When “Careless Whisper” came on, it was time—I said to Lara, “Just a second,” and I ran over to my dumb friend, with a clear idea of what I needed to tell him. Something like, “If you don’t ask her now, I’ll never let you copy my history homework ever again.”
I was only a few feet from him when I ran into his brother. He was fifteen, a head taller than me, with his shoulder and torso in a cast from recently breaking his collarbone. In the intermittent half-darkness of the attic, my face slammed into his cast like a Fiat 500 into a brick wall. I fell back and passed out, waking up in my own blood.
When I came to, Riccardo still hadn’t danced with Mariarosa. On the bright side, now I looked like Owen Wilson. They took me to the emergency room and everything, but it was the early eighties, and in those days you were stuck with whatever you did to yourself as long as it wasn’t life-threatening. So my nose remained.
Seven years later, I broke it for the second time during a karate match. Filippo knocked my guard off with a textbook ura mawashi geri that hit me right in the face and sent me flying. When I fell onto the mat I heard the distinct pop of nasal cartilage. Back at home, with my white karate uniform looking like the Japanese flag as painted by Jackson Pollock, my mother told me, “Maybe you should stick to cycling.”
But before I had the time, I moved to Venice.
There, during my first university party, I slipped on a bridge—too much ice and vin brulé—and fell facedown on a step. That was the third time I ruined my nose, even if I didn’t really realize it until the next morning, waking up at some blond girl’s place off Campo delle Girandole.
The fourth and last time was eleven years ago.
I’d just met Paola, but we hadn’t gone out yet. We were still at the stage where we were just writing to each other and she considered me a harmless schmuck, due to my abundant use of emoticons.
On a June night during that period, at a popular bar in Verona, someone made an offensive wisecrack to my friend Silvio. I’m very protective of my friends and I responded directly with my innate and reactionary . . . ahem . . . expressive abilities. The guy took it partly as a joke, partly not, and mimed a head butt in my direction. He did it so well that he tripped and crashed right into my nose. After a half hour of lackluster blows, we were drinking gin and tonics together on the stairs. He told me he was epileptic and asked for a cigarette. I gave him one, he sniffed it deeply and then tucked it behind his ear.
“Sorry again about your nose,” he said.
“What happens if you have a seizure when you’re drunk?” I said.
“I stay drunk,” he said.
“Ah, there you go,” I said.
I went back home with a swollen nose and at two in the morning I wrote Paola.
It was the first time she wrote me back immediately.
A week later we went on a date.
There Are Lots of Love
While we were in the car this morning, Ginevra asked me about love.
“Daddy,” she said, taking me by surprise, “can two women get married?”
Before answering I thought hard; I really wished Mama were there in my place.
“No,” I said, not wanting to lie to her. “Here they can’t, but they can love each other and live together.”
“Like you and Mommy?” she said.
“Yes.”
“But why can’t they get married?”
“It’s a complicated issue, Ginevra,” I said. “In some places they can, but they can’t here yet.”
“Can they do it in Sant’Ambrogio?”
“No, Ginevra, not anyplace. I meant countries, like Italy.”
“But I saw two girls kissing in Sant’Ambrogio.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that, Ginevra. If they love each other very much, everyone can kiss.”
“Even boys?”
“If they love each other very much, yes.”
She paused, and it seemed like she was gearing up for something.
“Daddy,” she said, “when two women get married, how do they love each other?”
“The way everyone in the world does,” I said. “With their heart.”
“Love is inside the heart?”
“Everything is inside the heart.”
“Why?”
“Because the heart is like a big closet, Ginevra,” I said. “Inside are the people you choose, and there’s a shelf for kisses, drawers for hugs, hangers for looks, a row of hooks for sadness and for happiness. Everything.”
“Melania has a drawer for food on her face!”
“True,” I said, laughing.
“Daddy,” she said.
“What?”
“There are love in our hearts, right?”
“Yes, but you don’t say ‘there are,’ Ginevra. You say ‘there is’; love is singular.”
“That’s not true!” she said, looking serious. “There are lots of love.”
I shut up and didn’t correct her any further, because I believe there are lots of love too.
The Courier
Early Saturday morning, I’m down in the studio, when the doorbell rings.
I go and see who it is. It’s a courier with a package. The courier is a strapping young man with a pointy beard and a Spider-Man hat. The package, judging by its size, looks like a book, and I think I know which one.
“Paolo Barbato?” the courier asks.
“Paola,” I say.
He gives me a strange look.
“Paola is my wife. Well, she’s not actually my wife, but anyway, the package is for her,” I say.
“And how do you know who the package is for?” he says.
“Excuse me, but you just told me yourself,” I say.
“I told you it’s for Paolo Barbato,” he says.
“Yes. And I told you there’s a mistake, the name is Paola Barbato,” I say.
“It’s Paolo written here,” he says.
“But it’s actually Paola,” I say.
He stands there in front of me hesitating, holding on to my book. He stares at me, perplexed. I’m in my undershirt, it’s chilly, and I want to go back inside.
“Fine then, that’s me,” I say.
“You’re Paolo?” he says.
“Yes,” I say.
“Why didn’t you say so to begin with?” he says.
“I’m embarrassed, I don’t like the name,” I say.
He looks at me questioningly. He passes me the electronic thingy and stylus through the closed gate.
“Sign here,” he says.
I sign. He delivers me the package. I smile at the electronic thingy.
“Who’s Matteo Bustolo?” he says.
“Bussola,” I say.
“Who’s Matteo Bussola?” he says. “Weren’t you Paolo Barbato?”
“Listen,” I say. “The package contains a book. If you want, I can guess the title without even opening it. On the bell it says ‘Bussola-Barbato.’ So who do you think Matteo Bussola is?”
He looks at me strangely.
“Your wife?” he says.
Five Scars (The Habit of Staying)
I have five scars.
One I got tumbling down the stairs at the age of three. My chin hit a corner hard and split open. Every so often Virginia says to me, “Daddy, can I see the scar under your beard?” I lift my chin and she digs through my beard and looks at the scar, then asks me if it hurts.
The second is on my chest, the result of a long operation after my lung exploded one summer night. I slept on it all night thinking it was just a pain between my ribs, but it was one of my lungs that had collapsed on my heart. I survived due to a mixture of intuition and good timing and because the second doctor took me seriously instead of sending me home with two tablets of Voltaren like the first one did.
The third scar is in the middle of my right hand, from a cut I got when I was young and too stupid to realize that sometimes you actually win when you lose.
The fourth and fifth aren’t visible, but they’re the only scars that still hurt.
I didn’t learn anything from the first three, but from the others, I did.
I learned that when things end it’s not necessarily your fault, but if you try to protect yourself by keeping others at a distance, you can’t expect to get them back when you feel ready all of a sudden. That life is what happens, even if it’s made of what you choose. And with what happens, you generally have two choices: embrace it wholly or walk away.
For a long time, I thought I wanted to be free like a sailor about to set out to sea. But now I know the freedom I choose and the strength that counts—that horizon I thought I would have to keep searching for farther and farther away—don’t come from the inclination to leave.
But from the habit of staying.
Dinner
Dinner at our house:
I set some meatballs in front of Melania. “Nyo!” she says, pushing the plate away and eyeballing her sister’s grilled cheese.
“Meto! Meto!” (Translation: Me too, now! You’re trying to starve me!)
Virginia offers half her sandwich in pity. Melania crumbles it up into three hundred and seventy-seven pieces, sees there’s prosciutto inside, sucks on it, gets down from her seat, and runs away. Paola gets up too.
“Where are you going?” I ask. “I can go after her, I’m afraid she’ll jump off the balcony.” But Paola runs to get her anyway.
“Three olives inside and five on the side, I said!” Ginevra yells at her sandwich. Then she looks at me with a hand already in the toy make-up and a fuchsia eye and says, “I’m gonna make myself pretty!” Then she gets up and leaves.
Virginia abandons her sucked-on cube of cream cheese and half sandwich and says, “I hafta go pee-pee!” And she too goes off. That makes four.
I stay at the table by myself for about fifteen seconds in a banquet of leftovers, with the same deep sense of solitude that Bill Murray had in the Suntory whiskey commercial. I toss a drooly half sandwich in my mouth; compose a ball of cream cheese, bread crumbs, prosciutto fat, and lettuce and throw it down the hatch; and clean up as I finish chewing. I go back and scarf down Melania’s meatballs, squirting a little mustard in my mouth right out of the container, as I watch the end of the Peppa Pig episode with Grandad Dog and the boat.
And they say gastritis makes you introverted.
The Tickles
Ginevra and I woke up at five a.m. today.
Yesterday she threw a tantrum about going to sleep and kept whining intermittently throughout the night. First she was hot, then cold, then thirsty, then itchy. Around four-thirty she started complaining that her feet hurt. When I was little I too had bad foot aches, which peppered all the visits to all the museums of European Art with complaints, to the delight of my father, who always thought I was exaggerating. And so I took her feet in my hands and rubbed them for a while. It was useless because Ginevra laughed, saying it tickled.
By then we were both awake and it was pointless to force her to go to sleep, so we both got up, got dressed in the bathroom, and went into the living room. We flopped down on the couch and watched cartoons while we munched on cookies. Ginevra was very happy, because there were different cartoons on at that hour from the later morning ones. The previous night we’d forgotten to close the shutters and there was a faint light, like when you’d wake up early to go to the beach when you were little. It was the first dawn we’d seen together since she was born. Ginevra was wearing her new sky-blue Peppa Pig T-shirt and petted it as if it were a puppy.
At some point she turned to me and said, “Daddy, do you want to wake up together every morning, just us two?”
I smiled because I knew that waking up at this ungodly hour, she’d go to sleep at nine tonight and then I’d have to wake her up with a cannonade the next morning so she could visit her grandparents in the mountains.
“Maybe, we’ll see,” I said.
That was when Virginia stormed into the living room all disheveled and sweaty, saying, “Did you forget about me?”
And Melania woke up in her crib singing a vowel-only version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
I went into the baby’s room and picked her up and rested her sweaty head on my shoulder. Virginia went to the bathroom to brush her teeth. Ginevra asked for a muffin, and while I was giving Melania her milk, Ginevra looked at me with grown-up complicity, as if we shared a secret.
In the car on our way to the store, she took off her sandals and poked her feet a little.
“Daddy, my feet don’t hurt anymore, you know,” she said.
“Great,” I said.
“But I still have the tickles,” she said. “And I feel like laughing.”
In the rearview mirror I saw her and Melania chewing on a piece of tart that had been on the seat since Saturday.
“Me too,” I said.
Toi, Tu La Connais?
A French comics editor I haven’t heard from in about a year writes to me.
The gist of the conversation, in thick French, is more or less as follows:
“Oo-la-la, profiterole! I tell you I get back to you, n’est-ce pas?”
“Allez-allez, with calm, eh. Don’t wear yourself out.”
“Listen, so, since in practice we have not yet found someone, would you like to do a sample for this projet? That is, clearly, I’m asking you pourquoi we truly, truly thought of you right away, eh?”
“A-ha-ha, merci. I’m happy you thought of moi, but at the moment, je suis busy with another sample and with an Italien book. . . . Are you in a very big hurry?”
“Did you say Italien? Do you mean to compare an Italien projet with an internationale proposal from our très grand publishing maison?”
“No, moi, I didn’t want to compare them, I’m just busy at the moment, that’s all.”
“For how long?”
“Eh, how long, the rest of the year for sure. At the very, very least, eh?”
“So I should take this as a ‘no, merci’?”
“Eh oui, sadly.”
“You stupid Italien loser!”
“Ta soeur!”
“Excusi?”
“My regards to your sister.”
“Toi, tu la connais?”
“In Italy, everyone does.”
Dog Eyes
Paola always told me I had dog eyes.
Dog eyes are eyes with a slight droop that, regardless of situation or expression, give off a hint of vague and indelible melancholy that the unobservant mistake for depth; but actually, I know it’s supposed to be a compliment because Paola loves dogs more than anything. But every time I think of it, I laugh—it makes me think how sometimes we might believe we’re falling in love with someone because they’re sensitive, or beautiful, or sweet, or because they meet our needs or show up at the right time. Whereas things happen like someone falling in love with you because you have dog eyes, or because when you laugh you get just one dimple, on the left. And you with her because she has round ears like a cartoon character. Or because every time you see her laugh, you get just one dimple.
On the left.
Miss Marisa
I left without having breakfast this morning.
The fact that the two older girls are in the mountains put me off schedule, and I found myself in the car realizing that I hadn’t even had any coffee. So I said to myself, “Screw it,” and stopped at Marisa’s to get my fix with a double espresso and a croissant. When I got out of the car, I saw Marisa in the doorway, cleaning intently, broom in hand, the place deserted and the shutters halfway down. I suddenly remembered the bar is closed on Mondays.
“Come on, come in anyway,” Marisa told me. “You can keep
me company.”
She had me sit down and brought me a cream-filled croissant and some apricot juice, since the espresso machine was off and—even though she offered—I didn’t have the heart to make her turn it on just for me. She sat in front of me with that look of knowing weariness shared by all women of that generation and all mothers over sixty. She told me her life story for the hundredth time, how she raised three children by herself, how she managed to buy the bar after working as a housecleaner, a cobbler, a produce seller, and finally a factory worker at a big plant in the South for ten years. An internal emigrant in reverse.
As I finished the delectable croissant, ready to ask for another, shooting lustful glances at the cabaret of delights on show at the bar, a thought came to me.
“Marisa,” I said, “how come you have croissants and pastries even when you’re closed?”
“Eh, partly out of habit, partly because the baker is a dimwit who doesn’t understand squat,” she said. “It doesn’t matter, anyway.”
At that moment, a young black man with a pile of bags almost as tall as he was entered the saloon, making an entrance like John Wayne. He came into the bar without ringing or anything, as if it were his house. Immediately I thought, “Here we go, we’re about to witness the usual tragedy of ‘I don’t need anything, go away, we’re closed,’ at the very least.”
“Marisa!” the black man burst out. “Have you seen what a nice day it is?”
“Yeah, be happy it’s not pouring on your head anymore, honey,” Marisa said, standing up.
The black man set his bags on the ground, zipped one open and pulled out a cardboard box full of different-colored lighters, like the little Bics.
“What’ll it be today?” he asked her.
“Hmm. All right, give me orange,” Marisa replied.
Marisa took the little lighter, looking the black man up and down, and set it on a shelf next to the bar that had, I swear, like fifty lighters in all different colors. Then she lifted the pastries in plain view, put some in a paper bag, added a bottle of mineral water and handed it all to the young man. He smiled, displaying a row of bright white teeth, took the bag with the pastries, loaded the bags up on his back again, thanked Marisa, and slid out the door without even asking me if I wanted to buy anything.
Sleepless Nights and Kisses for Breakfast Page 9
