The Book of Good Nights. Unknown author.

This is the story of how my grandfather found his bedtime story.

Grandpa and I look a lot alike. We have, for example, the same blue eyes, and the same chin dimple. But what makes us so similar is sharing an extraordinarily long and varied list of fears. We are not just afraid of the dark, of spiders, of monsters in the closet, of walking down a hallway on our own. My grandfather and I are afraid to lean on the elevator mirror because we are convinced we can walk through it and plummet to the bottom. We tighten our eyelids so as not to cross the light of a stand-by LED on the TV or stereo. Before we wear a shirt we need someone to check it inside.

The most painful fear, however, is perhaps that of books. Closed, we can hold them in our hands, admire them; but we cannot leaf through them. We don't know what might be hiding on each page.

When he was a child, my grandfather lived in a huge, falling-down house. No wonder he was convinced that it was inhabited by ghosts. In most of the rooms, no one practically ever set foot. A slight breeze was enough to make undetectable parts creak. At night, mice scampered in the attic, the basement and, God forbid, the kitchen.

In the house there was a room, large, bright, immersed in an unusual silence. Grandpa entered it, one summer afternoon, while everyone was taking a nap. His hands were cold and clammy, his heart like a rabbit caught in a trap. Yet he was curious. In the room, only a table placed in the center, of light wood, and a chair that had once been comfortable. On the walls, up to the ceiling, everywhere, books. Books of every size, color, age, type of dust. Books that seemed to confabulate with each other, hiding within them entire universes in which it was possible and easy to get lost forever.

Since that afternoon, my grandfather, every day entered that room. He would stand in the center, not touching anything, in perfect silence. And he was certain that he could hear the voices of the books. He could not understand their language, but he interpreted their tone, their mood.

When Grandpa had to go to bed at night and his mother would come up with a book of fairy tales, he would curl up under the covers, listening with trepidation. He pretended to fall asleep, but as soon as his mother left the room, he clung to his teddy bear and repeated the story he had just told in order to be sure that it was always the same, that it did not change in his memory, reserving unwelcome surprises during the night. He only fell asleep when his little head was so tired that it mixed all the thoughts of the day into a single mush that resembled ice cream held in the sun.

In order to learn to read and write, Grandpa had to have the pages of books and notebooks ripped out and scattered across the table so that he could embrace them all in one glance.

One night an unprecedented thunderstorm broke out. Lightning was falling near the house. The windows all looked like they were about to explode. At some point, inevitably, there was a power outage.

Grandpa started screaming until his mother came over to hug him and calm him down. Then, they both headed to the book room where candles were kept.

It was on that occasion that my grandfather noticed, on the first shelf of one of the bookcases, a special book. Special in his eyes, special for no apparent reason. The spine of the book was blue and in silver was written: The Book of Good Nights. Unknown author. Grandpa didn't take courage, simply a force similar to fear but which acted in reverse, making him move instead of paralyzing him, pushed him to touch the book, to take it in his hand, to open it.

But the book wasn't a book, it was just its cardboard container, like the ones used to hold together the volumes of a long novel, or a synthetic encyclopedia for kids.

Grandpa was amazed, and at the same time happy. There were no mysteries in that book other than the cover. And that’s when he started writing bedtime stories. He wrote them on little sheets collected here and there, which he then rolled up and kept inside the book's case. And with each fairy tale his heart lightened a little.

I wrote this short story. I crumpled up the paper and deposited it in the blue container with the silver lettering. Tonight my little girl will find it. And it will be another bedtime story.