He got back on his bike crestfallen. But your mother called him back. I can still hear her: “Laddie, come here!”
Glaring at the woman, she ordered her to give him the largest cone available—whereupon she handed it to the little chap. She refused to set foot inside the shop again.
* * *
On our visits to the Pagoda she met someone called Carlo. He was a handsome lad—or rather a man, since he must have been thirty. In those days, when you were thirty you were a man.
Carlo was your mother’s first boyfriend. He came from near Asti and owned a car. That counted for something in those days when everyone had bikes.
One Sunday he and his brother drove us to their hometown for the festival held for the local saint’s day. The dance in the town square was scheduled to begin at sunset, after the evening service in church—too late for two city girls who had to get home in time for dinner. But Carlo wanted to dance with your mother, so managed to persuade the band to start up in advance. The townsfolk were all scandalized.
He was always out for a good time and never wanted to do any proper work. He took off before their relationship became serious. Your mother was very upset, but she got over it. Then there was Vanni, who’d left another girl to be with your mother—in fact, I think he married her after your mother got shot of him . . . I mean, ditched him. But she was never really in love with him.
She met your father at the wedding of two of our colleagues, Giorgio and Ginetta. Vanni had been shy, but he was completely different. It might seem strange to you, but when he was among friends your father was a real extrovert.
I imagine you know the rest of the story. How your grandmother Emma was against the match, the way they all had to live together in your grandparents’ flat, the move to a new place and then your arrival.
* * *
Your mother was scared of physical pain. When her wisdom teeth came through, what a saga that was! They hurt whenever she ate, but she preferred keeping them rather than going to the dentist.
I’d offered to go with her, but on three consecutive occasions she didn’t turn up for the appointment. The fourth time I went and fetched her from home and accompanied her all the way to the door of the dentist’s surgery.
I rang the bell and said hello to the receptionist (we’d got to know each other well). I told her I’d finally brought my friend along. She said “What friend?” I turned round and your mother had gone.
I managed to grab hold of her at the foot of the stairs. When the dentist had finished taking the teeth out she asked to see them. She couldn’t believe they’d been removed—thanks to the anesthetic she’d felt nothing.
* * *
Why am I telling you all this? I’m getting old and sometimes I forget what I’m saying . . . Now I remember: your mother was scared of physical pain. It was a kind of phobia which just overcame her completely.
The only time I ever saw her not paralyzed by it was just before you were born. Then she was so happy not even the fear of pain could touch her. I brought you home from the maternity clinic in my arms. Uncle Nevio drove very carefully—we were carrying a precious item!
Every Sunday afternoon we would come to visit and we always ended up staying on for supper, even if it was only some bread and cheese. While your mother did the washing-up, I’d lay you in your cot and talk to you. You used to like the sound of my voice—you would smile and start to complain if I stopped. What lovely conversations we used to have!
I remember once—you must have been about two—I called to say hello on my way home from the office and you flung your little arms round my neck, crying. You didn’t want me to leave. But I think it was really because you liked the feel of the soft fur collar of my overcoat.
Some years after that—do you remember?—we’d all gone on a cruise together to the Canary Islands. Your mother was seasick and either stayed in her cabin or sat in a deck chair with me, asking what you were up to. You were always somewhere else. Everything excited your curiosity. You had a passion for the names of capital cities at the time. You would stop a passenger and ask him: what’s the capital of Peru? And if he didn’t know the answer, you would tell him off.
When we stopped at Cadiz, the guide who was supposed to escort us on a guided visit to a distillery turned up late. He didn’t know Italian very well, so he said he was “sad” for his delay. I remember you were struck by the admission—and in fact he had a rather depressed appearance anyway.
When we got back on the coach to return to the ship, we found a bottle of liqueur waiting for us on every seat. You didn’t hesitate—you took the bottle and gave it to our guide. “So you won’t feel sad anymore.” And in fact you succeeded in getting a smile out of him.
* * *
They were good times. But they came to an end when your mother became ill. I don’t know what you’ve been told about her. But it was impossible not to love her. She was just such a nice person. She had a kind of energy about her.
After she died, your father told me we couldn’t see each other on Sundays as we used to, because you had a season ticket for the Toro, even for their away matches.
But I was at work the rest of the week. I pleaded with him to come to some arrangement. He said that he wasn’t accustomed to asking for charity: if I couldn’t make time to see you during the week, then the two of you could do without me.
On Christmas Eve Uncle Nevio and I came to fetch you to go and buy your present together. You were waiting by the main door. Your father didn’t even want us to come up to the flat.
I think he was jealous of my husband, who was a university professor and used to keep you spellbound with his talk. And then my presence must have reminded him of your mother at a time when he was hoping to close that chapter in his life.
How many times I tried to get in touch with you! But it was no good. I never cry, but one evening Uncle Nevio found me sobbing by the telephone. He got very angry and told me never to call your father again.
But I’ve followed you at a distance. Giorgio and Ginetta gave me news of you. When you wrote for Il Giorno I used to buy it secretly. Then you moved to La Stampa, which we took at home, and I could keep an eye on what you were doing without resorting to subterfuge. For many years reading your articles was my way of being with you.
We’ve met again too late. My husband is dead and I’m aware that with every month—let alone year—that passes my strength is not what it was and my aches and pains increase. But it’s a huge consolation to know you’re still around and that you’re with Elisa. I took a liking to her immediately. Your mother would have done too.
Much love to you both, my dears—you’re the most precious thing I have now.
Your godmother
twenty-nine
The final page was gloomy, but I closed the notebook with a sense of gratitude. I’d found out about the young girl who’d become my mother. And about how strong a friendship could be. Mom and my godmother had been like sisters—more than sisters, since they’d chosen each other.
I was struck too by all the things that little boy, so bold and energetic, had done. Had I really been like that once—before love and its strength abandoned me?
So the “if ” game started again . . .
If Mom had lived, if she had been like any normal mother, I would have grown up with two women looking after me—my mother and my godmother. Instead of having to circle awkwardly round the girls I liked, I’d have gone boldly up to them and asked them to tell me what the capital of Peru was. And instead of spending my teens barricaded in my own room navel-gazing, I would have dished out bottles of liqueur to the world’s depressed, at the risk of being arrested for encouraging drunk and disorderly behavior.
But it would have been all too easy. And what good would it have done me in the end? All things considered, I preferred myself having to carry a thorn in my side. I’d spent the first half of my existence regretting another way of life which, it turned out, I wouldn’t have wanted to live anyway.<
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I still missed, terribly, the young woman with her blond hair and her hands blue from carbon paper and her wide eyes gazing at a world full of terrors. But I missed her in a different way. Now I missed the opportunity of being able to protect her.
* * *
I got married, for the second time, in the Rome registry office on the Campidoglio one spring morning at nine o’clock. We toasted each other with black currant juice. While I smiled at the photographer who was busy immortalizing the different poses we assumed against the backdrop of the Roman Forum, for a moment I felt like a man rather than an orphan.
With Elisa beside me, I was discovering new places and new books. I found that you can cultivate the spirit without having to belong to any established religion. I began to understand the secrets we refuse to acknowledge even though they’re within us—or perhaps because they’re within us.
I learnt not to surrender passively to events but to interpret them as signs. I realized that love can be a stick to lean on, but also a sword with which to conquer new insights into your own potentialities. For years I’d thought of love as something you acquire: now I saw that it involved giving something to another person.
* * *
I started to talk about such matters with readers through the medium of a lonely-hearts column. Elisa persuaded me to do it and to ignore all those men who think getting a sentimental education is a waste of time and regard any talk about one’s inner torments as an admission of weakness.
One March day a particular letter arrived for me at the newspaper offices. As soon as I started to read it, I realized that life was finally presenting me with the opportunity to tell others who I was. I’ve copied the letter, as well as my reply, just as they appeared in the newspaper.
I’m thirty-nine years old and happily married. So I’m not writing to you about marriage problems, but because I had a wonderful mother. She gave birth to me when she was just twenty. She died from breast cancer during the Christmas holidays; since then my life has been like a black-and-white film.
Thanks to my mother I love the Rolling Stones (the Beatles too, though not so much) and Lucio Battisti—and mankind. She taught me to get on well with people, to show respect to those who are vulnerable, not to get upset when the world turns a blind eye and a deaf ear to romantics like us.
She worked in a factory all her life. Her love for my father was profound; she cared for my grandfather and looked after her own mother right up until her death, when she herself was terminally ill. When my grandmother died, she leant close to her and whispered in her ear: “Thank you for everything.”
Three months later she died. It was a sunny morning. She could hardly speak but told me: “Don’t you ever give up: you’re a good lad. I’m honored to have you as a son.”
I’m crying as I write this, but my heart is broken and I don’t know how to get back to normal. It’s just too hard to get over it. The pain is too extreme. So I wanted to write to you to ask if you, with your wisdom and experience, can suggest how to fill, at least in part, this enormous gap in my life.
Gabriele
Gabriele, I’ve got no wisdom and no experience. But I lost my mother too, when I was just nine. And letters like yours can still upset me, even nowadays when people go on TV to display their emotions.
Ten years ago, when I was thirty, I didn’t willingly speak about my mother to anyone, not even myself. As a boy I unconsciously refused to believe she was dead. I hid her photo away in a drawer. If I can write about it now in a newspaper it’s because I’ve learnt to accept my grief and to forgive, to forgive my mother for leaving me and the universe for taking her away—when she was only forty-three, after a life not so different from that of your own mother.
My mother’s father died when she was a girl. During the war, at an age when today’s teenage girls write and tell this column about their first boyfriend troubles, she was working in a factory as bombs were falling, in order to help her mother bring up her four younger siblings.
She was fair-haired, a bit harebrained, emotional—like me. She was selfless, always ready to help anyone, like a radiator always on steady heat. I wish I were like her in that, but I’m not.
If somehow she’d survived the illness which killed her during the Christmas holidays, just like your mother, I would probably have ended up today as a lawyer (that’s what she saw me as—“He talks nonstop!”). Journalism is too risky a profession—I’m not sure if I’d have had the courage to upset her by going into it.
I envy you, Gabriele, because there’s no mention in your letter of the most obvious recrimination: how could such a good woman go off in such a hurry? But your mother didn’t leave behind in the nest some frightened little fledgling: she left an adult, and she had time to teach him how to love mankind, Lucio Battisti and the Rolling Stones—in a word, the basics of life.
But still, when your mother dies early it remains an injustice you just can’t comprehend. What saves us is the thought that this life is simply an apprenticeship. We must get through it with a smile, if we can. Real happiness, however, must lie elsewhere.
We’re here to prepare ourselves. But we’re not all at the same stage. Some are ahead of us and need less time before taking off the L-plates and driving away. If you’re an angel when you’re young, what’s the point of growing old? That’s not always the case, of course, otherwise only the wicked would grow old—and that’s obviously not true.
So let’s put it like this: each of us has a task to carry out in life. In our case, our mothers accomplished it more quickly than others. Because they didn’t have so much to do, or because they were better at doing it. We live on as their sons with our memories—which, for you, luckily, outweigh the regrets.
I’ve been told that on the night my mother died the last thing she did was to come into my bedroom and tuck in the blankets. Your mother whispered those marvelous words in your ear.
Let’s remember them like that, in the act of loving us and blessing us for the last time. And let’s try to be worthy of them, Gabriele. Without showing off about it, without being scared.
* * *
I hadn’t given a thought to what the effects of writing this might be. A warm flood of letters overwhelmed me, as if for a second my words had touched the innermost spirit of the world.
One woman wrote to tell me that after she’d read my column she’d gone to see her mother just to give her a hug. She hadn’t done this for a long time, but she now thought herself lucky she still could after reading about those who’d missed their mother’s embraces their whole life. The opposite of another woman, who wrote to say that, having lost her mother when she was just two years old, she thought I was fortunate, since at least I could remember mine.
Among my colleagues at the newspaper the revelation produced different reactions according to which office they worked in. The current affairs reporters who thronged the room known as “Tiananmen” pinned the cutting to the noticeboard. One of the clerks sent me his condolences.
In the room called “Capalbio,” the office where the eggheads and the pundits hung out, and which I too frequented, no one showed any sign of having read it, except for one pointlessly pretty female colleague, who asked me which French film had given me the idea. Only a fellow columnist in her sixties known for her bad temper left two chocolates on my desk, with a note: “These are for you, with two kisses.”
A very famous TV journalist called me to say how disappointed he was I’d turned sentimental. From a scourge of contemporary manners like me he would have expected more spice and less sugar.
He added that he was just about to go on a safari with a group of bankers. I wished the lions bon appétit.
how much time had gone by
thirty
How much time had gone by since I’d made my public confession?
The blink of an eye, a mere nine years.
Billie had become even whiter and Elisa had grown even younger—her complexion was as fresh as a girl’s.
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I was working once again in Turin as in the old days when I had Orso as a boss—with the difference that I was now one of the bosses.
Belfagor had continued to doze on and off inside me. But the last few months had seen an increase in his activity, like a volcano coming to life which you’d mistakenly thought extinct.
It was writing my first novel—or the “novelette,” as I fondly called it—which had woken him up. I started and abandoned dozens of stories, but I’d finally succeeded in finishing one. But the work of interior excavation which the writer, like an archaeologist, undertakes had roused my monstrous familiar from his slumber.
All those books I’d left unfinished proved how much the prospect of Belfagor’s reawakening scared me. And yet, if I really wanted to change my life, I had to provoke him into action, tempt him out of his cave for the final battle.
The day of truth began with the Moka pot muttering away on the cooker without releasing any flow of coffee to break the tension.
Perhaps I’d forgotten to fill it with water? If so, there was a reason for it. My fingers were covered with bits of Sellotape: I’d been trying to patch together the copy of my book I had been hawking round with me in bookshop presentations, which in the course of its journeys had fallen to bits. It’s a well-known fact that we men can’t succeed in doing two things at the same time—after all, that’s why we’ve created a society which allows us to get on with one thing only, leaving all the rest for our better halves to do.
My novelette was about a man who resembled me—he’d lost his mother too—but not closely. I’d sent him off to take the waters at a rather special health center, the Soul Spa, where he would be forced to undertake an initiation which I myself had never had the courage to face up to.
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