Sweet Dreams Read Online Free

bookshelves at home? The pearl necklace and jersey cardigan she was wearing were doing their best to make her look old, but her girlish smile and bright-blue eyes, ready to be amazed at all they saw, gave the lie to that impression.
    Nonna Giulia shuffled unsteadily in her slippers towards us. She clung to me more out of desperation than affection and dragged me into a room which looked out onto the garden.
    â€œWhat have they done to my daughter?” she cried, before My Uncle had had a chance to extract me from her grip.
    It had never occurred to me to think of my mother as someone’s daughter.
    I was amazed that no one had told my grandmother the truth about my mother going off with “Terrible Thing” after doing all her errands.
    I was ready to tell her the whole story, leaving out only the puzzling fact of the dressing gown, but My Uncle dragged me off.
    I would also have told her that the story wasn’t over yet, and that she would reappear as unexpectedly as she had disappeared. After all, didn’t all mothers have a special pass which allowed them to come and go as they liked?
    Sitting in the passenger seat next to My Uncle, I made an effort to keep my eyes fixed on the road ahead. As the roadside advertisement hoardings sped past, I promised myself I would broach the subject as soon as the next one had gone by—but we reached home and I still hadn’t plucked up the courage.
    Certain questions frightened me. Or perhaps I was more frightened of the answers.

seven
    When it came to my grandmothers, I’d had to admit total defeat, but the situation was not so dissimilar when it came to the other possible candidates for the role of deputy mother.
    Madamìn already had two children of her own to look after and couldn’t move in to take care of me.
    My godmother was childless, but she and my father had fallen out. An icy antagonism formed between them, full of things unsaid. She and Uncle Nevio started coming round less and less, and then their visits stopped altogether.
    My father shrugged this off by assuming a tough-guy stance: “You’re really stuck if you have to rely on other people. We can count ourselves lucky: we don’t need anyone’s help.”
    Perhaps the thought occurred to me there might be a connection between the mysterious quarrel and whatever had happened to my mother—or perhaps it didn’t and it’s just hindsight painting a picture of me behaving like some underage detective in search of clues, whereas all I was was a little grief-struck boy who couldn’t come to terms with the fact his mother had died.
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    My life had become void of female figures: the only women who remained were my primary school teacher and the mothers of my classmates.
    My teacher had a large and capacious heart. She regarded the forty of us in her class like her adopted children. Far too many for an ordinary mother, but not for her: she saw into our souls, she knew when we needed to be scolded and when we deserved to be rewarded.
    She’d been brought up in a socialist family and used to inveigh fervently against the Americans, who were at the time bogged down in the Vietnam War. I took note of her views and reported them back to my father, who adored the United States because they’d helped to drive the Nazis out of Italy. I was learning the elements of what would later become my job: taking note and reportingback—with a degree of emotional involvement, to be sure, but nevertheless aware there are always two sides to every story.
    Dad never passed any comment on my observations. My parents never criticized my teacher. If I got a low mark in class it was because I’d deserved it, not because the teacher had it in for me. The earliest authority figures in my life had enough sense of their own authority not to want to undermine each other, and their presence gave me the reassuring sense I lived in an ordered universe.
    This bright picture was