This morning I woke Daniele while he was still warm with sleep, the warmth only small children have when you lift them out of bed and for a moment they don’t quite know where they are. Then I rushed off on my bike to get to work. Nothing special, the same morning as always. I had Avrai, by Claudio Baglioni, in my ears, and I let it play while I pedalled down the road I take every day without looking at it anymore.
Avrai is a song a father writes for a child who has just arrived in the world. It tells no particular story; it does something harder. It tries to say in advance everything that child will meet, the good things and the crooked ones, and to promise them the way you promise something that doesn’t really depend on you. It is a father leaning out over the future of a person who has only just begun to breathe, telling them, in essence, I will be here. A promise no one can fully keep, and one that matters precisely for that reason.
While I was listening to it, for the umpteenth time in twenty years, something happened that had never happened before. I realised I already knew that song before I heard it. Its meaning, I mean, not its words. My father had handed it to me a long time ago, and he had done so without writing it and without ever telling me, not once in his whole life, that he loved me.
My father never said the tender things. He did them, and that was all. His whole life he spoke a single language, the language of gestures, and the sentences other fathers allow themselves now and then, the ones you say and then forget, he always skipped. Not out of coldness. Out of a kind of old-fashioned reticence, I think, the idea that certain things spoil when they are said out loud, and that the only serious way to love someone is to show up. To be there early in the morning and late at night. To do the hard work and never name it.
Because this is the part that now, as a father myself, I am beginning to see for the first time. My father had almost none of what I have had. He didn’t have the education I have had, and he didn’t have the room, or the freedom to fail knowing there would be a second chance to get back on his feet. Life set itself in front of him narrow, and inside that narrow life he built a wide one for me. He put me through school, he left me free to try roads that had never even been shown to him. And the hardest thing was not doing all that work. Work gets done; you grit your teeth and you do it. The hard thing, the one I now don’t even know how to thank him for, was never letting me feel its weight. Never telling me anything. Letting me grow up with the idea that it was all natural and owed, when it was nothing like simple.
He didn’t teach me to talk about love. He taught me what it is, and he did it in the riskiest way there is, by letting me see it and trusting that sooner or later I would work it out on my own. It took me forty years and a child of my own. But I understood.
There would be plenty of examples to tell, but those will stay between him and me (and Mum).
There is something no one tells you beforehand, which is that becoming a father doesn’t first teach you to be a father. It teaches you to read your own. Every night spent awake, every sacrifice made without telling anyone, none of it do you really understand until you are the one, on the other side, who has to do it. And when you begin to do it you look back, you see your father who did it for years in silence, for you, and a kind of vertigo takes hold of you.
Daniele is three. He is blond, the image of his mother, and he carries a serenity that some mornings moves me without warning, while I tie his shoes or watch him eat, convinced the world is a good place. He is serene in a way that doesn’t belong to me, and for that very reason I look at him the way you look at something almost miraculous. Of my own character, though, he has taken plenty. I see it in the details, in how he gets angry and how he loses himself inside a thing until he forgets everything else.
And here is the part that frightens me, and I might as well say it. Along with the things of mine I would like to leave him, there is the one I have always fought, that weight that every so often sits down on my chest without asking permission. Depression isn’t something you choose, and it isn’t something you talk about willingly, least of all here. And sometimes I am afraid I have passed it to him in the blood, along with other traits of character.
You might think the best thing I can do for him, then, is to keep it all inside, the way my father did, and let him see nothing. But that is not what I want, and it is not the real lesson my father taught either. His lesson was not to hide the pain. It was to choose, every single day, what to let reach a child. Who knows what he carried inside; he never told me and I will never ask him. Of all that world in there, only the good reached me, because every day he decided that the good was what would reach me. Maybe being a father is all here, in this stubborn daily sorting. You are not without shadows. You only decide which shadows not to let fall on your children.
My father has become a little old man now. I say it with tenderness, not sadness. He has grown a bit smaller and a bit slower (though still faster than the rest of us), and the rock he has always been for me is still there, only now it is a delicate rock. He doesn’t raise his voice, he never has, and he goes on speaking the only language he knows, the language of deeds, even now that the deeds he can still do are smaller and rarer. There is something unbearably sweet in watching the strongest person in your life grow more fragile and remain, underneath the fragility, exactly the same as ever.
This post I probably won’t read to him. It isn’t our way, and forcing it would betray the very thing he taught me. But I am writing it anyway, and I am putting it here, where I usually talk about other things, about code and European rules, so that the education and the words he never had, and gave to me instead, serve at least for this. To say, once, out loud, the thing he taught me without ever saying it. I love him. Deeply, and always have, even when I didn’t know it.
And with Daniele I will try to let it reach him the same way, because it is the right way, the one that actually works. In deeds, first of all. Being there in the morning when I wake him and in the evening when I come home, and doing the hard work without telling him about it. But unlike my father, every now and then, I also want to say it to him. I want him to feel it in the gestures and, every so often, to feel it in words too, so that he doesn’t have to wait forty years and a song heard on a bike to understand something that was there all along. Because maybe, and I hope so, he will be different from me, and better than me.
May it be so.
❤️