9.

On my way home, I decided to put in half an hour on my punching bag. The idea, as always, made me slightly giddy. I think it might be interesting for a skilled psychologist to spend some time studying my relationship with the heavy bag. Obviously, I punch it a lot. But before I get started, in the pauses between rounds, and especially afterward, perhaps while drinking a cold beer or a glass of wine, I talk to it.

This began when Margherita left for New York, and it got more serious when she wrote to say that she wasn’t planning to come back to Italy. That letter—a genuine letter on paper, not an e-mail—certified what I already knew: It was over between us, and she now had another life, in another city, in another world. That left me with the crumbs of our old life, in our old city, in our old world. In the months that followed, what I talked about most of all to him—to the punching bag, I mean—was Margherita and the other women I’ve loved. Three in all.

“You know, friend, what strikes me as especially sad?”

“—”

“I no longer remember the devastating feeling that I experienced, albeit differently, with Tiziana, Margherita, and Sara. I just can’t seem to remember it. I know I felt it, but I have to work to convince myself of that, because I have no memory of it. It’s gone.”

Mister Bag swung from side to side, and I understood he wanted an explanation. I probably hadn’t described it well. What did I mean when I said that I couldn’t remember that devastating feeling?

“Maybe you know that song by Fabrizio De André, ‘The Song of Lost Love.’ You remember that verse that goes, ‘Nothing’s left but a few halfhearted caresses and a little tenderness’?

“—”

“Okay, you don’t know it. Well, you might not recognize the words, but you’ve definitely heard the song. There was a time when I played it a lot. Yeah, I know, it’s a little pathetic. After all, you’re the only one I talk to about it. Anyway, I want to tell you something, but you have to promise to keep it to yourself.”

“—”

“You’re right, sorry. No one can keep a secret like you. You know how sometimes I feel like crying?”

“—”

“Sure, I’ll tell you why. Because I actually feel the need to talk about it. I feel like crying when I realize that the memory of the women I loved doesn’t make me suffer. The worst it does is give me a sort of vague, feeble, distant sadness. It’s so nothing. It’s like a puddle of stagnant water.”

“—”

“Okay, I admit, that’s not much of a metaphor. And you’re right, I get lost in my own thoughts and don’t do a good job of explaining things. The reason I feel like crying is that everything seems drab, silent. Even my pain. My so-called emotional life is like a silent movie. I know that you’re not exactly the kind of guy who delves into subtleties, but I’m sad, and I feel like crying, because I can’t manage to get in touch with that sadness. That healthy sadness, the kind that makes your temples throb, that makes you feel alive. Not this flabby, miserable, soft thing. You understand?”

By this point in the conversation, Mister Bag was completely motionless. The last bit of swing from the punches he had so obligingly absorbed from his clearly unbalanced friend—me—had worn off, and he hung there, perfectly still. As if what I was telling him were so upsetting that it froze him. He was thinking, but it wasn’t his style to offer answers, opinions, or advice.

Still, believe it or not, after those conversations, so rife with psychiatric pathology—and after throwing a lot of punches, of course—I always felt better, and sometimes I even felt perfectly fine.

To tell the truth, Mister Bag is the perfect therapist. He listens and never interrupts. He never judges (at the very most, he might swing a little), and he never charges a fee. Plus, the transference problem is minimal: I feel a certain tenderness for him, but without any sexual implications. That’s why I’d never dream of replacing him. When he splits where I’ve been hitting particularly hard or insistently, I repair him with a length of duct tape. I really appreciate how it makes him look like a battle-scarred warrior, and I think that he’s grateful to me for not tossing him out and replacing him with some shiny new bag that has no significance.

I walked into the apartment, loosening my tie, and the first thing I did was put on a CD that I had burned for myself with twenty or so songs of all kinds. Two minutes later, I had taken off my trousers and shirt (still wearing my boxers, just to be clear), taped up my hands, and put on my gloves, and I was punching the bag.

I went for a first round of mild jabs, just a warm-up session. Light combinations of three or four punches with both hands, without follow-through. Jab, straight, left hook. Right hook, left hook, uppercut. Jab, jab, straight right. And so on, for the first three minutes, getting warmed up. Between rounds, I exchanged a few words with Mister Bag, but to tell the truth, that evening neither of us really felt much like talking. When I started the second round, I began putting a little more energy into my punches. The shuffle feature on my CD player brought up the intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana, which made me feel a lot like Robert De Niro in Raging Bull.

Sometimes when I’m punching the heavy bag with the right music and the right level of focus, unexpected memories pop out of nowhere. Doors swing open to show me scenes, sounds, noises, voices, and even smells that I’d long forgotten.

That evening, while I was pummeling Mister Bag, who patiently let me work on him, I remembered, as if I were screening a movie in my mind, my first fight as an amateur boxer, welterweight, classification novice.

I was just sixteen, tall, skinny, and scared to death. My opponent was shorter and more muscular than I was, with an acne-scarred face and the expression of a murderer. Or at least, that’s what he looked like to me. I had decided to become a boxer precisely to help me overcome my fear of guys like him. In the interminable minutes before the bout began, I thought—among many other things—that clearly the treatment wasn’t working. My legs were shaking, my breathing was labored, and I felt as if my arms were paralyzed. I thought I’d never be able to raise my arms to defend myself, much less to throw a punch. The terror became so intense that I even considered faking illness—falling to the floor and pretending to faint—just to keep from having to fight.

But when the bell rang, I stood up and walked out to fight. And that’s when a strange thing happened.

His fists didn’t hurt me. They pummeled my helmet and especially my body, since he was shorter than I was, and he was doing everything he could to make up for it. With every punch he threw, he exhaled with a guttural grunt, as if he were trying to deliver the final haymaker. But his punches were slow, feeble, and harmless—and they didn’t hurt. I kept moving around him, trying to take advantage of my reach, and I kept tapping him with my left.

In the third round, he got mad. Maybe his trainer told him he was losing the match, or maybe he figured it out on his own. In any case, when the bell rang he lunged at me furiously, frantically windmilling his arms. My right-cross counter-punch shot out and caught him in the head, without my quite realizing what I’d done. I still can’t remember it exactly. What I do remember—or more likely what I think I remember—is a sort of film still, an image from the moment a fraction of a second after the punch connected and before he dropped to the canvas, in just as sprawling and disorderly a fashion as he had come windmilling and lunging toward me in the first place.

In amateur boxing, it’s a rare thing to knock down your opponent, and a knockout is even rarer. It’s an event, and everyone knows it. When I saw my opponent flat on his back, a rush of heat and savage joy rose from my hips all the way to the nape of my neck.

The referee ordered me into my corner, and he began the count. The other guy got to his feet almost immediately, raising both gloves to show that he could continue the fight. And in fact, the fight resumed, but it was already over. At that point, I had an unbeatable lead, and if my acne-scarred opponent wanted to win, he was going to have to knock me out for the full count. He wasn’t up to that. I kept on circling around him, easily staying out of reach of his lunges and attacks, which were increasingly feeble and frantic, and I kept tapping him with my left until the bell rang, ending the round and the match.

That night, I didn’t get a wink of sleep. I was still a child and that was why I knew, as I would at few other times in my life, what it meant to feel like a man.

I stopped punching. I stood there, face-to-face with Mister Bag, trying to regain control of my breathing, feeling the violent throbbing in my temples, as a desperate, fondness for the man-child I’d been, lying awake in the darkness, wrapped in my blanket, looking forward to what was yet to come, swept over me.

When the swaying of the bag and my own breathing slowed, I shook myself out of that trance.

Nico and the Velvet Underground were singing “I’ll Be Your Mirror.”

“Okay, Mister Bag, I’m going to go take a shower and then I’m going to sleep. I hope. Anyway, it’s always a pleasure to spend a little time with you.”

He nodded, swinging, understanding. He loved me, too, in spite of everything.