Sweet Dreams (15 page)

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 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.

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.

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.

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.”