Sweet Dreams

by Massimo Gramellini

And yet not even there did I ever feel I was one of them. I specialized in feeling ill at ease wherever I went. Among those interested in the spiritual life, my sense of the comic would surface, like a petulant little voice which prevented me from taking them seriously. Among intellectuals, I would feel trapped in their arid conversations, my soul parched and thirsting for the infinite.

  There’s nothing from this period in my biscuit tin. What can be found there, though, are the remains of a burst balloon wrapped round an old passport, the one with the visa stamp of Maybe Airlines.

  * * *

  A unique train of events resulted in my finding myself, in the summer I turned thirty-three, in the phone box of a military airport, wearing a bulletproof jacket and talking to my wife at the other end of the line. I’d got married four months earlier—but not to Agnese. Our love affair was more of a bridge than a landing point. No angry scenes accompanied our separation: we left each other with a sense of mutual gratitude and exhaustion.

  I’d been rescued by a colleague who behaved abrasively with the people around her but was very sweet to me. She had read all my favorite foreign authors—in her case she had not needed translations—and at that moment was giving me a speed course in autogenic training on the phone.

  “You’re the most courageous man in the world!”

  “I’m sorry, I think you’ve got the wrong number.”

  “Do you want me to call you a coward?”

  “At least you’d be right. I’m pissing myself—and believe me, I am not speaking metaphorically . . . Look, I can’t go to Sarajevo. It’s under siege. There’s no light, no water, no gas. People are shooting each other in the streets.”

  “I know, and I’m really scared too. But I also know you can do it!”

  “And what have I got to do with this war? Three years ago I was still a sports journalist. And when I started to write about politics the greatest risk I ran was having coffee with some minister.”

  “That’s just it: other people see you as just a humorist, only capable of seeing the funny side of things.”

  “I don’t give a damn about what others think of me.” I lied.

  “Get on that plane and prove them all wrong!”

  So with my goddess of war pushing me on, I adjusted the bulletproof jacket round my belly and climbed aboard a UN bomber plane full of food provisions. I dug out a space for myself at the back from among piles of tinned tuna.

  The emotional high only lasted until takeoff, and was already running low when we approached Sarajevo, as the German pilot pointed out to me the Serbian antiaircraft artillery camouflaged in the scrub.

  “If they shoot us down, tomorrow the United Nations will issue a sharp protest,” he told me in stilted English.

  To which my reply, screamed in Italian, was: “What the hell am I doing here?”

  The bulletproof jacket didn’t protect me from a shameful fear of dying. I tried to fight it back by talking aloud to my mother:

  “I’m a coward . . . Don’t you think I am? Believe me, I’m a coward. The real problem is that it was cowardly of me to get married.”

  My tone had all the sincerity which comes at decisive moments.

  “It’s not my wife who’s the problem. She’s committed and determined—you heard her on the phone. It’s me. I should have taken a climb, but instead I’ve taken a shortcut. I tried to change my life without changing myself. I told myself the fable of love between kindred spirits and the union of two solitudes. Then there’s her family, which is stable and welcoming: a real family. Have I ever had anything similar, since you left us? But if I continue like this, Mom, I won’t grow up. Even at our wedding I wasn’t a bridegroom: I was the usual motherless child. I felt weighed down by shame during the ceremony. I feared the reactions of the guests when they found out you only existed in the lies I’d fed them over the years. Even though I have to admit your absence didn’t seem to upset them—they seemed more interested in the buffet.”

  This self-examination session was carried out at altitude under the threat of antiaircraft fire: I was really pushing the boundaries of psychoanalysis.

  “I’m still the same depressed elf who walks on tiptoe keeping his head down . . . Yet when I placed the ring on her finger, I thought I was looking at heaven.”

  The pilot and copilot didn’t understand Italian and were giving me strange looks. Perhaps they assumed I was talking into a portable recorder? I doubt it. From the way they grinned, it would seem they thought I was mad.

  “But perhaps, Mom, I only got married because I was scared. Yes, that’s it. I was scared of losing something which I realize now I could easily do without—that illusion of stability and safety which is just a pale imitation of the sweet dreams you used to wish me when I was a child. Please let me land alive in Sarajevo and I promise you I’ll make my marriage take off . . . I’ll shake off all the old habits, immediately. I’ll start again from the simplest feelings.”

  For example, by being nice to Matt, the Scandinavian UN soldier with a horned helmet who welcomed me to the airport, among dilapidated hangars and ghostly warehouses.

  Well, “welcomed” is not the right word. He actually grabbed me by the scruff of my neck, dragged me heavily along the runway, out of range of the snipers and into customs, a mud trench with what remained of a battered desk standing in it.

  Matt sat on the table and stamped the first empty page in my passport—Maybe Airlines.

  “It’s the entry visa,” he chuckled. “Do you like the name? I invented it.”

  I gave him a cigarette in exchange.

  “You don’t want one?” he asked, taking a greedy drag.

  “I’ve just given up.”

  It was true. I’d smoked my last cigarette during my honeymoon, on top of a hill we renamed Mount Respiration in honor of the occasion.

  All the same I’d brought with me a multipack, on the assumption that in wartime health concerns take less of a priority. But the idea came to me of inaugurating my new life with a generous gesture. I turned my backpack upside down and a pack of ten Camel Lights tumbled into Matt the Viking’s arms. He thanked me in his unintelligible language, but his smile was very eloquent.

  * * *

  Another example: being nice to Salem.

  twenty-five

  The hospital in Sarajevo floated like some phantom ship enveloped in clouds of dust, among blackened buildings and torn-apart streets. A nurse persisted in cleaning the floors with an inevitably dry mop, while a horde of mothers hardened by desperation pursued the doctors along the corridors and seized hold of their white coats, with pleas and threats.

  It was one of those situations where even charitable organizations are forced to choose their priorities. The United Nations had arranged for an airplane to fly to London with forty children in desperate medical conditions. The doctors were going through the wards drawing up priority lists, which changed all the time because each day some of the patients died. A place had just become available, and all the mothers were fighting like lionesses, prepared to do anything to get their children to make progress on this absurd waiting list.

  Room 51 in the pediatric ward looked directly onto the street since a bomb had made a hole in the walls and smashed out the glass in the windows. There were no more drips or clean sheets or food. Families crowded round the narrow beds. There was a bed in the far corner which had no visitors in attendance: in it lay a little boy with hair so black it seemed blue.

  His solitude caught my attention. An ancient rubber pacifier protruded from his mouth, totally unsuitable for his age. A bloodstained piece of cloth on his chest rose and fell as he breathed. He was clutching a burst balloon in one hand.

  I stroked his face. A shrill cry burst from him: “Mama! Dada!”

  “He’s calling for his mommy and daddy,” said Doctor Joza. He was actually a nurse, but everyone called him doctor. He’d won his promotion on the field.

  “Salem is an orphan. His parents died in a bomb attack a month ago. An
d then he was shot in the stomach by a sniper.”

  In other words, in that city there existed a human being who, because of some fatuous obsession with race, had hidden behind a parapet and taken aim through his gunsight at a little boy in the street playing with a balloon and had shot him in the stomach.

  “Is he on the list for London?” I asked.

  Dr. Joza shook his head.

  “He hasn’t got a mother to fight to get him on it.”

  It was as if a starting pistol for a hurdle race had fired in my head.

  “I’m going to try and get him out of here.”

  I went round tormenting UN officials and British diplomats, but all of them already had their own lists. Out of politeness they added Salem’s name to the bottom.

  My last hope was the wad of dollars hidden away in my bulletproof jacket. I had to pay out a hundred in order to get a name—Commander Chuka.

  * * *

  An interpreter took me to my appointment through spotlessly clean streets. In Sarajevo the street cleaners stole a march on the war.

  Like everyone else in the besieged city, we walked along one side of the street only, the pavement which was out of aim of the besiegers’ fire. Every other step we’d look up at the roofs to check for the presence of snipers. Continuous bursts of rifle shots in the background accompanied us like sinister music. It was impossible to tell where they were being fired, or who was firing against whom.

  Commander Chuka was waiting for us in a smoky bar. The walls were covered with student graffiti harking back to slogans of 1968. He’d been able to buy the bar from the proceeds of bank heists. In a previous existence he’d spent long periods in prison for armed robbery, but when the whole of Sarajevo turned into an open-air prison he’d dished out firearms to thirty youths in his neighborhood and proclaimed himself their leader.

  What distinguishes the human from the inhuman is a sense of justice. Commander Chuka wasn’t good. But he was just. He’d made sure the old people in the area got to safety and he’d fought a battle to get hold of a hundred kilos of flour which he’d then presented to a group of orphan children who’d taken refuge in a cave by the river. Every time he went to see them in his Mazda sports car, bright red and obviously stolen, the kids would kiss his hands, clasped to the machine gun he always carried round with him.

  I told him about Salem and pushed a bundle of dollars across the table towards him.

  “I’ll take it, but not for myself,” he said. “It’ll help to oil the wheels.”

  I went back the following day, and he showed me a list with all the official stamps required. At number 11—my favorite number—was Salem’s name.

  Before I took my leave he handed me a red balloon.

  “Give it to the little boy from me.”

  So it was that I entered the saddest hospital in the world with a smile on my face and a balloon tied to my finger.

  I crossed room 51 and saw a crowd round Salem’s bed. For a moment I hoped they might be Salem’s Muslim parents, but they were fair-haired like the little boy wearing braces who was lying on the bed and gobbling instant mash.

  Dr. Joza plonked a hand down on my shoulder.

  “We’ve done it!” I burst out. “Salem’s on the list! By the way, which ward have you transferred him to?”

  “Salem died this morning.”

  I hugged the balloon so tightly to my chest it burst in my hands.

  “Shall I take you to see him?” Dr. Joza asked.

  “Thanks, but I can go on my own.”

  I shut my eyes and saw him. As a teenager, in his prime, as an old man—all the things he would never be—and then again as the little boy in the hospital bed, with a hole in his stomach I’d not managed to fill in time.

  Once more I’d deluded myself that life was a story with a happy ending, while in fact it was just a balloon filled with my own dreams and destined always to burst in my hands.

  * * *

  In Sarajevo I spent a month in hotels with no water and no electricity, meeting children who had lost their mothers, and their limbs, stepping on a land mine.

  My own childhood drama was reawakened by those sights. It was the drama of my adulthood that no longer stirred any emotion in me. What earthly use was this life of mine which I was so scared of losing?

  Before I went back to Rome, I helped the interpreter move some books out of his bombed-out house. I saw a copy of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables in French and looked for a sentence which I knew must be somewhere towards the end.

  The protagonist Jean Valjean is dying, and his adopted daughter, Cosette, is begging him to fight to get better. She doesn’t want him to die, but Valjean, a just man if ever there was one, reassures her.

  “Ce n’est rien de mourir. C’est affreux de ne pas vivre.”

  “Dying is nothing. What’s terrifying is not to live.”

  * * *

  Once I’d returned to my routine existence, I plunged back into my usual way of life. After a while I no longer kept looking up every few steps to see if I could spot snipers on the roofs of Trastevere. Even the memory of Salem began to fade. Belfagor had provided me with a shield of egotism and irony, and I hid behind it to avoid any sense of grief.

  I forgot the promise I’d made to my mother. After a difficult year, my marriage broke down one evening, when my wife announced that her biological clock had sounded an alarm.

  I stepped back against the doors of the wardrobe, as if to put a tangible distance between her impulse and mine. All my life I’d regretted not having a family. And now, when I could have had one, I realized I was terrified by the idea.

  It’s not really true that you desire what you’ve never had. When you’re not well, you prefer what you’ve always had.

  All victims have a tendency to repeat the old familiar formulas of the past. My past evoked Christmas dinners with Mita and Dad. Whenever I thought of a son, I never saw him as an heir, but as a potential orphan.

  * * *

  My protracted silence had worn My Uncle down, and he stopped trying to contact me. But while I was in the throes of my marriage breakdown, he told my father he would like to see me again briefly. He was ill and didn’t have much time left to live.

  We met in my father’s apartment, where we had spent so many afternoons talking about the Toro, tick-tock and the books which only he had really read.

  He’d lost all his hair because of the treatment he had undergone, but his eyes were the same, bright blue, like Mom’s.

  I should have asked him to forgive me and shown him unstinting love. Perhaps if I’d made such a gesture all my problems would have dissolved away. As it was, my embarrassment prevented me from saying anything more than small talk. I’d grown used to frequenting the terraces of the powerful in Rome and regarded my relatives’ simplicity with ill-concealed annoyance. Thinking back on it, my behavior was disgusting.

  When My Uncle died in his bed like Jean Valjean, his wife sent, to my address in Rome, a matchbox my mother had used to light her last cigarette before her final collapse. Someone had found it on a windowsill, and he had preserved it like a relic.

  So I found out that on the point of dying from a heart attack, my mother had lit a cigarette. She must have been mad. Like me. But, unlike me, she was also good.

  twenty-six

  It was women who helped me out of the problems I’d got myself tangled up in, perhaps to make up for their mass desertion of me during my childhood. Everywhere I turned I was met by a smiling female face: the friend who found me a place to rent in her block, the cleaning lady who resembled the kindly babysitter I’d longed for as a boy, the bed companion who accepted me for what I could give her—very little, to be honest.

  The rapid blooming and fading of my marriage had had a subtle knock-on effect on my sexual appetites. Sudden arousal would be followed by an equally rapid loss of interest.

  Detaching myself was complicated by my victims’ dedication. They couldn’t get their heads round my emotional ups a
nd downs. I was like those men who lack the willpower to leave the woman they no longer desire and allow themselves to be pushed out of the relationship as if it was she who was rejecting them.

  After two years of getting myself into unspeakable messes, I made a decision to keep away from women in order not to ruin anyone’s life. I drew strength from this voluntary abstinence. I began to feel I could survive on my own. One summer evening, convinced I was done with love for good, I accepted an invitation to a party on a Roman terrace. My life’s soul mate happened to choose this occasion to come up behind me unannounced.

  I was holding forth to a couple of friends on how not even the vulgarity of certain persons (I was referring to a colleague who had the habit of serving lasagna onto plates with his bare hands) could destroy my faith in human progress, when a glamorous voice sounded out somewhere just behind the nape of my neck.

  “We’re not evolved monkeys: we’re fallen divinities!”

  As I turned to see who’d spoken, I remember thinking: here’s the usual crazy gate-crasher who’s helped herself to a bit too much gin. Then I saw her and realized it wasn’t only her voice which was glamorous.

  After a silent appreciation of her fine cheekbones, I made the mistake of replying to her.

  “How do you know you’re right?”

  “How do you know you are? The idea we’ve evolved from monkeys is just a platitude scientists have accepted because they can’t come up with a better explanation!”

  “And might that not be because a better explanation doesn’t exist?”

  “If you’re using just your head and your five senses you’re obviously not going to find a better explanation!”

  “And what should I be using instead?”

  “Your heart!”

  My reader will no doubt have noticed that I was trying to advance through this philosophical jungle by waving feeble question marks in the air, while my interlocutor cut her way through with exclamations.