Sweet Dreams (8 page)

There wasn't even the possibility of sharing a desk with some girl I could write poems to or whose breasts I could take sly glimpses of. We had to make do with what was available—in other words the girls' school at the corner of the block, a pack of demure young maidens who wanted to but felt they really shouldn't. “Don't do that, cos you know I like it,” they would moan as some of the older boys gave them a hug. All they said to me was, “You're really cute”—a sure sign the road ahead was closed.

As a teenager, I divided girls up into two categories: unreachable virgin madonnas and disposable Red Cross nurses. You don't seduce virgin madonnas: you worship them. I worshipped them and at the same time
was tormented by their indifference. Yet, as soon as they showed some interest in me, they lost all their appeal.

In order to avoid the possibility of being dumped, I only allowed myself to go out with girls I thought I could control in some way. Showing a lack of commitment was my speciality.

“Do you love me?” they would ask. I would count to 11 (Pulici's shirt number) and then come out with a series of inconclusive answers: a) I don't know; b) I'm afraid; c) I'm afraid I don't know.

Thinking back, I must have been a real idiot—and of the worst kind, an idiot who doesn't even know he's an idiot.

And yet, was I really like that? Or is hindsight massaging my memories in order to paint a flattering self-portrait? Being an idiot—and not knowing it!—is less of a humiliation than being a coward.

When I went to the wedding of Sveva's son, I realized that not all orphans are the same. Those, like him, who lose their fathers when they're children feel at ease among women. They never fall completely in love, since no girl they meet could ever live up to their supermoms, but this impediment just becomes another part of their charm.

Whereas losing your mother makes you less appealing. Not so much a solitary titan as a bedraggled chick.

Come to think of it, I've never mixed with other men who lost their mothers in childhood. Meeting other members of the club would only have undermined my belief I was unique.

In order to soften the impact of the real world, Belfagor had dulled all my senses. Nothing really enthused me, not even transgression. I didn't get drunk, I didn't take drugs, I didn't smoke joints (an occasional cigarette on an empty stomach was the limit of my daring). I didn't enjoy extreme sports or all-night parties: I've seen the sun rise more often waking up early than coming home late. I wasn't left wing or right wing: I supported the Liberals—which when you're eighteen is like preferring lemonade to tequila.

Political utopias made me anxious—just as emotions, dreams and suchlike did. And just as my mother did. I stopped adoring her and became indifferent. I no longer hid her photograph, but simply forgot it was there.

My spirit coasted along close to the ground. I didn't believe in anything, except perhaps in a few songs. Studying
materialist philosophy and spending too much time in the company of priests had turned me into a mocking atheist. God was man's invention, and death was the end of everything.

When during the Ash Wednesday service the priest smeared my forehead, I laughed in his face. I knew all too well I'd end up as dust again, just as I knew nothing remained of my mother other than dust.

In every young man's heart there's a need to escape, and the best way ever discovered to escape from yourself is to fall for someone who isn't right for you.

At university I met Alessia—extremely tall, beautiful and vain—my “Miss First Times.”

It was the first time I accepted the risk of someone turning me down (on the contrary she said yes before I'd even finished asking)—the first time I succeeded in unclasping a girl's bra with a single, elegant flick of the wrist—the first time I made love. As so often happens, it wasn't a particularly memorable experience: Alessia seemed to be more concerned about not spoiling her makeup, and I felt like a thief who finally breaks open the safe and finds it empty.

She became my girlfriend while continuing to surround herself with a court of silent admirers, whom she kept in a state of permanent uncertainty, playing with their infatuation just for the pleasure of exercising her charm over them. She was one of those emotionally dangerous people who pride themselves on their egotism thinking it shows they're sensitive.

I was the last person capable of becoming her moral tutor. “Have nice dreams,” my mother had told me: here I was, trampling all over them.

In the hope of becoming a journalist, I wanted to study literature or political science at university, but my father continued to nurture Napoleonic aspirations for me: he saw me graduating in economics and then becoming a leader of industry.

I didn't fight for my dream, for the simple reason I was deaf to it. Our dreams are rooted in our deepest selves, and my deepest self was out of order.

So my father and I found a compromise solution which satisfied neither of us and was therefore entirely acceptable: I should study law.

“If you end up a complete failure in everything else, at least you'll turn out to be a lawyer like your mother always dreamed you would be,” was the way my father, with his characteristic pragmatism, summed up the situation.

But I alone was responsible for the mistake. I'd chosen the wrong university course and the wrong girlfriend because I was too scared to listen to my dreams. It was obvious I was setting myself up to fail.

Alessia dumped me during a telephone conversation, moments after telling me she still loved me. All my defenses collapsed and Belfagor moved back in.

After some pathetic attempts to try to win her back, I stopped going to classes, closed the shutters and barricaded myself in my bedroom.

Is the ability to move on the recipe for a successful love life? I don't know. But if you lose out you stay exactly where you are. I sat for hours on end at my desk: my only comfort was listening to The Police and smoking Camel Lights (“Lights” sums up all my cowardice).

I'd studied a bit of psychoanalysis for the course in criminal anthropology and, armed with this smattering, I drew up a vast dossier on myself in which I stated various presumed truths in a dry unemotional tone and using the third person.

In the chapter entitled “Diagnosis” I wrote: “Since the trauma caused by his mother's death has alienated
the patient's real self, everything he does, thinks and says does not originate from his own self but rather from a dysfunctional personality which has developed over the years and might be said to have taken over his life.”

But how could the patient recover his real self? The chapter entitled “Prognosis” dealt with this question. It had as many “shoulds” and “musts” in it as any politician's hustings speech.

“We must deactivate the intellect and the senses, both of which have been unavoidably compromised. The instinct, as the only structural component of personality unaffected by the trauma, should be freed.”

These were not straightforward problems. What could put me in touch with that “structural component” if not my—now completely superannuated—intellect and senses? But, even more important, who was to say that this entire dossier was not the product of the dysfunctional personality who had usurped my life rather than of my authentic self ?

In this way my self-analysis got so tangled up in itself that it took weeks to find a way of extricating it. Then, one Sunday morning, as I was opening the windows to air the smoke-filled room, something suddenly dawned on me: if I wanted to recover my real self, I needed to open the windows there too and let the fresh air in.

It had nothing to do with setting off in a car or on a train: it was an interior journey I had to undertake. I would erase my past life, setting the hands of the clock back to the first morning I'd woken up to find I was without a mother. I fixed the precise time my new life would begin: 11:11 on the following day. But, when the time came, I happened to be sitting on the toilet, hardly the best place for an initiation ceremony.

So Belfagor agreed to give my real self another twenty-four hours, which turned into forty-eight—and then seventy-two. I'd got stuck again.

After further bouts of reclusiveness and raving, one evening I exultantly burst open the door of my bedroom to tell Sveva, the only person with whom I'd maintained at least the appearance of human contact, that I'd finally found the solution. In order to find my real self I needed to readjust the balance which had been destroyed when my mother died by bringing her back to life as well, through imagination.

If I could have done, I would have drawn her—this time without a bunch of grapes in her hand. All I did, instead, was try and bring her ID details up to date.

She'd have been fifty-six years old—still looking young for her years, although (I liked to think) perhaps a tad overweight: she'd always had a sweet tooth.

What would her voice be like when she spoke to me? I no longer remembered how it sounded. Her blond hair—I'd lost the sensation of its fragrance—what color would it be now? And her clothes? Would the wardrobe in which I used to play hide-and-seek as a child still be full of the same two-piece suits?

I circled round and round my mental cage. It was a prelude to madness.

One day I ventured out onto the landing and saw Palmira—now on her own after Tiglio had died—surrounded by shopping bags. She took a look at the dark rings under my eyes, the scrappy beard and the thinning hair at the back of my neck. Despite her understandable hesitation, she stroked my cheek.

“You're no longer the laddie I remember. You've got cold. If you'd had some warmth round you when you were growing up, if your poor mother had been alive . . .”

“Only failures use the word ‘if '! You achieve greatness in life
in spite of
. ”

I'd defended myself by parroting Father Nico's
How to Become an Übermensch
, but I knew my self was dead and done for. Even Palmira said so.

Her words kept echoing in my head. I could feel them going down my stomach, floating around in some acidic puddle and then trying to climb back to my heart.

It wasn't easy to overcome the obstacles Belfagor had put in the way. But a feeble voice did get through.

“
If
you'd grown up with your mother, you'd be less scared now of falling. But you'd also feel less of a need to fly.
In spite of
the fact she's no longer with you, it's time to start using your wings.”

I suddenly didn't care anymore about becoming my “real self.” Just becoming someone would be enough. Better still if that someone were someone else.

I had to do something, though. The monsters which prey on our hearts feed on our inertia. They don't grow because we are defeated, but because we give up.

I emerged from my prison cell and went back to university. I got top marks on my Criminal Procedure exam. I needed to take six more courses before I could graduate. I asked old friends who'd started their studies with me to give me a hand. But they were all working on their theses and didn't have time to turn back and help me catch up.

Once again I shut myself in my room. I drew up study schedules that I updated on an hourly basis. But working
on my own on subjects which didn't really interest me just served to remind me how much my present life had become the result of all the defensive choices I had made in the past.

I needed to escape, and asked My Uncle if he could give me a job in his firm. It was exactly what he wanted, but not now—first I had to get my degree. He belonged to the last generation who had a real respect for education. At Christmas I used to give him abstruse philosophy books, which he would devour with an immense if disorderly hunger for knowledge.

I sought distraction in laddish Saturday-night pursuits, but the chosen companions weren't up—or down—to the task. I used to go about with a group of engineering students, all solid prosaic young men who dismissed my inner torments as mere whims and introduced me to nice but utterly forgettable girls.

They didn't even know I didn't have a mother. Or at least they didn't know it from me. I never broached the topic, and the fact that Sveva was around—after her son had got married she'd moved in with us—dispensed me from the need for further explanations.

Young men often find a cure for their existential malaise in politics or theater. But I didn't have the energy to cultivate creative talents. As for ideologies, I regarded
them in the same way as I did love: to me, they were utopias that were totally incompatible with the egotism of human beings, especially my own.

Sveva suggested I go to the gym in an attempt to work off the toxins I'd accumulated, but when a pair of instructors with bronze-statue physiques—whom I nicknamed the Pillocks of Hercules—proposed a course of steroids so I too could have a body like theirs, I never set foot inside the place again.

Psychoanalysis remained an option, but sessions on the analyst's couch would have meant overcoming my embarrassment and asking for money from my father, who considered digging around in one's brain a loser's way of wasting time.

There are a lot of “buts” in the last few sentences, I realize. At the time it was my pet word. I felt as though a wall of incompatibility constantly loomed over me—as if anything I undertook, all my short-lived enthusiasms, would sooner or later disintegrate against it.

The law books on my desk I was supposed to be studying gradually made way for self-help manuals.

Taking Your Life in Your Own Hands.

The Art of Winning Friends and Influencing People.

Overcoming Neurosis.

How to Solve Your Problems and Start a New Life.