Sweet Dreams

by Massimo Gramellini

  Young men often find a cure for their existential malaise in politics or theater. But I didn’t have the energy to cultivate creative talents. As for ideologies, I regarded them in the same way as I did love: to me, they were utopias that were totally incompatible with the egotism of human beings, especially my own.

  Sveva suggested I go to the gym in an attempt to work off the toxins I’d accumulated, but when a pair of instructors with bronze-statue physiques—whom I nicknamed the Pillocks of Hercules—proposed a course of steroids so I too could have a body like theirs, I never set foot inside the place again.

  Psychoanalysis remained an option, but sessions on the analyst’s couch would have meant overcoming my embarrassment and asking for money from my father, who considered digging around in one’s brain a loser’s way of wasting time.

  * * *

  There are a lot of “buts” in the last few sentences, I realize. At the time it was my pet word. I felt as though a wall of incompatibility constantly loomed over me—as if anything I undertook, all my short-lived enthusiasms, would sooner or later disintegrate against it.

  The law books on my desk I was supposed to be studying gradually made way for self-help manuals.

  Taking Your Life in Your Own Hands.

  The Art of Winning Friends and Influencing People.

  Overcoming Neurosis.

  How to Solve Your Problems and Start a New Life.

  I used to highlight the important sentences, but I’d highlight more and more with each reading, until the pages were completely colored in orange.

  I learned the following by heart:

  – Björn Borg’s opening speech at a tennis course run by the Swedish Tennis Association: “If you lack self-confidence, you’re going to lose control of your movements”;

  – Kipling’s “If ”: “If you can dream—and not make dreams your master / If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim”;

  – the anonymous poem “Found in Old St. Paul’s Church in Baltimore,” which touched upon the same themes but with less literary style: “Do not be cynical about love, for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is perennial as the grass.” As if on cue, the flower bed outside my apartment block had just been concreted over.

  * * *

  I even managed to turn The Great Gatsby into a self-help manual, identifying with the likeable crooked hero of the novel tangled up with an unsuitable woman. Ever since childhood, Gatsby had been trying to improve himself, filling his pockets with reminders: “No more smoking or chewing; read one improving book or magazine per week.”

  I started to fill my own pockets too: “Do eleven sessions of press-ups a day and learn Spanish.”

  The two volumes for Commercial Law on my desk remained unopened, but for a month I studied Spanish and did a lot of press-ups.

  Then suddenly, without warning, I packed that in, like a stage set being dismantled, and abruptly put up another: “Listen to the whole of Mozart and read the complete works of Jung. After eleven weeks, give Alessia a call.”

  * * *

  But not even two weeks had gone by when Sveva burst into my room, shutting the volume of Jung and turning Mozart off.

  “Do you think I can’t see how you’re leading your father on? You’re not following your courses, you do the exams only when you feel like it—you may even have stopped taking them. Someone with your abilities—you should be ashamed of yourself.”

  She burst into tears.

  “I don’t think I deserve your tears,” I replied sententiously, but secretly pleased.

  “Your father and I are splitting up. He says he wants his freedom back. In a few years he’ll be as old as your grandfather was when he died, and he wants to make the most of the time left to him.”

  “Dad’s scared of dying, and I’m scared of living. Perhaps we could swap.”

  “He says we should leave him in peace and he’d be all right.”

  “And what do you want me to do about it?”

  “Study! He says he’s unhappy because you won’t get on and take your degree. You’re a disappointment to him: he’s lost his faith in the future because of you.”

  “We’re quits then. Can’t you see he’s just using me as an alibi to get his own way?”

  “If I were your mother, I’d give you a good smack. I just hope that wherever she is now she can’t see the state you’ve got yourself into!”

  “Don’t even mention my mom, OK? Get out! Or I’ll go instead. That way you can get at each other’s throats without putting me in the middle.”

  That was it. I’d managed to break the last thread of human kindness in my life.

  Belfagor must have been really proud of my progress. I thought I heard him murmuring his usual instructions in my head:

  “You’ll always be different from the others; no one will ever really love you.”

  * * *

  I remembered it was summertime. I fetched the Canadian tent from the cellar and went off to join my engineering chums on a campsite on the Adriatic. But if you’re sick in your soul, you can’t solve your problems just by changing hospital. I hated my friends, I hated the camping site, I hated the Adriatic and every other sea in the world. I hated myself.

  One morning I woke up with an excruciating pain at the back of my jaw. It was my wisdom teeth. I was twenty-five and they’d decided to come out.

  The instinct for survival took over. I was capable of throwing my life to the dogs, but I wasn’t going to be treated by a dentist I didn’t know.

  I took the first train back home. I closed my eyes to try and deaden the pain as a hazy memory from the long-distant past resurfaced, bringing the image of a pair of black-framed glasses bent down over my face.

  I try to escape their investigative stare, but I can’t, because I’ve got a drill stuck in my mouth. The buzzing of the metal beast finally dies down, and I turn my head to see if I’m still alive—and the black-rimmed glasses become a complete face which is talking to my mother and telling her my tooth needs to be removed.

  I scream, and the dentist shows signs of impatience. Then he leaves the surgery and goes into the room next door to do something or other with a filling.

  “Try to calm the boy down before I get back.”

  “I’ll calm him down, Doctor, don’t worry,” my mother replies.

  She comes up to the chair, removes the bib round my neck and slips her hand into mine.

  “Quickly, let’s go!”

  We’re outside in a moment, but a drill-like voice echoes in the stairwell.

  “Where are you going, signora?”

  “I’ve just remembered I need to collect something from the dry cleaners.”

  “The dry cleaner won’t close for three hours.”

  “The traffic is really bad today.”

  We run into the street and give each other a hug. Mom tells me about when as a girl her wisdom teeth had grown and how she’d come up with all the excuses under the sun to avoid going to the dentist to have them taken out.

  “What happened then?”

  “And then I had them taken out. After a while. We’ll have your tooth taken out as well, my poppet. Just as soon as we’re both a bit less scared . . .”

  twenty-one

  My wisdom teeth turned out to be so wise that I had to spend the mid-August bank holiday in Turin.

  During a game of mixed doubles (two tennis players and two—one was me—who could barely hit the ball) I got to know Alberto, whose summer plans had also gone wrong and who worked for the Corriere dello Sport. One evening I accompanied him to a Toro match, wrote my impressions of the game on a crumpled piece of paper and gave it to him.

  A few weeks later he left to do his military service, and his boss asked me to come and take his place. He was called Orso, and he was the first journalist I had come across. After my conversation with him, I thought he would also be the last.

  He was waiting for me in the entrance hall and kept me standing like some petitioner. “
Alberto gave me a zany piece to read and told me you’d written it,” he began. “I haven’t worked out if you’re mad or you’ve just had a difficult childhood. The two possibilities are not mutually exclusive, of course. But I’m inclined to think you’re mad. Which means we’ll get on fine together. Your main job is to bring me my coffee from the bar without spilling half of it on the stairs. I must warn you from the outset: a permanent job is out of the question. But even in the most unlikely event you might one day succeed in fulfilling your nightmare of becoming a journalist, please accept right away my condolences, because it’s a shit job. So, are you on?”

  I said yes and started to type out brief delirious articles on local sports I’d never heard of such as balon and tambass for a thousand lire a piece: enough to buy a coffee and a bun.

  I was finally somebody.

  I’d achieved quite unexpectedly my dream of becoming a writer just when I thought I had given up wanting to become one. If you’ve got a dream and it’s your dream, the thing which you’ve come into the world to do, you can spend your entire life trying to hide the fact under a cloud of skepticism, but it will never let go its hold on you. It’ll go on sending out desperate signals—like boredom and lack of enthusiasm—in the hope that sooner or later you’ll rebel.

  I reached a truce with Belfagor. I would stop probing into my wounded soul, while he agreed not to undermine the dream I’d just attained by inducing a collapse of self-confidence.

  I didn’t carry many coffees up the stairs, but I wrote a lot of stories, which gradually became articles. At first only my initials appeared beneath them, but afterwards they were well and truly signed with my name and surname.

  So that I might be able to pay for an extra bun or two in the morning, my boss, Orso, managed to get me a job as a contributor to the sports pages of Il Giorno in Milan. Life is a master at irony: it turned out they only wanted pieces on Juventus.

  In the meantime, Dad was splitting up with Sveva. It was a long-drawn-out process, with lots of rows and reconciliations. She continued to ask me for help, but I acted as if I didn’t know anything about it. Belfagor had taught me how to behave in these cases: steering clear of any situations in which getting to the truth of the matter was bound to lead to suffering.

  My father too seemed to have been infected with the same disease I had, and in order to distract himself from his own worries started to take an interest in my transformations. He was like a fencing master who knew exactly where his opponent’s weak points were. In my company he would make scornful remarks on the futility of journalism as a profession, but he would read out my articles to his colleagues as if a new Hemingway had come on the scene.

  It was a battle of nerves between us—and, strange to say, I managed to deal with it. In this I was helped by the thought that I had found a job and possibly a career without having to call on his support. Once, however, I made the mistake of asking him if Mom would have been proud of my choice of profession.

  “Poor woman,” he replied. “She must be turning in her grave. She wanted you to have a proper job, a secure one. You’ll never get a permanent contract from a newspaper . . .”

  * * *

  The following mid-August bank holiday, all dental problems a thing of the past, I was basking in the heat of a telephone box somewhere in the middle of Sardinia.

  “This is the editor of Il Giorno speaking,” the voice at the other end of the line was saying. “I really like your articles on Juventus. I’m a Juve fan and I’ve read all of them. I wanted to ask you if you’d consider joining our team.”

  “Sure, I’d love to. But I’d need to win the lottery first if I am to live in Milan on a freelancer’s pay.”

  “I think you’ve won it—we’d like to offer you a job. But don’t get too excited: we’ve just lost our leading sports writer and can only afford to replace him with someone young who won’t cost too much. So, what do you think?”

  “What do I think? If it’s OK? Whey-hey!”

  I hung up and made eyes at the red-haired girl who was smiling at me on the other side of the glass door. Then I half-closed them: I needed to make an internal phone call.

  “I’ve got a permanent job after just a year of training! And I’m in love, at last! Mom, if I’m ever going to join you, let it be now. There won’t be a better moment to die.”

  So it had happened. Writing had emboldened me to such a degree that I could break the agreement with Belfagor unilaterally.

  I’d fallen head over heels for the girl. Bonfires and guitars on the beach, lounging by the sea and inside my sleeping bag. All of us, once in our lives, have the right to believe those summer pop songs are written for us and us alone.

  Like my paternal grandmother she was called Emma. She shared the same stubbornness of character too. All the boys in the group wanted to sleep with her, but she was considered off-limits, since her boyfriend was a Hulk lookalike. He’d been her dream man—and still was, even though they’d broken up just before the summer holidays and he was now showing off his muscles round the world without her.

  I’d succeeded in seducing Emma—much to everyone’s surprise (including, to some degree, my own)—by implementing an infallible strategy: listening to her. Women are not won over with our vocal cords but with our ears: it’s a waste of time trying to impress them with memorable remarks when all they want is for us to pay some attention to what they’re thinking.

  I emerged at dawn from the sleeping bag feeling I was on cloud nine and ready to plan the next hundred years of my life with her.

  She was as drunk with amazement as I was, but much more down to earth as well: she started to pick up the discarded beer cans littered along the beach, while I worked off my pent-up excitement by drawing the outline of her face in the sand, with my big toe.

  A friend of hers asked me if I was trying to draw a dinosaur. And to think that I drew better with my feet than with my hands. Then she cut to the chase. “Don’t raise your hopes,” was her advice. “Emma and her boyfriend might be going through a crisis, but it’s not over yet. She’s really invested a lot in their relationship.”

  Common sense suggested she was right, but I was filled with a sense of omnipotence that made me feel invulnerable to whatever fate had in store for me. My heart had just emerged from its bunker and seen the stars in the sky: it had no intention of going back now, and the voice of wisdom was no match for its stubborn refusal to listen.

  After the summer break, I returned to my old job in Turin while waiting to move to the new one in Milan. By the end of the first week I was already desperate to see Emma again, but I’d used up my money and had no idea how I could pay for another trip to Sardinia. I started to consider all the possibilities, including getting a lift on a fishing trawler, when my boss, Orso, asked to see me in his office.

  “I’ve just read your interview with Michel Platini. The one where you ask him his views on true love—and whether he thinks it’s true that separation weakens our feelings . . . Unpublishable treacle. You’re yearning for your Miss Sardinia, aren’t you? Of course I know who she is: she calls the office fifty times a day. Next Sunday your Toro is playing away at Cagliari, right? We won’t send any correspondents, but I’ve persuaded the club to take you with them on the plane as an executive of their entourage . . . No need to thank me: I’ve only done it because that way I get the use of the phone line back. I hope you’re not leading her up the garden path, eh? Remember: love is sacred . . . What are you doing, hugging me? Then you fancy me instead? Who’s going to tell Miss Sardinia she’s got a rival?”

  Emma came to meet me at the airport wearing a headscarf and dark glasses like a spy, as if to remind herself that our love affair was a secret one. But as soon as she saw me she forgot all her precautions and ran to meet me in front of the cameras of a local TV channel who were there to record for posterity the Toro’s arrival. Our kiss was broadcast over the entire island.

  Two days later Miss Sardinia took me back to Departures. She was no
longer wearing her dark glasses and her headscarf. She told me she considered herself my girlfriend and planned to join me in Milan in the autumn. She added that, on his return from his world tour, The Hulk was definitely going to split up with her.

  She didn’t say she would split up with him. But by now ignoring uncomfortable truths was part of my way of life. I wrote the classic Hollywood screenplay and played it out to myself inside my head: The Hulk comes back from his trip unchanged, Emma realizes she no longer loves him and sets sail for her new life with me.

  Instead, The Hulk came back from his trip and offered Emma everything she’d ever hoped for from him: a house, marriage, children.

  We argued endlessly over the phone, but it was an unequal battle—and I wasn’t fighting it on home turf.

  One morning in November, my legs like jelly, I entered the Palazzo dell’Informazione in Milan to sign my new contract with Il Giorno. I’d just hung up my coat when the telephone on my new desk rang.

  “Hi. I just wanted to wish you good luck. You’re beginning a new chapter—and so am I. I’m getting married in three months’ time. Please don’t get in touch again—you’d only hurt me and yourself.”

  I felt the same pain I’d felt in the Cubs’ meeting room when Baloo had broken the news: an icy spoon turning in my stomach and hollowing it out—the looming shadow of death I’d spent all my life trying to escape from.

  I went out into the street so my colleagues wouldn’t see me. I walked across Piazza Cavour and along Via Turati as far as Piazza della Repubblica. A bench facing the traffic offered a refuge. I sat down and hid behind a newspaper. Tears trickled down my face, like drips from a faulty tap.

  It was a pity the newspaper was a tabloid—too small to hide me entirely.