An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
First published in Italy by Einaudi Stile Libero, 2016
Copyright © 2016 by Matteo Bussola
English language translation copyright © 2017 by Jamie Richards
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Tarcher and Perigee are registered trademarks, and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Ebook ISBN 9781524705107
Interior illustrations by Sandra Chiu
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
Cover design and illustration by Sandra Chiu
Version_1
to them
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
WINTER
The Elephant’s Weight
Why Kids Have to Go to School
Kids’ Party
Garrett (Or, on Common Sense)
Karma
A!
The Camera
Heartbeats
Come By
The Man in the Car
Four
The Case
Why Does Mom . . . ?
The Crooked Tree
Beer
Sentimental Alphabet
Feet and Music
On Comics and Fathers and Sons
“Coffee” Coffee
Braids
What Women Don’t Say
Eyes Like Andy Garcia
A Christmas Story
Minestrina
God and Rapunzel
Our Birthday
All for One
The Man Who Doesn’t Laugh
Pockets Full of Stones
SPRING
The Moment Before
The Blue Scooter
Cashiers at Esselunga Read Bukowski
Being a Parent
Spring Is Useless
April Fools’
That’s My Mother
Boy Colors
Beer Fest
There’s This Time
Chocolate Coins
Trail of Breadcrumbs
Daughter to Go
To Live—Forever (Do the Dead Take Their Cars to Heaven?)
Two Years
Can I, Daddy?
Drawing for School
The Hearts of Blonds
The Tie
Saving Yourself Every Day
The Dandelions
Mommy Sleeps All the Time
The Boy Cartoonist
The Cookie
The Snake
The Hairband
SUMMER
The Right Way
Nothing Happens
Four
The Cat
Cyrano
There Are Lots of Love
The Courier
Five Scars (The Habit of Staying)
Dinner
The Tickles
Toi, Tu La Connais?
Dog Eyes
Miss Marisa
Above the Clouds
The Box (Life with Paola)
Gianni
Winning
My Neighbor Has a Cow
To Ourselves (Mel & Me)
Face Stickers
Us Two
The Typical Day of the Comics Artist Father
Open Letter to Fedez
FALL
Never Completely
The Best Part (Les Enfants Qui S’aiment)
Mobile Dining
Light
Prejudice
The News Vendor
Letter to My Daughter Who Is Growing Up
The Kiss
The Coat
Canon
The Visit
Three Hundred and Forty-seven
Ears
Children’s Dreams
Why the World Exists
Lucca Comics
New Shoes
Boy Hair
Taking Care
You Always Laugh
Mr. Mbokany
There’s This Mom
The Tired Dad
The Day
Two of Hearts
About the Author
Introduction
My job is being a father. My profession is drawing comics. I write for fun.
I learned the comics profession by drawing, the job of fatherhood by being a father. I had three wonderful teachers: my daughters who are eight, four, and two. Writing, in a sense, was always there.
I decided to put all these things together here, to draw a picture in words alone.
This book is a journal of sorts. It gathers stories, reports, reflections, and near-daily snapshots of my daughters’ growth—and my growth through theirs. It’s about how being a father has made me a better man, a more confident artist, and a more attentive partner. Also a more tired partner, but it’s a shared tiredness, that long-standing fatigue that comes from trying to plan and build something with another person.
Virginia, Ginevra, and Melania are the lens through which I observe the world. The view they provide gives me a different way of looking at everything, even at what I was before they came along. I think this is what’s called putting things in perspective. Perspective teaches us to create horizons and to realize that things change depending on how you choose to look at them; that sometimes the future that seems least likely is the result of a leap you started to take before even knowing it. You just have to conquer your fear of leaping when the time comes. Fatherhood was my leap.
Something I’ve discovered is that the nature of my fears has changed over the years. Having children shifts the nucleus of your fears to a darker place, but at the same time makes it invaluable, a beacon that lights your path instead of a fire that burns your skin. Fears are no longer something to defend against, but to nourish. And it’s a job you do in the dark with your eyes perpetually open, almost as if too much life keeps you from closing them and leaves you sleepless forever.
In my sleepless life, I am father, son, friend, cook, guitar player, gardener, illustrator, lover, dishwasher, builder of toy towers, and a ton of other things, every day, and not always in that order. But I’ve discovered that my role as father is the only one that contains me fully.
Every day I learn from it and every lesson I learn nourishes all the other lessons. My daughters nourish me and remind me that being a father means living in that gray area between responsibility and carelessness, strength and softness. And that goes for everything.
The rest is what follows.
WINTER
The Elephant’s Weight
It was January 2007, a Saturday just like today. The sky was low and full of clouds.
I was at the hospital. Seeing the doctors go
by, the women in robes, the coffee machines, and the fact that I was about to become a father for the first time made me feel like I wasn’t myself, like I was watching someone else’s life.
It was nighttime, I was in the waiting room, and I saw no one smoking. “People always smoke in the movies,” I thought. But I don’t. That also added to my perception of the whole scene as unreal, in slow motion, through a filter.
That filter was me. It was my old conception of myself, my old life, my old idea of everything, everything that was about to change, looming overhead like the puckered clouds outside.
Paola was calm, whereas I was like a drunk one glass short of too many. I went around in a haze, with unsteady feet and an idiotic smile that, seen from the outside, must have made me look relaxed to the point of either unconsciousness or mental impairment.
First, the nurse said eight, then nine, then ten, then eleven, then it stopped making any difference.
It was a long night, interminable—in which I faced all my fears at once and all my powerlessness at once; first all the anxiety and then the adrenaline crash, releasing a joy that had been held under pressure and almost rabidly pervaded my senses.
And so now, as I’m writing this, I realize that in reality I don’t want to describe the situation, the terror, the strength I saw and experienced. Because it’s not possible or because I don’t know the right way to say it. And also because these things are so personal and different for everybody; therefore, my experience would ultimately remain just that: mine.
What I actually want to say—which is also the reason behind this journal, which I’m typing quickly on my iPad while the girls are getting ready for school—is that, in my opinion, there are two decisive moments in a man’s life: there’s the before, and there’s the after.
The before and after aren’t the same for everyone. I know people for whom the after was a breakup, others for whom it was getting married. For some it was finding their dream job, for some others it was finding a job at all. For others, the after was going to Haiti with Doctors Without Borders. Once I talked to this old man who I kept just wanting to hug, and he told me what it was like after being liberated by the Americans, and how there are things that cancel out every after and blur lots of befores, that change your future forever right before your eyes.
When you become a father, your after weighs about seven and a half pounds. You can tell even from the first second that this will be a definitive after, the only thing in your life there’s no turning back from. Not even if you wanted to, not even if you tried your hardest—no matter what you do with your future, that after will never change.
In return, it will change you. It’s already changing you; it already has, in a way you don’t know how to articulate but feel in your arms and your legs—a metamorphosis.
In terms of pounds, now I’ve got about a hundred more. Every day I lug them to school and everywhere else I go. I move like an elephant when I used to move like a gazelle.
But the point is that the gazelle wakes up in the morning because it knows the lion is there. And the lion wakes up every morning because it knows the gazelle is there.
But an elephant couldn’t care less. He doesn’t run and doesn’t hunt. He wakes up after sleeping for a couple hours and does what he needs to do, knowing that it’s precisely his being an elephant that keeps it all together. He wakes up when he needs to and moves slowly, even in a china shop.
But when he moves, it’s neither for a lion nor a gazelle.
He moves because his life began when he became an elephant. It began after. And that after, the elephant’s after, is the only after in the world that is also a before. It’s the ultimate before, the before everything, the beginning and the ending at the same time. It’s actually the only experience that cancels out every before and after and transforms everything into a while.
An elephant lives only in the present and knows that his present has a certain weight; he feels it in his arms and legs. In his back.
Therein lies his strength. All the strength he needs.
The kind gazelles wish they had and lions can only dream of.
Why Kids Have to Go to School
I’m in the car, taking Ginevra and Melania to nursery school after taking Virginia to catch the bus for elementary school.
“Dad, why do kids have to go to school?”
“Eh, Ginevra, because they have to.”
“But why do kids have to go to school though?”
“Because it’s their job. Mommies’ and daddies’ job is to work. Kids’ job is going to school.”
“But if kids have a job, then why don’t we get any money?”
“Oh, you do get money, you know! You bet you do. It just that we daddies and mommies save it for you. Then when you get older, we give it to you.”
“How much do we get, Daddy?”
“Hmm, quite a bit. Especially kids who behave at school.”
“Like more than a euro?”
“Um, yes, yes, a lot more.”
“How much more?”
“Ten euros.”
“TEN EUROS? That’s a lot!”
“Yep.”
“Daddy, when we get back home, will you show me my money?”
I think, “Thank God I didn’t say five hundred.”
“Sure, Ginevra. I’ll show you today when you get home.”
“But Daddy, do you get paid for your job too?”
“Well, of course.”
“Do you get ten euros too?”
“No, no, I get more. Because I’m a grown-up.”
“How much?”
“Twenty euros.”
“TWENTY EUROS? Then you have a ton of money! You’re rich!”
“No, Ginevra, twenty euros isn’t that much money.”
“But you’re rich, right?”
I look at her in the rearview mirror. I see her eyes laughing. Beside her, Melania is sucking on a sock.
“Of course.”
Kids’ Party
Paola’s away for work, the two little ones are at Grandma and Grandpa’s, and Virginia and I are home alone.
Yesterday I took her to one of those horrible elementary school birthday parties. It was held in the Sunday school basement, which the priest was kind enough to let them use, and the atmosphere was straight out of Nightmare on Elm Street. The ceilings were barely six feet high, there were tiny slits for windows, a few sad streamers on the walls, and a crooked banner that said “HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAR A NA,” since the kids had already pulled down some of the letters. The mothers were all huddled in the back corner next to the potato chips and corn puffs, like so many hens in battery cages.
When we went in, since I was the only dad there, they eyed me as if a drunk, naked Hun had crashed their Christmas portrait session. But it lasted only a second, because moms like me.
After about three minutes Maria Carla was talking to me about her stiff neck; Mattia’s mom was telling me I look like that guy, what’s-his-name, you know who I mean, come on; and the birthday girl’s mother had brought me a salami sandwich.
All I wanted was to die, and in fact, I stubbornly kept my coat fully zipped and my scarf on, as the international sign for, “I’m just dropping her off and coming to pick her up later; don’t get any ideas, my getaway car’s out front with the motor running and a body in the trunk.” But no, I had to stay half an hour to suffer a conversation that was worse than having your bunions hammered with a burning hot pile driver.
Even better, as I whispered goodbye to Virginia, “Have fun, I’ll be back to pick you up at seven,” the birthday girl’s father came in loaded with trays, and cast me a look worse than a stray dog with mange in a spring thunderstorm.
“Where the hell are you going?” the look said. “You can’t leave me alone with them. There’s a blood pact between all men in the world, and you kn
ow it, you bastard. Stay here, and we’ll share our unfortunate lot like real brothers.”
I looked back at him, and my look said, “Like hell, this is your party and your daughter, and I had one of these things not so long ago and I don’t recall seeing you in my house, jerk. And be grateful I don’t trip you and make you drop all those mini sandwiches with mini toothpick flags stuck in them.”
And his eyes shot back, “That’s not cool, why do you have to be so stubborn? Everyone makes mistakes, and I didn’t even know about your party—my wife only tells me what she wants and she kept the invitation from me, I’m sorry.”
So I gave in to sentiment and went over and took half the trays, and when we set them on the big table, he smiled at me conspiratorially, elbowing me and saying, “Should we have a beer? Huh, huh?”
And already at “be—” you could feel the blast of wind from twenty-four mothers turning toward him in unison and giving him the stink eye as if he had cursed in church, or rather, at Sunday school.
“Beer at a kids’ party, did you say? Shame on you!” said their forty-eight accusatory eyes. At which I caught the ball mid-bounce, put a hand on his arm, brother-like, and told him, “Hey, thanks, but I’ve got minestrone on the stove at home and I’ve still got to stop at the store.”
At that moment, the twenty-four looks instantly transformed into expressions of exuberant sympathy and I came out strutting like a rooster, stroked by twenty-four pairs of eyelashes of mothers who had just heard the word “minestrone” from an Italian man without it being in the sentence: “Hey, is the minestrone ready yet?”
I said goodbye to Virginia again with a kiss on the forehead and went out into the crisp evening air. As I was heading to the car, some kid threw a noisemaker at me, making me jump, and I nearly fell over. I couldn’t help but think that bastard had sent a hit man after me as a warning. “Come back inside,” that noisemaker said, “or things will go south fast—remember we have your daughter!”
But I didn’t let myself be intimidated. Decisive, I got in the car, drove off, and went to the discount store, where I did the grocery shopping, like a real man. Then I went home, washed the dishes, answered three e-mails, fed the dogs, and it was already time to go pick her up.