“Because on Sky on the TV we watch Dora the Explorer.”
“Sorry, I don’t understand.”
“Valentina.”
“Yes?”
“You don’t have children, do you?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. Listen, I’ll make you a deal.”
“A deal?”
“Would you perhaps like one?”
“What?”
“Would you like one, a daughter? I’ll send one right to your home. Free trial with no commitment.”
“To my home?”
“Yes. She’s portable, you know.”
“But—”
“You can even take her to the beach, if you want. She works great at the beach even without a contract.”
“Listen, Mr. Bussola—”
“I guarantee you that on the beach, if you take her there, you’ll see things that Sky whatever can only dream of and you’ll have full access to her shows. In high definition too.”
“Have a good day.”
“Wait, it’s free!”
Click.
I didn’t get a chance to tell her that there were even three different sizes to choose from.
Hopefully she calls back.
To Live—Forever (Do the Dead Take Their Cars to Heaven?)
This morning I was supposed to be on a train to Milan, but I’m not.
I’m almost happier, because this way, I was able to take the girls to school again.
On the way, we passed a hearse. Ginevra started to ask me what that strange car was, because it was all black and long. I tried to explain as best I could, but she didn’t seem totally convinced.
“So dead people go to heaven in cars?”
“No, Ginevra,” I said, “they go to heaven without them.”
“Why do people die, Daddy?” she said later, out of the blue.
“Because that’s how it is” was the only answer I could think of. “But fortunately, that goes for everyone.”
She was silent for a long time, looking out the window. Then she resumed.
“Daddy,” she said. “I want to live forever.”
“Eh, well, you can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because you can’t.”
“Yes, but why?”
I tried to think of an image to help her understand.
“Ginevra,” I said. “Let’s say life is like a pizza. We’re all born hungry, and each of us is given a pizza. By living, we eat it a bite at a time, a slice every day. What matters isn’t how big the pizza is, but only that in the end you’re not hungry anymore. Do you understand what I mean?”
“I always get pizza with prosciutto,” she said.
“That’s true,” I said, “and you always leave half because it’s too much for you and you get full before you can finish. And so, what would be the point if they gave you a pizza that went on forever?”
She got quiet for a few seconds, then she looked at me.
“Daddy,” she said. “Are you really hungry still?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’d say I’m still pretty hungry.”
“Well, what do you have on your pizza?” she said.
“The things I’ve chosen are on it,” I said.
“Am I on it too?”
“Yes.”
“And Mama too? And Virgi and Melania?”
“Of course.”
“Well, on my pizza there’s the whole world,” she said, “because I’m only four years old.”
Two Years
Today Melania turned two.
Her grandparents are coming over and I’m going to cook only things she likes. Rice with ham and peas, meatballs and potatoes, and we’ll have chocolate cake. And I’ve been singing her “Happy Birthday” since seven in the morning, as a result of which she’s now speeding around the house in her little red pajamas shouting, “To you! Too yooo!” with the same intonation as a sneeze.
I woke up before five a.m. to work on a few pages and make up for the time lost today on the party, since I have a deadline coming up next week.
“Lost” is an imprecise term, because all the time I’ve spent with Melania since she was born has always been time gained.
Truth is, I didn’t wake up before five to get a head start on work, but because getting a head start on work allows me to spend more time with her.
And on this day, which is her day, it’s twice as valuable.
Just like her two years, which are what give value and meaning to mine.
Can I, Daddy?
Getting into the car to go to nursery school:
“Daddy, can I bring some dandelions from the yard with me?”
“No, Ginevra, not in the car.”
“Please! Just one!”
“No, because then you’ll blow on them in the car like last time and the seeds will all get stuck to the seats.”
“And they’ll get our clothes dirty too.”
“There you go.”
As we’re driving through the gate, she looks out the window.
“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“Can I bring a blackbird then?”
Drawing for School
Virginia was making a drawing for school.
She’d been working on it for almost a week and was supposed to turn it in this morning. Last night, while we were on Skype with Mama in Milan, Melania snuck into Virginia’s room, got up on the desk chair, grabbed a marker, and finished the drawing, covering the entire sky with big green spirals. Virginia was mad at first, then cried, then wanted me to write her teacher a note. I didn’t, and after consulting Mommy, told her that unfortunately she’d have to redo the whole thing, because she was responsible for leaving it unattended near an uncapped marker—something we keep telling her she needs to pay attention to—and especially because, if she had focused on working instead of whining, she would have had more than enough time. She asked me for a sheet of the nice paper and in a huff began the drawing again at seven p.m. At eight we had dinner and afterward she went back to it. While I was in the bedroom watching a YouTube tutorial on how to braid hair, with Melania jumping on the bed and Ginevra watching cartoons, Virginia would come in and show me the intermediate steps, becoming increasingly confident. I encouraged her each time. She stopped around ten and went to bed with the sky half done. She finished her drawing before breakfast this morning, and ran to show it to me while I was dressing Melania. She had a gleam in her eye and an incredulous look on her face. The drawing was very meticulous. She wanted us to take a photo of it with the iPad and made me promise to send it to Mommy today.
“Daddy, it came out much better than last time. I’m almost glad Melania ruined the first one!” she said, filled with pride.
I was very proud too, because Virginia learned an important lesson today. She learned not to give up and how to react in a difficult situation without losing heart. That when they scribble on your paper and you have to start over from scratch, it’s not always such a bad thing. That sometimes, when it seems like life is ruining all your plans, maybe it’s just because it has something better in store for you.
But that something always depends on you.
The Hearts of Blonds
I’m sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. It’s full of people. I thought it would be, so I brought my iPad. I start writing to pass the time.
A blond girl has just sat down next to me. Around twenty-five, she’s wearing an orange sweatshirt with ALOHA on the front and a flashy blue hat almost covering her eyes. She’s chewing some kind of gum or candy that smells really good.
The girl sneaks a glance at what I’m writing, or at least it seems like she does. So I write, “The blond girl sneaks a glance at what I’m writing,” and after two seconds I hear her laugh.
“I wrote you were blond to muddy the waters and protect your identity.”
“Protect it from whom?”
“You never know. Maybe I’ll post it on Facebook and your father who doesn’t know you’re at the doctor will see it.”
“It’s true, he doesn’t know.”
“See? Now I’ll even replace the orange sweatshirt with a turquoise turtleneck.”
She laughs.
“What are you writing?”
“I’m writing a journal.”
“Wow, that’s great. Like in school. I always kept a journal too. Used to.”
She says this with a look of irreparable regret, as if she were a thousand years old. She stares at the iPad balanced on my knees over the comic that Paola had brought me from the publisher yesterday.
“You read Dylan Dog?” she says.
“I’m one of the illustrators,” I say.
“Really? No way! What’s your name?”
I tell her.
“Sorry, I’ve never heard of you.”
“I know, I know. It’s just that my story won’t be out until 2027, if I ever manage to finish it. Until then I’m incognito, so keep it to yourself.”
She laughs.
“The latest stories are pretty good,” she says. “I liked the last one a lot. The one that’s really weirdly drawn.”
“The Heart of Men?”
“Yes.”
“Weirdly drawn is a great description.”
“Sorry, I have a hard time expressing myself,” she says. “It’s like you see the drawings and at first they seem bad. But after a while, you realize that’s why they’re so beautiful. I can’t put it any better than that.”
“I think you put it very well.”
Suddenly the office door opens. No one comes out.
“Serughetti!” comes a voice from inside.
The girl leaps up and walks past me. She takes off her hat just before going in. She’s completely bald. Everyone stares.
“I told you I wasn’t blond,” she says, turning toward me.
“That’s okay. I don’t draw for Dylan Dog either,” I say, looking at her.
She laughs.
“Will you still put me in your journal? Even if I’m not blond?”
“Only if you want me to.”
“I do,” she says, and an instant later disappears into the office, the door shutting behind her.
The Tie
At the nursery school with Ginevra:
As I’m buttoning up her smock, another dad passes in front of us in a dark suit and tie, holding a briefcase in his right hand. He goes out.
“Daddy, why don’t you have a tie?”
“Because I don’t need one, Ginevra.”
“But why do the other daddies have them?”
“Well, because they don’t draw for a living.”
“Why do you draw then?”
“Maybe because I don’t like ties.”
She looks at me seriously.
“Ties suck!”
“Exactly!”
“Daddy?”
“Yeah?”
“Grandpa got you an orange one at the market last Sunday.”
Saving Yourself Every Day
Every morning I get up at 5:05.
Technically, I wake up about fifteen minutes before, but I lie in bed with my eyes open. When the red digital alarm on Paola’s nightstand says 5:05, then I get up.
I go into the kitchen, put the coffee on, then go downstairs to let the dogs into the yard. I come back up, pour my coffee into the yellow elephant cup, and put five cookies on a small plate. I go back to my studio in the dark, trying not to kill myself on the spiral staircase.
I work from 5:05 until 7:05. I draw, immersed in silence; sometimes in the background there’s the sound of Garrett snoring in the doghouse, other times there’s classical music on Radio 3 that I put on low. Listening to music at a very low volume transforms the sound waves into a sort of primordial frequency, like a heartbeat. The melody fades into the background—it’s virtually gone, and all you can hear is the drums, the percussion. The basses. The rhythm. That rhythm helps me to keep time while I work; it becomes the measure of the marks on the page, which in turn become the score for the vibrations I hear on the radio, which come from inside myself. Drawing is always a matter of tuning. Because drawing, like writing, is first and foremost about listening. Most people don’t realize it’s almost never a matter of saying, but of giving. Making yourself an instrument, a sounding box, for something which, upon closer inspection, is already there, and you just need to roll it out like a tent.
Every day I get up at 5:05. That’s how it’s been for years. I have a theory as to why.
The red 5:05, on Paola’s clock, is in the typical square characters on digital clocks, and I always read it as: S:OS. S-O-S. In my imagination, it’s a call for help coming from another dimension, like a message in a bottle cast into the open sea.
I know if I get up at 5:05, somewhere in the universe, I’m saving someone. Only recently did I discover that someone is me.
Waking up at 5:05, I save myself every morning, because the two hours between 5:05 and 7:05 are the most fruitful of the entire day. When the world starts up again, I’m already in a good mood, even if there’s a crappy day on the horizon, because I feel like I’ve already finished a little of my own. As if every day pushed me a little ahead and my internal clock were two hours behind, giving me an advantage on the normal passage of time.
At 7:05, I go to wake Virginia. Then Ginevra. Finally, Melania. When I pull Melania out of the crib and hold her close and she rests her head on my shoulder, in the thirty seconds before I move her to the bed, into Mama’s embrace waiting to snap her up like a shell, I save myself a second time, each morning.
The second time never happens at a specific hour, but that time is the one that counts.
The Dandelions
“All right, we’re finally going to mow the lawn this afternoon. . . .”
“No, Daddy!”
“No?”
“No, if you mow the lawn you’ll destroy all the dandelions!”
“Ah, Ginevra. What are we supposed to do? We can’t exactly mow around them.”
“Wait!”
“What?”
“I’ll go outside and blow all of them, then when I’m done, you can go!”
Mommy Sleeps All the Time
In the car on the way to nursery school:
“Daddy, why does Mommy sleep all the time?”
“No, Mommy doesn’t sleep all the time, Ginevra. It’s just that sometimes Mommy has to work at night while we’re sleeping. So sometimes she sleeps in, when we’re already awake.”
“Yeah, Mommy is like an owl.”
I laugh.
“But can’t she work during the day like you?”
“Well, sometimes she does. But she says during the day she gets distracted: the mailman comes, the phone rings, she gets messages, Grandma and Grandpa call, or I have to ask her things. But at night it’s quieter and she concentrates better. And then in the afternoon she wants to be with you.”
“Yeah, and she has to help Virgi with her homework.”
“There’s also the fact that Mommy prefers to work at night because she just likes it, I think.”
“Daddy.”
“Yes?”
“That way she doesn’t see you at night.”
The Boy Cartoonist
I go out to get some paper.
At the stationery store, there’s a little boy ahead of me. He’s maybe ten or eleven. Skinny, not tall for his age, he’s wearing a green Ninja Turtles T-shirt and lighter green cargo pants. His short hair
is covered in sweat.
“And a putty eraser and a pad with rough paper,” he says. “And a triangle, I need it for the panels.”
The clerk disappears. The boy looks at me. I go up to the counter.
“Panels like in comic strips?” I ask. “Are you drawing a comic?”
He stares at me with a look somewhere between “how about you mind your own business” and “you ugly freak.”
“Yeah,” he says. “For school. Except I can’t really draw.”
“That doesn’t matter,” I say. “You know, to make comics, you don’t have to draw that well.”
Now his look is somewhere between “you’re an idiot” and a flicker of interest.
“It’s true,” I say. “The story is what matters. Think about the story you want to tell and the drawing will come to you, you’ll see.”
He stares at me, unsure whether or not to trust me.
“I wanted to write a story about some shoes.”
“Great,” I say. “What shoes?”
“Shoes that when you put them on you know karate.”
“Interesting.”
“And then when you take them off you go back to normal.”
“That sounds like a fine story to me,” I say. “But be aware that shoes are hard to draw. Draw a kind without laces, trust me.”
“I don’t know how to draw laces.”
“I don’t know how to draw shoes.”
“For me shoes turn out all right.”
“Shoes only turn out for people who can draw,” I say.
He smiles. The clerk hands him the bag; he pays, says goodbye, and leaves almost in a hurry. I see him through the window jumping onto his bike.
“He’s a good kid,” the clerk says.
“I’m sure,” I say.
“And how can I help you?”
“Two pads of Fabriano F2 paper.”
“Smooth or rough?”
“Rough. Now that I think of it, give me a triangle too, I need it for the panels.”
Sleepless Nights and Kisses for Breakfast Page 7
