Sweet Dreams by Massimo Gramellini Page A

among the alleyways of Trastevere, the winter after I’d arrived in Rome. After finishing work at the newspaper late at night, I would saunter off to join the company of the Eternally Hopeful—actors looking for a director, directors looking for producers, producers looking for money. Their tribe would move from party to party, terrace to terrace, succeeding only in eliciting a vague promise of “we must meet up for dinner sometime.”
    Agnese acted for a living but, more than that, she was an actress through and through. She was blond, sensual, unintentionally comic. She’d been in a successful film,had inspired adolescent fantasies by appearing once on a cover of Playboy wearing only a leather bikini and had tried out a whole range of thrills, with a marked preference for the most dangerous ones. She was about to turn thirty when an encounter with Buddhism saved her from the bonfire of the vanities and turned her into a soldier for truth.
    It was the first time my bedroom has been used also for religious practices. Each evening Agnese would kneel in front of a small portable temple to recite her mantra. She always emerged completely refreshed from these intimate encounters with herself. She’d awoken my interest in the Buddha using that irresistible technique—a mixture of indirect allusions and doleful looks—women adopt when they want you to do something without asking you explicitly.
    I took my time to say yes, coming up with nonexistent religious scruples, until I finally agreed I’d go along with her to a meeting.
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    â€œHe has a problem with the father figure . . .”
    â€œWith the father figure? More with the mother figure,” I objected.
    â€œWith the mother or the father?” the woman who took care of the incense (and who owned the flat) asked.
    â€œI’ve got problems with both the mother figure and the father figure,” a young woman, whom I thought I might have seen on TV, remarked.
    â€œMe too!”
    â€œAnd me!”
    â€œYou see? Here you’re never alone,” Agnese summed up, her photogenic face beaming with a wide beatific smile.
    â€œBut I haven’t any issues with my father. I mean, I’ve got a few, but not important ones.”
    â€œIs that so? Then why do you always forget to pay bills and don’t know how to change a lightbulb?”
    â€œDo you have to tell everyone my personal stuff? What’s my father got to do with paying bills and changing lightbulbs?”
    â€œHaven’t you always told me he’s a very practical man? Your refusal to be practical is a way of criticizing him. It’s your way of showing you’re different from him.”
    â€œMy problem is that I’m in love but I’m not happy.”
    I don’t know how that remark came out. Perhaps it was Belfagor who inspired it—he’d seen the topic of conversation was bothering me and I wanted to change it.
    Everyone’s eyes turned on Agnese with a questioninggaze. Except for Che Guevara’s, who was looking at me instead.
    â€œYou’ve made an important discovery. Love isn’t enough to make people happy. Happiness doesn’t come from the world but from the way we relate to the world. It doesn’t depend on wealth or health or even the affection another person feels for us. It depends only on us. We can all experience happiness. Let’s repeat now: I can be happy.”
    A chorus of voices intoned: “I can be happy.”
    Che turned back to me. “You agree?”
    â€œIn theory, yes. But life isn’t a mantra for people who are out to have a good time. We all have an intimation of the injustice that has been inflicted on us, which we cannot accept. It shows there’s no such thing as Providence, because if there were it wouldn’t have allowed it to happen. In order to endure the pain we’ve had to arm ourselves with cynicism to protect ourselves from the