quarters of an hour. Twice a week. What do you say?’
‘Yeah, that’s not too much,’ I told her.
If my mother thought I’d end up being like the others that was fine with me. Everyone had to think that I was normal, Mum included.
Nihal would take me. A fat secretary wearing a caramel perfume would lead me into a mouldy-smelling room with a low ceiling. The window faced a grey wall. On the hazelnut-coloured walls hung old black and white photos of Rome.
‘But does everyone who has problems lie there?’ I asked Professor Masburger, as he pointed towards a faded brocade couch.
‘Of course. Everyone. This way you can talk more freely.’
Perfect. I would pretend to be a normal kid with problems. It wouldn’t take much to trick him. I knew exactly how the others reasoned, what they liked and what they wished for. And if what I knew wasn’t enough, that couch I was lying on would transfer to me, like a warm body transfers heat to a cold body, the thoughts of the kids that had lain there before me.
And so I told him all about a different Lorenzo. A Lorenzo who was embarrassed to talk to the others but who wanted to be like them. I liked pretending that I loved the others.
A few weeks after I began the therapy I heard my parents whispering in the living room. I went into the study. I took a few volumes from the bookshelves and put my ear up against the wall.
‘So what’s wrong with him?’ Father was saying.
‘He said that he has a narcissistic personality disorder.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘He says that Lorenzo is unable to feel empathy for others. For him everything that’s outside his circle of affections doesn’t exist, has no effect on him. He believes he is special and only people as special as him can understand him.’
‘You want to know what I think? That this Masburger is a dickhead. I have never seen any boy as affectionate as our son.’
‘That’s true, but only with us, Francesco. Lorenzo thinks that we’re the special people and he considers everyone else to be inferior.’
‘He’s a snob? Is that what the professor is trying to tell us?’
‘He said that he has an inflated sense of self-importance.’
My father burst into laughter. ‘Thank goodness. Just think if he had a low sense of self-importance. That’s enough, take him away from that worthless idiot before he fills up our son’s brain with nonsense for good. Lorenzo is a normal child.’
‘Lorenzo is a normal child,’ I repeated to myself.
Little by little I worked out how I should act at school. I had to keep to myself, but not too much, otherwise I stuck out.
I was like a sardine in a school of sardines. I camouflaged myself like a stick insect on dry branches. And I learned to control my anger. I imagined that I had a tank in my stomach, and when it filled up I emptied it out through my feet and the anger ended up in the ground and penetrated into the world’s guts and was burned up by the eternal flames.
Now nobody bothered me.
For middle school I was sent to St Joseph’s, an English school filled with the children of diplomats, of foreign artists who had fallen in love with Italy, of managers from the US and of wealthy Italians who could afford the fees. Everyone was out of place there. They all spoke different languages and looked like they were just passing through. The girls kept to themselves and the guys played football on the big field opposite the school. I fitted in well.
But my parents weren’t satisfied. I had to have friends.
Football was a stupid game, everyone running around after a ball, but that’s what everyone else liked. If I learned to play, I was home free. I would have some friends.
I found the courage and put myself in goal, where nobody ever wanted to play. I realised that defending it from enemy attacks wasn’t all that bad. There was this one guy, Angelo Stangoni, who was unstoppable whenever he got the ball. He would shoot like a lightning bolt to the goal and kick really hard. One day a defender knocked him down with a kick. Penalty. I lined myself up in the middle of the goal. He took a run up.
I am not a man, I said to myself, I am a nyuzzo, a hideous but incredibly agile animal produced in an Umbrian laboratory that has just one purpose in life: to defend the earth from a mortal meteorite.
Stangoni kicked hard, straight down the line, and I flew like only a nyuzzo can, stretching out my arms. And the ball was there in my hands. I saved it.
I remember how all my team-mates hugged me and it was nice because they thought I was one of them.
They put me on the team. Suddenly I had schoolmates who called me at home. My mother would answer and she was happy to be able to say: ‘Lorenzo, it’s for you.’
I used to say I was going over to my friend’s house but really I went and hid out at Grandma Laura’s. She lived on the top floor of an apartment building near ours, with Pericle, an old Basset Hound, and Olga, her Russian carer. We spent our afternoons playing canasta. She would drink Bloody Marys and I would have tomato juice with pepper and salt. We had made a pact: she wouldn’t tell about my not going out with my friends and I wouldn’t tell about her drinking Bloody Marys.
But middle school was soon over and my father called me into his study, sat me down in an armchair and said, ‘Lorenzo, I think it’s time you went to a public high school. You’ve had enough of these private schools for spoiled kids. So, what would you prefer, mathematics or history?’
I glanced quickly at all his heavy volumes on the ancient Egyptians and on the Babylonians, neatly lined up on his bookshelf. ‘History.’
He gave me a satisfied pat on the shoulder. ‘Excellent, old boy, we like the same things. You’ll enjoy the Classics high school, you’ll see.’
When I walked up to the entrance of the high school on my first day I almost fainted.
It was hell on earth. There were hundreds of kids. It felt like I was standing outside the gates of a rock concert. Some of them were way bigger than me. They even had beards. The girls had tits. They rode scooters, skateboards. Some were running. Some were laughing. Some were yelling. They were going in and out of the cafeteria. One guy climbed up a tree and hung a girl’s backpack on a branch and she threw stones at him.
Anxiety took my breath away. I leaned up against a wall covered in graffiti. Why did I have to go to school? Why did the world work like this? You are born, you go to school, you work and you die. Who had decided that that was the right way? Couldn’t we live differently? Like primitive man? Like Grandma Laura, who when she was little had studied at home and had the teachers come to her. Why couldn’t I do that too? Why didn’t they just leave me alone? Why did I have to be just like the others? Couldn’t I live by myself in a forest in Canada?
‘I am not like them. I have an inflated sense of self-importance,’ I whispered, as three colossal beasts walking arm in arm pushed me aside like I was a bowling pin. ‘Piss off, shrimp.’
In a trance I felt my legs as stiff as tree trunks walk me into class.
