There’s something about me you don’t know. I don’t usually talk about it much. My son, Lorenzo, and I are exactly the same. As a child, I was a young terror too. Ever since early elementary school, my teacher (Miranda De Pascalis, ditzier than most people on earth, and capable of explaining the multiplication tables with exactly the same words three days running, while never once remembering that she’d done it) would regularly call my grandparents to complain about my conduct. But it was never my fault alone. I had a bad influence, a fellow student who led me down the road to perdition, my own personal Candlewick. His name was Attilio Brancato, but everyone knew him as Branca; we were never in the same class together, but he attended the class next door, from elementary school to high school. An ordeal and a blight upon my record. A genuine living legend in the Rome municipal school system, a hooligan of rare quality, capable of sabotaging vending machines to provoke cascades of snacks, falsifying class attendance records, and even wrecking teachers’ cars.
Grandpa hated him. One time he even decided to switch schools to get me out from under Brancato’s influence.
Luckily, once Brancato managed to finish high school, he vanished. Nobody ever heard a thing from him again. I was free at last.
Many years later, the day that Grandpa passed away, I couldn’t hold my terrible secret in a minute longer.
Grandpa was in bed, dressed in his pajamas, flat on his back and in appearance miles away, but I knew that he could hear me. I lean over close to the bed and whisper to him, with no need for any preamble: “Grandpa, Brancato never existed.”
Silence.
“I just invented him. He was my scapegoat. A perfect alibi for any and all occasions. A fictitious individual.”
Silence.
“Forgive me if I never told you. Brancato was me, and I was Brancato.”
I think back to all the punishments, and maybe even smacks, I avoided thanks to Brancato. Then I look over at Grandpa, whose eyes are open and staring unblinking at the ceiling.
Suddenly he smiles. In fact, he laughs. He feels like laughing. Not the usual thing with someone who’s about to die, a moriturus.
He turns to look at me with glistening eyes and reveals the truth: “Lucio mio, I knew it the whole time.”
I smile back at him.
“Sometimes it’s best for a son,” he adds, “and to me you’re a son, to underestimate you. It makes for a happier childhood.”
He squeezes my hand. Hard. Then I feel his energy slip away, like the water dribbling out of a garden hose.
Those were his last words to me.
* * *
I had made a resolution not to think about death.
It doesn’t look like I’m going to be able to keep it.