Sweet Dreams by Massimo Gramellini

me feel I still belonged to someone or to something.
    So I left to take up the new job in Rome—Rome, the great bitch who licks all our wounds.

twenty-three
    I keep a round box in one of the bottom drawers of my desk. In its glory days it housed three layers of Danish biscuits, but a long time ago it was converted into a safe for a lifetime’s worth of souvenirs.
    Working up from the bottom, there’s my first school exercise book, with the picture of a panther on the cover and on the first page the incipit which marks the beginning of my literary career: “Its autum and the leves are faling.” Then my mother’s frayed headscarf, the one with the white spots I used to flick against the walls when I played tick-tock . Then the worn pipestem I used to keep in my mouth after I’d given up smoking Camel Lights, whistling through it like a referee or a locomotive whenever I felt the need to inhale.
    There’s more: a photo of the vain Alessia at a fancy-dress party (she’s dressed as an Egyptian queen); the note a girlfriend sneaked into one of my course books for Private Law: “However boring the lecture you’re listening to might be, just think that this evening we’ll be together”; the letter I never sent to Emma; her face in a Polaroid photograph: her fiery red hair has faded to a gentler rosé blur.
    The objects from the time I spent in Rome are at the top of the pile: the first item is a cover from Playboy magazine with the photocopy of a Buddhist prayer stapled to it.
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    The Buddhists of Rome met every Thursday evening near St. Peter’s Square, in a house which ironically looked out onto the bastion of Christianity.
    It was a large gloomy palazzo which had belonged to an old noble Roman family. The lift didn’t work, and the steps of the staircase were very shallow to allow carriages to drive up them.
    There wasn’t a horse-drawn carriage in sight when I first went (the service had been suspended some centuries ago), so I had to sweat my way up the stairs to the sixth floor. But climbing is good for the soul. After all, Iconsoled myself, not even Moses had taken delivery of the Ten Commandments down in a cellar.
    As I slipped off my shoes outside the door, an organ-like sound took me back to the church services I’d been to as a boy. Here it was produced by voices chanting a mantra in unison.
    Feeling suitably abashed in spirit, I made my way into the prayer room and, like the others, sat down on the floor in the lotus position, until a very unspiritual cramp in my calf muscles forced me to disentangle my legs and stretch them sideways, making me recline like a bayadère.
    The leader of the group declared the meeting open. He had an unkempt beard resembling Che Guevara’s and had probably been one of his followers in his youth, later channeling his revolutionary fervors on himself rather than society at large.
    Each of those present then told the others about the benefits Buddhist practices had brought to their lives. The room contained a full spectrum of human types: the only thing which had brought them together was the experience of grief.
    I was struck by their refusal to play the victim. A young woman who’d been a drug addict told us how at the nadir of her existence she’d taken to thinking that even the trees moved away from her to deprive her of shade. Butprayer had restored her energy to live. She knew now that the causes of her troubles were to be found within her.
    After each confession, there was a round of applause. There was also applause when a beaming university student told us that reciting a mantra had helped him solve the problem of where to park his car.
    The applause, how to park your car—it was all a bit too much for me. But just as I was thinking this, Agnese decided to introduce me to the assembled company.
    â€œHe’s got a problem with the father figure . . .”
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    I’d met Agnese