Sweet Dreams

by Massimo Gramellini

  The girls I’d been talking to made off at the first sign that blood was about to be spilt. But in fact there was no clash between us. I merely greeted her revelations with a series of ironic grimaces and raised eyebrows.

  Elisa told me about Atlantis, a civilization more developed than our own which had destroyed itself through excessive greed. Its ruin lay deep in the ocean, hidden from our eyes, but not from our consciences, if only we could use them.

  I used mine and realized that this mixture of spirit and cheekbones had managed to dismantle the armor I’d worn so carefully all these years.

  The friend who’d brought her to the party later told me she was his girlfriend. It took months for me to find out it wasn’t true—when all I needed to do was ask her directly. When I finally did, by some kind of instinctive mutual agreement we immediately became a couple, almost as if we’d fallen in love with each other in some previous life—in an Atlantis attic perhaps.

  * * *

  I won Elisa over with an intimate supper at my place. She arrived under the kind of hat a silent-film diva might have worn, encased in a bright-orange woolen skirt which stopped at the knees to reveal a pair of jet-black tights disappearing into long boots.

  She brought along two frozen organic pizzas, as if predicting what would happen to my ready-cooked veal roulades, which emerged from the microwave in a liquid state.

  When a couple first gets together, you can see the purpose of the relationship in their gestures. Elisa came into my life to change the menu. But it wasn’t clear what I was supposed to do for her. Amuse her perhaps? The expression on my face as I extracted the roulades from the microwave had sent her into fits of laughter.

  When we went into the sitting room, I felt so much at ease with her that I decided to tell her everything. I don’t mean the usual lies, but something quite amazing for me: the truth.

  I placed an album of family photographs in her lap and sat on the arm of the chair to guide her through it.

  “Here’s me when I was very little with my mother . . . Don’t say what everyone says: you were so cute: what happened to you?”

  “I prefer you as you are now. I wouldn’t like you with puffy cheeks and a curly head.”

  “But something really did happen to me. Look: my mother isn’t in any of the later photographs. She died when I was nine.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She brushed my hand with her long pianist’s fingers and left them there.

  “She was ill with cancer, but became so weak that she died of a heart attack on New Year’s Eve.”

  She gave me a certain look, the kind of look a woman gives you when she’s decided to trust you.

  I tried to touch her knee with my free hand, but ended up digging her in the thigh with my elbow.

  “The fact I’ve got no mother . . . is that a problem for you?”

  She recoiled slightly, but more because I’d just managed to elbow her than because I was motherless.

  “I know lots of people who are orphans even though their parents are alive—they’ve never been loved or understood.”

  “Are you scared of dying?”

  Typical. I’m perched on the arm of a chair, waiting for the right moment to kiss the woman I might spend the rest of my life with, and I ask her if she’s terrified of snuffing it.

  However the question didn’t seem to upset her—or startle her.

  “I came quite close to dying when I was a girl. Since then I know what death is and I no longer think about it. I know it’s a transition from one dimension to another, from the material to the immaterial. The ancient Egyptians called it emerging into light. When you think of it like that, it seems less scary, don’t you think?”

  “And what about life?”

  “I’m scared by the thought of wasting it. If death is a journey, then life is the price of the ticket.”

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

  “I think I’ve read that somewhere—I can’t remember where.”

  “I wrote it.”

  If ever we shacked up together I must remember to remove my copy of Les Misérables from my shelves.

  “Are you sure? And what did you mean exactly when you wrote it?”

  I was beginning to understand the type of person she was. She wasn’t satisfied with phrasemaking: she wanted to get me to the heart of the matter.

  “Erm . . . that we need to confront life. That the suffering we undergo, the injustices, the tears we shed for a cause have a purpose. Though I couldn’t tell you what that is.”

  “I think their purpose is to make us change. Haven’t you ever asked yourself, when something bad happens to you: why has this happened to me, what’s life telling me?”

  “No, usually I just complain about it. And what might the answer be, in your opinion?”

  “You’ll make fun of me as you did with Atlantis.”

  “I didn’t make fun of you! Not that much, anyway.”

  To prove my innocence I flung my arms out, like some arthritic butterfly, in the process digging her with my elbow for the second time, this time in the shoulder.

  She took hold of my hands, in self-defense I think. We interlaced fingers and she squeezed mine. When two people fall in love there’s no more beautiful moment than when you interlace your fingers in those of the other person and she squeezes them. A voyage of discovery is beginning.

  I bent my lips down to meet hers, but I didn’t have to bend all the way as hers came up to meet mine.

  They tasted of sweet dreams.

  the inevitable happened to me without advance warning

  twenty-seven

  The inevitable happened to me without advance warning, just as I was packing my bags for a work trip.

  My father had been fighting for some time with cancer. He phoned to tell me that his condition had worsened, in the same dry bureaucratic tone he used to remind me to pay an overdue bill.

  I felt my stomach clench. I was surprised by the intensity. Was I just scared of losing him or had I only now found out how much I loved him?

  I changed the labels on my luggage and together with Elisa went to spend the summer in Turin, in the bedroom where my mother had spoken to me for the last time.

  Dad was lying in the bed now. With the approach of death, he was helpless, utterly unlike the man I’d gone in awe of all my life.

  One August evening he watched the sun set through the window and knew he wouldn’t see it again. He took hold of my wrist.

  “You know I’ve only ever loved your mother, don’t you?”

  “I hope you’ve loved your son as well.”

  “I’ve never understood you. But of course I’ve loved you—on trust.”

  He tried to smile but was overcome by a fit of coughing.

  “I still feel I’m to blame for your mother. If I hadn’t gone back to bed and fallen asleep that night . . .”

  “What are you talking about, Dad? I know you’re Napoleon, but even he couldn’t have stopped someone dying from a heart attack.”

  He seemed about to say something, but then closed his eyes instead. When he reopened them he was already drifting off elsewhere.

  “After your mother died, you were too much on your own. I should have got you a dog.”

  “I’d have been happy with a decent babysitter. But don’t worry about that now, try to rest . . .”

  “Dog” was the last word my father spoke. I’d never heard him mention a dog before, and I attributed it to feverish ramblings. The world of animals had never attracted him.

  The coffin was put on display in the sitting room where my mother’s coffin had once been shown. Only, this time I was present, standing guard over the corpse.

  As she passed by the refrigerated coffin to pay her respects with her husband, Giorgio, Ginetta took me aside and told me in an urgent whisper: “Sell this place. It’s cursed!”

  Her remark bewildered me. I immediately consulted Belfagor as to what it might mean. He put it do
wn to Ginetta’s grief at losing an old friend.

  * * *

  On my birthday, which also happens to be the feast day of the Guardian Angels, Elisa and I decided to take a walk up Monte Circeo, to try to salvage something of the missed holiday.

  We were walking by the edge of the wood when suddenly, from under a bush, something completely white emerged. It was a dog, not much bigger than a large rat, with the muzzle and paws of a wolf.

  He sniffed the air, uncertain which way to go. He looked at the various people out for a stroll and then headed resolutely in my direction.

  I fell in love with him at first sight, so naturally I tried to shake him off. It’s what I always do when I fall in love. I managed to leave him behind at a crossroads, but Elisa went back for him. She found him sitting in the middle of the road, waiting for her.

  We called him Billy. Neither of us knew much about dogs—it took us a couple of days to discover it was in fact a “she.” The name didn’t change, only the spelling: Billie. Dad had sent me a four-legged guardian angel as a birthday present.

  I would have been the first to scoff at this fortuitous alignment of the stars if it hadn’t been obvious right from the beginning that Billie was a very unusual dog. She never barked at cats. Before she entered a room she raised her front paw as if to knock on the door. She cultivated her solitude assiduously and would spend entire days gazing at some undefined point in space.

  Over time I think I’ve started to understand what she’s seeing. She intercepts the energy emanating from love. She feeds on those vibrations.

  If someone nearby raised their voice, that was enough to send her looking for a hiding place in some inaccessible corner of the closet. But if two people embraced within her signal range, they’d feel a light breeze round their ankles—it was Billie, the angel of love, happily wagging her tail with her tongue hanging out.

  * * *

  For work reasons I had to spend the entire winter in a service flat in Milan. Elisa and Billie would join me at the weekends.

  One evening, when dark gray clouds filled the sky—and my heart, thanks to Belfagor—I took the wolf-rat from Circeo for a walk on a small oasis of green in the middle of the traffic.

  The other dogs stood motionless in that patch of grass, paralyzed at the thought that if they sprinted off they’d be run over by cars. Billie, on the other hand, decided to entrust herself to the aerodynamic forces of her own small body and started to race frenetically round and round the small island of green. It was an absurd and marvelous sight. It was her way of facing down reality by transforming it into the dream she carried around inside her.

  But Billie’s lesson was lost on me. At supper that evening I sat facing Elisa, filling my stomach with ravioli and her ears with complaints about the world and why everyone treated me so badly.

  “Why do you always play the victim when you’re not one?” she broke in to ask. “The way you think is bad. And the way you eat is even worse. You’re holding your fork like a chisel and you’ve got sauce dripping out of your mouth. It’s disgusting!”

  “My word, what sharp observational skills! So, Miss Twenty-Twenty Vision, the only thing which interests you in all I’ve been saying is the sauce on my chin?”

  “Yes, it does interest me. A lot. You’re forty years old and you eat like a spoilt child. Did no one ever teach you some good manners?”

  “And who was around to teach me? Who? No one ever taught me anything. No one!”

  I stormed into the sitting room looking for something I could vent my rage on, when I saw something white shivering between the sofa and the curtains—Billie.

  She was terrified, but also offended: loveless as I was, I was starving her. I dropped to my knees and gathered her up in a hug which reminded me of hugs I’d received long ago. I started to cry—I didn’t think I could. Billie licked all my tears away, and my anger gradually faded away.

  The following morning I found a note from Elisa inside my jacket pocket. She’d written it on the back of a business card.

  Remember at every moment that your mother is alive and is showing you how to live. She has always been with you. She’s sad you don’t believe in perfect love. Say hello to her when you wake up and talk to her all the time, about everything. She knows about love. Thank her for her love for you and make an effort not to give way to your skepticism. Just throw it in the wastepaper bin.

  I would need to find a large one, but in the meantime I put the card in my wallet in the inside pocket of my jacket, adding it to the photograph of me smiling on my mother’s lap and a rare example of my father’s handwriting. On one occasion, at the bottom of the usual typewritten letter to me full of warnings about my unsettled bills and unpaid parking fines, he’d added, in pen: Lots of love, Dad.

  twenty-eight

  When I got back from his funeral, my godmother got in touch with me. Before reentering my life, she’d waited obstinately for my father to finish his.

  She spoke to me as if I were a nine-year-old boy: she was still stuck in the past—like me, in a way. Our childhood affections are imprinted on our hearts, like indelible tattoos. They may seem extinguished, but they’re only smoldering. And they are rekindled without the need for too much explanation.

  My godmother turned out to be a survivor from a forgotten world. She came out of the mists of the past, my past, carrying a suitcase packed full with memories.

  I was worried I wouldn’t be able to remember it all, so I asked her to write everything down—everything to do with Mom.

  On Christmas Eve, she gave me a green notebook with squared paper. The pages were filled with a story written in a simple prose and clear handwriting, with no crossings out.

  I got to know her during the war. I was working at Spa, a factory belonging to Fiat, which had just been bombed, and she had come for an interview. She was sixteen, three years younger than me. I remember her large blue eyes, full of anxiety and fear. I said to one of my colleagues: “There’s a young girl waiting outside who looks like a little angel.”

  Sometime later I saw her in the office, wearing a black scarf over her hair. After she’d been taken on as a typist she’d fallen ill with typhoid and lost all her hair. Her fingers were blue, but that had nothing to do with her illness. It was the ink from the carbon paper she put into the typewriter to make copies.

  We found out we lived near to each other and we started to meet up on Saturday afternoons. Then came the end of the war. The Liberation. The workers had occupied the factory while the women were sent down to the cellars for a whole day and night, waiting for the Germans to leave the city.

  After we came out, your mother and I started to walk home. We had to walk in a zigzag, because it still wasn’t safe. Fascist snipers were shooting from the roofs and we had to run. Your mother had a particular problem of her own. She’d broken the strap of one of her sandals, and every time we had to run down a dangerous road it would come off. I can’t remember the number of times I had to stop and wait for her.

  On the following days it wasn’t easy for us to meet up, because she lived in Via Calandra, right next to two “houses of ill repute”—and the queue of partisans waiting to get in stretched all the way down to Corso Vittorio. Your mother only went out accompanied by your grandmother Giulia. She’d pretend not to hear the obscene appreciations of the young men waiting in line as she walked by.

  * * *

  Now that the war was over, that summer we let off all our past tension by going dancing. We used to go to the Pagoda, a dance hall on Corso Massimo, just next to the tram stop.

  We would leave the office at five. The Pagoda was open until 6:30, and then again later on, in the evening, but I wasn’t allowed to go out then. So we took advantage of that brief period before we went home for dinner to enjoy ourselves.

  One table was reserved for Senator Agnelli, the man who’d founded Fiat. He sat there with his nurse. He would listen to the music without speaking, watching the young people dance. He was always the
last to leave. He died a few months later.

  On one occasion a group of elegantly dressed young men came in. We had never seen them before. One of them came up to the most beautiful blonde in the room and asked her to dance a tango with him. He said his name was Gianni. It was only after he’d left we found out he was Gianni Agnelli, the grandson of old senator Agnelli. All the other girls crowded round the blonde he’d danced with: “What did he say to you?” But she couldn’t remember. Perhaps all he’d said was “Thank you.”

  Your mother wasn’t aware she’d danced the tango with her boss.

  When she was twenty she fell ill with pneumonia. Antibiotics weren’t commercially available then, so the treatment consisted of giving her sulphonamide and applying poultices, but her temperature remained very high. Her breathing was difficult and sometime the catarrh was so bad she couldn’t even swallow. The doctor who was treating her—well, he was just hoping in a miracle, like the rest of us.

  Every evening, when I left the office, I would rush to see her. My mother was scared the disease was infectious, but she didn’t dare to stop me—nor did she want to, really—from going to see her. She’d convinced herself that smoking got rid of germs so—to my amazement, she’d always strictly forbidden me to smoke—she bought me cigarettes.

  But the pneumonia got worse, so I put on a brave face and went to see her head of department. He was a grumpy old man, but kindhearted. He called a senior person in the firm. The following day antibiotics arrived and your mother got well again.

  * * *

  She had such a sweet tooth. In summer she’d take me to a dairy shop near where she lived to eat ice creams. Once when we were there, a young boy came in dressed in overalls. He was riding a rickety bicycle piled high with goods he was delivering. He asked for the cheapest cone, but found he didn’t have enough money even for that, so the woman behind the counter refused to give him one.