Sweet Dreams

by Massimo Gramellini

“She’s probably a nice person inside,” My Uncle suggested.

  He was wrong.

  Mita had previously been in the service of a countess related to the Agnelli family and with a villa in the hills outside Turin. She regarded working for my father as a step down the social scale, and looking after me as a complete nuisance.

  Still remembering the passionate hugs my mother used to give me, I tried to have the same physical contact with Mita. She turned out to be as rigid as wood, so I decided to try and win her over emotionally. But in that wasteland it proved impossible to leave any mark which could replace her nostalgic—and maliciously comparative—sense of the glorious years she had spent working for the now lost countess, the only time in her life when all had seemed like a fairy tale.

  Mita was the first really dim person I had ever come across, and I found it impossible to adapt to her level of conversation. I wanted an audience who would listen enthusiastically to my monologues, but Mita was incapable of following even the simplest reasoning: our talks would leave me with a sense that I was either mad or had been completely misunderstood.

  The only interest we had in common was the television. Mita could rightly regard herself as a real expert, with her thorough knowledge of the main textbooks in the field: the television guides Sorrisi e Canzoni and Radiocorriere TV.

  For her, watching the telly was a kind of pagan ritual, where the various presenters and singers were the divinities. The heavens and the earth had been created in six days by the TV host Mike Bongiorno, who on the seventh had rested from his labors and handed over to Pippo Baudo’s variety show. But the real watershed in the course of human history had been Gigliola Cinquetti’s appearance at the Sanremo Music Festival. Many years had passed since that miracle had taken place, but Mita continued to bask in the longing for a lost paradise, back in the days when she would listen to Gigliola Cinquetti singing “Non ho l’età per amarti” as she ironed the countess’s undergarments.

  * * *

  One Saturday evening in autumn, Dad went out to dinner with friends. It was the first time he had left me on my own in the evening, and the prospect filled me with twinges of anxiety.

  Mita took over the sitting room and sat down in front of the television with Sorrisi e Canzoni open on her lap like a prayer book. Canzonissima was just about to start. It involved singers taking part in a competition in which the winners were chosen by the TV audience, who could send in their votes with their New Year’s Day lottery tickets.

  Mita was a decidedly floating voter, but her choices had a subtle consistency about them. She liked talented newcomers such as Mino Reitano or Massimo Ranieri. She told me the names of their girlfriends and other personal secrets until my attention was suddenly distracted by a mesmerizing vision which had just appeared on the TV screen: a woman’s bare midriff with a belly button.

  The woman who’d had the audacity to exhibit her belly button in public was called Raffaella Carrà. She came from Romagna, like my grandmother Emma, and she was blond, like my mother. She later reappeared in a miniskirt, kicking and twirling her legs, judiciously covered in dark stockings, in a variety of provocative poses.

  I was still too young to perceive any glimmer of sensuality in what I was watching, but I was still stirred by the images. They succeeded in opening a breach in my hardened soul. When the dance had ended I plunged like a diver, holding my breath, into Mita’s arms and kissed her hollow cheeks.

  “You’ll be my mommy won’t you?” I pleaded, shamefully.

  “I’m sorry, boy . . .”

  That’s what she said: boy. She didn’t use my name.

  “I’m sorry, boy . . . I can’t love you. No one’s ever loved me and . . . I don’t know how to.”

  “I’ll teach you.”

  It was true, I could just about remember how to.

  “I can’t . . . I’m sorry.”

  She brushed a hand over her eyes and hurried into the bathroom just as Massimo Ranieri came on stage.

  That was the moment when I felt an iron curtain drop down within me. The illusion I could somehow regain the love I had lost, the imaginary world to which I’d clung for a whole year.

  I now admitted to myself that my mother was gone forever and that no one ever again would love me, accept and protect me as she had done.

  I buried my face in the sofa cushions and finally wept for what had happened to my mother. And to me.

  nine

  The candidates who might have replaced my mother had all fallen by the wayside, and I no longer had any hope of getting back the original. All that was left to me was Dad.

  When a mother dies, you need men with feminine sensibilities to fill at least in part the abyss which is left. Men capable of being strict when necessary, but also sensitive. But my father was the epitome of masculinity. When he was growing up, his models had been two formidable men: Nonna Emma and Napoleon.

  He had large hands and a fierce expression which intimidated me as much as it did strangers. An affectionate pat on the shoulder felt as though he’d hit me: he was as incapable of touching me gently as he was of making a decent cup of coffee. In the interval between Mom’s death and Mita’s arrival he was forced to take on a role for which he was entirely unsuited.

  Each day, when school was over, the kindly mother of one of my classmates would give me a lift to the city council office where he worked. I’d sit tight at one of the corners of his desk waiting for the hour of release while doodling bunches of huge grapes on the backs of sheets of paper I fished out of the wastepaper basket. My mother had disappeared also from the drawings.

  When my pen ran out, Dad would allow me to use one of the office pens, but as soon as the time came to go home he insisted I put it back where it came from.

  “It doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to the State.”

  I grew up thinking the State was a manufacturer of pens.

  At two-thirty we sat down together at the kitchen table. It was the worst moment of the day, because everything in the room reminded me of my mother.

  Dad would stand at the cooker and start to prepare lunch. His meals remained on my stomach and in my memory. I recall them with a kind of stupefied awe. They were so absurd they had a touch of genius about them. His specialty was tinned meat heated up.

  A man with a feminine sensibility would have tried to find a babysitter capable of thawing my frozen heart. But my father regarded all such talk as so much hot air. The criteria he used when he chose Mita were the only ones he recognized: honesty and practicality.

  I went back to eating tinned meat cold—cold like the rest of the house. In exchange I had to give up my bedroom for the new babysitter and resign myself to sharing my father’s.

  Mom’s king-sized bed disappeared and was replaced by a pair of single beds covered by bedspreads sporting a pattern of black and brown lozenges.

  The bedspreads were the least of my problems. My father snored like a bear who’d eaten a barrel of honey. The only solution was to get to sleep before the bear got into his den.

  * * *

  All our relationships are colored by a dominant tonality. The one with my father had been fixed forever when I was playing once as an infant on some meadow. I toddled resolutely towards the ball he had just thrown to me when I realized I was about to tread on a daisy, so bent down to pick it and give it to my mother.

  She was touched; he thought I was unmanly. After all, in the biographies of Napoleon, which my father knew all by heart, was there an episode from the future hero’s childhood when he’d decided to pick a bunch of daisies to give to his mother instead of expressing his will to power by bashing all and sundry round the head?

  The incident dogged me for decades like a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: “Besides, when he was little he once stopped to pick some daisies . . .”

  Now that my mother was no longer there to cushion us both, the friction between our different temperaments lost its momentum and became instead a blind outburst of frustration from two vi
ctims incapable of understanding each other. It’s true it cannot have been easy for him to live with a son whose physical appearance and to some extent personality reminded him continually of the wife he had lost, but I was too taken up in my own suffering to bother myself about his.

  Talking about my mother was completely off-limits. Only once did I dare to ask him, in order to find out what the most awful thing which could happen might be in some hypothetical hierarchy of bad luck—whether it was worse to lose your wife or your mother prematurely?

  It wasn’t a philosophical enquiry, but a cry for help. Only a few months had gone by since I had discovered that women had belly buttons and my mother was never going to come back. I felt a desperate need for some emotional bond with my father.

  We were in his car—a Fiat 124 Coupé, more appropriate for some slender Grand Prix driver than my father’s massive bulk—on our way to see Giorgio and Ginetta for a birthday party.

  He presented a very logical argument, which lasted the duration of three red traffic lights and was brought to a close with this solemn assertion, as he parked the car in reverse gear: we were both in a mess, but I was more in a mess than he was, since you can replace a wife, but you can’t replace a mother.

  We got out of the car and never mentioned the subject again.

  ten

  The only thing that connected us was our passion for Torino Football Club.

  When I was five I thought the story of the Great Torino Team was a fairy tale. Dad would tell it to me to make me fall asleep, but luckily I never did.

  I wanted to hear how it ended, and it always ended in the same way: after they’d won hundreds of matches and scored hundreds of goals, “those great lads”—he always referred to them in these terms, and it was the only time he ever had a lump in his throat—climbed on board an airplane bound for heaven and never came back.

  Everything was clear, everything was perfect. Death didn’t mean anything to me at the time. Two years later I’d find out about it, once again thanks to the Toro team, who are good at teaching you some of life’s severest lessons.

  The day before a local derby against Juventus caught the flu. But no sooner had Mum gone out to get some medicine from the chemist’s than I perked up.

  After promoting a vase and the umbrella holder to the status of goalposts, I started to dance around in the hallway dribbling the rubber ball with my bare feet. I did everything by myself, even the radio commentary, pronouncing the name of my favorite player in a high-pitched voice.

  “Gigi Meroni gets the ball, wriggles past one Juve player, then another, then another . . . What’s he up to now? Unbelievable! He’s coming back and dribbling past all of them again. Now he’s only got the goalkeeper. He slots the ball through his legs, lobs it over his head, squeezes it under his arms . . . Meroni is through, in front of an open goal . . .”

  The doorbell rang. It was Riccardo, the Juve supporter who lived on the second floor.

  “Meroni’s dead, Meroni’s dead!” he chanted with that malicious glee you find sometimes in children.

  “What do you mean?” I shouted at him, the ball still between my feet. “I’m Meroni!”

  Out on my own, in front of an undefended goal.

  “You’re Meroni? You’re crazy! Turn on the radio. He’s been run over by a car.”

  No airplanes involved this time round.

  I went to the derby with my father. Among the general mourning, Toro triumphed four–nil. The typical joys of a Toro supporter. The match was my baptism of fire, my official initiation into a sect of grumbling but indomitable fans who are always ready to face down the Fates.

  * * *

  Sundays followed an unchanging ritual. Over lunch Dad would list all the reasons why he wouldn’t take me to the stadium that afternoon: all of them could be summed up by saying he was tired of spending time and money on a bunch of clumsy oafs who didn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as “those great lads.”

  He would peel an apple with surgical precision and then shut himself in the sitting room, where he would pretend to watch the telly while I started to dress: underpants and scarf in the team’s garnet colors, and then whatever came to hand.

  After mulling over the TV news, my father would get up and stand by the window, watching the fans queuing up at the stadium gates. Our apartment block was just across the street.

  He watched them in silence for a while and then heaved a huge sigh, which sounded as if the sky had fallen in, then disappeared into the closet to put his shoes on. While he was doing this, he would shout out to me: “OK, we’re going! But it’s only for your sake!”

  I’d been waiting on the landing already for ages, leaning on the flag My Uncle had given me, which was the color of blood and Barbera wine. We always arrived after the game had started, and each time I felt ashamed—just as when my father took me to school late. With my mother, I would never have been late.

  Football fanaticism left her cold, but she’d had to learn to live with it.

  One Sunday in spring, Dad had proposed to her a trip to some of the places near Lake Como which appear in Manzoni’s classic novel The Betrothed. The poor woman agreed. She didn’t know Torino had an away match scheduled that day near Lake Como . . .

  They were sipping their cappuccinos in front of the castle which had belonged to Manzoni’s archvillain—the Unnamed—when, feigning surprise, he pointed out a poster advertising the afternoon’s match on display in the bar.

  When they got to the stadium my mother demanded they buy seats rather than stand: she was already several months pregnant with another Torino ultrà.

  I was born quite a few games later, but that was the first match of my life. It was raining and the result was a boring nil–nil. But it didn’t matter—I was still safe in my warm box seat.

  * * *

  After Mom had joined Gigi Meroni and “those great lads,” I was no longer sure of anything. I became taciturn—you could have fitted the monosyllabic interjections I came out with on any given Sunday into a matchbox.

  Dad felt certain that I only cheered up when I watched Torino play, and so started to take me to all their away matches too. That really helped. I remember one game at Varese, when we were winning two–nil three minutes from the final whistle. Varese managed to scrape a draw and I spent the journey back throwing up.

  Then the spring arrived and Torino started to climb the Serie A table little by little. One Sunday about Easter time we had a home match against Naples: if we won, we’d leapfrog Juventus and come out top. Just like “those great lads.”

  This time Dad and I turned up at the stadium an hour before the start. But that was not much use: we reached the ninetieth minute and it was still nil–nil. I looked at my father, I looked at the pitch, I looked at the crowd. Nothing doing anywhere. So I decided to call on God.

  “Dear Lord, please let us score a goal. You’ve taken my mother, you owe me.”

  A few moments later the Toro’s coach sent onto the field the smallest striker in the world. He was called Toschi and, like all good elves, he ran onto the pitch and hid among the blades of grass.

  The goalkeeper was holding the ball to his chest: he passed it to the fullback, who passed it back to the goalkeeper, who returned it to the fullback, who was just about to kick it to the goalkeeper . . .

  The elf had had enough. He came out from his hiding place, managed to get hold of the stray ball and stick it in the back of the net.

  The crowd roared in excitement; no one noticed the eleven-year-old boy holding his hands in prayer and looking up at the sky.

  “Thank you, God!” I yelled as I fell to my knees.

  Yes, thanks a bunch. At the end of the season the referees disallowed two completely regular goals scored by Torino, and Juve beat us to the scudetto by a whisker. That meant Riccardo could plaster the walls of the lift with pictures of his beloved “pajama boys” (my nickname for the Juve players, on account of their striped shirts).

  My stomac
h was so churned up I ate only grissini for a week. I kept on asking myself what kind of a sadist God was in leaving me motherless while still a child and making me the supporter of the unluckiest football team on earth.

  eleven

  When I came to the end of primary school, the teacher who’d been my last bulwark disappeared too. I lost all my bearings and drifted without a direction. A new feeling seized hold of me and wouldn’t let go—a demon clinging to my back and weighing me down, a soft spongy monster who fed on my doubts and fears: mistrust, rejection, abandonment.

  I called him Belfagor, after the TV series The Phantom of the Louvre I’d watched as a boy. He’d been a near contender to Polyphemus in becoming my nightmare bogeyman.

  Endless questions tormented me. Out of all the mothers there were in the world, how come mine had to die? My classmates were taken to school holding their mothers’ hands, their mothers cooked them nice food to eat, when they were upset they could go and be comforted in their mothers’ arms. Why couldn’t I?

  My little brain kept searching for an answer. If I’d been capable of lifting my eyes and looking around me, I would have seen the world was full of much greater problems: wars, epidemics, floods. But Belfagor was good at keeping my eyes down so I couldn’t see beyond the narrow horizons of my own small existence.

  Every so often my father would threaten to send me away to boarding school—for example when I left my dental braces on my plate in a restaurant. Or whenever I asked him to sack Mita and replace her with a human being.

  I became an avid reader of stories about orphans. I kept Nobody’s Boy and Oliver Twist under my pillow—but they weren’t any comfort. I even envied the main characters. They were desperate, but so too were all the characters around them. So they never felt themselves to be different in the way I did when I ended up in a Catholic secondary school for boys full of kids from families much better off than mine.