After I had extracted that promise, amidst giggles and dark thoughts, I put all my religious and funereal concerns aside. I focused instead on my studies, on literary pursuits that regarded other aspects of humanity, and on nocturnal wanderings that did not take into the slightest consideration how my poor grandmother couldn’t sleep knowing I wasn’t at home and tucked in bed. Then I graduated from high school and set off along the path to university, a mysterious place where none of my relatives had ever set foot, not even by mistake.
I wasted a little time at the beginning because I didn’t know which course of study to choose. At first, I enrolled in Engineering to please my father, as he had always wanted me to become a railroad engineer. Then I briefly considered Mathematics because I’d recently met a girl who was studying math, we were going out, and I didn’t want to appear less intelligent than her. Finally, I chose the department of Letters, which seemed like the fastest way to become the greatest writer on the planet.
With this goal in mind, I read night and day, beat-up old volumes purchased for little from street vendors: lots of ancient writers, eighteenth and nineteenth century novellas, novels, and epics, and a fair share of giants of Italian literature, from Guido Cavalcanti to Giacomo Leopardi. I would’ve gladly read more modern writers but didn’t have the money to buy fresh-off-the-press contemporary literature, so I hardly ever ventured into the twentieth century. Even so, I chugged right along. Studying for school had always bored me—all those dates and notes, the homework and grades—but reading for the sake of reading and interrupting it only to urgently dash off my own lyrics, verselets, canticles, canzoni, and decamerons seemed like a pretty good life. Every chance I got, I trained my writing muscles to evoke in future readers thoughts of rebellion against the powerful, empathy for the destitute, an occasional snicker, and, in general, to incite them to dedicate their lives to the benefit of Italy and the world.
But it didn’t last. University, even more than school, turned out to be the mortal enemy of reading and writing, and I was forced to accept that I had to take exams, memorize authors’ biographies and bibliographies, and be able to regurgitate in proper Italian boring textbooks on history and geography. I ended up wandering up and down hallways, looking for classrooms, trying to understand how to survive amid a crowd of students who were probably just as lost as I was and maybe even shared my overblown ambitions. I knew nothing about the hierarchy of professors, course requirements, how much books and lecture notes cost, class schedules, how to get attendance signatures, or the enormous efforts it took to get basic information from either registrars or building custodians. And so, I proceeded empirically, initially planning to take exams like Latin, Italian, and Greek, which sounded good when lumped together. But these classes were overcrowded and difficult to understand, the books were dull and expensive tomes, and so I fell back on subjects—namely, Papyrology and Glottology—whose chief merit was that their textbooks were slender and not too costly.
There was another reason I chose that route. Papyrology and glottology were words I’d never heard before, definitely not at home but not even at school, and appropriating them seemed like a good way to signal my cultural elegance to friends, relatives and my new girlfriend.
“What exam are you studying for?”
“Papyrology.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“And then, after that?”
“Glottology.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
Basically, I tried to seem like someone who had a plan for the future. But in actual fact, there was no plan, all I did was dream. One day I felt like I was on the right path, the next day I doubted it entirely. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for scholarly work. Maybe I didn’t know how to study, recall, or write riveting things. Maybe I’d never know glory and forever be a poorly dressed, disheveled mess, like some oppressed student in Tzarist Russia, toiling to scrounge up enough money to pay for my books by giving lessons to kids only slightly less intelligent than me. In other words, I lived in a constant state of anxiety, as if I were hanging from the top of a glass wall by my fingertips, always on the verge of sliding down into a dark pool of sludge with a horrifying screech.
I was careful not to let anyone see this side of me, not even my girlfriend. With everyone, and particularly with her, I employed the constantly bemused tone that I had first adopted around the age of fifteen and that by now I was incapable of altering—some, she more than most, found it entertaining. And yet, not a day went by that I didn’t want to slink down some empty street and, without any apparent reason and like never before, howl with despair, kick and punch the air, and cry, if but for a minute. I had even identified the right street—parallel to the train station—and sometimes I walked down it, but I never managed to blow off steam. I just didn’t know how.