Sweet Dreams (3 page)

She was also gifted with an infectious laugh. My godmother used to tell me how at my parents' wedding the priest had to halt proceedings because the bride couldn't stop laughing. When she managed to suppress her giggles, her eyes were still full of laughter—and so she even sent her gruff husband-to-be into fits of laughter as well. My parents took their eternal vows while laughing fit to burst.

My mother overcame Nonna Emma's prejudices by the sheer force of her character, and my arrival did the rest. They became firm friends. Walking between them, holding their hands, I felt safe.

Now there were only men left to walk next to me.

At least David Copperfield had an aunt. I would have to make do with my mother's four brothers.

The youngest of them shared her sensitivity of character and so ended up by injecting a feminine note into an atmosphere which was otherwise heavy with the smell of aftershave lotion. I took to calling him “My Uncle.” I had a desperate need to bind the survivors to me.

One Saturday afternoon My Uncle took me to see my maternal grandmother, who was now in a rest home set among the rolling vineyards of the Langhe region. During the drive there I found out why I wouldn't be able to count on her.

Grandma Giulia's life had been filled with too many misfortunes and too many children. The youngest of
these had been My Uncle. While she'd been pregnant with him she'd caught German measles and ever since had suffered from epileptic fits.

At the start of the Second World War her husband had died in her arms from a cold which a simple shot of penicillin would have cured, leaving her with a widow's pension and five hungry children. The eldest, my mother, had to shoulder the responsibility of feeding them on her own. At the age of sixteen she'd started work as a typist at the Fiat factory, while still looking after her mother and all her brothers.

I can testify to the fact that she continued to keep an eye on them. Our house saw an endless coming and going of awkward young men who would turn up to ask their big sister's advice on a variety of topics from their love lives and their jobs to what color of socks they should wear.

Mom would talk to them in the kitchen, the oracle's cave they would enter bearing the tribute of a box of marrons glacés. As the cook's assistant and official sheller of peas I had a privileged ringside seat at these incomprehensible conversations, punctuated with expressions such as “She's a nice girl” and “It's a secure job.”

My Uncle was twelve years younger than my mother and thought of himself a bit like her son. He told me about the night when he'd ridden across the city on a
clapped-out scooter to get to the maternity clinic where I had just seen the light of day. While the rest of the family bombarded the midwife with questions about me, he'd wanted to know above all how she was.

“The number of times she showed me your number twos!”

“What do you mean?” I blushed.

“You used to do your business in a potty shaped like a duck. Your mother used to carry it round the house, showing off the contents as if they were some kind of sculpture. She was crazy about you.”

“So why has she gone away?”

It was obvious she'd liked me as long as I'd used the potty: when I'd started to sit on the toilet she'd stopped loving me.

“It wasn't her decision. It was fate . . .”

My Uncle lifted a hand from the steering wheel to put his sunglasses on so I wouldn't see he was crying.

We arrived at the rest home and were taken through rooms packed with years. Would I ever see my mother's face all covered in wrinkles? Or would she always remain the young woman staring out from a photograph on one
of the bookshelves at home? The pearl necklace and jersey cardigan she was wearing were doing their best to make her look old, but her girlish smile and bright-blue eyes, ready to be amazed at all they saw, gave the lie to that impression.

Nonna Giulia shuffled unsteadily in her slippers towards us. She clung to me more out of desperation than affection and dragged me into a room which looked out onto the garden.

“What have they done to my daughter?” she cried, before My Uncle had had a chance to extract me from her grip.

It had never occurred to me to think of my mother as someone's daughter.

I was amazed that no one had told my grandmother the truth about my mother going off with “Terrible Thing” after doing all her errands.

I was ready to tell her the whole story, leaving out only the puzzling fact of the dressing gown, but My Uncle dragged me off.

I would also have told her that the story wasn't over yet, and that she would reappear as unexpectedly as she had disappeared. After all, didn't all mothers have a special pass which allowed them to come and go as they liked?

Sitting in the passenger seat next to My Uncle, I made an effort to keep my eyes fixed on the road ahead. As the roadside advertisement hoardings sped past, I promised myself I would broach the subject as soon as the next one had gone by—but we reached home and I still hadn't plucked up the courage.

Certain questions frightened me. Or perhaps I was more frightened of the answers.

When it came to my grandmothers, I'd had to admit total defeat, but the situation was not so dissimilar when it came to the other possible candidates for the role of deputy mother.

Madamìn already had two children of her own to look after and couldn't move in to take care of me.

My godmother was childless, but she and my father had fallen out. An icy antagonism formed between them, full of things unsaid. She and Uncle Nevio started coming round less and less, and then their visits stopped altogether.

My father shrugged this off by assuming a tough-guy stance: “You're really stuck if you have to rely on other people. We can count ourselves lucky: we don't need anyone's help.”

Perhaps the thought occurred to me there might be a connection between the mysterious quarrel and whatever had happened to my mother—or perhaps it didn't and it's just hindsight painting a picture of me behaving like some underage detective in search of clues, whereas all I was was a little grief-struck boy who couldn't come to terms with the fact his mother had died.

My life had become void of female figures: the only women who remained were my primary school teacher and the mothers of my classmates.

My teacher had a large and capacious heart. She regarded the forty of us in her class like her adopted children. Far too many for an ordinary mother, but not for her: she saw into our souls, she knew when we needed to be scolded and when we deserved to be rewarded.

She'd been brought up in a socialist family and used to inveigh fervently against the Americans, who were at the time bogged down in the Vietnam War. I took note of her views and reported them back to my father, who adored the United States because they'd helped to drive the Nazis out of Italy. I was learning the elements of what would later become my job: taking note and reporting
back—with a degree of emotional involvement, to be sure, but nevertheless aware there are always two sides to every story.

Dad never passed any comment on my observations. My parents never criticized my teacher. If I got a low mark in class it was because I'd deserved it, not because the teacher had it in for me. The earliest authority figures in my life had enough sense of their own authority not to want to undermine each other, and their presence gave me the reassuring sense I lived in an ordered universe.

This bright picture was blighted by my mother's disappearance: I was suddenly marked out as different. From being a little lord in a golden kingdom—gentle mother, stern father, but both guided by a sense of fairness—I found myself thrown out by the scruff of my neck into the dust.

I was the only one in my class not to be equipped with a loving mother. Despite all my teacher's careful efforts never to say the word “Mommy” in my presence, the discomforting sense of being an orphan combined with the worry that this was never going to go away, thus stirring up aggressive feelings towards others.

During my early school years, true to the star sign I'd been born under—Libra—I'd been a natural peacemaker, making strenuous efforts to pacify quarrelsome classmates.
Now, whenever I was provoked, I would give as good as I got, hitting back, blow for blow. What was the point of being well behaved if there was no longer anyone around to say “Good boy”?

The mothers of my classmates would give me pitying hugs, but cautiously, so as not to get dirty, as though I were some kind of bedraggled teddy bear which had fallen into a puddle. The way they hugged their own children was very different: it was the way my mother had always hugged me, with a kind of natural abandon.

It's hard to be without a mother in the land of mother-worship. It's true the Italians also enjoy being victims and the loss of a parent in early childhood, if displayed in the right way, can give you the status of a saint or a ticket for a free ride through life. However, when it comes to being a victim, you need to be cut out for the role.

I didn't want pity or special treatment: I just wanted to be loved. I wanted someone to be my number-one fan, but I knew that for all the other mothers there was always going to be someone else at the top of the list.

The despair I felt was carefully concealed under a show of pride, which took its inspiration from my
father's stoical principle of the solitary hero sufficient unto himself.

I could never stand whingers. I never cried, even alone in my bed at night. I still believed that I'd wake up one morning and find my mother with her dressing gown on standing at the foot of my bed. I didn't want her to see my pillow wet with tears.

Then Mita arrived. She was the babysitter who'd been given the task of bringing back some normality into my life.

I imagined she'd be a kind of Mary Poppins, showering me with kisses and chocolate cakes. My only concern was that she might turn out to be very beautiful and Dad would want to marry her.

So it was a relief when I first set eyes on her. She had as big a moustache as the school janitor. She bared her gums in a skeleton's grimace with a blast of bad breath which practically knocked me out.

“She's probably a nice person inside,” My Uncle suggested.

He was wrong.

Mita had previously been in the service of a countess related to the Agnelli family and with a villa in the hills outside Turin. She regarded working for my father as a step down the social scale, and looking after me as a complete nuisance.

Still remembering the passionate hugs my mother used to give me, I tried to have the same physical contact with Mita. She turned out to be as rigid as wood, so I decided to try and win her over emotionally. But in that wasteland it proved impossible to leave any mark which could replace her nostalgic—and maliciously comparative—sense of the glorious years she had spent working for the now lost countess, the only time in her life when all had seemed like a fairy tale.

Mita was the first really dim person I had ever come across, and I found it impossible to adapt to her level of conversation. I wanted an audience who would listen enthusiastically to my monologues, but Mita was incapable of following even the simplest reasoning: our talks would leave me with a sense that I was either mad or had been completely misunderstood.

The only interest we had in common was the television. Mita could rightly regard herself as a real expert, with her thorough knowledge of the main textbooks in the field: the television guides
Sorrisi e Canzoni
and
Radiocorriere TV
.

For her, watching the telly was a kind of pagan ritual, where the various presenters and singers were the divinities. The heavens and the earth had been created in six days by the TV host Mike Bongiorno, who on the seventh had rested from his labors and handed over to Pippo Baudo's variety show. But the real watershed in the course of human history had been Gigliola Cinquetti's appearance at the Sanremo Music Festival. Many years had passed since that miracle had taken place, but Mita continued to bask in the longing for a lost paradise, back in the days when she would listen to Gigliola Cinquetti singing “Non ho l'età per amarti” as she ironed the countess's undergarments.

One Saturday evening in autumn, Dad went out to dinner with friends. It was the first time he had left me on my own in the evening, and the prospect filled me with twinges of anxiety.

Mita took over the sitting room and sat down in front of the television with
Sorrisi e Canzoni
open on her lap like a prayer book.
Canzonissima
was just about to start. It involved singers taking part in a competition in which the winners were chosen by the TV audience, who could send
in their votes with their New Year's Day lottery tickets.

Mita was a decidedly floating voter, but her choices had a subtle consistency about them. She liked talented newcomers such as Mino Reitano or Massimo Ranieri. She told me the names of their girlfriends and other personal secrets until my attention was suddenly distracted by a mesmerizing vision which had just appeared on the TV screen: a woman's bare midriff with a belly button.

The woman who'd had the audacity to exhibit her belly button in public was called Raffaella Carrà. She came from Romagna, like my grandmother Emma, and she was blond, like my mother. She later reappeared in a miniskirt, kicking and twirling her legs, judiciously covered in dark stockings, in a variety of provocative poses.

I was still too young to perceive any glimmer of sensuality in what I was watching, but I was still stirred by the images. They succeeded in opening a breach in my hardened soul. When the dance had ended I plunged like a diver, holding my breath, into Mita's arms and kissed her hollow cheeks.