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  “And what should I do: leave for New York, beat up her boyfriend and tell her how much I miss her?”

  “You must have tried to make sense of the situation, haven’t you?”

  “You want to know why I’m so into her? It’s because I had the feeling we’ve always liked each other, even when we were just looking at each other. And then, at the café, I had the impression that she felt something. Then I tell myself it wasn’t the case, that it’s all in my head. I never tried talking to her before because I didn’t want to be one of those guys who, as soon as a girl smiles, they think she’s easy. And so in the end women don’t smile at anyone anymore. It’s not that they’re stuck up: often they don’t smile because if they do, men feel like they have to make a pass at them. Those looks, those silences, those gestures and that meeting at the café were so beautiful that I’m afraid I’ll spoil them. It is as if we met in the revolving door of a hotel. We said hello, but we were going in opposite directions. Do you think that the same people, if they meet at different times, can start different types of relationships?”

  “I really think so. These days I wouldn’t even let someone like my husband take me out for ice cream.”

  “But what if these feelings were just part of my imagination, a film I’m shooting in my head?How would it look if I showed up at her doorstep? I should track down her number, call her and ask her to send me a copy of her own film, to see if they match: ‘Hello? Michela? Listen, I wanted to ask you if you’d like to exchange films, to see whether they’re similar or if we’re watching, and living, two different movies.’ You might think it’s strange, since I don’t know her, but when I learned she was leaving, I was devastated, and when I saw her with that man the next day, it was as if I found my wife in bed with another man. I’m too sensitive when it comes to these things.”

  “I know that, and I know you, but sooner or later you’ll have to face your problems. You can’t keep running away from them.”

  “And what would I be running away from?”

  “From your own vulnerability. When you see her, you get scared.”

  “What can I do about it?”

  “Over the years, especially when it comes to women, you’ve built a wall around yourself. I can see it. You did the same with me. The issue is that, after building it for so long, you became the wall. A wall you can walk along, but never cross.”

  “Perhaps one of my problems is that I don’t ask anyone for anything, but I need everyone. I’ve always tried not to disappoint other people, not to be a nuisance or a bore. I grew up trying to cope with my mother’s expectations.”

  “You have the biggest heart out of all the people I know. You are loyal. And to me that is the most important thing. I’m curious to find out what you’ll grow up to be. What we’ll both grow up to be. I imagine who you’ll be in a few years.”

  “And who do you see?”

  “Now, for instance, it makes me laugh how you are still so unorganized, in spite of your age. Your fridge is always empty. You still haven’t hung pictures on your walls. Often you don’t even remember where you parked your own car. You’re messy. Often lazy. Certainly, as of late, bored.”

  “It’s the natural reaction to my mother’s obsession with order.”

  “You’re one of those men who looks for women to go out with by scrolling through your cell phone contacts. But you’re not like the others. You’re different. You’re curious, creative, you’ve traveled, you learned early on how to fend for yourself, you’re a man on the move. The only thing you haven’t figured out is how to bond with people. I had to learn how to keep my distance, otherwise you would have run away from me, too. But it took quite some time for you to trust me. And yet I know that sooner or later you’ll grow up. Meaning, that you’ll learn how to manage and organize your life in a more orderly, cleaner way. More balanced. I’ve always felt this way, and in my opinion, this crisis of yours, your boredom and your interest for Michela are all answers: they’re the doors you need to open in order to start a new chapter.”

  “What doors? Where?”

  “Sometimes people are just doors, passageways. You were for me, and I for you. Even strangers, every encounter is a door. For instance, Michela could be an opportunity, an escape route. You might find that she can help you grow.”

  “Silvia, you know, I’m not the kind of person who just hops on a plane and goes to someone he doesn’t know just because it feels right.”

  “Well, rather than always being yourself, you could try to do something different, be someone else for a change. Make up a new Giacomo, for once. What’s something that you’re passionate about, something you dream about, something you like thinking about at this point in your life?”

  “You already know the answer. Michela is the only thing I dream about, because I see her as an unknown reality, radically different from my own life.”

  “Then, if you want to step out of your life for a bit and you find her attractive, maybe that’s a door you should open. Why don’t you go to New York? Go, and if you realize you were wrong, you come back. But at least you tried.”

  “But even if I went to New York, what would change? When I see her, assuming I’ll be able to find her, it’s not like I’ll change into someone else.”

  “That’s not true, because if nothing else, you’d run the risk of looking ridiculous. But you’d rather not. Too risky.”

  “She’s thirty six, not fifteen.”

  “What is that supposed to mean? It doesn’t matter. You know nothing about women.”

  “Let me get this straight: you think the reason I’m not going is not because it’s absurd, but rather because I’m afraid of looking ridiculous?”

  “Precisely! To look ridiculous you need to be courageous. And you’ve never been courageous with women. With Michela you weren’t in charge of the situation, so you gave up. The boyfriend is just an excuse. I know how you work, I know you. Who knows what other lies you’ll come up with to justify doing nothing. I know your methods very well, the way you think, and the mental machines you design to bring everything back to its proper order.

  Suddenly the phone rang. It was Dante.

  “Silvia, guess who it is.”

  “Dante?”

  “Precisely.”

  It was good seeing him the other day, but since then he kept calling me and sending me messages. He kept asking me to go out with him, and I really had no desire to do so. I felt like we didn’t have much in common anymore. We’d become very different. Perhaps was just my imagination. There are certain people I don’t hang out with because of the way they make me feel when I see them. It’s almost as if they steal my energy: they consume me. Dante is one of those, but he wouldn’t give up. Sometimes he tried to trick me by blocking the caller ID. But I knew it was him. And I wouldn’t answer. My cell has a button that turns off the ringer. It’s called “mute.” If I press it twice, it hangs up, but if I only press it once, it just silences the ringer. Dante is one of those people who made me press that button very often.

  “I don’t know how to tell him that I don’t feel like hanging out with him. It’s hard enough to break up with a woman, but with a friend… How can you say: ‘It’s over’? You can only wait for him to get it on his own.The other day I saved his number under a new name. On my phone he’s not Dante anymore, but redunDant-e. Sometimes he’s so persistent that my phone’s screen turns itself off, and he’s still there, letting it ring. I know this because the light comes back on when he finally hangs up.”

  I gave Silvia a look she knows very well. A look that says I’m about to say something serious, that I’m not joking anymore.

  “Do you think I’ll regret not doing it?”

  “Not answering Dante’s calls?” Then, since she knew I was serious, she added, “If you’re referring to Michela… who knows? That’s the beauty of taking risks.”

  4

  A Dad Who Wasn’t There

  When I was seven, I was a genius, for about twenty m
inutes. Then darkness. My friends and I were talking about what the teacher had said that morning in class. About the fact that it takes the earth twenty-four hours to make a complete turn, and three hundred sixty-five days and six hours to circle the sun. That’s why every four years there’s a 29th of February. Four times six, twenty-four. We were talking about gravity, and how far away America was.

  A man who lived in my building sometimes told us that America was on the other side of the world, but that he could take us to see Paris whenever we wanted. To us, there wasn’t much of a difference between Paris and New York; it was another world just the same. Curious, we’d say yes, and, one at a time, he would lift us by placing his hands on our heads, just above the ears. I remember I would grab his wrists to lighten the load so it wouldn’t hurt that bad. But what a pain it was!

  While we were hanging there between his hands, he would ask us if we could see Paris. How cruel. That was the same man who would play the nose trick on us. He would grab our nose between his fingers, and then he would stick out his thumb between the curled index and middle fingers, then he’d say, “Here it is, I got your nose.”

  The old man was fun. Then he died. It happens sometimes: it’s called life.

  The statement that made me a genius for about twenty minutes was, “But if it’s true that the earth turns, then that means that America should eventually find its way here. All we need to do is find a way to hover at a certain height and wait for the time difference to pass. We don’t have to take a plane, we could take a helicopter and wait in the sky, when the earth turns it will bring America under our feet and then we can get off.”

  We started jumping to see if we would land in a different spot. We assumed that the earth was turning in the same direction as the one-way street we were standing on. And I must say that our jumps convinced us that we were indeed landing at a different spot. I had just become not only a genius, but also the hero of the group. The king of the square.

  I grew up playing with a lot of kids, but Andrea was my best friend. He was like a brother to me. I would sleep over at his place and vice versa. After school he would often come to my grandma’s for an afternoon snack. I remember it well because everyday when our mouths were full we would ask each other, “Do you want to see a tunnel accident?” And then we would open our mouths to show the half-chewed food. But we’re not that close anymore.

  The day my theories had made me king of the square, my dad, who was usually at work at that time, happened to be home. After talking to my mom, he came down to my kingdom and took me aside. He had a strange expression on his face. I walked toward him to give him the good news: his son was a genius; he had to know it. He hugged me but I was squirming because I wanted to talk to him. Finally, he told me, with a tear in his eye, that he was going to work and he left. That was the last time I saw him. The father of the little genius had moved out, leaving me with my mother.

  In the meantime, the fruit vendor, Mr. Know-it-all, had explained to everyone that you can’t hover and wait for America to pass because there are things such as currents, atmosphere, gravity, and a whole bunch of others I can’t even remember. The bottom line: I wasn’t a genius anymore. I was devastated. So much so that one day I had another ingenious thought, but I didn’t tell anybody. I was a little older: I had thought that when an elevator falls uncontrollably to the ground the person inside it could save himself by jumping a second before impact. I wonder if it would work…

  My life changed the day my father left. I wasn’t a genius anymore and I no longer had a father. But most importantly, I had become the only love story in my mother’s life. At first, she would tell me he was away on business, then one day, when I saw her stuffing all my father’s things into trash bags, I knew he wasn’t coming back. I tried to stop her, kicking and screaming, and she, with tears in her eyes, told me he wasn’t coming back then gave me a smack. I went to my room to hide one of his sweaters. My mother didn’t notice it was missing, until one day she found me hiding in the closet, smelling it. I did it often: hiding and smelling it. When she caught me she took it away from me and I never saw it again.

  I have very few memories of my father. At home, all the pictures he was in had a hole where his face was supposed to be. My mother had cut them all out. Is there anything sadder in the world? A picture with me, my mother, and next to us, a body with a hole over its neck? Anyway, it’s not like he spent that much time with me when he lived with us. On Saturday afternoons, for instance, I played soccer at the church tournament. My mother would always take me. One day my father told her that he would take me. When I heard those words I immediately thought I was about to play the best game of my life. I promised myself I would do everything I could to show him I was true champion. In fact, as soon as I got to the field I started running around like a chicken with its head cut off. I would play defense, run down the sidelines, steal the ball, pass it back and forth, and run it into the opponent’s goal box. At every turn, I would look up at my dad in the stands.

  Finally, my efforts paid off. I stole the ball and scored a goal. It wasn’t a great goal but it didn’t matter. The ball went in and as my teammates were hugging me I tried to break free and look at my dad. At that moment, however, he wasn’t there anymore. In the end, I saw him behind a parked car arguing with a woman I had never seen before. It looked like they knew each other very well, judging from the way they were fighting. Even though my team had won the game, I was still really sad on the drive home. My dad didn’t even notice. He simply asked me, “Why the long face? You won.”

  I didn’t answer him. We didn’t speak for the rest of the drive.

  I have good memories of him on our Sunday outings, though. I would ride in the back of the car, standing between the seats, chatting with my mother on the right and my dad at the wheel. When I was tired or bored, I would repeat over and over, every thirty seconds, like a machine, “How much longer? Are we there yet? How much longer? Are we there yet?”

  After my dad left, this is how the car seats were assigned: my mother at the wheel and an empty seat on the right. Or, at times, the grocery bags.

  I also remember the time he talked to me one-on-one in my room after I had done that thing in front of all our guests. ‘That thing’ was when I was little and liked to play with my pee-pee. I didn’t know it was a bad thing, I liked it and I did it. One day, while all my friends and relatives were in the living room, I walked in completely naked and, in front of everyone, I started playing with my pee-pee, yelling “It’s great, come on, try it…”

  Someone was laughing and so I kept going. I was happy my discovery had made them laugh. That’s when my father sat me down and told me it was something I shouldn’t do. I couldn’t understand why. I kept telling him, “But it’s great. Try it.”

  I still don’t understand why, and in fact, I do it often. The trick is not to do it in front of friends and relatives. I’ve never understood much about sex. Lucio was right when, at age eight, he came up to me in the school hallway and told me, “Giacomo, do you know what the glans is?”

  “No.”

  “Come on… You know nothing about sex.”

  And he left.

  It’s true: nobody’s ever bothered to tell me about sex. Unlike Salvatore’s dad, who one day told him, “It’s time you learned a few things about sex… Come. Hide in the closet and look at what I do to your mother.” Impossible. I never believed it.

  I was a late bloomer when it came to sex. I wasn’t ashamed about my size, but unlike all my other friends, I didn’t have a single hair down there; they were already combing them. I was completely glabrous, while they all looked like Pepe, the kid from Calabria who at age nine was already a man.

  When my friends would tell stories about masturbating and orgasms I was still just masturbating, like when I did it in front of everybody in the living room. The first time I came, it took almost an hour. My dick was on fire. I could have grilled vegetables on it, like a barbecue. But in the end, when a little dr
op came out, I was very happy. Unforgettable.

  My dad had already left by then. I don’t even know if I would have told him anyway. He never told me anything; in fact, sometimes he would bullshit me and I would believe him. In my room I had a poster of a formula one car and he told me that it was him under that helmet. He said that before getting married he used to work at Ferrari. One time he told me he was friends with Giuseppe Garibaldi. So, when I would I walk by Largo Cairoli, I would look at the statue on the horse and say, “Hi! Hello. I’m Giacomo, Giovanni’s son.”

  Then one day at school the teacher told us about Garibaldi. I raised my hand and said, “I know him! He’s a friend of my dad’s.”

  Everyone made fun of me, but I thought they were just jealous. Like when the older kids teased me because my dad had told me that to catch a bird without shooting it you had to put some salt on its tail. I tried it more than once.

  At school I was the only one whose dad had left. There were the children of complete families, the children of separated parents, of divorced ones, and then me. My situation was completely different. My dad had left. For me there were no weekends with dad, like for the children of separated parents. No double gifts at birthdays and Christmas. My father had disappeared and made another family somewhere else. I have a half-sister.

  My parents were basically two immature children who had a baby and I am the result. Here I am. Like in the movie Kramer vs. Kramer: the first time I saw it, I was already an adult but I cried like a baby. Although in the movie it's the mother who leaves.

  At first my mother made me sleep in bed with her. Sometimes it made me happy, at others it made me feel bad. Especially the nights she would cry. She would hold me. The more she cried, the tighter she held me. I still remember having her smell all over me. Sweaty skin. It was almost suffocating. I couldn’t breathe. She would squeeze me, against her chest, her breasts. I could feel the cross on her necklace on my cheek. She made me feel bad, but I wouldn’t say anything. Not even when she would kiss me on the head and I could feel her tears dampening my hair. Sometimes, in addition to crying, she would say bad things about men in general and my father in particular. I was just a little boy, so I didn’t feel included in that criticism. She liked to remind me that my father didn’t love us and that he abandoned us. I was much happier when I slept alone, because I feared those moments. I felt powerless, incapable of helping her fix the situation. I would have liked to see her the way she was when my father was still around; I wanted to be him. I grew up to become the solution, trying to never disappoint my mother, trying to be a good kid, a good son. This is why, from a very early age, I always did what had to be done. I wanted to live up to people’s expectations; I didn’t want to disappoint my family, my teacher, the world, God.