My grandfather took me along to a gym after seeing me come home with my face swollen from the beating it had taken. Administered by a fellow bigger – and nastier – than me.

I was fourteen then, very skinny, with a nose red and shiny from acne. I was in the fourth form at grammar school, and was perfectly convinced that there was no such thing as happiness. For me, at any rate.

The gym was in a damp basement. The instructor was a lean man approaching seventy, with arms still lean and muscular and a face like Buster Keaton’s. He was a friend of my grandfather.

I have a precise recollection of the moment we entered it, at the foot of some narrow, ill-lit steps. There was not a voice to be heard, only the dull thud of fists hitting the punch bag, the rap of skipping ropes, the rhythm of the punch ball. There was a smell I can’t describe, but it is there in my nostrils now, as I write, and a thrill runs through me.

That I was going in for boxing was long kept secret from my mother. She only learned it when, at the age of seventeen and a half, I won the welterweight silver medal in the regional junior championships.

My grandfather, however, never got to see me on that pasteboard podium.

Three months previously he had been walking through a pine wood with his Alsatian when at a certain moment he stopped and calmly sat down on a bench.

A lad who was nearby reported that, after stroking the dog, he had leaned his head on the back of the bench in an unusual fashion.

The carabinieri had to shoot the dog before they could approach the body and identify him as Guido Guerrieri, former Professor of Medieval Philosophy.

My grandfather.

I won other medals after those regional championships. Even a bronze as a middleweight in the Italian university championships.

I never had a deadly punch, but I’d acquired a good technique, and I was tall and lean, with a longer reach than others at my weight.

Shortly before I took my degree I gave it up, because boxing is something you can keep up for long only if you are a champion, or if you have something to prove.

I was not a champion and it seemed to me I had already proved what I had to prove.

Having decided to get along without modern psychiatry, I searched my mind for some alternative. And I found what I needed was a spot of fisticuffs.

Thinking it over, I realized that it had been one of the few solid things in my life. The smell of glove leather, the punches given and taken, the hot shower afterwards, when you discovered that for two whole hours not a single thought had passed through your head.

The fear as you were walking towards the ring, the fear behind your expressionless eyes, behind the expressionless eyes of your opponent. Dancing, jumping, trying to dodge, giving and taking ’em, with arms so weary you can’t keep your guard up, breathing through your mouth, praying it’ll end because you can’t take it any longer, wanting to punch but being unable to, thinking you don’t care whether you win or lose as long as it ends, thinking you want to throw yourself on the ground but you don’t, and you don’t know what’s keeping you on your feet or why and then the bell rings and you think you’ve lost and you don’t care and then the referee raises your arm and you realize you’ve won and nothing exists at that moment, nothing exists but that moment. No one can take it away from you. Never ever.

I searched for a gym that catered for boxing. The old basement of nearly twenty-five years before was long gone. The instructor was dead. I consulted the Yellow Pages and saw that the city was full of gyms for the martial arts of Japan, Thailand, Korea, China and even Vietnam. The choice was vast: judo, ju-jitsu, aikido, karate, Thai boxing, taekwondo, tai chi chuan, wing chun, kendo, viet vo dao.

Boxing seemed to have simply vanished, but I didn’t give up. I rang the local office of the Olympic Committee and asked if there were any gyms in Bari that did boxing. The chap at the other end was very efficient and helpful. Yes, there were two boxing clubs in Bari, one near the new stadium, housed by the council, and the other, which used the gym of a secondary school just round the corner from where I lived.

I went to take a look at it and found that the instructor was an acquaintance of mine from the old gym. Pino. But to remember his surname was obviously beyond me. He had started at the basement shortly before I gave up. He was a heavyweight with not much technique but really powerful fists. He’d even had a few bouts as a professional, without great success. Now he had a number of occupations: boxing instructor, bouncer in discothèques, head of security at rock concerts, mass events, festivals and the like.

He was glad to see me, and of course I could sign up, I was his guest, he wouldn’t hear of my paying. And in any case a lawyer might always come in useful.

In short, starting the following week, every Monday and Thursday I left the office at half-past six, by seven I was in the gym, and for nearly two hours I was boxing away.

This made me feel a little better. Not what you might call well, but a little better. I skipped, did the knee-bends, abdominal exercises, punched the punchbag, and fought a few rounds with lads twenty years younger than myself.

Some nights I managed to get some sleep on my own, without pills. Others not.

Sometimes I even managed to sleep for five or six hours at a stretch.

Some evenings I went out with friends and felt almost relaxed.

I still burst into tears, but less often, and in any case I managed to keep it under control.

I went on not taking the lift, but this wasn’t a great problem and nobody noticed anyway.

I passed almost unscathed through the Christmas holidays, even if one day, perhaps the 29th or 30th, I saw Sara in the street in the middle of town. She was with a woman friend and a man I had never seen. He could well have been the friend’s fiancé, or her uncle, or a gay as far as I knew. All the same, I was convinced at once that he was Sara’s new boyfriend.

We waved to each other from opposite pavements. I went on another step or so and then realized that I was holding my breath. My diaphragm was obstructed. I felt something, something hot, rising up in me to spread across my whole face, into the roots of my hair. My mind was a blank for several minutes.

I had trouble breathing for the rest of the day and got no sleep that night.

Then even that passed.

After the Christmas holidays I started working again, at least a little. I recognized the catastrophe that was threatening my practice and above all my unsuspecting clients and, ploddingly, I attempted to regain a modicum of control over the situation.

I began once more to prepare for trials, began to listen – a little – to what my clients were saying, I began to listen to what my secretary was saying.

Slowly, in jerks, like a worn-out jalopy, my life began to get moving again.