I dream about my parents. Ever since I started taking industrial doses of ibuprofen to cut the pain, I’ve been sleeping more profoundly. I often have dreams and I always remember what happened in my mind while my body was on standby. All my dreams are of me as a child.
This time we’re aboard a small red sailboat, off the coast of Ladispoli. I’m two years old, my Papà’s sixty, and my Mamma’s sixteen. A chronological and oneiric chaos—I never knew either of them at those ages.
At a certain point a great white shark shoots past us like a speedboat, barely a yard away, and the wake from its passage almost tosses us overboard. Even if it’s a dream, a monstrous white shark 150 feet off the beach of Ladispoli remains highly unlikely. And it’s not alone—there is a pack of them. They surround us, a good twenty of them, then they attack. They bare their teeth, like giant meatgrinders, an enormous razor-sharp cavern ready to take us in, chop us up, and digest us. Papà fights heroically, beating them back with his oar, and he’s the first to be swallowed up, oar and all. Mamma abandons me without a second thought, diving in and trying to swim off and make her escape. A shark gulps her down like a human aspirin tablet before she has a chance to swim ten strokes. I’m left alone, it’s like an Italian remake of Life of Pi.
I hadn’t dreamed about my parents for years. I really miss them. And I really hate them. I told you that I’d only talk about them when I was ready. Well, today I’m ready. This way, you’ll have a chance to hate them almost as much as I do.
After the unwanted pregnancy, for a couple of years Mamma and Papà lived with my grandparents, whom you’ve already met. Then my father found a job as a disc jockey (though back then in Italy that’s not what it was called) in a dance hall in Lido di Ostia and even managed to get a salary high enough to afford to rent an apartment and live there with Mamma. And so it was that at the tender age of just two, I went to live with two wretched young people in their twenties in a one-room apartment in Ostia, which makes sense in the summer, but certainly doesn’t in the winter. Mamma rounded out Papà’s salary by cleaning beach houses during the tourist season. At night she was so exhausted that she’d almost always fall asleep next to me, just as Papà was leaving for work at the dance hall.
I was more or less three years old when I suddenly discovered the most terrible thing a child can discover: Papà and Mamma didn’t love each other. The only reason they were together at all was my arrival, and they had nothing in common, no mutual respect. The spark of love between them had never even flickered into life. The law permitting abortion in Italy dates from 1978, so they’d had no choice but to accept my unwanted presence. To understand that you were “unwanted” at the tender age of three is no fun, let me tell you. I was the cause of every fight, the scapegoat whenever anything went wrong. If I’d been fifteen, I would have run away from home, but I wouldn’t be fifteen for twelve more years, and even then, I wasn’t exactly lionhearted for my age.
One day, Papà announced that he’d found work on a cruise ship. A six-month stint in the Caribbean as an activities leader. We didn’t even go with him to the airport. Our hasty farewells took place in the kitchen. I saw him get into a taxi from our second-story window. He never came back. Mamma cried for six months. We went back to live with her parents, and that made me happy. My grandparents were the only stable point of reference in my life. The next summer, my mother—who in the meantime was becoming an increasingly depressed hippie freak—left for India with a girlfriend to find herself. I don’t know if she ever did, but I do know that we never saw her again. Motherly love was definitely not her strong suit. From that day forward, for all intents and purposes, my grandparents became my immediate family. They were everything for me. Now do you understand why I’m never really interested in talking about my loving parents?