Sleepless Nights and Kisses for Breakfast

by Matteo Bussola

  As soon as I pay, they shove my stuff to the side with that divider that looks like a giant nutcracker. Then they piteously toss me a couple of recyclable plastic bags, which invariably break before I get to the elevator.

  Today something different happens.

  The cashier at Esselunga, as I’m taking my things out of the cart, stares at me with gentle insistence. I’m not imagining it. She keeps looking up and over at me the whole time.

  The cashier had to be thirty or so. Red hair gathered gracefully at her nape, milky white skin. Waxen. When our eyes meet, I don’t know whether to feel flattered or uncomfortable. Maybe, I think, I have some trace of my charm as a faux melancholy suburbanite left. A patina that three daughters and sleepless nights and two mortgages and a lack of money have not yet managed to wipe away.

  I bag the last things, my forty-year-old ego gratified.

  “You’re Mr. Bussola, aren’t you?” she asks me out of nowhere.

  I’m about to slide my card into the reader. I drop it.

  “Um, yeah,” I say.

  I narrow my eyes and study her, trying to figure out if I can place her.

  “I follow you on Facebook,” she says bluntly.

  “Oh,” I say.

  “You write very well,” she says.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  She pauses. She takes a breath as if about to confess a secret.

  “Your writing really reminds me of Bukowski.”

  “Huh. You’re really too kind. Anyway, I should say, I’ve stopped drinking.”

  She smiles. She doesn’t know that I’ve just revealed a part of my life that few people know about. Maybe that’s also why I don’t know what to say next. I’m not used to talking to people anymore and my shyness has come back to claim its due.

  “Sorry, but I really have to get going,” I say.

  I say goodbye, take my groceries, and leave.

  Outside, it’s about to rain. I unlock the car quickly and as I’m putting everything in the trunk, three thoughts come to mind, in the following order:

  I was so bewildered by the situation that I didn’t even ask her name.

  If only I really wrote like old Hank, lady.

  Against all stereotypes, cashiers at Esselunga read Bukowski.

  That would make a great title for a story, I think.

  I have half a mind to actually write it.

  Being a Parent

  I couldn’t get to sleep last night.

  I dug the remote control out from under the covers and turned on the TV. One of those late-night programs, where writers and scholars discuss a topic, was on. I couldn’t tell what the topic was, but at some point someone I didn’t recognize said something that rocked me.

  He said it wasn’t true at all that rubbing alcohol is a disinfectant.

  You know, the kind in the pink bottle that our moms and grandmas put on our cuts or wiped on our skinned knees when we were little. Not only does it not disinfect, it’s an irritant and even toxic. Skeptical, I went and looked it up on the Internet, and in fact he’s right.

  Which means, incidentally, that kids have been right for hundreds of years. When they cried, saying the alcohol burned, they were right. Besides burning, it’s completely useless. But no one ever listened to them.

  I found it to be a horrible realization, yet symbolic and powerful at the same time. In an instant, I better understood the meaning of many things I’ve written.

  Stories about my daughters or our road trips—and their funny, off-kilter view of the world—were perhaps an attempt to listen to them. To remind myself that my role as an adult and a father isn’t to be right, but to acknowledge rightness when I see it. Not only to protect, but also to be protected. Not just to guide, but to let myself be led. To remind myself that children aren’t right because they’re children, but have a right to their childlike logic.

  That the most important and difficult part of being a parent is perhaps being careful, always, not to burn our children’s skin because of our fallible adult reasoning.

  Spring Is Useless

  In the car, on the way to nursery school:

  “Daddy, why does spring only come once?”

  “It doesn’t only come once, Ginevra. It comes once a year, but it comes back year after year.”

  “Yeah. Spring is like Santa Claus.”

  “More or less, that’s the idea.”

  “Except spring doesn’t bring gifts.”

  “Well, that depends. The violets come out, for example. And primroses. And boars in the woods.”

  “And you can go to the beach.”

  “No, Ginevra, you know that you go to the beach in the summer.”

  “Geez, Daddy!”

  “What is it?”

  “Spring is useless.”

  April Fools’

  I had my first April fools’ joke played on me in spring 1983.

  Someone told me that the blond girl who sat in the back liked me. The blond girl’s name was Vittoria and she was my second love. The first, Arianna, was taken away from me in fourth grade by her parents when they moved to another city.

  I sent my friend Riccardo to check out the situation with Vittoria, because in any case, I didn’t believe that she liked me and I was pathologically shy. I sent him to ask for definite confirmation. He asked her straight out: “Is it true that you like Matteo Bussola?”

  I was bent on one knee outside the classroom door, pretending to tie my shoe. She saw me and gave me her answer, looking right at me.

  “No,” she said.

  Riccardo came back to relay the message but I already knew. I got up and went to wait for the bus with a feigned laugh.

  Antonio was in the courtyard; he was the one who told me: “April fools’! April fools’!” he sang at me.

  I kept on laughing, since Antonio was two grades ahead of me and getting mad at him was prohibited. When I got home, my mom had made gnocchi. I ate less than usual and shut myself in my room. She came to ask me if everything was all right and I told her something bad happened at school. She understood immediately. That afternoon she gave me five thousand lire to buy a game I wanted, and letting myself go completely, I bought the Julio Iglesias tape Che male fa innamorarsi alla mia età a few days later.

  Yesterday, while I was in bed waiting for the episode of Force Five: Grendizer to start, Virginia stuck a fish-shaped April fools’ note on my back. “Turn around,” she said. When she went off snickering, I removed it. The paper said: “I love Vittoria’s mom.” The Vittoria Virginia was talking about was one of her classmates. When I read the joke, it made me laugh a little. I went into the living room and there was Melania intently scribbling on the floor with a blue marker. I took it away from her and brought her into the bedroom with me. She climbed down from the bed and ran back to the living room, taking an orange marker from the box and resuming her writing on the floor. I cleaned it up this morning while making the three breakfast.

  On the table was another April fools’ fish torn in half with the words in pencil: “I love Daddy.”

  That’s My Mother

  I’m at the pharmacy, there’s a long line. Next to me there’s a guy around fifty, well dressed, with a scarf carefully wrapped around his neck and hair like Conan O’Brien’s. In front of us there’s an old woman in a veil. He nods at me like, “See that?” I lift my hand like, “See what?”

  “We’re surrounded now,” he says, indicating the woman in the veil and seeking complicity. He’s not loud, but not quiet either; he says it without worrying whether the woman in front of us can hear. I feel like responding, “Yeah, by idiots like you.”

  Instead, I say, “That’s my mother.”

  The veiled lady turns just slightly and smiles at me in profile. I relish the look on the guy’s face, hanging between mounting embarrassment and that of a tour
ist in sandals who just stepped in elephant shit.

  I wish I had a smartphone to take a picture of him as a reminder of the shitty country I live in.

  But I don’t, so I wrote this.

  Boy Colors

  This morning we saw the little boy with the blue scooter.

  We passed him at the entrance when we were dropping Melania off at nursery school. We were walking in and he was coming out, his mom pulling the scooter by the handlebar. He was about eight, blond, with his hair short in front and long in back like German kids in the eighties. Ginevra watched him with suspicion and a touch of disappointment.

  “Did you see that, Daddy? He isn’t dead after all,” she said to me on the stairs.

  “Thank goodness.”

  “Otherwise, you know, his mom would be very sad.”

  “Right.”

  “And if he was dead maybe they wouldn’t know who to give the scooter to.”

  “That’s true, though blue is for boys.”

  She stopped on a step and looked at me.

  “What is it?”

  “Daddy. Colors are just colors, don’t you know that?”

  Then she went off again, giving me the cold shoulder and leaving me there on the stairs, with Melania in her little pink coat in my arms and a father’s smile on my lips.

  Beer Fest

  Paola is at the store. I made a shopping list for her, item by item. She calls me.

  “What’s up?”

  “Listen, I’m at the discount store and there’s a sign that says, ‘Beer Fest,’ so I wanted to ask you if instead of the beer—”

  “STOP! Don’t take any kind of initiative! Get what I told you and that’s it, please!”

  “Geez, I was just trying to be nice, you know.”

  “Sorry, you’re right. Okay, go on.”

  “Belgian beer is on sale.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “There are two kinds.”

  “Okay. Describe the labels.”

  “One is white and one is yellow.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “The yellow one says volume seven, the white one volume five. Which one should I get?”

  I laugh.

  “Listen, just leave them where they are. I haven’t even read the first four volumes.”

  There’s This Time

  There’s this time, perfectly balanced between afternoon and evening.

  When the sun appears between the pines and the hill, the dusty light comes in through the window, the last rays cast long shadows on my studio wall and make the empty bottle of Franziskaner I use to hold paintbrushes sparkle. It all happens within a couple of minutes. The daylight fades slowly and I turn on the desk lamp, the dogs come back in from the yard to tell me it’s dinnertime, I hear little feet running excitedly upstairs, Paola makes her umpteenth cup of tea, which she leaves in the sink or forgets on the bookshelf. I start to think about what to do for dinner while the brush slides over the paper, when the fiery sunset momentarily blends in with the lamp’s electric light, as my hand grazes African faces and rocky landscapes that come to life between light and darkness, in perfect balance between the was and the will be, at the fork of the could be. Then the eye decides, the hand follows, the ink flows, the sun disappears behind the roofs of the houses, leaving a wake that starts out orange, then turns purple, then silver, then everything. Then nothing. Then night.

  Chocolate Coins

  In the kitchen, 7:30 a.m.

  “Daddy.”

  “Yes, Ginevra?”

  “You shouldn’t go out this morning.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, you should stay home. You’re sick and Mommy can take me to school.”

  “Well, if Mom agrees, that’s fine.”

  “That way Mommy can start getting used to it.”

  “To what?”

  “Taking me to school all the time, since she’ll have to when you’re dead.”

  “Ginevra, I really hope that by the time I die you’ll be done with school and that you’ll have had a driver’s license for a long time.”

  “Okay, but if you want to die before then, don’t worry, just tell me first.”

  “Thanks. If it does happen, I’ll make sure to write you a note.”

  “Daddy!”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know how to read!”

  “Oh, right. What should we do then?”

  “If you die, leave a chocolate coin on my pillow.”

  “All right.”

  “A big one!”

  “Sure. How about, just to be on the safe side, I leave you two.”

  I have a coughing fit that lasts a good twenty seconds.

  “Daddy.”

  “Yes?”

  “Could you give me one now?”

  Trail of Breadcrumbs

  This morning I took the girls to school and gave them each two kisses, one for Paola and one for me. I went to the pharmacy and picked up two prescriptions, one for Paola and one for me. I went to the bakery and bought one plain croissant and one with jam, the first for Paola and the second for me. Then I went back home, made myself my third weak coffee and went down to my studio. I replied to two urgent e-mails, checked my bank account, prepared a paper square for a new page. The robin hit the glass like he does every day, because at that hour he sees his reflection in the glass door and starts a fight with himself. I opened the door and threw him some crumbs of pastry, but he got startled and flew away. Sometimes that happens with people too, I thought. When you open the door for them too fast, they get scared and run off. I sharpened a pencil and got to work with that thought in my head, I don’t know why. The thought is still with me as I draw now, reminding me of two fears that decided to trust each other without running away, two doors that ended up becoming one. Behind that door there are breadcrumbs all over, and I like to think that they’re the visible proof of the efforts we made to create a path leading home, like “Hansel and Gretel” in reverse. The house holds five lives and two paths, one for Paola and one for me. The two trails converge at one point—that point is here. Here begins a shared trail of breadcrumbs that fades into the horizon of a visionary faith, and it is renewed every day.

  For Paola and for me.

  Daughter to Go

  The phone rings, there’s no number.

  I chance it.

  “Hello?”

  “Good morning, hello. Mr. Matteo Bussola?”

  “Yes, this is he.”

  “Hello, Mr. Bussola. This is Valentina from Sky Cable TV.”

  “Hi, Valentina.”

  “Mr. Bussola, I’m calling to offer you a new service that Sky is providing free of charge to its most loyal customers.”

  “All right.”

  “So, with the new Sky to Go service, you can watch Sky anytime, anywhere, even if you move or go on vacation, for example.”

  “Ah, I see. I’m not interested, thank you.”

  “How come? This is a very useful service, you know.”

  “Yes, but believe me, Valentina. One: I have no plan to move for, let’s say, the next thirty years. Two: I never go on vacation except for a week at the beach in July.”

  “But it’s free!”

  “Okay. Tell you what. Try to convince me, I’ll listen.”

  “Good. Imagine you’re on vacation at the sea, like you said. But you don’t have a TV. With Sky to Go you can access all Sky programs and services, even on the beach.”

  “On the beach?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Sorry, but besides the fact that at the beach I usually read or get buried in the sand, if I don’t have a TV, like you said, how can I watch Sky programs? With magic?”

  “Well, on your enabled tablet or smartphone, obviously.”

  “Oh, so this is something for the te
lephone. Then that’s no good, see? I don’t have a smartphone.”

  “What do you mean you don’t have . . .”

  “I have a 2002 Nokia. It was given to me as a present after the Motorola broke, which had been given to me as a graduation present. It makes calls and nothing else and I’m perfectly happy with it.”

  “You don’t have a tablet either?”

  “Oh, like an iPad? Yes, yes, that I have.”

  “Well then, see?”

  “Yes, but, correct me if I’m wrong: If I’m at the beach, with my tablet and Sky whatever, I need to have a wireless plan, right? My tablet would have to be connected to a cellular network.”

  “Sure, obviously.”

  “Ah, well, that I don’t have.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t have that?”

  “I didn’t activate the cellular card for my tablet—the plan is too expensive for me. I only use my iPad at home, where it automatically connects to my home network.”

  “Excuse me, but what do you use it for then? The tablet, by definition, is a portable device. That’s like having a cell phone and only using it to make calls from home.”

  “But portable is portable, right? In fact, we mostly use it in bed, to watch Peppa Pig videos on YouTube.”

  “Ah, perfect. You see? With Sky to Go you can watch Peppa Pig in bed on your tablet but through Sky, with access to many more episodes!”

  “Yes, but I already have a TV in the bedroom. With Sky. So why would I need to watch Peppa Pig on Sky on my tablet when I can watch it on Sky on television? Also in bed, of course.”

  “Excuse me, but if you can already watch Peppa Pig through Sky on television, why do you watch it on YouTube on your tablet?”