Sweet Dreams

by Massimo Gramellini

  “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.

  fifteen

  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.

  One evening in winter, when outside the snow was falling, my father called me into his study.

  “What’s happened to the photograph?”

  I avoided his gaze.

  “What photograph?”

  “The one which matches that.”

  He pointed to the photograph of my mother enthroned behind the glass doors of the bookcase, standing like a sentinel in the midst of the serried ranks of biographies of Napoleon.

  “I don’t remember where I’ve put it.”

  “You’re ashamed of your mother?”

  I didn’t say anything for some time, I’m not sure how long—but nothing compared to the seven years he’d never said anything to me. Then I said: “Tell me what happened when she died.”

  sixteen

  Just before the summer, Mom found out she had cancer. She was operated on too late: the tumor had spread.

  All those months when I grew convinced she no longer loved me, radiotherapy was wearing her body down, but she still made an effort to hide anything which might have alarmed me. She was always sad, but not on her own account. She was sad for us. She didn’t want to leave us on our own.

  On New Year’s Eve, at dawn, my father woke up with a start and found she had gone into my room and was sitting on the bed. She was tucking in the blankets.

  She’d reassured him: go back to bed, I’ll stay here a little bit longer. The last image he had of Mom was of her head bent close to mine, while outside the window snow was falling.

  Probably she’d suddenly felt unwell while she was in my room. A violent pain must have led her to take her dressing gown off. She crossed the corridor to reach the sofa in the sitting room, but she didn’t manage to get there.

  Dad had woken up again, almost immediately, as if he’d sensed something had happened, and he’d found her body huddled on the carpet.

  He thought she might be still alive, but that illusion vanished when the ambulance arrived and the emergency doctor gave his verdict: my mother had suffered a massive heart attack.

  She’d always had a weak heart, and the radiotherapy treatment, together with the spreading cancer, had weakened her resistance. But she’d fought to the very end in order not to leave us on our own.

  “You should never be ashamed of a mother who did all that,” my father said.

  I went to look out of the window at the stadium across the road, covered in snow.

  Perhaps she would have seen the snow falling. As the day of her death dawned, it was everywhere: in heaven as on earth.

  I wondered if she liked snow. I didn’t know. I knew nothing about her. This was the ideal prerequisite for turning her into a myth.

  seventeen

  Mom became my angel “without fear and without reproach,” while the devil was the mother of one of my rich classmates. I would always see her at the end of the school day, draped with studied elegance against the boot of her jeep. Her hair was tinted blond, her lips painted an aggressive red, and her close-fitting jeans disappeared into long boots as black as her evil sunglasses.

  I had a kind of nightmare. Over the Christmas holidays I would wake up at dawn and find that my room had been locked from the outside. I looked through the keyhole and managed to see a throne in the hallway and, sitting on it, the jeep blonde. She had attacked and killed my mother and invaded our house.

  Two strangers were holding my father under the arms and dragging him in front of her. The blond woman spoke. Her voice was icy.

  “Give me the keys of the boy’s bedroom, or I’ll kill you too.”

  At this point Mita appeared, baring her gums and clutching a key.

  “I’ve got a copy of the key, Countess!”

  The blonde got down from the throne and marched towards my room.

  I sneaked into the Submarine and through the spyhole of the sheet kept my eye on the door.

  It opened. Across the threshold a pointed black boot appeared, and then . . . my mother with her kindly smile holding the teatime tray.

  The same smile she had in the photograph I’d hidden away in the drawer.

  * * *

  Her portrait now took pride of place among the posters of Pulici and Peter Gabriel. I was sorry it couldn’t speak to me: I would have asked her advice on a mysterious phenomenon which was beginning to intrigue me more than Genesis or even the Toro. Girls.

  As a happy little boy, when life seemed like an endless visit to the sweetshop and like some playboy I was always surrounded by women, the feminine held no mysteries for me.

  My first love affair occurred one summer when we were staying at a hotel in the mountains. She had plaits and was called Cristina. She was seven years old and had an elderly lover—Antonello, aged ten.

  One day Cristina came running up to me, squealing. Antonello had pushed her off the swing.

  To punish him, I head-butted him in the stomach—he was tall and I couldn’t reach any farther—and he repaid the kindness by beating me to a pulp with methodical precision. But it was more painful when I saw Cristina and Antonello together again on the swing. Now I think back on it, perhaps I wasn’t such an expert on women then as I thought.

  But Mom was there, and my wounded pride was soon forgotten. After a week of frenetic swinging, an irrevocable crisis occurred in Cristina and Antonello’s relationship.

  On the night when the first man landed on the moon, Cristina burst into the TV lounge, walked straight past the armchair where Antonello was sitting, as if he didn’t exist, and came to speak to me.

  “Let’s go outside and look at the moon.”

  “But you can see the moon here!” Antonello’s mother objected, pointing to the gray grainy images flickering on the small screen.

  Leaving aside the fact that Cristina had asked me and not her son, how could anyone prefer to watch television rather than the sky?

  Mom seemed to read my thoughts.

  “That’s all right, just remember to put a pullover on.”

  And she gave me one of her famous hugs.

  “Go and have nice dreams. Both of you have nice dreams. When you dream together dreams are even nicer.”

  Cristina and I stretched out on the
hotel lawn looking up at the sky. The moon was three-quarters full and shone in the middle of a circle of stars, looking far closer here than it had done on the TV screen.

  I pointed out to Cristina a mark darkening the wrinkled surface.

  “Look, there’s the spaceship!”

  “That’s not the spaceship. That’s Arrosto,” she replied, wincing in disgust at my ignorance. “Can you keep a secret?” she whispered. “Mommy told me that a long time ago an Italian went to the moon. He was called Arrosto, and he was riding on a hipposniff.”

  “Your mother doesn’t know anything about it. My mother told me that Johnny Nose-snatcher lives on the moon.”

  “Johnny Nose-what?”

  “If you tell a lie, he comes and cuts off your nose and takes it up there.”

  “Why?” the startled Cristina quavered, touching her nose to make sure it was still there in place.

  “To eat it, obviously. He’s eaten mine a dozen times.”

  I thought I’d managed to reassure her. But she suddenly screamed. A second mark had appeared on the moon’s surface.

  “Johnny is going to eat Arrosto’s nose!” she exclaimed.

  “I told you the story about the hipposniff was a lie.”

  “Shush!”

  She grabbed hold of my hand, which made me feel peculiar.

  From the half-open windows of the hotel you could hear the voices of the TV commentators quarreling about the exact moment of the landing.

  “It’s touched down! . . .” “No, it hasn’t touched down yet!”

  Cristina shook her head.

  “Poor Arrosto! By the time the spacemen arrive, Johnny will have eaten his nose.”

  “Don’t worry. It’ll grow back.”

  You see, I’ve always had a weakness for happy endings.

  eighteen

  Since those days of the moon landings, I’d only been going backwards. I dragged my gloomy and clumsy self around a stage overcrowded with men. I was approaching the season of first love without knowing the slightest thing about women.