Sweet Dreams Read Online Free Page B

either mad or had been completely misunderstood.
    The only interest we had in common was the television. Mita could rightly regard herself as a real expert, with her thorough knowledge of the main textbooks in the field: the television guides Sorrisi e Canzoni and Radiocorriere TV .
    For her, watching the telly was a kind of pagan ritual, where the various presenters and singers were the divinities. The heavens and the earth had been created in six days by the TV host Mike Bongiorno, who on the seventh had rested from his labors and handed over to Pippo Baudo’s variety show. But the real watershed in the course of human history had been Gigliola Cinquetti’s appearance at the Sanremo Music Festival. Many years had passed since that miracle had taken place, but Mita continued to bask in the longing for a lost paradise, back in the days when she would listen to Gigliola Cinquetti singing “Non ho l’età per amarti” as she ironed the countess’s undergarments.
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    One Saturday evening in autumn, Dad went out to dinner with friends. It was the first time he had left me on my own in the evening, and the prospect filled me with twinges of anxiety.
    Mita took over the sitting room and sat down in front of the television with Sorrisi e Canzoni open on her lap like a prayer book. Canzonissima was just about to start. It involved singers taking part in a competition in which the winners were chosen by the TV audience, who could sendin their votes with their New Year’s Day lottery tickets.
    Mita was a decidedly floating voter, but her choices had a subtle consistency about them. She liked talented newcomers such as Mino Reitano or Massimo Ranieri. She told me the names of their girlfriends and other personal secrets until my attention was suddenly distracted by a mesmerizing vision which had just appeared on the TV screen: a woman’s bare midriff with a belly button.
    The woman who’d had the audacity to exhibit her belly button in public was called Raffaella Carrà. She came from Romagna, like my grandmother Emma, and she was blond, like my mother. She later reappeared in a miniskirt, kicking and twirling her legs, judiciously covered in dark stockings, in a variety of provocative poses.
    I was still too young to perceive any glimmer of sensuality in what I was watching, but I was still stirred by the images. They succeeded in opening a breach in my hardened soul. When the dance had ended I plunged like a diver, holding my breath, into Mita’s arms and kissed her hollow cheeks.
    â€œYou’ll be my mommy won’t you?” I pleaded, shamefully.
    â€œI’m sorry, boy . . .”
    That’s what she said: boy. She didn’t use my name.
    â€œI’m sorry, boy . . . I can’t love you. No one’s ever loved me and . . . I don’t know how to.”
    â€œI’ll teach you.”
    It was true, I could just about remember how to.
    â€œI can’t  . . . I’m sorry.”
    She brushed a hand over her eyes and hurried into the bathroom just as Massimo Ranieri came on stage.
    That was the moment when I felt an iron curtain drop down within me. The illusion I could somehow regain the love I had lost, the imaginary world to which I’d clung for a whole year.
    I now admitted to myself that my mother was gone forever and that no one ever again would love me, accept and protect me as she had done.
    I buried my face in the sofa cushions and finally wept for what had happened to my mother. And to me.

nine
    The candidates who might have replaced my mother had all fallen by the wayside, and I no longer had any hope of getting back the original. All that was left to me was Dad.
    When a mother dies, you need men with feminine sensibilities to fill at least in part the abyss which is left. Men capable of being strict when necessary, but also sensitive. But my father was the epitome of masculinity. When he was growing up, his