letting me scrape off the hot chocolate sticking to the sides of the pan with a wooden spoon. My father got upset every time he saw me doing this, since he’d never been allowed to as a boy.
She had my grandfather so much under her thumb that when he died everyone thought she would barely notice he wasn’t there. Instead, on account of one of those curious laws that keep together apparently unbalanced marriages, she herself died six months later, and in terrible pain—which my kindly mother did her best to alleviate right up to the last.
* * *
My grandmother had reacted to my parents’ marriage by retreating into an epic sulk. She’d wanted my father to marry someone better off.
Dad was ruled by his mother, but the revolution brought about by love inspired him with enough energy to send my grandmother packing—and my grandfather, too.
“It’s about time you wore the trousers in this house!” he’d shouted at him before slamming the door as he left.
For a long time relations between my father and my grandmother were strained. It was my mother who brought them together again when she agreed to live in her in-laws’ house after the honeymoon.
The small community was founded on a single principle: power, sole and indivisible, resided with Grandma Emma.
Detailed rules dictated every aspect of daily life. Sunday was designated bath day, but filling the bathtub four times over was not allowed under the terms of my grandmother’s charter. Therefore, the same water had to be used by the two members of each couple in order to reduce waste.
My mother reacted to all these acts of oppression with gestures of unconditional love. She didn’t give expecting something in return—she just gave, without calculation, without reproach, without hope of reward. My father kept telling me this all my life, to underline just how different I was from her.
She was also gifted with an infectious laugh. My godmother used to tell me how at my parents’ wedding the priest had to halt proceedings because the bride couldn’t stop laughing. When she managed to suppress her giggles, her eyes were still full of laughter—and so she even sent her gruff husband-to-be into fits of laughter as well. My parents took their eternal vows while laughing fit to burst.
My mother overcame Nonna Emma’s prejudices by the sheer force of her character, and my arrival did the rest. They became firm friends. Walking between them, holding their hands, I felt safe.
Now there were only men left to walk next to me.
six
At least David Copperfield had an aunt. I would have to make do with my mother’s four brothers.
The youngest of them shared her sensitivity of character and so ended up by injecting a feminine note into an atmosphere which was otherwise heavy with the smell of aftershave lotion. I took to calling him “My Uncle.” I had a desperate need to bind the survivors to me.
One Saturday afternoon My Uncle took me to see my maternal grandmother, who was now in a rest home set among the rolling vineyards of the Langhe region. During the drive there I found out why I wouldn’t be able to count on her.
Grandma Giulia’s life had been filled with too many misfortunes and too many children. The youngest of these had been My Uncle. While she’d been pregnant with him she’d caught German measles and ever since had suffered from epileptic fits.
At the start of the Second World War her husband had died in her arms from a cold which a simple shot of penicillin would have cured, leaving her with a widow’s pension and five hungry children. The eldest, my mother, had to shoulder the responsibility of feeding them on her own. At the age of sixteen she’d started work as a typist at the Fiat factory, while still looking after her mother and all her brothers.
I can testify to the fact that she continued to keep an eye on them. Our house saw an endless coming and going of awkward young men who would turn up to ask their big sister’s advice on a variety of topics from their love lives and their jobs to what color of socks they should wear.
Mom would talk to them in the kitchen, the oracle’s cave they would enter bearing the tribute of a box of marrons glacés. As the cook’s assistant and official sheller of peas I had a privileged ringside seat at these incomprehensible conversations, punctuated with expressions such as “She’s a nice girl” and “It’s a secure job.”
My Uncle was twelve years younger than my mother and thought of himself a bit like her son. He told me about the night when he’d ridden across the city on a clapped-out scooter to get to the maternity clinic where I had just seen the light of day. While the rest of the family bombarded the midwife with questions about me, he’d wanted to know above all how she was.
“The number of times she showed me your number twos!”
“What do you mean?” I blushed.
“You used to do your business in a potty shaped like a duck. Your mother used to carry it round the house, showing off the contents as if they were some kind of sculpture. She was crazy about you.”
“So why has she gone away?”
It was obvious she’d liked me as long as I’d used the potty: when I’d started to sit on the toilet she’d stopped loving me.
“It wasn’t her decision. It was fate . . .”
My Uncle lifted a hand from the steering wheel to put his sunglasses on so I wouldn’t see he was crying.
* * *
We arrived at the rest home and were taken through rooms packed with years. Would I ever see my mother’s face all covered in wrinkles? Or would she always remain the young woman staring out from a photograph on one of the bookshelves at home? The pearl necklace and jersey cardigan she was wearing were doing their best to make her look old, but her girlish smile and bright-blue eyes, ready to be amazed at all they saw, gave the lie to that impression.
Nonna Giulia shuffled unsteadily in her slippers towards us. She clung to me more out of desperation than affection and dragged me into a room which looked out onto the garden.
“What have they done to my daughter?” she cried, before My Uncle had had a chance to extract me from her grip.
It had never occurred to me to think of my mother as someone’s daughter.
I was amazed that no one had told my grandmother the truth about my mother going off with “Terrible Thing” after doing all her errands.
I was ready to tell her the whole story, leaving out only the puzzling fact of the dressing gown, but My Uncle dragged me off.
I would also have told her that the story wasn’t over yet, and that she would reappear as unexpectedly as she had disappeared. After all, didn’t all mothers have a special pass which allowed them to come and go as they liked?
Sitting in the passenger seat next to My Uncle, I made an effort to keep my eyes fixed on the road ahead. As the roadside advertisement hoardings sped past, I promised myself I would broach the subject as soon as the next one had gone by—but we reached home and I still hadn’t plucked up the courage.
Certain questions frightened me. Or perhaps I was more frightened of the answers.
seven
When it came to my grandmothers, I’d had to admit total defeat, but the situation was not so dissimilar when it came to the other possible candidates for the role of deputy mother.
Madamìn already had two children of her own to look after and couldn’t move in to take care of me.
My godmother was childless, but she and my father had fallen out. An icy antagonism formed between them, full of things unsaid. She and Uncle Nevio started coming round less and less, and then their visits stopped altogether.
My father shrugged this off by assuming a tough-guy stance: “You’re really stuck if you have to rely on other people. We can count ourselves lucky: we don’t need anyone’s help.”
Perhaps the thought occurred to me there might be a connection between the mysterious quarrel and whatever had happened to my mother—or perhaps it didn’t and it’s just hindsight painting a picture of me behaving like some underage detective in search of clues, whereas all I was was a little grief-struck boy who couldn’t come to terms with the fact his mother had died.
* * *
My life had become void of female figures: the only women who remained were my primary school teacher and the mothers of my classmates.
My teacher had a large and capacious heart. She regarded the forty of us in her class like her adopted children. Far too many for an ordinary mother, but not for her: she saw into our souls, she knew when we needed to be scolded and when we deserved to be rewarded.
She’d been brought up in a socialist family and used to inveigh fervently against the Americans, who were at the time bogged down in the Vietnam War. I took note of her views and reported them back to my father, who adored the United States because they’d helped to drive the Nazis out of Italy. I was learning the elements of what would later become my job: taking note and reporting back—with a degree of emotional involvement, to be sure, but nevertheless aware there are always two sides to every story.
Dad never passed any comment on my observations. My parents never criticized my teacher. If I got a low mark in class it was because I’d deserved it, not because the teacher had it in for me. The earliest authority figures in my life had enough sense of their own authority not to want to undermine each other, and their presence gave me the reassuring sense I lived in an ordered universe.
This bright picture was blighted by my mother’s disappearance: I was suddenly marked out as different. From being a little lord in a golden kingdom—gentle mother, stern father, but both guided by a sense of fairness—I found myself thrown out by the scruff of my neck into the dust.
I was the only one in my class not to be equipped with a loving mother. Despite all my teacher’s careful efforts never to say the word “Mommy” in my presence, the discomforting sense of being an orphan combined with the worry that this was never going to go away, thus stirring up aggressive feelings towards others.
During my early school years, true to the star sign I’d been born under—Libra—I’d been a natural peacemaker, making strenuous efforts to pacify quarrelsome classmates. Now, whenever I was provoked, I would give as good as I got, hitting back, blow for blow. What was the point of being well behaved if there was no longer anyone around to say “Good boy”?
* * *
The mothers of my classmates would give me pitying hugs, but cautiously, so as not to get dirty, as though I were some kind of bedraggled teddy bear which had fallen
into a puddle. The way they hugged their own children was very different: it was the way my mother had always hugged me, with a kind of natural abandon.
It’s hard to be without a mother in the land of mother-worship. It’s true the Italians also enjoy being victims and the loss of a parent in early childhood, if displayed in the right way, can give you the status of a saint or a ticket for a free ride through life. However, when it comes to being a victim, you need to be cut out for the role.
I didn’t want pity or special treatment: I just wanted to be loved. I wanted someone to be my number-one fan, but I knew that for all the other mothers there was always going to be someone else at the top of the list.
The despair I felt was carefully concealed under a show of pride, which took its inspiration from my father’s stoical principle of the solitary hero sufficient unto himself.
I could never stand whingers. I never cried, even alone in my bed at night. I still believed that I’d wake up one morning and find my mother with her dressing gown on standing at the foot of my bed. I didn’t want her to see my pillow wet with tears.
eight
Then Mita arrived. She was the babysitter who’d been given the task of bringing back some normality into my life.
I imagined she’d be a kind of Mary Poppins, showering me with kisses and chocolate cakes. My only concern was that she might turn out to be very beautiful and Dad would want to marry her.
So it was a relief when I first set eyes on her. She had as big a moustache as the school janitor. She bared her gums in a skeleton’s grimace with a blast of bad breath which practically knocked me out.
Sweet Dreams Page 2