Authors: Niccolò Ammaniti
I used to say I was going over to my friend’s house but really I went and hid out at Grandma Laura’s. She lived on the top floor of an apartment building near ours, with Pericle, an
old Basset Hound, and Olga, her Russian carer. We spent our afternoons playing canasta. She would drink Bloody Marys and I would have tomato juice with pepper and salt. We had made a pact: she
wouldn’t tell about my not going out with my friends and I wouldn’t tell about her drinking Bloody Marys.
But middle school was soon over and my father called me into his study, sat me down in an armchair and said, ‘Lorenzo, I think it’s time you went to a public high school.
You’ve had enough of these private schools for spoiled kids. So, what would you prefer, mathematics or history?’
I glanced quickly at all his heavy volumes on the ancient Egyptians and on the Babylonians, neatly lined up on his bookshelf. ‘History.’
He gave me a satisfied pat on the shoulder. ‘Excellent, old boy, we like the same things. You’ll enjoy the Classics high school, you’ll see.’
When I walked up to the entrance of the high school on my first day I almost fainted.
It was hell on earth. There were hundreds of kids. It felt like I was standing outside the gates of a rock concert. Some of them were way bigger than me. They even had beards. The girls had
tits. They rode scooters, skateboards. Some were running. Some were laughing. Some were yelling. They were going in and out of the cafeteria. One guy climbed up a tree and hung a girl’s
backpack on a branch and she threw stones at him.
Anxiety took my breath away. I leaned up against a wall covered in graffiti. Why did I have to go to school? Why did the world work like this? You are born, you go to school, you work and you
die. Who had decided that that was the right way? Couldn’t we live differently? Like primitive man? Like Grandma Laura, who when she was little had studied at home and had the teachers come
to her. Why couldn’t I do that too? Why didn’t they just leave me alone? Why did I have to be just like the others? Couldn’t I live by myself in a forest in Canada?
‘I am not like them. I have an inflated sense of self-importance,’ I whispered, as three colossal beasts walking arm in arm pushed me aside like I was a bowling pin. ‘Piss off,
shrimp.’
In a trance I felt my legs as stiff as tree trunks walk me into class. I sat in the second last row, near the window, and tried to make myself invisible. But I realised that the camouflage
technique didn’t work in this hostile planet. In this school the predators had evolved, were much more aggressive and they moved in herds. Any introversion, any unusual behaviour, was
immediately noticed and punished.
They called me out. They picked on me for the way I dressed, because I didn’t talk. And then they stoned me with chalk dusters.
I begged my parents to let me change schools – one for misfits or deaf and dumb students would be perfect. I came up with every excuse in the book to stay home. I stopped studying. In
class I spent my time counting the minutes left before I could get out of that jail.
One morning I was at home with a fake headache and I saw a documentary on television about insects that mimic other insects.
Somewhere, in the tropics, lives a fly that imitates wasps. He has four wings, just like the other flies, but he keeps them one on top of the other, so that they look like two. He has a black
and yellow striped belly, antennae and bulbous eyes and even a fake stinger. He can’t hurt you, he’s a nice insect, but dressed up as a wasp, the birds, the lizards, even human beings
fear him. He can mosey into a wasp nest, one of the most dangerous and well-protected places in the world, and go unrecognised.
I had been going about it the wrong way.
Here’s what I had to do.
Imitate the dangerous ones.
I wore the same things the others wore. Adidas trainers, jeans with holes in them, a black hoodie. I messed up the parting in my hair and let it grow long. I even wanted to get my ear pierced
but my mother forbade me. To make up for it, for Christmas, my parents gave me a scooter. The most popular one.
I walked like them, with my legs wide apart. I threw my backpack on the ground and kicked it around.
I mimicked them discreetly. There’s a fine line between imitation and caricature.
During the lessons I sat at my desk pretending to listen – but in actual fact I was thinking about my own stuff, making up science-fiction stories. I even went to PE classes. I laughed at
the others’ jokes, I played stupid tricks on the girls. A couple of times I even answered back to the teachers. And I handed in a class test without answering a single question.
The fly had managed to trick them all, integrating perfectly with the waspian society. They thought I was one of them. That I was all right.
When I got home I told my parents that at school everyone said I was cool, and I made up funny stories about things that had happened to me.
But the longer I put on this show, the more different I felt. The chasm that separated me from the others grew deeper. On my own I was happy, with the others I always had to pretend.
Sometimes this scared me. Would I have to imitate them for the rest of my life?
It was like the fly was inside me, telling me how things really were. It told me that it only took a second for friends to forget about you, that girls are mean and they make fun of you, that
the world outside your house is filled with competition, violence and suffocation.
One night I had a nightmare and I woke up screaming. I discovered that my T-shirt and jeans were my skin and my trainers were my feet. My jacket was as hard as an exoskeleton, and under it
wriggled one hundred insect feet.
Everything went along pretty smoothly until one morning I wished, for just a moment, that I wasn’t a fly dressed up as a wasp, but that I was really a wasp.
During the break I would wander up and down the crowded school corridors like I had something to do, so that nobody got suspicious. Then just before the bell rang I would sit back down at my
desk and eat my plain pizza with prosciutto, the same pizza that everybody bought from the school janitor. In the classroom the usual duster battle was taking place. Two sides faced each other,
throwing it back and forth. If they happened to hit me, I would retaliate, trying, if possible, not to hit anybody so that I didn’t set off any further retaliation.
Alessia Roncato was sitting behind me. She and Oscar Tommasi were huddled together, talking intensely and writing down a list of names on a piece of paper.
What was on that list?
I shouldn’t have cared, not at all, and yet my stupid curiosity, which popped up occasionally for no apparent reason, made me slide my chair backwards to try and hear what they were
saying.
‘Do you reckon they’ll let him come?’ Oscar Tommasi was saying.
‘If my mum talks to them, yeah,’ Alessia Roncato answered.
‘But can we all come?’
‘Sure, it’s really big . . .’
Somebody began to yell and I wasn’t able to hear anything else. They were probably trying to work out who they should invite to some party.
On the way out I put my headphones on but I didn’t turn on the music. Alessia Roncato and Oscar Tommasi were hanging out near the school wall with the Sumerian and Riccardo Dobosz. They
were all excited. The Sumerian was pretending to ski. He kept bending down like he was doing a slalom. Dobosz jumped onto his back and pretended to strangle him. I had no way of knowing what
Alessia was saying to Oscar Tommasi. But her eyes sparkled as she watched the Sumerian and Dobosz.
I moved over until I was just a couple of metres from the group, and in the end it was easy to work out what was going on.
Alessia had invited them all up to her house in Cortina for ski week.
Those four were different from the others. They kept to themselves and you could see that they were all best friends. It was like they had an invisible bubble around them that
nobody else could get inside unless they wanted to let you in.
Alessia Roncato was the leader and she was the prettiest girl in the whole school. But she didn’t show off, she didn’t try to act like anyone else – she was herself, full
stop.
Oscar Tommasi was skinny and walked like a girl. Whenever he said anything everyone burst into laughter.
Riccardo Dobosz was quiet and he always looked as serious as a samurai.
But the one I liked the most was the Sumerian. I don’t know why they called him that. He had a motorcycle and he was good at all sports, and they said that he would become a champion rugby
player. He was as big as a refrigerator, had hands like plasticine, a crew cut, a flat nose. I reckon if the Sumerian punched a Great Dane in the nose he could kill it on the spot. He was in fourth
form, but he was never a bully with the younger kids. As far as he was concerned the kids from the lower classes were a bit like dust mites in his mattress. They were there but he couldn’t
see them.
They were the Fantastic Four and I was the Silver Surfer.
The Sumerian hopped on to his motorbike and pulled Alessia on, who hugged him like she was scared of losing him, and they took off, tyres screeching. One by one all the other
students headed off home, and the street emptied. The CD shop and the white goods shop had pulled down their shutters for the lunch break.
I was the only one left.
I had to go home because if my mother didn’t see me walk though the door in ten minutes’ time she’d call me. I turned off my mobile. I stared at the graffiti until it went out
of focus. Splashes of colour on the wall of a building.
If Alessia had invited me along too they would all have seen how good a skier I was. I would have shown them the secret slopes.
I had been going to Cortina since I was born. I knew all the slopes and loads of secret slopes too. My favourite began on Mount Cristallo and went all the way into the town centre. It took you
through forests, there were some amazing jumps, and once I had seen two chamois deer behind a house. Then we could have gone to the cinema and got a hot chocolate at Lovat’s.
I had so many things in common with them. The fact that Alessia had a house in Cortina couldn’t be just a coincidence. And that’s when I realised. They too were flies pretending to
be wasps. It was just that they were much better than I was. If I had gone with them to Cortina they would have realised that I was just like them.
When I got home my mother was teaching Nihal the recipe for osso buco. I sat down, opened and closed the cutlery drawer and said, ‘Alessia Roncato invited me to go skiing with them in
Cortina.’
My mother stared at me as if I’d told her I’d grown a tail. She looked around for a chair, took a deep breath and stuttered, ‘Darling, I’m so happy.’ And she hugged
me really hard. ‘It’ll be lovely. Excuse me a second.’ She got up, smiled at me and locked herself in the bathroom.
What was the matter with her?
I put my ear up against the door. She was crying, and every now and then she sniffed. Then I heard her turn on the tap and splash her face.
I was confused.
She began talking on her mobile. ‘Francesco, I have to tell you something. Our son has been invited to go for ski week . . . Yes, in Cortina. See, we don’t have to worry . . .
I’m so happy I burst into tears like an idiot. I locked myself in the bathroom so that he wouldn’t notice . . .’
For a couple of days I tried to tell Mum that it was a lie, that I’d made it up just for fun, but each time I saw how happy and excited she was, I retreated in defeat,
feeling like I had committed a murder.
The problem wasn’t having to tell her that I had made everything up and that I hadn’t been invited by anyone to go anywhere. It was humiliating, but I’d have been able to
handle it. What I couldn’t handle was the question that would have undoubtedly followed.
‘But Lorenzo, why did you lie to me like that?’
And that was a question there was no answer to.
In my bedroom, at night, I tried to find one.
‘Because . . .’
But it was as if I had a mental block.
‘Because I’m a dickhead.’ That was the only answer that came to mind. But I knew it wasn’t enough, that underneath there was something I didn’t want to face up to.
And so, in the end, I let myself go with the flow and I began to believe it. I even told the Silver Monkey about ski week. I was becoming more and more convincing. I embellished the story with
details – we would stay in a refuge high up in the mountains and we would take a helicopter.
I threw a tantrum because I wanted my parents to buy me skis, ski boots and a new jacket. And as the days went by I began to believe that Alessia really had invited me along.
If I closed my eyes I could see her walking up to me. I was taking the chain off my scooter and she was looking at me with her blue eyes. She was running her fingers through her blonde fringe.
She then put one Nike on top of the other and said to me, ‘Listen, Lorenzo, I’ve organised a ski week. Do you want to come?’
I thought about it for a bit and then answered coolly, ‘Okay, I’ll come.’
Then, one day, while I was in my bedroom with my new ski boots on my feet, my gaze wandered to the mirror on the cupboard door and I saw the reflection of a young boy in underwear, as pasty
white as a worm, with legs that looked like twigs, a total of four hairs on his body, a wimpy chest and those ridiculous red things on his feet, and after half a minute of studying him with my
mouth half open I said, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’
And the young boy in the mirror answered me in a strangely adult-like voice: ‘Nowhere.’
I threw myself on to the bed, ski boots and all, feeling like someone had dumped a ton of rubble on me, and I realised that I had no idea how to get out of the mess I had created and that if I
tried again, even just once, to believe that Alessia had invited me to go with them, I would throw myself out the window, amen and ciao ciao and farewell and thanks for everything.
It was the simplest thing to do. My life sucked anyway.
‘That’s enough! I have to tell her that I can’t go because Grandma Laura is in hospital and she’s dying of cancer.’ I put on a really serious voice and looking up
at the ceiling I said, ‘Mum, I’ve decided not to go skiing because Grandma’s sick and what if she dies while I’m away?’