Sweet Dreams (2 page)

Only as an adult would I learn not to shun open coffins. I'd also learn that the dead get smaller, almost as if their clothing of bones shrinks a couple of sizes when the spirit no longer fills it.

The dead grow smaller and the survivors turn sour like rejected lovers. They take offense when they see the world doesn't share their grief.

My grief made me impossible to deal with. It had happened two years before when I'd come round from an operation to remove my tonsils with my throat on fire and shouted at the doctors and relatives crowding round my bed: “Go away, all of you, I only want Mommy!”

This time I directed my snarls at the visitors to the apartment. But far from annoying them, my rudeness only made them even more keen to show their pity.

I couldn't bear their faces put on for the occasion, the compassionate caresses, the stupid phrases drifting through the room.

What a tragedy.

She was so young.

Poor little boy.

It's a terrible thing to get.

As if you could get a pleasant thing, one which did you the favour of leaving you alive.

Tonsillitis must have been a very pleasant thing then. During the weeks I was convalescing, I had no school homework to do, Mommy brought me ice creams and I was free to enjoy my secret hideaway, the Submarine.

At a certain point in the afternoon I would lower
the blinds and get back into bed with my head at the bottom and my feet under the pillow.

I would usually plunge down on my own, but on the trickier missions I got Nemecsek to come along with me. He was one of the Paul Street boys—the one who, even when he was dying, still dragged himself out of bed to go and help his companions in the decisive battle. The page was all tearstained in the book my mother had read to me.

Enemies encircled the Submarine on all sides but, protected by the magic bedsheet, I held out against their attacks until it was teatime and my mother came in with the tray. The fantasy gave me a feeling of security I've only found, since then, in the act of writing.

On the morning of the funeral I shut myself in my room and waited for the coffin to be taken out of the house. I lowered the blinds, got into bed head downwards and climbed aboard the Submarine wanting to declare war on the entire world. But there were no longer any enemies out there to be found: they were all inside me.

I started to hate her because she didn't come back. I tried not to think about her, but hard as I might my thoughts would automatically take over whenever I was tired, and I would drift off into memories—the taste of the veal cutlets she used to cook in butter, the pleasant smell of her hair whenever I gave her a hug, the last time we'd been happy together.

They'd been showing an adaptation of the
Odyssey
on the television and I'd been transfixed by the sight of the cyclops Polyphemus flinging Ulysses's companions against the walls of his cave and then popping them into his mouth like chips.

I imagined Polyphemus's voice to be harsh and alarming like that of the narrator of the series, the poet Giuseppe
Ungaretti. He was heard at the beginning of each episode reciting Homer's verses. As soon as his grating tones died away, a montage from previous episodes was shown summing up the story so far—which meant that the following week I again saw the scene with Polyphemus munching away.

Today's children are inured to scenes of killing and bloodshed on the television screen and would doubtless regard Polyphemus's grisly meal as a light snack. But I started to wake up in the middle of the night feeling like a particularly appetizing chip Polyphemus's single eye had greedily caught sight of. After putting up a brief struggle against the darkness I would give up and go and take refuge in my parents' bed.

In order to put a stop to these nightly migrations—I was, after all, a manly eight-year-old—my mother put an energy-saving night-light on my bedside table. Even so, we all knew another sight of the Cyclops would prove fatal.

On the evening of the final episode, just before the summary montage started to be shown, I fled into the kitchen with my mother, holding her tight, my nose in her blond hair—until my father, stationed by the TV set in the sitting room, gave the all-clear.

My other memories of her were confused and unsuppressible, and tended to merge with more recent ones. When had she stopped loving me? The light in those blue eyes everyone knew had dimmed after the end of summer. She'd suddenly turned fretful and gloomy. She'd always had a smile for everyone, but it was plain her supply of smiles had been used up.

One morning she wasn't there—she'd had to go and “do something.” A few days later she came back, even sadder than before. Dad and I divided up our tasks: he caressed her with words and I spoke to her with caresses. But she didn't respond to either.

My godmother was her closest friend, and every Sunday she and her husband, Uncle Nevio, would come and visit us.

I would show off in front of my father and Uncle Nevio by drawing on my repertoire—reading out imaginary menus (“Would you like the dead-toad lasagne today, sir?”) or improvising football-match commentaries. But as soon as they started to talk about politics, I would run into the kitchen to complain.

“They're not listening to me!”

My godmother laughed, but my mother would look at me with a vacant stare which was almost as frightening as that of Polyphemus.

She had become completely dependent on Madamìn, the capable woman who helped with the housework. Madamìn was a widow with two children: she worked because she needed the money, but seeing her you would have thought she helped out of a disinterested generosity of spirit. Her smallest gestures had a noble dignity about them which gave her an air of authority. In her company my mother behaved like a little girl.

The day before New Year's Eve I burst into the kitchen with breaking news.

“Mommy, Mommy! Daddy said he'll take us to see the new James Bond film!”

“I'm not going without Madamìn.”

I'd asked
her
to go with me. Wasn't that enough for her? Wasn't I enough for her?

“Go away, I hate you!” I exclaimed.

“I hate you.”

I went and locked myself in my room, turning the key twice, and it took all my father's authority to get me to unlock it.

My mother clung to Madamìn for the entire duration of the film,
On Her Majesty's Secret Service
, the first James Bond movie without Sean Connery. He'd been replaced by some bargain-basement imitation.

Perhaps my mother too had been replaced? This
woman was no longer the mother I knew, and what happened that evening proved it. It was the last time I saw her.

She'd called me to her bedside to apologize for her behavior over the Bond film. She'd hugged me in the old way, with her scented hair tumbling over my head.

I thought the mother I knew had come back, but all it took was a sudden bout of coughing and she started to behave like a feeble invalid again. In a plaintive tone of voice, she urged me once again to be good and kind towards everyone—to which my reaction was: “Yes, Mom, OK. Sleep well. Can I go now?”

“Sweet dreams, little one.”

“I'm not little. I'll soon be taller than you.”

“Of course you will be, taller and stronger. Promise me you will be?”

I couldn't put up with it anymore. I fled back into my room and, in protest, got straight into bed without brushing my teeth and fell immediately into a deep and dreamless sleep.

Madamìn solved the mystery of the dressing gown left in my room. “Terrible Thing” had come to wake my mother during the night, but she'd asked him to be so kind as to wait while she came to tuck me up in bed . . . Afterwards, she'd forgotten to take her dressing gown and left it in my room. At this point the story always ended, as Madamìn started to cry.

I had no idea what my mother might have been feeling like when she was confronted with “Terrible Thing”—pretty bad, I guessed, even though mothers had always inexhaustible resources to draw on. But I knew it wasn't possible that only my mother had been able to persuade this thug to let her come and tuck me in.

It was clearly a tall story invented by someone with no imagination—in other words, Dad. He was trying to make me believe that my mother had gone on loving us right up to the moment she'd disappeared, whereas it was evident to me that if she'd run off with “Terrible Thing” it was because she'd had enough of us both. I could just about manage to understand how she might have grown tired of him—but of me? How could she have stopped loving me?

We suffer when we're not loved, but it's a greater pain when we're loved no longer. In one-way infatuations the objects of our love deny us their love in return. They take something away from us, which in fact they've only given
to us in our imaginations. But when a reciprocated feeling ceases to be reciprocated, a shared flow of energy is suddenly and brutally cut off. The person who has been abandoned feels like a sweet that tastes bad and is spat out. We've done something wrong—but what?

That was how I felt. I hadn't been able to make her stay with us. Perhaps she'd gone off to find a son who could do better drawings of her?

And yet I went on thinking she would come back, perhaps with the other son in tow. Never mind. I'd put up with any humiliation, just so long as she'd return.

In the meantime, while waiting, a spare mother would have come in useful. Unfortunately, as destiny would have it, none of the leading candidates for the role were still available.

Grandmother Emma, my father's mother from the Romagna, was one of those women who become the stuff of legends. The most scintillating story told about her was that as a girl she'd landed a wallop on the nose of a fellow Romagnolo—the future Duce—when he'd tried to take advantage of her on top of a haystack. The source of this piece of braggadocio was my socialist grandfather, but anyone who'd been on the receiving end of my grandmother's fists was inclined to believe the tale.

On another occasion—and this time there was
evidence—she'd forced a local builder who kept his workmen on starvation wages to pay them decently by bursting onto the building site near her home and brandishing a rolling pin still covered in flour over the man's head. She then threatened to use the same weapon on the workmen if they so much as thought of going off and spending the money in the local tavern rather than taking it home and handing it over forthwith to their wives.

At the age of thirty, she and my grandfather upped sticks and moved to Turin. During the day she worked as a concierge and in the evenings supplemented the family income in a pizzeria, baking
piadine al prosciutto
and
farinata
.

Her most prized possession was a tin box. On my grandfather's paydays, my grandmother would requisition his entire tram-driver wages by “de-wine right”—meaning he would otherwise have gone and spent them drinking with his chums—and stashed them away in the box together with her own earnings.

The accumulated hoard was divided up into three piles. One went to pay the bills, another was for daily expenses, but the last and most important one was set aside for my grandmother's own wishes. She would make a wish for something—a washing machine, a refrigerator, a sewing machine—and then started watching the pile grow
week by week. Only over her dead body—which, like her personality, was on the large scale—would the rest of the family have dared to come near the tin box.

When the pile of money set aside for her dreams reached the set target, my grandmother would put on her Sunday best and take herself down to the shop, as proud as the Emperor of Cathay. Once the shop assistant suggested she buy something on a hire-purchase scheme: my grandmother fixed him with a stare as though he were a piece of pastry ready for her rolling pin. “Do you really think I'd go on paying for something I already own?”

That was my grandmother. I recall her sudden bouts of sulking, her hands like blades working the pasta dough, and her famous
cremigi
pudding, all yellow and black, which she would turn out onto an oval dish, letting me scrape off the hot chocolate sticking to the sides of the pan with a wooden spoon. My father got upset every time he saw me doing this, since he'd never been allowed to as a boy.

She had my grandfather so much under her thumb that when he died everyone thought she would barely notice he wasn't there. Instead, on account of one of those curious laws that keep together apparently unbalanced marriages, she herself died six months later, and in terrible pain—which my kindly mother did her best to alleviate right up to the last.

My grandmother had reacted to my parents' marriage by retreating into an epic sulk. She'd wanted my father to marry someone better off.

Dad was ruled by his mother, but the revolution brought about by love inspired him with enough energy to send my grandmother packing—and my grandfather, too.

“It's about time you wore the trousers in this house!” he'd shouted at him before slamming the door as he left.

For a long time relations between my father and my grandmother were strained. It was my mother who brought them together again when she agreed to live in her in-laws' house after the honeymoon.

The small community was founded on a single principle: power, sole and indivisible, resided with Grandma Emma.

Detailed rules dictated every aspect of daily life. Sunday was designated bath day, but filling the bathtub four times over was not allowed under the terms of my grandmother's charter. Therefore, the same water had to be used by the two members of each couple in order to reduce waste.

My mother reacted to all these acts of oppression with gestures of unconditional love. She didn't give expecting something in return—she just gave, without calculation,
without reproach, without hope of reward. My father kept telling me this all my life, to underline just how different I was from her.