Pietro Grossi - Fists

LET’S GET THIS STRAIGHT: I really liked the whole boxing thing.

I don’t know what it was, whether it was the sense of security or the awareness that I was doing something the way it should be done. Maybe both, maybe also the terrific feeling that there was a place where I had what it takes, where I could fight on equal terms.

There was a logic about it. You couldn’t escape it, neither you nor anyone else; you knew who you were fighting, it was always a single person, he weighed as much as you did, and if he beat you that meant he was either better than you or more experienced, and in both cases all you could do was learn from your defeat. I know it seems absurd, but the fact is, you end up going to a place where everyone fights because you feel more secure there.

There was also the fact that I was good at it. It must have been all those videos of Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Robinson my dad used to watch when I was little, but when I walked into that hangar-like building for the first time and saw that patched-together ring, which was only standing by a miracle, I imagined myself up there skipping about like Ali and firing off jabs like arrows.

I don’t know, maybe if you convince yourself of something, in the end you get it. The fact is, that’s how I learnt to fight: I would skip around my opponent and torment him like a mosquito with those straight punches as precise and quick and sharp as strokes of a lash. Let’s be honest: I didn’t have a boxer’s body, I didn’t look very promising. I was skinny, with a long, straight neck, slender wrists, thin legs and bony knees. I looked like a branch hurriedly stripped of its twigs. But I got up there, hunched my shoulders, raised my guard, started hopping backwards and forwards, and it was as if I was getting ready to fly. Sometimes I thought I heard Beethoven, a piano sonata maybe, and I had the feeling I was inside that deaf bastard’s notes, landing straight punches to the rhythm of the music.

It was my mother who had forced me to learn the piano. She made me take lessons from a filthy old woman whose breath stank and who scattered dandruff like confetti.

That was how I started boxing. I was the perfect son — studious, nerdy, conventional, obedient, who went to bed early and who, if you asked him, even said his prayers before going to sleep. But he didn’t want to play the piano. I hated the piano. I hated Mozart and Bach and that deaf freak Beethoven and that stinky old woman, Signora Poli. The only one I could swallow a bit was Rachmaninov, because the music always sounded angry and because it was so hard to play.

One day, I told my mother I hated the piano. Music was fundamental, she said, it gave you discipline. Discipline. Why discipline? I was the most disciplined child in the world. I was so disciplined, I’d almost vanished from the face of the earth.

My mother looked at me and told me not to talk nonsense, music was important. It was a tricky situation.

“Then I also want to learn to box.”

“What?”

“If I play the piano I also want to learn to box.”

“To box?”

“That’s right, to box.”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” my mother said, trying to cut the conversation short.

“I want to learn to box.”

“The word want doesn’t cut any ice with me.”

It was the first time I had dug my heels in with my mother, and half-of-me felt strangely excited, as if I had suddenly woken up and landed a left-right in the sixth round of a tough fight. The other half-of-me wanted to cry.

“I want to learn to box.” Right hook to the face.

“Let’s not even talk about it. Discussion closed.”

End of round. Saved by the bell.

But I’d woken up, I’d raised my head high. For once, the nice, disciplined little boy was fighting for something. It was a difficult fight; one of those exhausting fifteen-round matches. I stopped studying, kept my mouth shut for two oral tests in a row, stopped speaking and playing the piano. Three times Signora Poli had to give up after trying for ten minutes to make me play or speak. She had even convinced herself to feel sorry for me. I went a whole week without speaking. No one knew what to do; they were ready to send me to a shrink, when one evening my mother suddenly came into my bedroom and told me she’d talked to my father, and that if I wanted I could try boxing.

“Good,” I said. “I’ll enrol at the gym tomorrow.”

It was my first victory: a technical knockout in the fourteenth round, prepared with skill and patience. Maybe I would have won on points anyway. I don’t know, my mother has always been a bit of a pain.

When I enrolled, a couple of boys started laughing, and Gustavo, a thin old guy with a voice like a black jazzman, asked me to bring certificates and authorisation from my parents, statements absolving the gym of responsibility and five thousand lire for the registration fee.

Six months later, I was dancing in that ring like a ballerina and scattering straight lefts like summer hailstones. It was undeniable: even though no one had ever seen a boxer with a more unsuitable body, it was if I was born to be up there. And since I’d started training, my piano playing had improved, too, and I was even starting to like that bastard Beethoven. I don’t know what happened to me up there, but suddenly the noises, the shouts and the smells would disappear, the world around me would disappear and all I saw was my opponent, who suddenly seemed almost to be moving in slow motion, all I heard was my own heartbeat, as clear and regular as a steam train. Only my heartbeat and the tired eyes of the poor guy in front of me.

Left. Left. Turn, skip. Left. Left. Left right left. Turn. Parry. Parry. Left. Parry. Left right left. Left. Turn. Turn. Skip. Sharp right and left hook. Bell.

I was a pleasure to watch. Gustavo showed me off to everyone as if I was a new car.

“Try to guess how much he weighs,” he would ask people who didn’t know me, his eyes all lit up like a boy’s, as if he was asking them about his car. “Try to guess how many kilometres to the litre.”

“I don’t know, sixty-six kilos, maybe sixty-seven?” they would usually say.

Gustavo would give one of his black jazzman’s half-laughs. “Sixty-three and a half,” he would say. “A junior welterweight.”

Then he would send me into the ring and tell me to go one round. While I was up there, dancing, he would nudge that friend of his who had never seen me and smile.

“My dear Giorgi,” I heard him say once to a guy in a long wet raincoat, “we’re going to get this one to the Olympics.”

“Why not let him turn pro?” the other man asked.

“That nose doesn’t deserve it,” Gustavo replied.

I do in fact have quite a nice nose. It stands out like a smooth, well-drawn little mountain on that hollow, lopsided face of mine, looking as if it’s been removed from someone else’s face and stuck there — but, although it doesn’t really fit, it seems to give some kind of order to the rest.

I don’t know why Gustavo had convinced himself that if I stayed an amateur my nose would be saved, as if amateurs threw fewer punches. The fact is that, when he told that guy Giorgi that he would take me to the Olympics, I hadn’t had a single fight.

I was a kind of legend. They talked about me in all the gyms. They called me the Dancer. Quite often, some boxer shooting his mouth off, who might not even have seen me, would actually call me the Ballerina. It was said I was the best, the strongest, and that I didn’t fight because I knew I’d already won. They said a whole lot of things, and people went crazy talking about me. The trainers cursed because I could have taken gold for Italy at the Olympics but wasn’t interested; the local toughs talked about me on the streets without even having seen me, and the boxers, when they weren’t shooting their mouths off, were grateful that I didn’t fight and hoped I would carry on like that.