Free Sweet Dreams by Massimo Gramellini Page B

my self was dead and done for. Even Palmira said so.
    Her words kept echoing in my head. I could feel them going down my stomach, floating around in some acidic puddle and then trying to climb back to my heart.
    It wasn’t easy to overcome the obstacles Belfagor had put in the way. But a feeble voice did get through.
    â€œ If you’d grown up with your mother, you’d be less scared now of falling. But you’d also feel less of a need to fly. In spite of the fact she’s no longer with you, it’s time to start using your wings.”

twenty
    I suddenly didn’t care anymore about becoming my “real self.” Just becoming someone would be enough. Better still if that someone were someone else.
    I had to do something, though. The monsters which prey on our hearts feed on our inertia. They don’t grow because we are defeated, but because we give up.
    I emerged from my prison cell and went back to university. I got top marks on my Criminal Procedure exam. I needed to take six more courses before I could graduate. I asked old friends who’d started their studies with me to give me a hand. But they were all working on their theses and didn’t have time to turn back and help me catch up.
    Once again I shut myself in my room. I drew up study schedules that I updated on an hourly basis. But workingon my own on subjects which didn’t really interest me just served to remind me how much my present life had become the result of all the defensive choices I had made in the past.
    I needed to escape, and asked My Uncle if he could give me a job in his firm. It was exactly what he wanted, but not now—first I had to get my degree. He belonged to the last generation who had a real respect for education. At Christmas I used to give him abstruse philosophy books, which he would devour with an immense if disorderly hunger for knowledge.
    I sought distraction in laddish Saturday-night pursuits, but the chosen companions weren’t up—or down—to the task. I used to go about with a group of engineering students, all solid prosaic young men who dismissed my inner torments as mere whims and introduced me to nice but utterly forgettable girls.
    They didn’t even know I didn’t have a mother. Or at least they didn’t know it from me. I never broached the topic, and the fact that Sveva was around—after her son had got married she’d moved in with us—dispensed me from the need for further explanations.
    Young men often find a cure for their existential malaise in politics or theater. But I didn’t have the energy to cultivate creative talents. As for ideologies, I regardedthem in the same way as I did love: to me, they were utopias that were totally incompatible with the egotism of human beings, especially my own.
    Sveva suggested I go to the gym in an attempt to work off the toxins I’d accumulated, but when a pair of instructors with bronze-statue physiques—whom I nicknamed the Pillocks of Hercules—proposed a course of steroids so I too could have a body like theirs, I never set foot inside the place again.
    Psychoanalysis remained an option, but sessions on the analyst’s couch would have meant overcoming my embarrassment and asking for money from my father, who considered digging around in one’s brain a loser’s way of wasting time.
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    There are a lot of “buts” in the last few sentences, I realize. At the time it was my pet word. I felt as though a wall of incompatibility constantly loomed over me—as if anything I undertook, all my short-lived enthusiasms, would sooner or later disintegrate against it.
    The law books on my desk I was supposed to be studying gradually made way for self-help manuals.
    Taking Your Life in Your Own Hands.
    The Art of Winning Friends and Influencing People.
    Overcoming Neurosis.
    How to Solve Your Problems and Start a New Life.
    I used to highlight the important sentences, but I’d