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team on earth.

eleven
    When I came to the end of primary school, the teacher who’d been my last bulwark disappeared too. I lost all my bearings and drifted without a direction. A new feeling seized hold of me and wouldn’t let go—a demon clinging to my back and weighing me down, a soft spongy monster who fed on my doubts and fears: mistrust, rejection, abandonment.
    I called him Belfagor, after the TV series The Phantom of the Louvre I’d watched as a boy. He’d been a near contender to Polyphemus in becoming my nightmare bogeyman.
    Endless questions tormented me. Out of all the mothers there were in the world, how come mine had to die? My classmates were taken to school holding their mothers’ hands, their mothers cooked them nice food to eat, whenthey were upset they could go and be comforted in their mothers’ arms. Why couldn’t I?
    My little brain kept searching for an answer. If I’d been capable of lifting my eyes and looking around me, I would have seen the world was full of much greater problems: wars, epidemics, floods. But Belfagor was good at keeping my eyes down so I couldn’t see beyond the narrow horizons of my own small existence.
    Every so often my father would threaten to send me away to boarding school—for example when I left my dental braces on my plate in a restaurant. Or whenever I asked him to sack Mita and replace her with a human being.
    I became an avid reader of stories about orphans. I kept Nobody’s Boy and Oliver Twist under my pillow—but they weren’t any comfort. I even envied the main characters. They were desperate, but so too were all the characters around them. So they never felt themselves to be different in the way I did when I ended up in a Catholic secondary school for boys full of kids from families much better off than mine.
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    I needed the presence of someone like my primary school teacher—and instead I got Father Skullhead.
    His nickname came from the bone-chilling shape of his skull. The religious order to which he belonged had demonstrated the wisdom it had accumulated over the centuries by packing him off to Libya from where, following Qaddafi’s purges of the Italian community, he escaped back to Italy in order to purge me. Whenever I rebelled against some tyrannical exercise of power—and everything seemed tyrannical to me—his hard, square knuckles would come down on the nape of my neck. Baring his gums like Mita, he would hiss, “I know you don’t like me . . .”
    It was true: I didn’t like him. I was the antihero in a novel Dickens had never had the guts to write: the story of a little boy’s life in which all the women around him are inexplicably removed so he is forced to grow up with a dried-up nanny and a priest who liked walloping boys round the head.
    Dad had enrolled me in a private school because it was the only one he could find which would keep me incarcerated until the evening, so that he didn’t have to bother himself about me while he was at work. It was an advantage not to have to see Mita in daylight, but there was a price to pay: the evening meal in the school canteen.
    This is how I picture to myself the seventh circle of Hell: a gloomy rectangular hall smelling of unwashed feet, where a serving assistant not overly conversant with therules of personal hygiene plonks potato croquettes down in the dishes with his bare hands; somewhere in the dark background outsized pans bubble away with a potion which has the magic powers of making hungry little boys willingly decide to fast.
    The lids were taken off the pans and a new fragrance wafted through the room: the good old smell of unwashed feet was replaced by a filthy stink of rotting cheese. As the content of the pans was ladled into the tureens, Father Skullhead presided over the supreme rite by intoning the prayer with which we gave thanks to the Lord for our daily slops—risotto with chicken