My father wasn't a saint.
He wasn't a good man.
He was an asshole.
An alcoholic, cynical, greedy, violent and opportunistic.
But he was my father.
Not especially handsome, but women fell at his feet all the same because he was terribly sexy.
Magnetic.
His gaze was his best weapon.
He was never there in my life.
He never gave a fuck about a rhythmic gymnastics performance of mine, my first communion, or whether I was performing in an operetta reviewed in Corriere della Sera.
My father simply wasn't there.
And that's why I can remember precisely that once he took me to the gym and another time to the amusement park, with my middle-school classmates, who kept asking me whether he was an idiot because of the strange way he spoke.
After all, it was hard for a group of eleven-year-olds to understand that he was simply a drunk man.
I'll spare you the bad memories.
He was my father.
And honestly, I never accepted him for who he was until all I could do was regret that lost opportunity.
He spoke 5 languages +1, because, let's be honest, I always suspected that when he made his case in Arabic he was just taking the piss out of me.
But despite everything...the greatest lesson I've always carried with me came from him.
"Learn languages and you'll be a citizen of the world, learn languages and you'll be free."
Not the obvious meaning of what he said, but its exact opposite.
Freedom is within us, not in what we do.
Nothing that happens to us can truly control us unless we let it.
And so...he traveled the world, possessed every woman he desired, had all the money anyone could ever spend in a lifetime, two beautiful daughters...but he was never able to be happy.
Because he wasn't free from himself.
He was a slave.
A slave to his desire for freedom.
And he spent his life in the vain attempt to attain something he simply already had.
But it's only when you have something you're able to give that no one can take it away from you anymore.
They can steal what you have, not who you are.
And only those who identify with what they have rather than who they are truly feel robbed.
And I, who had never been able to have that man as the father I wanted, was for years only able to find him in the little things he had given me in his rare moments of sober clarity.
Losing those objects meant losing everything.
Actually losing them meant rediscovering the meaning of what they represented.
A man, his flaws and what, despite himself, those flaws taught me.
Something no one will ever be able to take away from me, not even the greatest thief.