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We never spoke about Mom, even when we visited the cemetery, where Dad preferred to focus on practical matters: buying artificial flowers because they lasted longer, wheeling the mobile steps to the appropriate vertical row of burial niches and climb up to the topmost one, where the photograph of the departed smiled out, making sure not to spill waterfrom the vase (but what was the point of the water if the flowers were artificial?), then climbing back down again and wheeling the steps back to the exact spot from which he’d moved them.
    We then stood there gazing upwards without speaking for a few minutes, before returning home to enjoy the rest of the holiday—my father in one room, me in another, and Mita in between watching television. At Christmas we turned down My Uncle’s invitations—after all “we didn’t need anyone’s help”—both to dinner on Christmas Eve and lunch on Christmas Day. We didn’t even need to find a separate set of excuses.
    The football schedule took a break over the New Year, so we needed to find another way to while away the time. Dad was struck by the bright idea of going on a package holiday to India—from New Delhi to Benares, the holy city on the banks of the Ganges with its famous steps going down into the river, crowded with all the earth’s outcasts. With our arrival, they could at last put up the “Fully Booked” sign.
    There were lots of mothers in the holiday-tour group. Everywhere we went you’d hear their anxious instructions: don’t touch this, don’t go near that animal, stay clear of those beggars. Dad did his best to copy them, but he just didn’t have their sharp eye or tenacity. Theresult was I always ended up in scrapes. I was probably the envy of the other boys on the tour.
    I wish I could say I brought back some glimmers of spirituality from this pilgrimage of a widower and an orphan to the land of mysticism—but the only snapshots in my mental travel album consist of a series of humiliations, all of them profane.
    Dad offering to buy a round of drinks for the waiters in the hotel—it was New Year’s Eve—wherewith a party of high-caste Brahmins got up and left the room, giving us dirty looks on the way out.
    Dad in a pink turban like some fake maharajah clambering up onto an elephant while I, dying from embarrassment, hid behind the column of a Hindu temple.
    One of Dad’s friends turning on a compatriot of Astérix who had managed to stab him in the hand with a fork in the daily scramble for the buffet and declaring in Franglais: “Vous, français, très rude. Je suis proud to be italien!”
    Dad, again—I came across him in the hotel corridor planting noisy kisses on the cheeks of one of the women in the holiday group. She was blond and her short legs clothed in leopard tights poked out from her skirt like a pair of pythons.
    At the time I pretended I hadn’t seen anything, but as soon as we got home I wrote him a twenty-page letter—the gist of which was contained in the concluding sentence: “If you marry another Mommy, I’ll leave home forever.”
    I didn’t get a reply. But the python woman disappeared into the jungle, never to return.

real life had shown itself to be a bloodthirsty tyrant

thirteen
    Real life had shown itself to be a bloodthirsty tyrant, so I asked for political asylum in the land of fantasy.
    The sitting-room walls echoed with my radio football commentaries, improvised aloud while I flicked against their surface a blue headscarf with white spots that had belonged to my mother.
    The flick produced a dry little noise, which led My Uncle to call the game tick-tock . He was the only person I’d initiated into the workings of this strange ritual enacted behind the closed doors of the sitting room.
    As soon as I took hold of the miraculous scarf, my mind’s eye would fill with pictures of a footballer who had my name