Sweet Dreams by Massimo Gramellini Read Free Book Online Page A

for thieves, but for what they’d stolen. Something that had been stolen from me.
    Once, during my nightly inspection, the sight of a large box in my father’s study awakened a memory from my earliest childhood. My godmother had come up to me looking perplexed.
    â€œWhere’s your Mommy? I can’t find her.”
    â€œSilly, she’s in the kitchen!”
    â€œAre you sure? Go and check.”
    I went through all the rooms calling for her, increasingly nervous and upset. I even looked to see if she was inside the cooker. I finally plucked up the courage to enter the holy of holies, strictly off-limits—my father’s study—but all I’d found was a large box under his desk.
    Then I started to cry, and my mother jumped out of the box and hugged me.
    â€œSurprise, surprise!”
    But I was furious. Children are serious-minded: they hate stupid jokes. They know that sooner or later they become real.

fourteen
    After my missile attack on him, my father decided to send me to see a psychiatrist. He was actually just a general practitioner who’d studied psychology in his spare time. For my father to have sent me to a genuine psychiatrist would have meant admitting that I was genuinely mad.
    Dr. Frassino’s monologues were punctuated with long, exhausting silences—and I would come out of those slow-mo sessions more jittery than when I went in. I don’t remember anything else about him except for one of his declarations:
    â€œOne’s personality is formed during the first three years of life. Losing your mother at the age of nine doesn’t lead to deep-seated psychological deficiencies, though it may reinforce certain underlying tendencies.”
    Let me translate: if the little one had lost his mom while still a toddler, he would go on throwing stones at his dad. But as he was a little older when she died, the worst thing that could happen is he’d tie one to his father’s neck one day.
    This was a time when everyone thought they had the right to pronounce on who I was. Father Skullhead had made us take a kind of crossword puzzle which he said was an aptitude test and declared that the secondary-school course best suited to the development of my talents was Accountancy. Even my father had to laugh.
    I needed a factory producing good role models which could show me the way—and I found them in biographies. My passion for reading about the lives of others stems from the unconscious desire to discover how they managed to survive their first experience of grief.
    I was obsessed with the idea that the loss of my mother when I was still a child would mark my existence forever and wanted to be reassured this was not the case. I remember reading that the Buddha and a Mafia godfather had both lost their mothers when they were children. But they’d taken different routes afterwards. Perhaps I too might come up with an acceptable compromise.
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    But I’d have been happy just to keep my feet on the ground. Instead I used to walk about on tiptoe like some kind of elf. The soles of my shoes were worn away only in front: my heels hovered in midair, quite uselessly.
    I walked on the tips of my toes and kept looking down at them, since I was incapable of looking up, towards the sky.
    I had good reasons not to. The sky frightened me—and so did the earth.
    My Uncle came up with a piece of sensible advice: he told me to lift my chin while walking, as if I was trying to draw a line between my chin and my belly button.
    I tried it out, making a real effort. I ended up walking straight into a lamppost.
    In essence, the story of my life is the story of my attempts to keep my feet on the ground while looking up at the sky.
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    I may have gone around on tiptoe, but I could play football well enough with the other kids in the neighborhood. On summer afternoons I’d meet up with my acne-ridden peers from the area in the car park of an autoparts factory.
    We divided