Sweet Dreams Read Free

first James Bond movie without Sean Connery. He’d been replaced by some bargain-basement imitation.
    Perhaps my mother too had been replaced? Thiswoman was no longer the mother I knew, and what happened that evening proved it. It was the last time I saw her.
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    She’d called me to her bedside to apologize for her behavior over the Bond film. She’d hugged me in the old way, with her scented hair tumbling over my head.
    I thought the mother I knew had come back, but all it took was a sudden bout of coughing and she started to behave like a feeble invalid again. In a plaintive tone of voice, she urged me once again to be good and kind towards everyone—to which my reaction was: “Yes, Mom, OK. Sleep well. Can I go now?”
    â€œSweet dreams, little one.”
    â€œI’m not little. I’ll soon be taller than you.”
    â€œOf course you will be, taller and stronger. Promise me you will be?”
    I couldn’t put up with it anymore. I fled back into my room and, in protest, got straight into bed without brushing my teeth and fell immediately into a deep and dreamless sleep.
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    Madamìn solved the mystery of the dressing gown left in my room. “Terrible Thing” had come to wake my mother during the night, but she’d asked him to be so kind as to wait while she came to tuck me up in bed . . . Afterwards, she’d forgotten to take her dressing gown and left it in my room. At this point the story always ended, as Madamìn started to cry.
    I had no idea what my mother might have been feeling like when she was confronted with “Terrible Thing”—pretty bad, I guessed, even though mothers had always inexhaustible resources to draw on. But I knew it wasn’t possible that only my mother had been able to persuade this thug to let her come and tuck me in.
    It was clearly a tall story invented by someone with no imagination—in other words, Dad. He was trying to make me believe that my mother had gone on loving us right up to the moment she’d disappeared, whereas it was evident to me that if she’d run off with “Terrible Thing” it was because she’d had enough of us both. I could just about manage to understand how she might have grown tired of him—but of me? How could she have stopped loving me?
    We suffer when we’re not loved, but it’s a greater pain when we’re loved no longer. In one-way infatuations the objects of our love deny us their love in return. They take something away from us, which in fact they’ve only givento us in our imaginations. But when a reciprocated feeling ceases to be reciprocated, a shared flow of energy is suddenly and brutally cut off. The person who has been abandoned feels like a sweet that tastes bad and is spat out. We’ve done something wrong—but what?
    That was how I felt. I hadn’t been able to make her stay with us. Perhaps she’d gone off to find a son who could do better drawings of her?
    And yet I went on thinking she would come back, perhaps with the other son in tow. Never mind. I’d put up with any humiliation, just so long as she’d return.

five
    In the meantime, while waiting, a spare mother would have come in useful. Unfortunately, as destiny would have it, none of the leading candidates for the role were still available.
    Grandmother Emma, my father’s mother from the Romagna, was one of those women who become the stuff of legends. The most scintillating story told about her was that as a girl she’d landed a wallop on the nose of a fellow Romagnolo—the future Duce—when he’d tried to take advantage of her on top of a haystack. The source of this piece of braggadocio was my socialist grandfather, but anyone who’d been on the receiving end of my grandmother’s fists was inclined to believe the tale.
    On another occasion—and this time there wasevidence—she’d forced a local builder who kept