Free Sweet Dreams by Massimo Gramellini

left wing or right wing: I supported the Liberals—which when you’re eighteen is like preferring lemonade to tequila.
    Political utopias made me anxious—just as emotions, dreams and suchlike did. And just as my mother did. I stopped adoring her and became indifferent. I no longer hid her photograph, but simply forgot it was there.
    My spirit coasted along close to the ground. I didn’t believe in anything, except perhaps in a few songs. Studyingmaterialist philosophy and spending too much time in the company of priests had turned me into a mocking atheist. God was man’s invention, and death was the end of everything.
    When during the Ash Wednesday service the priest smeared my forehead, I laughed in his face. I knew all too well I’d end up as dust again, just as I knew nothing remained of my mother other than dust.

in every young man’s heart there’s a need to escape

nineteen
    In every young man’s heart there’s a need to escape, and the best way ever discovered to escape from yourself is to fall for someone who isn’t right for you.
    At university I met Alessia—extremely tall, beautiful and vain—my “Miss First Times.”
    It was the first time I accepted the risk of someone turning me down (on the contrary she said yes before I’d even finished asking)—the first time I succeeded in unclasping a girl’s bra with a single, elegant flick of the wrist—the first time I made love. As so often happens, it wasn’t a particularly memorable experience: Alessia seemed to be more concerned about not spoiling her makeup, and I felt like a thief who finally breaks open the safe and finds it empty.
    She became my girlfriend while continuing to surround herself with a court of silent admirers, whom she kept in a state of permanent uncertainty, playing with their infatuation just for the pleasure of exercising her charm over them. She was one of those emotionally dangerous people who pride themselves on their egotism thinking it shows they’re sensitive.
    I was the last person capable of becoming her moral tutor. “Have nice dreams,” my mother had told me: here I was, trampling all over them.
    In the hope of becoming a journalist, I wanted to study literature or political science at university, but my father continued to nurture Napoleonic aspirations for me: he saw me graduating in economics and then becoming a leader of industry.
    I didn’t fight for my dream, for the simple reason I was deaf to it. Our dreams are rooted in our deepest selves, and my deepest self was out of order.
    So my father and I found a compromise solution which satisfied neither of us and was therefore entirely acceptable: I should study law.
    â€œIf you end up a complete failure in everything else, at least you’ll turn out to be a lawyer like your mother always dreamed you would be,” was the way my father, with his characteristic pragmatism, summed up the situation.
    But I alone was responsible for the mistake. I’d chosen the wrong university course and the wrong girlfriend because I was too scared to listen to my dreams. It was obvious I was setting myself up to fail.
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    Alessia dumped me during a telephone conversation, moments after telling me she still loved me. All my defenses collapsed and Belfagor moved back in.
    After some pathetic attempts to try to win her back, I stopped going to classes, closed the shutters and barricaded myself in my bedroom.
    Is the ability to move on the recipe for a successful love life? I don’t know. But if you lose out you stay exactly where you are. I sat for hours on end at my desk: my only comfort was listening to The Police and smoking Camel Lights (“Lights” sums up all my cowardice).
    I’d studied a bit of psychoanalysis for the course in criminal anthropology and, armed with this smattering, I drew up a vast dossier on myself in which I stated various presumed truths in a dry