Free Temporary Perfections by Gianrico Carofiglio

hook, left hook, uppercut. Jab, jab, straight right. And so on, for the first three minutes, getting warmed up. Between rounds, I exchanged a few words with Mister Bag, but to tell the truth, that evening neither of us really felt much like talking. When I started the second round, I began putting a little more energy into my punches. The shuffle feature on my CD player brought up the intermezzo from
Cavalleria Rusticana
, which made me feel a lot like Robert De Niro in
Raging Bull
.
    Sometimes when I’m punching the heavy bag with the right music and the right level of focus, unexpected memories pop out of nowhere. Doors swing open to show me scenes, sounds, noises, voices, and even smells that I’d long forgotten.
    That evening, while I was pummeling Mister Bag, who patiently let me work on him, I remembered, as if I were screening a movie in my mind, my first fight as an amateur boxer, welterweight, classification novice.
    I was just sixteen, tall, skinny, and scared to death. My opponent was shorter and more muscular than I was, with an acne-scarred face and the expression of a murderer. Or at least, that’s what he looked like to me. I had decided to become a boxer precisely to help me overcome my fear of guys like him. In the interminable minutes before the bout began, I thought—among many other things—that clearlythe treatment wasn’t working. My legs were shaking, my breathing was labored, and I felt as if my arms were paralyzed. I thought I’d never be able to raise my arms to defend myself, much less to throw a punch. The terror became so intense that I even considered faking illness—falling to the floor and pretending to faint—just to keep from having to fight.
    But when the bell rang, I stood up and walked out to fight. And that’s when a strange thing happened.
    His fists didn’t hurt me. They pummeled my helmet and especially my body, since he was shorter than I was, and he was doing everything he could to make up for it. With every punch he threw, he exhaled with a guttural grunt, as if he were trying to deliver the final haymaker. But his punches were slow, feeble, and harmless—and they didn’t hurt. I kept moving around him, trying to take advantage of my reach, and I kept tapping him with my left.
    In the third round, he got mad. Maybe his trainer told him he was losing the match, or maybe he figured it out on his own. In any case, when the bell rang he lunged at me furiously, frantically windmilling his arms. My right-cross counter-punch shot out and caught him in the head, without my quite realizing what I’d done. I still can’t remember it exactly. What I do remember—or more likely what I think I remember—is a sort of film still, an image from the moment a fraction of a second after the punch connected and before he dropped to the canvas, in just as sprawling and disorderly a fashion as he had come windmilling and lunging toward me in the first place.
    In amateur boxing, it’s a rare thing to knock down your opponent, and a knockout is even rarer. It’s an event, and everyone knows it. When I saw my opponent flat on hisback, a rush of heat and savage joy rose from my hips all the way to the nape of my neck.
    The referee ordered me into my corner, and he began the count. The other guy got to his feet almost immediately, raising both gloves to show that he could continue the fight. And in fact, the fight resumed, but it was already over. At that point, I had an unbeatable lead, and if my acne-scarred opponent wanted to win, he was going to have to knock me out for the full count. He wasn’t up to that. I kept on circling around him, easily staying out of reach of his lunges and attacks, which were increasingly feeble and frantic, and I kept tapping him with my left until the bell rang, ending the round and the match.
    That night, I didn’t get a wink of sleep. I was still a child and that was why I knew, as I would at few other times in my life, what it meant to feel like a