Sleepless Nights and Kisses for Breakfast

by Matteo Bussola

  Never mind that we, by inclination, went with the flow, with no regard to last names. We’re dreamers. We like surprises, and we never wanted stars guiding our journey, not even dancing ones.

  It was always enough for us to follow the winds and trust in our own hands.

  And in cats that come in through the window, especially them.

  All for One

  Two of our neighbors’ houses got robbed the other night.

  Yesterday after dark, Garrett was barking into the woods and I went to call him in. I thought it was the usual cat or maybe a boar, but instead I saw a shadow moving through the dark, illuminating its path with a small flashlight like one from a cell phone.

  “Who’s there?” I asked.

  “I heard some noises,” a voice said.

  It was my neighbor from two houses down.

  “Oh, I heard noises too, but it was you,” I said.

  He came up to the fence and told me about the other night. Two thieves were ransacking his garage, and upon hearing all the racket he went and looked in through the window. They saw him and ran away. He grabbed his air gun to scare them off with the noise, but his wife told him not to because he’d terrify the kids. They called the police, but in the meantime, the thieves escaped into the woods. Then they stopped for a second robbery at the yellow house at the end of the road.

  Since Paola is away, last night I decided to sleep on the couch with the lights on. I barricaded the front door with the Chicco baby gate and kept a steel ladle handy, since a knife seemed excessive.

  Around three, a violent noise woke me with a start. There was a monster movie on TV that, I must say, didn’t make for a clear head. My heart started to pound. I picked up the ladle and listened. Another sound, this time from downstairs. I gripped the ladle tighter and put on my slippers. I went over to the spiral staircase and shouted, “Who’s there?” Silence was the only response. Actually, as I later thought, it’s unlikely that anyone would reply, “Robbers,” but that’s not how you think in the moment.

  I opened the gate that was there to keep Melania from falling down the spiral stairs with a creak, and slowly descended. It must have taken me ten minutes to go down that staircase, one for each step. I could feel the ladle buzzing in my hand like a Jedi light saber. I hopped down the last step and swung the ladle in front of me, bracing for the worst.

  In the cellar one of the dogs was closed up in the cot like a sandwich. The spring had given way and made it slam shut, and Garrett had gotten halfway stuck inside like in a bear trap. Cordelia was staring at him in the corner, sitting there perfectly composed. I freed Garrett and fixed the cot, and at that point, since I was there, I decided to take him out to pee so I wouldn’t find any surprises to clean up in the morning.

  As soon as I opened the door, Garrett ran outside barking, and Cordelia followed. It was three in the morning, so I rushed outside to get him. Garrett was at the fence barking toward the woods as if aliens were landing out there. I turned toward the trees and heard leaves rustling. I listened awhile and without a doubt, it was footsteps. I clutched the ladle, thinking how it would have been better to bring the wok too, but good ideas always come too late.

  “Who’s there?” I yelled into the darkness.

  The footsteps came closer. I instinctively raised the ladle over my head.

  “I heard a noise,” my neighbor said.

  “Damn it,” I told him. “You nearly gave me a heart attack!”

  The neighbor switched on his little flashlight and shined it in my face.

  “Were you making soup?” he said.

  “Oh, no, no,” I said. “I just grabbed the first thing I found.”

  Then we heard more footsteps. We both turned around.

  “Who’s there?” we said in unison.

  “I heard a noise,” the second neighbor said.

  When he came closer, we saw that he had fireplace tongs in his hand. The first neighbor, I noticed just then, was clutching a bicycle pump.

  If we caught a thief, one of us could squeeze him, the second blow him up, and the third scoop up his tortellini.

  The Man Who Doesn’t Laugh

  This morning I saw a man digging through the trash.

  I was dropping the girls off at school and all the parking spots by the front were taken, so we drove around twice, then parked up the hill. I left the car near the yellow Caritas bins for clothing donations. When I came out of the school and was walking back to the car, I saw him. It’s an increasingly common sight in the city, but I’d never come across it out here.

  Across the street, a husky guy in his sixties in a dark green jacket was standing there watching the man, with folded arms, his expression somewhere between surprise and mounting irritation.

  “Go back where you belong and dig through the trash there!” the guy shouted from the sidewalk, shaking his fist.

  I didn’t get that “where you belong” for a moment, but then I realized that the man, whose face was almost completely covered by a red-and-white-striped wool beanie and whose hands were deep in the bin, was black. I was about to say something to the guy on the other side of the street when a tiny old woman came walking down the street, leaning on a black umbrella as if it were a cane.

  “What’s your goddamn problem?” the woman shouted at the guy across the street. “You think he’d be digging through the trash if he wasn’t poor too?”

  The guy was dumbfounded, not having expected an outburst like that, and at that moment, the first man pulled a pair of old pink plastic clogs out of the bin. He looked at them, turned them around in his hands, and put them in a plastic grocery bag. Then he waved goodbye to the woman as if they knew each other and left without saying a word. I went up to her and wanted to hug her, but instead I just silently offered her my hand. The woman looked me up and down, suspicious. Then she shook it.

  “These dickheads,” she said, motioning to the guy across the street. “You should be grateful that life has gone so well for you!” she added, shaking her umbrella at him.

  “Senile old bat!” the guy shouted.

  “Your mama!” the woman replied.

  It seemed like the guy was about to cross the street. But then, maybe because he saw me there, maybe because he realized what he was about to do, he came to his senses. He went off, hurrying up the hill and waving his hand in the air as if to say, “Both of you can go to hell.”

  “You should be careful though, ma’am,” I told her.

  “What do you mean, careful?” she said. “That fool? I’ve known him since he was ten years old. And he’s always been a fool!”

  I felt like laughing. I said goodbye to the woman, shaking her hand again, and went to my car and drove off.

  When I got to the traffic light, I saw the man from the trash giving the pink plastic clogs to a ten-year-old girl.

  The little girl was smiling, but the man was not.

  Pockets Full of Stones

  We’ve been sick the last few days.

  Melania infected the entire family with a terrible virus that re-created scenes straight out of The Exorcist. We slept little, ate less, barely worked; we interacted in a haze, slowly and with increasing grouchiness. Ginevra and Melania have been home sick for five days, Virginia just succumbed this morning. She’d been jealous and difficult until today because she had been the only one going to school, and had to get ready in the morning without her sisters’ company or Mama combing her hair. I’d yelled at her on more than one occasion, partly out of exhaustion.

  Then last night, watching her in profile, a little lady sighing and finishing her homework, I remembered when she was a defenseless little pile of curls, and when she was two and knew The Jungle Book by heart and would flip through it and recite the text with a dubber’s perfect timing while I secretly recorded her so I could try to convince my friends she already knew how to read. And now she’
s a schoolgirl—one day she likes one boy and the next day another; she has a poster of Marco Mengoni up next to her bed and pretty soon she won’t even give me the time of day.

  Being a father is brutal.

  Your daughter will only be eight once and only four once and only two once, and every day, every hour, every minute you find yourself watching a series of shows with no repeat performances. You, from thirty-five to forty, have new experiences, you do stuff, but essentially feel like the same person. Whereas they, between two and eight, learn to speak, read, reason, develop tastes and form independent judgments. They become.

  The thing you don’t know is that it’s not true that you stay the same person. Because while they learn life, you learn to be a father—that is, you learn your second life. What it means to stop being and start being present, to know that everything is going to fly by, to be able to catch that lucky smile that’s all for you even when you’re tired. The beauty of playing even if you’re stressed, the wonder of those thirty-five pounds that want to do nothing but sleep on your chest even when you’re dead tired and would give anything to sleep on your back without little fingers going up your nose. The fact is, your nostrils will be exactly the same in five years. Those little fingers won’t. That desire to sleep on top of you will vanish too, and you’ll regret every day you didn’t enjoy it, every missed chance to rub that head when it was within reach. And when the show has moved on to other stages you can’t see, when you’re no longer in the front row but outside the door, you’ll sleep on your back just to remember.

  Being a father teaches you to focus, always. I know there are people who focus anyway, who don’t have to have children to do that, and it’s definitely a question of attitude and intelligence. A personal thing, as they say. But I, who have never shone with brilliance, only learned how as a father.

  I used to waste tons of time; now I hoard it every day. I don’t feel like an adult getting old while my daughters become young women; I’m more like a tireless wanderer filling his pockets with stones from the side of the road. Each of those stones is a memory that tells me that I was there. The stones slow me down and make me heavy, but each one anchors me to the present and makes me the foundation for someone else’s future. That future is what I fight for every day, working even when I have a fever, losing sleep so I can be a pillow, letting every wall in my house be covered with scribbles because walls are just walls, while what makes a difference, at least for me, are the stones I’m able to carry along—for as long as my pockets hold up. When the stones fall to the ground, they’ll be there for whoever may want to pick them up. Some perhaps in the form of iPad notes written at nine a.m. before going downstairs to work; a coffee gone cold, left on the couch armrest while one daughter falls asleep with her head on my lap, while my back is still good and my pockets have plenty of room.

  SPRING

  The Moment Before

  There’s this thing. Spring is coming and I don’t want it to.

  The first baby birds are chirping in the yard and the crow has returned to the woods; at one p.m. yesterday it was 60 degrees in the sun.

  I don’t love spring, it’s a cliché. The rebirth of life doesn’t interest me, just the life that continues to quietly smolder beneath the ashes. I love waiting for the before, the latent potential, the pause that precedes the opening of wings, the promise contained by the cold. I’ve always been fascinated not by horoscopes but by astrological symbolism. My sign is considered the fixed water sign of the zodiac. Fixed water is the still water of a pond, as opposed to the running water of a river. I’ve always found it to be a perfect image, one that represents me to a T. Teeming life beneath a decaying, motionless surface, without a single ripple. Life you can’t see but is there, that you don’t suspect but exists. The tireless labor behind the trace of the visible.

  Spring is life returning, brazen. Winter is life brooding, indomitable. Spring is the chick breaking through the shell of winter. Winter is the chick that dreams of its image as it gradually comes into being, taking its time, breathing under the snow, sensing but faintly the light of the world. The contrast between what is and the moment in which everything can still become.

  The crossroads. Robert Frost just before he chose the road less traveled, stopping awhile at the inn at the edge of the woods, sipping a hot toddy and quietly planning his future.

  The moment before the first step, in the first minute on the first day of the rest of the life you’re about to choose.

  The Blue Scooter

  Ginevra and I are going down the stairs at the nursery school. We’ve just dropped off Melania.

  At the bottom of the stairs, right outside the door, there’s a blue scooter. Ginevra eyes it like it’s a promise.

  “Daddy, who do you think that scooter belongs to?”

  “I don’t know, Ginevra. It probably belongs to a boy who took his little brother to nursery school and parked it there.”

  “Did you know it was there yesterday too?”

  “He must have taken him yesterday too.”

  We cross the yard. At the door to Ginevra’s nursery school she stops and turns around.

  “Maybe he’s dead.”

  “I really doubt that, Ginevra.”

  “Well, how do you know?”

  “Because scooters always go to heaven with their owners.”

  She eyes me, suspicious.

  “Will your car go to heaven with you too, Daddy?”

  “Well, yeah. Unless you want me to leave it for you.”

  “No, no, you can take it.”

  “All right.”

  “Just leave me a Popsicle and Mommy.”

  Love Can’t Be Said

  Paola doesn’t know it, but I watch her.

  I watch her while she sleeps, when she talks on the phone, as she writes.

  She’s radiant when she writes, even though she contorts herself into positions on her chair even weirder than a blind cormorant. Sometimes I peek at her reflection in the bathroom mirror while she’s getting dressed, like in a romantic movie. Except I’m not lying half asleep between damp sheets like Richard Gere after making love. I do it on purpose, going between the bedroom and bathroom, to look at her.

  Every day I add something to the image of the girl who put her hair up that July day, saying “Let’s go,” though I didn’t know where. She was wearing just a pair of shorts and a tank top and in her eyes, she was only eighteen; maybe I was the same. Some days we still feel eighteen, and that’s what saves us. I’ve clung to that image during the tough times, which we’ve had our share of. Because love is all in the eyes and nose and that’s it. Sometimes in words. The rest is extra.

  Anyway, I didn’t want to say anything about love, because I think love can’t be said, so I guess that’s it. Except for one thing.

  Once I read that a relationship dies if the couple doesn’t grow together. That’s not true. It doesn’t have to be together. It dies when one doesn’t recognize the growth of the other. The other’s patterns and pauses. A couple is based primarily on patience, which is why so many people break up. Accepting that it is what it is, is devastating some days. You wish for something else, certain moments. Sometimes you almost feel like you’re alone in the room and don’t know where the other person went.

  Paola and I, for example, often wait for each other. Sometimes I’m there, sometimes she’s there, some days neither of us is. When we bump into each other like a couple of strangers waiting for the bus, those are the best moments, especially because the bus never comes.

  Meanwhile, we’ve had three daughters, we create stories, we pay our mortgages, we laugh. We order a ton of pizza. We love each other in the cutouts, in the corners, in what’s left over after everything else. Because, yes, a couple is the basis for a family, but like all foundations, it gets buried and you can’t see it, to the point that you almost forget about it and it takes visionary faith
to keep on feeling it. Paola and I have that in spades, and we’ve also got a few tricks: we still flirt with furtive glances in the hall; we meet like teenagers in the doorway between the living room and the bedroom and I want to take her in my arms, but she always has a full cup of tea in her hands. Paola hates it when I’m washing the dishes or breading meat when she wants to embrace me. Our embraces are out of sync. But it’s actually all a subconscious tactic for making the unexpected ones even better.

  Meanwhile I watch her reflection in the mirror, or as she writes. When she writes, she’s radiant, even if she makes faces weirder than an albino iguana’s. I also watch her while she sleeps and sometimes I make her turn over, because she snores like Popeye after a bender.

  Last night though, sleeping alone because she was away, I was the one tossing and turning, for a long time. Without her snoring it’s like being at a party after the music stops, eating the last little sandwich with a toothpick flag on top.

  But she doesn’t know that, so don’t tell her.

  Cashiers at Esselunga Read Bukowski

  The cashiers at Esselunga look at you with that self-righteous expression, knowing full well they’re the only barrier between you and freedom.

  They inspect your groceries like detectives. They deduce who you are by what you put on the conveyor belt, imperceptibly raising an eyebrow.

  For years, the cashiers at Esselunga winked at me suggestively—when I looked like a young bachelor, rebellious but with the evident security of a real job. When I bought cases of Tennent’s, artisanal Gragnano pasta, salmon and tuna for sushi, expensive coffee.

  When I could afford those things.

  Now, however, they look at me sadly. They note my plain clothes and discounted pasta, jumbo-pack diapers, baby food, and cans of formula with cruel pity. They remind me of swimmers at the beach looking at dirty seawater with resignation.