Sweet Dreams (16 page)

“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.”

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.

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.

After her death it was worse than being left on his own. He was in a desert with a little boy to look after. I would have gone to pieces in his place. But he lifted me onto his shoulders and started off again along the road. He kept tripping up and losing the way: he'd got the wrong shoes on; he chose inappropriate traveling companions. But somehow or other he succeeded in bringing me to safety.

He had really loved me. More than Mom. Because he'd stayed. The person who stays always shows more love than the person who leaves.

His masterpiece has been the construction of the myth of the departed mother. He'd inculcated me with the myth so that I wouldn't come to hate her, with the result that all the affection he deserved was spent on an imaginary woman.

The thought of my mother made me shake with anger,
but at the same time I felt an almost painful tenderness for her.

She'd been weak. No glory awaits those who escape their responsibilities.

That headline kept going through my head:

MOTHER THROWS HERSELF FROM FIFTH FLOOR

A headline always attempts to sum up the gist of a news report. Here what was important was not that some woman had killed herself, but that she was a mother.

That's what had really struck the reporter who'd written the piece among the printing machines, surrounded by panettone cakes that had done the rounds and colleagues wishing each other a happy new year as they hurried off home. That a mother had been so selfish as to sentence the child she'd brought into the world to a life without her . . .

In the hospital in Sarajevo I'd seen wounded women fight like lionesses against the approach of death, stretching their arms out in the crazy hope they could once more embrace their dead children.

I'd been in the room next door—alive. But that hadn't stopped Mom. She'd only thought of herself.

I got home. Billie avoided me. When I tried to stroke her, she went and hid in a cupboard with her tail between her legs.

I took off my shoes and stood barefoot on the sitting-room carpet. I caught sight of my mother's photograph on the mantelpiece, the one I used to hide in a drawer when I was a boy and which I'd always carried around with me as I'd moved from place to place—the one with the beatific smile I'd used to construct an entire myth.

I turned my back on it, only to see Elisa facing me. She too was barefoot: she'd come up behind me without my noticing.

“How are you feeling?” she asked. That question mark, unusual for her, spoke volumes.

“She wasn't the mother I thought I'd had.”

“I've always thought of her like that. Like a jewel box full of passions and fears.”

“Just think about it. Choosing to kill yourself when you've got a child.”

“It happens. You're a journalist. Don't you read the newspapers?”

“I don't read that kind of news. I've always been turned off by it. Now I see why.”

“If the child is really small, the mother usually takes it with her.”

“I mattered so little to her that she didn't want me around.”

“She knew you'd survive without her.”

“Don't talk nonsense! She rejected me.”

“She didn't reject you: she rejected life.”

“But I was her life!”

Elisa stroked my hand in the way only she can.

“Her life, that's right. But your mother wasn't living in the real world anymore: she was possessed by imaginary ghosts.”

“Couldn't she have been rescued?”

“Perhaps. She needed to be brought out from that world and back into this one.”

“What could have done that? Or who?”

“There's no point in wondering about that now. What I'm trying to say is that fear always kills love. Even a mother's love.”

We fell silent, looking down at our feet. Then she pointed at something.

“Your heels!”

“What about them?”

“They're on the carpet.”

I lifted them immediately.