Sweet Dreams

by Massimo Gramellini

  The writer of the letter convinced himself he had to leave his girlfriend. With the typical cowardice shown by men when they want to dump a woman, he didn’t have the strength of character to leave her himself. Instead, he did everything he could to make her decide to leave him—and after prodigious efforts he succeeded.

  He’d been given a copy of Sweet Dreams, but didn’t open it for a month. He left it on his bedside table. It scared him. “But one night,” he wrote in the final part of his letter, “one night I tossed and turned like some fish caught in a net, so I switched on the light and started to read through the book. I got as far as the final chapter—the one where Elisa teaches you how to forgive and how to accept life for what it offers us—and I realized the book was talking directly to me. It was nearly dawn outside. I closed the book and put a sweatshirt over my pajamas and went out to stand under the apartment block where my girlfriend lived. I buzzed the intercom, and she put her head out to see who it was. I shouted: ‘Will you take me back?’ She didn’t reply: she just opened the front door to let me in.”

  * * *

  With Sweet Dreams, I opened a door through which compliments, confessions and thanks have poured in—thousands of expressions of gratitude, by post, via email and on social-networking sites—raising a useful wall to lean against when things don’t go well. For the open door also let in some people who wanted to give me a slap on the face rather than a compliment.

  It was to be expected. If you lift the veil on your innermost torments, you risk being attacked by those who find such sincerity unbearable—because they fear they might be infected by it. A few people wrote to tell me I’d wanted to make money out of a family tragedy; others criticized me for exploiting the public’s morbid interest in my private life, as if I were some kind of football star or groupie.

  So, if I knew from the start the risks I was running in publishing such a novel, what made me do it? That’s easy to answer. When destiny provides you with a story to tell and the tools with which to tell it, it’s not right you should keep it to yourself.

  For a long time I’d wanted to remind my readers that life has a meaning and that we shouldn’t let ourselves become paralyzed by thinking about all the “ifs” and “might have beens.” On the contrary, we need to face up to life “in spite of.” As George Bernard Shaw put it: “This is the true joy in life . . . the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.” Yet there are certain messages which come across as false if they’re seen as being spoken by a journalist regarded as one of the privileged elite. Only a ruthlessly frank confession of my own misfortunes and my own weaknesses would make the message/massage of hope I wanted to give believable.

  * * *

  Losing my mother at such an early age, I’d experienced in advance the trauma which sooner or later strikes all of us. The loss of love.

  In Sweet Dreams, I wrote that we suffer when we’re not loved, but it’s a worse suffering when we’re loved no longer, when we feel like a moldy sweet someone has tasted and spat out. It’s the fear of being abandoned which prevents us from abandoning ourselves.

  When I mention these ideas in public, I always get puzzled looks. So I tell the audience they come from Jung.

  In order to stop being frightened of suffering, we need to free ourselves from pain. Millions try to do this every day, pouring their efforts into prayers and good works or trying to stun themselves with drugs or other extreme experiences. But, as Jung said, you can’t just eliminate painful memories. What you can eliminate is the pain associated with those memories.

  Nowadays I can think of my mother without feeling pain, because in my innermost self I’ve learnt how to acknowledge an undemonstrable truth: everything that happens to us is always just and always perfect. Pain doesn’t happen to us because we’re unlucky: it’s the opportunity we’re offered to recognize the unresolved part of ourselves.

  Why do we like hearing or reading stories so much? Because stories reveal to us, as in a cipher, the secret of existence. At the beginning of a story the protagonist doesn’t know who he really is. He has a dream, but denies its existence or doesn’t even realize he’s got one. So it’s up to the narrator to play the part of the laws governing the universe—or God, if you like—and subject the hero to a series of challenges which will allow him to reveal to others, as well as to himself, who he really is. If your life doesn’t change completely—or at least in part—between your being born and your coming to die, that’s tantamount to saying you’ve lived all the years of your life for nothing.

  * * *

  When I was a boy I was given a T-shirt with a phrase printed on it. It was supposed to be something King Arthur had once said to the knights of the Round Table: “We’ve been forced to go round the world in search of adventures because we were no longer capable of going on adventures in our own hearts.” The phrase was a revelation to me. So the heroic exploits the world applauded were nothing more than pale imitations of the real adventure, the one each of us can undertake within ourselves.

  Today’s society is incapable of conceiving great adventures. It drags itself along in a suffocating present, poisoned by the fear of losing what it has, including the things it could perhaps do without. It exalts the lowest emotions, to the point that a marvelous word like “detachment” has come to have only negative connotations. It despises feelings.

  Emotions are violent and short-lived: they overcome you and then they disappear. Feelings on the other hand are slow and deep. Sometimes they’re boring. Yet they speak the universal language of the heart, which isn’t a language made up of words or reasonings, but of symbols. It’s the language of music, of myth, of fairy tales. And it uses the shrunken muscle of our intuition to communicate with us: what Jung called “the voice of the gods.”

  The voice whispers continuously to us what we should do. It tells us when a person or a choice is right for us and when it isn’t. It reminds us that life has a meaning, always, even when we don’t like the meaning. An authentic revelation our hearts are ready to acknowledge, in spite of Belfagor’s efforts to make us believe it’s merely a consoling illusion.

  Intuition cannot lie and cannot err. But in order to hear it, we have to stop covering up its voice with the noise of thoughts and emotions. The problem is that it so puts the wind up Belfagor he’ll think up any ruse to prevent us listening to it—rounds of applause at funerals, for example.

  * * *

  Our brain knows everything, but it prefers to pretend it doesn’t know. For forty years mine concealed the truth of my mother’s death and let me believe the story made up by my father, a man who was so steeped in real life he’d never bothered to read a novel.

  Our bookcases at home were filled with rows of history books, but there wasn’t a single work of fiction in them. I grew up surrounded by biographies of Napoleon. My father hero-worshipped the Emperor of the French and hoped I’d resemble him—not only by being bald.

  One day I gave him War and Peace to read.

  “Yes, it’s a novel,” I said, adding quickly: “but it’s all about Napoleon.”

  To please me he started to read it, but after a hundred or so pages he gave up.

  “Look, here it says that at such and such a time in such and such a place Napoleon was at this encampment. But that isn’t true: he was somewhere else thirty miles away!”

  “Dad, it’s a novel . . .”

  “And so what? This Tolstoy of yours should have done his research before writing such rubbish!”

  So no more War and Peace or any other novel for him. And yet . . . to protect his son he made up his own about my mother’s death—which I was the only person to believe was true.

  The other people who knew what had really happened never said anything to me—when I was little because they thought it wasn’t the right thing to do, and when I’d grown up because they assumed that in the meantime someone else had
told me and I didn’t want the subject raised.

  Perhaps that could only happen in a city like Turin, where people are reserved. In Rome, sooner or later, someone would have leant out of a window and shouted, “Come on, Max, wake up a bit . . .,” and told me why.

  Well, maybe. Who knows? What I’m trying to say is that even if no one ever told me, inside me I knew everything. I ignored the voice of the gods which was whispering the truth to me.

  * * *

  Did I want to know the truth? Perhaps not when I was nine. But I’d certainly have liked to find out before I was forty-nine.

  It’s vital to be told about evil. But it’s also dangerous. In the long run it can make us cynical or plunge us into despair, because we become convinced the world is a place of immutable horror. For this reason I prefer to tell the tale of good alongside that of evil—by telling stories about the people who’ve courageously stood up to evil and managed to defeat it because they’ve never stopped believing the world can be transformed by dreams.

  Only the dreamer of wonderful dreams can draw on the energy of the universe—in other words, love. But we no longer have wonderful dreams. We no longer conjugate verbs in the future tense. And when the future disappears, the first thing to die along with it is the present.

  Haven’t you noticed how the only people who still think about the future are people in love? Have you ever listened to the way they talk? Have you ever listened to the way you talk when you’re in love? People in love are continually making plans because they’re in touch with love’s energies. When you’re prey to passion, of whatever kind, you’re possessed by its energy.

  So I advised the pharmacist to tell the truth to her granddaughter: her mother had eaten a dream full of poison because she’d lost contact with love. And the truth needed to be accepted and remembered without grief, filling the table each day with good dreams, nourishing and easy to digest.

  So I reassured my kleptomaniac friend that he shouldn’t feel guilty about stealing my skis, only acknowledge that it was a wrong action for which he’d amply compensated through the generosity of his friendship.

  And so I wrote back to the young hotelier to tell him that suffering had shown him the power of love—that the girlfriend who had waited for him and forgiven him hadn’t done it out of weakness. On the contrary, her strength was such she’d kept her own dreams intact in spite of the indecisiveness of the man she loved. She knew that “if you’ve got a dream and it’s your dream, the thing which you’ve come into the world to do, you can spend your entire life trying to hide the fact under a cloud of skepticism, but it will never let go its hold on you. It goes on sending out desperate signals—like boredom and lack of enthusiasm—in the hope that sooner or later you’ll rebel.”

  That’s not Jung. It’s me. And William Shakespeare said it too, long before me and much better. It’s the summer solstice, midsummer night. Sweet dreams, everyone!

  —Massimo Gramellini, Rome, June 21, 2012

  about the author

  Massimo Gramellini is deputy editor at La Stampa, where he runs a front-page daily column. A household name in Italy, he is the author of several books, including L’ultima riga delle favole (The Last Line of Fairy Tales) and Fai bei sogni (Sweet Dreams), an international bestseller that has been translated into fourteen languages.

  about the translator

  Stephen Parkin is Curator, Italian Studies, at the British Library, with responsibility for the Library’s early printed Italian collections (1501–1850). His published translations include Giuseppe Garibaldi’s My Life (2004), Edmondo De Amicis’s Constantinople (2005), Roberto Olla’s Il Duce and His Women (2011) and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Childhood Memories (2013). He has also published widely on the history of bibliography and book collecting.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Massimo Gramellini

  English language translation © 2014 by Stephen Parkin

  Published by arrangement with Alma Books Ltd

  First published in Italian as Fai bei sogni by Longanesi & C., Gruppo editoriali Mauri Spagnol, in 2012

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Atria Paperback edition April 2014

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  Interior design by Leydiana Rodríguez-Ovalles

  Cover design by Zoe Norvell

  Cover art by Marko Mastosaari

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  ISBN 978-1-4767-1860-6

  ISBN 978-1-4767-1861-3 (ebook)