Sweet Dreams

by Massimo Gramellini

  some difficult literary moments followed

  twenty-two

  Some difficult literary moments followed, alternating between romantic despair and rhetorical posturing.

  From this period in Milan I’ve kept a couple of written mementos. The first is Jay McInerney’s novel Bright Lights, Big City, with its electrifying first sentence: “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.”

  That “you” could easily have been me: a young man who’s been dumped by the woman he thought he’d spend his life with gets lost in the Big City’s nocturnal streets in search of himself, until he discovers that the real missing love he’s never been able to come to terms with is the one for his mother, who had died of cancer.

  The second piece of evidence belongs to the following year and is the draft of a letter I wrote to Emma. Here’s what I wrote, with some later remarks added in brackets:

  Milan, 11th October

  Hi Emma,

  It’s four o’clock, in the middle of the night—or rather in the morning—and I no longer know what sleep means. (McInerney’s influence, all too obvious.)

  I’m writing this from the landing outside my small flat. The colleague I share the place with has gone to bed leaving the key inside the lock. I keep ringing the bell but he must be sleeping with cement earplugs in his ears. (Did I want to make her feel sorry for me or make her laugh? I was describing some hapless wretch who couldn’t even manage to get into his own flat.)

  We left the editorial offices at midnight, copies of the paper hot off the press under our arms (as well as some nice female colleagues). (A pathetic fib to try to make her jealous. In reality all ten of us were men, high on adrenaline and ravenously hungry.)

  One of us had been invited to go for dinner by a rival newspaper but didn’t have the courage to tell the others, so he just suggested that we go on ahead and he would join us later in his car. Pity we spotted him at Porta Venezia heading in the opposite direction.

  The restaurant was still packed and by the time we eventually managed to order our steaks it was already one o’clock. The food finally arrived at 1:30. On the bone and with all the trimmings. At two o’clock our Judas strolled in. He’d smeared his hands with grease to make out his car had had a breakdown. So we said to him: “You must be so hungry! But don’t worry, you’re in luck—there are two steaks left and a whole plate of chips.” He tried to protest he had a stomachache, but ended up having to eat again from start to finish—even a meringue cake for dessert—at which point I thought he was going to explode. (The gall in trying to dress up coarse schoolboy pranks as examples of the “dolce vita.”)

  I miss you, Emma. Not so much for what you’ve already given me, but for what you could have given me later, when I arrived in Milan on my own, lived and struggled on my own, had to do all my own cooking and rely on the kindness of the concierge to patch up my trousers. (What I was really angry with her for was that she hadn’t moved to Milan in order to cook my meals and mend my trousers.)

  I’ve just had my birthday—my twenty-seventh, as you know. What you don’t know is that La Stampa—that’s right, the leading newspaper in Turin—has offered me a job in its Rome offices. I’d like to talk this over with you. I’ve always wanted a lover who’d also be a friend and an adviser. I thought I’d found all three in you, Emma.

  I honestly thought I deserved you, after the kind of childhood I’d had. Do you remember I told you my mother lived in America, as the head of a multinational cosmetics company? (Since leaving school, I’d given my mother a series of high-flying promotions.)

  Things weren’t exactly like that—one day I’ll explain. But I still thought you were meant for me. And that you too needed me. But perhaps I don’t believe that anymore. (She’d chosen to marry another man, after all.)

  I’m sorry, I’m writing a load of crap, and it’s nearly five in the morning. The thing is—I thought you might need someone who’d write you a load of crap at five in the morning. (McInerney, again.)

  I thought I could give you a world full of bright amusing people. As well as another world, smaller but also larger: just the two of us. A world called happiness, Emma.

  Happiness is being able to make love at any hour of the day, so long as it’s with you. Happiness is learning to grow together, being stubborn and quarreling, but still being able to move on, despite the knocks to our pride, to another higher phase of our love for each other. Happiness is agreeing to meet in a café and turning up late. (A strange notion of happiness.) It’s you being worried about something but the two of us solving it together. It’s a bracelet I give you as a present, a shirt of mine you wash. (After mending it, I imagine.)

  Forgive me for these idiotic ramblings. I just wanted to tell you that I’m not missing the company of a woman. I miss you. You, who are a woman—and what a woman. But you’re something more than that: you’re the other part of me.

  * * *

  It’s unfair perhaps to make fun of my old self. There’s a dignity about real feelings which protects them from ridicule.

  I wrote dozens of letters like this one. I even posted some of them, but never received even a postcard in reply—and there are a lot of nice postcards you can send from Sardinia. I’ve got one which shows the beach where we first made love. I had sent it to myself. Every evening I’d look at it and, after committing every detail to memory, I’d close my eyes so I could smell the sea and taste our kisses.

  The idealized vision of Emma’s face gradually faded, but never entirely. It took me two years to get over it—in other words to get back to feeling as bad as I did before I met her. Grief can open up windows into the self. It’s just that I insisted on looking in the wrong direction.

  The experience of losing love once again was bad for me. I was driven by a fierce desire to deny the past. I never replied to a letter—the last I ever received—from Sveva. Moved by a kind of self-destructive urge, I even stopped answering phone calls from My Uncle, the only person who made me feel I still belonged to someone or to something.

  So I left to take up the new job in Rome—Rome, the great bitch who licks all our wounds.

  twenty-three

  I keep a round box in one of the bottom drawers of my desk. In its glory days it housed three layers of Danish biscuits, but a long time ago it was converted into a safe for a lifetime’s worth of souvenirs.

  Working up from the bottom, there’s my first school exercise book, with the picture of a panther on the cover and on the first page the incipit which marks the beginning of my literary career: “Its autum and the leves are faling.” Then my mother’s frayed headscarf, the one with the white spots I used to flick against the walls when I played tick-tock. Then the worn pipestem I used to keep in my mouth after I’d given up smoking Camel Lights, whistling through it like a referee or a locomotive whenever I felt the need to inhale.

  There’s more: a photo of the vain Alessia at a fancy-dress party (she’s dressed as an Egyptian queen); the note a girlfriend sneaked into one of my course books for Private Law: “However boring the lecture you’re listening to might be, just think that this evening we’ll be together”; the letter I never sent to Emma; her face in a Polaroid photograph: her fiery red hair has faded to a gentler rosé blur.

  The objects from the time I spent in Rome are at the top of the pile: the first item is a cover from Playboy magazine with the photocopy of a Buddhist prayer stapled to it.

  * * *

  The Buddhists of Rome met every Thursday evening near St. Peter’s Square, in a house which ironically looked out onto the bastion of Christianity.

  It was a large gloomy palazzo which had belonged to an old noble Roman family. The lift didn’t work, and the steps of the staircase were very shallow to allow carriages to drive up them.

  There wasn’t a horse-drawn carriage in sight when I first went (the service had been suspended some centuries ago), so I had to sweat my way up the stairs to the sixth floor. But climbin
g is good for the soul. After all, I consoled myself, not even Moses had taken delivery of the Ten Commandments down in a cellar.

  As I slipped off my shoes outside the door, an organ-like sound took me back to the church services I’d been to as a boy. Here it was produced by voices chanting a mantra in unison.

  Feeling suitably abashed in spirit, I made my way into the prayer room and, like the others, sat down on the floor in the lotus position, until a very unspiritual cramp in my calf muscles forced me to disentangle my legs and stretch them sideways, making me recline like a bayadère.

  The leader of the group declared the meeting open. He had an unkempt beard resembling Che Guevara’s and had probably been one of his followers in his youth, later channeling his revolutionary fervors on himself rather than society at large.

  Each of those present then told the others about the benefits Buddhist practices had brought to their lives. The room contained a full spectrum of human types: the only thing which had brought them together was the experience of grief.

  I was struck by their refusal to play the victim. A young woman who’d been a drug addict told us how at the nadir of her existence she’d taken to thinking that even the trees moved away from her to deprive her of shade. But prayer had restored her energy to live. She knew now that the causes of her troubles were to be found within her.

  After each confession, there was a round of applause. There was also applause when a beaming university student told us that reciting a mantra had helped him solve the problem of where to park his car.

  The applause, how to park your car—it was all a bit too much for me. But just as I was thinking this, Agnese decided to introduce me to the assembled company.

  “He’s got a problem with the father figure . . .”

  * * *

  I’d met Agnese among the alleyways of Trastevere, the winter after I’d arrived in Rome. After finishing work at the newspaper late at night, I would saunter off to join the company of the Eternally Hopeful—actors looking for a director, directors looking for producers, producers looking for money. Their tribe would move from party to party, terrace to terrace, succeeding only in eliciting a vague promise of “we must meet up for dinner sometime.”

  Agnese acted for a living but, more than that, she was an actress through and through. She was blond, sensual, unintentionally comic. She’d been in a successful film, had inspired adolescent fantasies by appearing once on a cover of Playboy wearing only a leather bikini and had tried out a whole range of thrills, with a marked preference for the most dangerous ones. She was about to turn thirty when an encounter with Buddhism saved her from the bonfire of the vanities and turned her into a soldier for truth.

  It was the first time my bedroom has been used also for religious practices. Each evening Agnese would kneel in front of a small portable temple to recite her mantra. She always emerged completely refreshed from these intimate encounters with herself. She’d awoken my interest in the Buddha using that irresistible technique—a mixture of indirect allusions and doleful looks—women adopt when they want you to do something without asking you explicitly.

  I took my time to say yes, coming up with nonexistent religious scruples, until I finally agreed I’d go along with her to a meeting.

  * * *

  “He has a problem with the father figure . . .”

  “With the father figure? More with the mother figure,” I objected.

  “With the mother or the father?” the woman who took care of the incense (and who owned the flat) asked.

  “I’ve got problems with both the mother figure and the father figure,” a young woman, whom I thought I might have seen on TV, remarked.

  “Me too!”

  “And me!”

  “You see? Here you’re never alone,” Agnese summed up, her photogenic face beaming with a wide beatific smile.

  “But I haven’t any issues with my father. I mean, I’ve got a few, but not important ones.”

  “Is that so? Then why do you always forget to pay bills and don’t know how to change a lightbulb?”

  “Do you have to tell everyone my personal stuff? What’s my father got to do with paying bills and changing lightbulbs?”

  “Haven’t you always told me he’s a very practical man? Your refusal to be practical is a way of criticizing him. It’s your way of showing you’re different from him.”

  “My problem is that I’m in love but I’m not happy.”

  I don’t know how that remark came out. Perhaps it was Belfagor who inspired it—he’d seen the topic of conversation was bothering me and I wanted to change it.

  Everyone’s eyes turned on Agnese with a questioning gaze. Except for Che Guevara’s, who was looking at me instead.

  “You’ve made an important discovery. Love isn’t enough to make people happy. Happiness doesn’t come from the world but from the way we relate to the world. It doesn’t depend on wealth or health or even the affection another person feels for us. It depends only on us. We can all experience happiness. Let’s repeat now: I can be happy.”

  A chorus of voices intoned: “I can be happy.”

  Che turned back to me. “You agree?”

  “In theory, yes. But life isn’t a mantra for people who are out to have a good time. We all have an intimation of the injustice that has been inflicted on us, which we cannot accept. It shows there’s no such thing as Providence, because if there were it wouldn’t have allowed it to happen. In order to endure the pain we’ve had to arm ourselves with cynicism to protect ourselves from the truth.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Nearly thirty.”

  “It’s the age when you first take stock. I know what you’re feeling: I’ve been there myself. You feel as if you’ve been living on a downwards slope which has brought you to where you are now. As if you’re the product of choices you’ve had nothing to do with but were made by the people around you. Was your mother difficult to deal with when you were growing up?”

  “Yes, she was . . . quite difficult,” I lied (but not much).

  “My mother is a complete nuisance too!” said the student with the beaming face who’d solved his parking problems.

  “You must learn to accept your mothers,” Che Guevara continued in a subdued tone that made his words seem less peremptory. “Only by accepting your mothers will you learn to accept yourselves and to approach life without a sense of persecution, but with that vigilant nonchalance which is the secret of a life well spent.”

  “But how do you learn to accept yourself?” I asked.

  “Each time you kneel down to recite the mantra you must try to reconcile yourself with your mother. Only then will you be able to see the truth as it really is, without the mists which conceal it from the eyes of the weak in spirit. If you want to change the effects, you must change the causes. Life will respond. It always does.”

  * * *

  After that evening, all the questions which had been stored away in the loft came down out of their packing cases. Why did my mother have to die so young? Would I have been a different person, a better person, if I’d grown up as part of a loving family? Given that your mother is the first person who teaches you what love is about, was I destined to go on having to learn for the rest of my life?

  Pray and you’ll find the answers, Che Guevara had said. I prayed in Japanese, but the answers didn’t come. So I started to look for them in books, in songs, in endless wearisome conversations with myself.

  One night, after we’d made love, Agnese curled up inside my arms. I tried to synchronize my body to the rhythm of her gentle breathing. Before I spoke to her I wanted to make sure she was asleep.

  “I want to be brave and tell you something—you, at least,” I whispered into her armpit. “My mother died when I was nine years old. She did all she could to stay alive until the end, but she couldn’t. And I still can’t accept she died, you see? It’s unfair, and I’ve still got to understand why. In those Greek tragedies you love so much there’s
always someone who takes revenge and restores the equilibrium that has been destroyed. But who can I take revenge on? On God who killed her and took her away from me? How can I, if I don’t know where he lives or what he’s like? And in any case your Buddha says that revenge doesn’t restore equilibrium, it just creates new imbalances.”

  The morning after I woke up to a smell of coffee and Agnese’s face smiling over me.

  “I had a strange dream last night,” she began. “There was a liar in my bed who was telling me the truth.”

  “Did you have a soft spot for him, a little?”

  “I told him to stop thinking over things all the time and to start feeling.”

  “Good advice. And what does the chef recommend for breakfast this morning?”

  “Something to set you on the right path again.”

  She handed me a tray. On it there was a cappuccino, a croissant and the photocopy of a Buddhist prayer.

  We need to learn how to control our own minds rather than letting them control us.

  My friends, let a new faith fill you. Keep polishing your lives like a mirror, day and night, never pausing to rest.

  Learn to dominate your self, learn how to control with skill the reins of that wild horse, the mind. And then you will be free to run with the wind . . .

  twenty-four

  But I’d never learnt to ride, and the mind kept unsaddling me. I was too accustomed to trying to work everything out in my head to be able to surrender to the spiritual.

  I sought refuge in the familiar world of work: that circle of journalists, politicians and intellectuals who choose to frequent the privileged milieu of Rome’s airiest, most elegant terraces. If you want to avoid any possibility of self-examination, exchanging tidbits of gossip with the powerful is a sure-fire method for doing so.