Sweet Dreams

by Massimo Gramellini

  I’d made sure he was surrounded by spiritual doctors who knew Father Nico’s favorite maxims by heart. I’d put obstacles and sufferings in his way, but at the same time endowed him with the energy to overcome them and to reestablish contact with his powers of intuition, that atrophied part of the brain which connects to the heart and enables us to hear what Jung called “the voice of the gods.”

  While I was writing the book, I’d heard it as well. It had shown me things which no chain of reasoning could ever have led me to, but which imposed themselves on my soul with all the force of a self-evident truth I had always known. Life sets each of us a test we have to face: mine was finding a way to sublimate the loss of my mother, to make up for the absence of female energy by discovering it within me.

  Having put the copy of my book more or less back to rights, at least pending more serious surgical intervention, I put it in the bottom drawer of my desk, side by side with the Danish biscuit tin. Then I prepared an extra cup of coffee, but only had time to swallow it down in one go without even adding sugar: Elisa had appeared in the kitchen doorway with the car keys in her hand.

  It was New Year’s Eve, and like every year since we’d got in touch again, we were going to accompany my godmother to visit Mom. At the cemetery.

  * * *

  She opened the door to us with her handbag already on her arm, but as I was helping her into her coat she mentioned my novelette.

  I’d given her a copy for Christmas, though it had come out earlier, in the spring. The reason for the delay had been an operation on her eyes—which had meant that for several months she wasn’t able to read the detective novels she used to enjoy so much. I could have read my book aloud to her of course, but the voice of the gods had suggested waiting until she’d recovered her sight and things could be done in the right and proper way.

  I asked her if she’d liked the pages on my hero’s mother. This was the only part of the book where I’d drawn directly on my own experience, although when I came to describe her death I’d allowed myself some poetic licence:

  She dragged herself towards the window . . . opened it wide and held on to the sill . . . but her fingers were already lifeless . . . they released their grip . . . and she fell forward into the void, her head upright and her limbs splayed . . . she landed on a heap of snow . . . without a bruise or cut . . . she’d died of a heart attack as she fell . . .

  The image of the flying corpse had seemed to come out of nowhere, as if I had dreamt it, while I was tapping away at the keyboard.

  My godmother had indicated to me that things hadn’t gone exactly like that. I knew that already. But I didn’t know just how differently.

  “I’d like to give you something, dear.”

  “It’s getting late, we need to get to the cemetery before it closes. You can give it to me later.”

  I’m an expert in putting things off until “later.” I know every trick in the book for transforming “later” into “never.”

  “No, not ‘later’! You’ll do it now!” Elisa intervened.

  The lady of the exclamation marks will not shy away from a problem: she advances towards it with an open heart.

  Emboldened by Elisa’s moral support, my godmother fumbled with dwarf-sized keys at the drawers of the bureau. Her lovely, gnarled old hands drew out a brown envelope.

  “After forty years, it’s time that someone told you the truth.”

  I opened the envelope awkwardly and took out an old newspaper cutting—from the newspaper for which I now worked.

  It was the afternoon edition for the last day of the year, forty years earlier.

  MOTHER THROWS HERSELF FROM FIFTH FLOOR

  Tragedy at dawn in Corso Agnelli—43-year-old woman was killed instantly—She’d recently been operated on

  A tragedy took place this morning, at dawn, in Corso Agnelli. Giuseppina Pastore, 43, mother of a little boy, threw herself from the window of her apartment, dying on impact.

  She lived on the fifth floor of No. 32 Corso Agnelli, with her husband Raoul Gramellini, an accountant, and their 9-year-old son Massimo. She’d been severely depressed following a recent operation for cancer on September 20.

  This morning, just after 6, as a result of a sudden panic, she got up while her husband and son were still asleep. It was snowing heavily. Giuseppina Pastore opened the sitting-room window, climbed onto the sill and threw herself down. Her body, covered in blood, was found in the snow by an early passerby, who called the police.

  The police, on the advice of a neighbor, called at the fifth-floor apartment. They had to ring a long time before the dead woman’s husband heard the doorbell. He’d been unaware of the tragic event all the time until the police informed him. He was stunned, then burst into tears. The little boy, Massimo, also woke up, but no one could bring themselves to tell his mother was dead.

  thirty-one

  In journalists’ jargon you’re said to have been “scooped” when your rivals get hold of a news story before you do. In this case my own newspaper had “scooped” me with a news story to last a lifetime—my lifetime.

  My godmother immediately told me the article contained a mistake. My mother hadn’t thrown herself from the sitting-room window, but from one in my father’s study. It was more secluded: she wanted to make sure that no one would disturb her secret rendezvous with death.

  My father had moved my desk to just underneath that window when I’d had to give up my own room for Mita and share both my father’s bedroom and study. He must have looked out of the window from which my mother plunged to her death on countless occasions. How many times had I done the same, never realizing where I was, never knowing who I was.

  * * *

  I needed to feel alive again and went out onto the kitchen balcony to breathe in some cold air.

  The article wasn’t signed: it would certainly not be possible to identify who wrote it at this distance in time. Perhaps it was a cub reporter, forced to work the graveyard shift on New Year’s Eve.

  I pictured him as he arrived, under the falling snow, at the apartment block where the tragedy had occurred, talked to the police, rang the neighbors’ doorbells in the hope of getting in touch with Tiglio and pieced together in his notebook the story I would read forty years later.

  Perhaps the reporter had been a woman—or a man with a feminine sensibility. There was a certain tact in the wording, even though the piece included details it would be unthinkable to publish today: the suicide’s address, the nature of her illness, the name of the minor involved—me.

  Any reader wanting to find out more about the pain I was feeling could have come and rung the intercom. But it was the afternoon edition on New Year’s Eve: the city was half empty and it was snowing hard. Only a few people would have seen it.

  * * *

  I came back into the kitchen, placed the cutting on the table and sat down opposite my godmother.

  Elisa lightly touched my hands to give me courage. I was about to undertake the most difficult interview I’d ever had to do in my life.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “I thought you knew and didn’t want to talk about it. But when I read your novel I realized noone had ever told you anything. I just couldn’t bring myself to remain silent.”

  After forty years, the remark seemed like a joke.

  “How did it happen?”

  “She didn’t fall off. She wanted to fall.”

  “She didn’t have a heart attack.”

  “Your mother had a good heart, in every sense of the word.”

  “So why did she do it?”

  “At the beginning of the summer she’d had an X-ray, and a shadow had shown up . . .”

  My godmother’s voice faltered. She took a sip of water to moisten her throat.

  “The doctor insisted she should be operated on. We finally managed to convince her to have the operation in the middle of September.”

  “She told me she had ‘things to do.’ ”


  “After the operation she seemed relieved. She was a bit annoyed with your father. who had to leave Turin for some work-related problem.”

  “Typical.”

  “It was an excuse. The surgeon had told him the tumor was malignant. He took a plane down to Puglia to contact a healer he’d read about in the newspapers.”

  “Mom was in danger of dying?”

  “The enemy had been defeated. The doctors thought there was a high chance the cancer wouldn’t come back.”

  “So why did Dad go off in search of quacks?”

  “Back then cancer was thought to be a death sentence. Your father was out of his mind with worry.”

  “My dad was out of his mind?”

  “It happens sometimes, when you’re in love with someone,” Elisa remarked.

  “But I still don’t understand. If the tumor had been removed, why on earth did my mother . . .”

  “The problems started when the doctors advised her to undergo radiotherapy treatment. It was routine, but she started to bombard them with questions. She convinced herself they weren’t telling her the truth.”

  “But didn’t she believe you and Dad?”

  “She thought we were in cahoots with the doctors.”

  “She wasn’t physically up to the radiotherapy?”

  “On the contrary. Physically it was fine. It was her head that wasn’t working. Every Sunday Uncle Nevio and I would come over and see you all. I’d go into the kitchen with your mother and she would start interrogating me. If she was undergoing treatment, it meant she still had cancer? Was nobody going to tell her she’d end up dying in lots of pain? If I was really her best friend—and she stressed the ‘if ’—it was my duty to tell her the truth.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I tried to reassure her, to soothe her. I’d tell her off. I pleaded with her to fight her fears. I’d say to her: think of your son.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “At least he’s got all of you . . .”

  And so I put the question which summed up all the others.

  “Did Mom really love me?”

  “For nine years you were her first thought on waking up and the last before she went to sleep. But then fear just completely took her over.”

  “Was she in pain?”

  “No, but she was convinced she would be.”

  “Did she ever talk to you about killing herself?”

  “People who kill themselves don’t talk about it. Whenever I told her: ‘Don’t pull yourself down’—figuratively of course—she’d just stare at me and say nothing.”

  “You should have taken her away with you!”

  “Where to? I invited her to come and stay in my cottage in Sanremo for Christmas. She just smiled at me sadly and said she didn’t feel up to contributing to the holiday merriment. A few days later I got the telephone call from your father . . . How many times I’ve thought about her—standing on that windowsill . . . It takes some courage to throw yourself down from the fifth floor, you know. Courage and despair . . . The snow might have persuaded her to do it.”

  “The snow?”

  “I’m sure the fairy-tale atmosphere with the snow must have made her do it. She must have thought that with all the snow on the ground the impact wouldn’t be so painful.”

  “What about her dressing gown by my bed? Did Dad put it there?”

  “No, I’m sure he didn’t. He told me he’d woken up suddenly and found your mother in your room. She asked him to go back to bed, because she wanted to stay just a bit longer with you. Your father obviously didn’t realize she’d come to say goodbye to you . . .”

  My godmother passed her hand over her eyes.

  “Do you need a hanky?”

  “No, thanks. You know I never cry. It’s just that I’m still angry with her, even after forty years. She had no right to leave you on your own. I always tell her that whenever I speak to her. And I speak to her every day.”

  thirty-two

  It was too late to go to the cemetery now. We said goodbye to my godmother and left. The sky was the color of milky coffee: snow was on its way.

  Elisa drove along in silence, trying to tune the radio to a channel for rock music. I twisted about, getting the seat belt—and myself—into a tangle.

  My mother had refused to believe the truth and had killed herself. I’d put my faith in a lie and was still alive—but at what cost?

  I asked Elisa to drop me off at my family’s old apartment, which had been sold off long ago.

  My eyes climbed up to the window of my father’s study. I imagined a woman’s silhouette standing on the windowsill, but I didn’t have the strength to look at her. I had gloves on, but I managed to take the newspaper cutting out to reread the last lines.

  The little boy, Massimo, also woke up, but no one could bring themselves to tell his mother was dead.

  There’d been a slight misprint: “him” had been left out: it should have read “to tell him.” And there was another, much more serious omission: no one had had the courage to tell me how she’d died.

  The secret had been kept for forty years. The people who knew the truth had told me nothing. And they went on telling me nothing perhaps because they thought that in the meantime I’d found out from someone else.

  Dad, my godmother, Tiglio and Palmira, Giorgio and Ginetta, Baloo, My Uncle, Madamìn, my primary-school teacher and who knows how many other people along with them. I felt I really should congratulate them all on keeping me in the dark so successfully.

  Like Belfagor, they’d all acted for my own good. What might I have thought, at the age of nine, if they’d told me my mother had thrown herself from a fifth-floor window? That she didn’t love me anymore. That I wasn’t worth anything.

  But the problem was that I’d thought this in any case, all my life.

  So what would the right moment have been for me to discover the truth?

  * * *

  I turned my back on my parents’ house and started to make my way towards mine, trying to find a grief within me which was no longer there or perhaps hadn’t yet arrived.

  The little boy, Massimo, also woke up.

  That was something the reporter had got completely wrong. I certainly hadn’t woken up.

  I’d had forty years in which to spot the flaws in that absurd story: a woman suffering from terminal cancer who dies of a heart attack after smoking a cigarette. Yet I’d pretended to believe it, even though I knew the truth intuitively, deep inside me, to the point of dragging it out of myself in writing the novelette.

  In an instant—a very long instant—I went back through my life searching for the clues I’d refused to see.

  The two strange men holding my father by the arms next to the Christmas tree weren’t doctors, but plainclothes policemen who’d come to tell my father the news.

  Nonna Giulia crying out, “What have they done to my daughter?”—how could that have been about someone dying from a heart attack?

  And then: the continuous references to the “tragic accident”; the tearful silences which sometimes overcame My Uncle; Ginetta’s remark to me as we were standing by my father’s coffin to sell this “cursed place” . . .

  Dad. He hadn’t even betrayed the secret on his deathbed. But I should have made him talk about it a long time before instead of avoiding the question with him and above all with myself.

  I’d spent entire evenings in the newspaper archives looking for information on public figures and events. How come the thought of investigating the private event that had shaped my whole life—of leafing through the printed record for those days, if only for the curiosity of finding my mother’s entry in the deaths column—had never occurred to me?

  I suddenly stopped in the middle of the street to look at a little boy who was running along—and the answer came to me, as plain as a pikestaff.

  I’d always known how my mother had died, but I’d decided right from the beginning that I didn’t want to know. It would have
been too much to take. Perhaps it was still too much to take.

  As the years went by, the denial of the truth extended to everything else. It attached itself, like a second skin, to my thoughts: it became my way of living my life while not living it.

  That’s what happens to those of us who carry a Belfagor around inside us. In order not to face up to reality, we prefer to live with fiction. We try to pass off the embellished or distorted reconstructions on which we base our vision of life as the real thing.

  Many of the sayings we attribute to historical personages were invented by their biographers—and yet we go on citing them as if they were actually said by them. To reinforce our prejudices we prefer to read and to listen only to people with similar opinions. We lull our minds asleep with made-up stories and soothing versions of them, seeing reality as a myth and taking myths literally.

  Our intuition tells us all the time who we are. But we remain deaf to the voice of the gods, covering it up with the chatter of thoughts and the din of emotions. We prefer to ignore the truth—so we don’t have to suffer—or get better. Because otherwise we would become what we’re frightened to be: completely alive.

  thirty-three

  Darkness had fallen. The streets were emptying, and the first fireworks were being let off early to see the old year out.

  I’d walked for hours without eating, without speaking, without feeling anything apart from the the weight of my feet resting finally on the ground.

  As I climbed up the last street home, I remembered My Uncle’s advice and raised my chin as if I were stretching a string between it and my navel.

  I was also thinking about my father. He’d taken it upon himself to protect me from the truth. The man who liked to tell shaggy-dog stories had thought up the saddest story of all and gone on telling it to me his entire life.

  For the first time ever I saw things through my father’s eyes. I felt how much he’d loved my mother: the shock of it made me tremble. I saw him queuing up under the sun to call on that quack he must have despised. I followed him in his anguish as he went from doctor to doctor. My hopes were raised and dashed with his. Right up to that last dawn, when my mother persuaded him to go back to bed and he’d fallen into a sleep he would always reproach himself for.