The Christmas Carol of a Real Son of a Beatnik

IMAGINE A NINE-MONTH-OLD BABY IN A NORTHERN Italian town in the mid-1960s. He was born in March across the Alps, in Switzerland, because his 26-year-old father was graduat­ing in architecture at the University of Geneva. There had been no time to christen the boy, and perhaps no intention. His parents saw themselves as beatniks, in that phase of life, people who sub­scribed to an anti-materialistic lifestyle. Sort of. They were living in the international dormitory of the university with already two daughters to take care of.

The baby would find out only later what beatniks were, looking at the photographs of those days—his young father donning a black turtleneck sweater, holding a small cigar in one hand, a drink in the other, wearing with swagger a bowler hat and sneering at someone with what was most likely considered beat generation disdain. They rejected conformity—that was the main point.

One of the baby’s sisters was also born in Geneva two years before. And she wasn’t christened either. They didn’t even give her a Christian name. When the baby’s mother found out she was going to give birth to a girl, the father pinned a request on the bulletin board in the dorm’s hallway: “Please help with suggestions for a girl’s name!” It so happens that there were a few students from India in that international dormitory in Geneva, in the mid-1960s. This is how his sister was named after the concept of illusion in Sanskrit.

The baby boy was given the name of his grandfather, who had passed away four years before after a life spent running a pharmacy; being mayor of the small town the baby soon would move to; fighting in World War I, participating in the invasion of Ethiopia and also in World War II—a heavy legacy to carry.

But the baby had no idea about that. He didn’t realise yet what his name was. He didn’t know how to speak, as he was living in that early aquatic life without the complication of words. He marvelled at lights and colours and sounds and the wind and people’s faces. That’s all he cared about.

He was too young to realise that he was being christened with champagne at the international students’ dormitory’s party with Polish counts, Croatian exiles, Nigerian princes, Pakistani and Indian students.

Those Swiss days didn’t last long. The baby’s father was about to get his de­gree, and the family moved back to the valley near the Dolomites where the baby was to spend his youth. Unbaptised.

His mother decided to keep this detail hidden. The region where they lived was considered the most Catholic region of one of the most Catholic countries at the time. A country which nestled another small nation called Vatican City. Funnily enough it was called a city, but it was a country in its own right. And the head of state of that country was actually the spiritual leader of millions of people who lived around the world: they called him the Pope.

The Pope had people representing him all over the globe. Even in the baby’s town there was a representative of the Pope. It was called: a priest. He came knocking at the door of the baby’s house after hearing the child was born in a country that was both Catholic and Protestant, a different blend of the same religion of Christianity. He wanted to know if the baby had been baptised in the right religion.

The mother decided to lie to him: Yes, we’ve baptised him in Geneva, she said.

The priest was used to hearing people lie during confession. And the mother was not a great liar, anyway. Something made the priest doubt the accuracy of the answer he was given.

Two weeks later, he returned to that house in the main street of the town in the valley in the Dolomites. He walked up the dark marble staircase to the second floor, knocked and said: we’ve checked with every parish in Geneva, there’s no record of your baby being baptised. The mother got irritated at the priest and chased him out of the house.

For his first Christmas, the boy was bun­dled in woollen blankets and recruited to act as Baby Jesus, while his older sister dressed as Mother Mary and his other sister—named after illusion—drew a beard and moustache on her face to look like Father Joseph. In the photograph, his eyes are staring in premature disbelief at being manipulated by the people he cared about.

As the baby became a child and started to go to school, he realised he was treated differently from every­one else. He was not invited to attend Sunday School at the Church, and he was not going to Mass on Sundays. All this be­cause he was not christened.

All his friends were envious of him because of this. They said they were bored stiff of having to go to Church every week and wished so much to have a family like his. Beat­niks. His beatnik family went skiing on Sun­day morning instead of attending mass.

When the boy went to middle school, he was asked by one of his schoolmates if he’d join the summer camp during the month of August up in the mountains, a few hours’ drive from their town. They would sleep in bunk beds inside green tents surrounded by a forest perched on the side of a peak. There was foosball, ping-pong, lots of hikes, and they would go and play football very often.

It will be fun, his friend said. But it was run by a priest. It turned out, however, that this priest was the same one who had celebrated the wedding of the boy’s parents. What the boy didn’t know and would find out only de­cades later was that the priest had to take a bus and travel near a bigger town, a city where a more important representative of the Pope lived, called a bishop, just like in the game of chess.

The bishop did not want a boy who had not been baptised to mingle with Catholic boys. But the priest was very convinc­ing. He was a modern priest. His masses were accompanied with guitars and soft rock songs. He was the reason the camp was fun. So, the priest persuaded the bishop, and the boy spent three summers of pure fun with his Catholic friends.

ALTHOUGH HIS PARENTS HAD told him that it would be up to him to decide if he wanted to be christened once he was old enough, the boy found it hard to be­lieve in the concept of God. From all he was read­ing, including the Bible, he felt that it would be impossible not to become a monk if one believed in such an incredible thing as the God described in that holy text. But he couldn’t feel that belief.

He had long conversations with the priest who taught Catholic religion in the public school he attended. But the boy was never able to abandon his logical thinking in order to embrace what was called faith.

The beatnik father was somewhat uncer­tain of his own beliefs. At one point he wor­shiped the Greek gods, he said. Zeus, Jupiter, Athena. Then he was meditating with the method of the Zen Buddhists he’d met in Japan. Then he liked Catholics again. So, when a little brother was born in the family, a few years later, the new baby was actually baptised. That little brother grew up studying in Jesuit institutions all the way to his PhD.

At any rate, everyone did as they pleased in that family, when it came to what you wanted to believe in. They were beatniks, after all. But every time Christmas came around, the boy’s family did celebrate it.

The mother said that for her it was the celebration of the concept of family, not of a god. It didn’t have much to do with Christ, for her. Turns out, in the 1920s her own father had a very unpleasant encounter with a perverted priest in a school of that snowy valley. Which explained a lot of things about the mother’s harsh feeling for the Church, the Pope, the bishop, and the priest.

Father Christmas was definitely loved by the boy and his sisters. He brought gifts. He seemed like a nice enough fellow with the best intentions. He was no priest. He was some fun guy from northern Europe. The boy didn’t know that technically Santa Claus came from what today we call Türkiye. But then again no one knew those sorts of things in those days before easily acces­sible digital information. They all thought he was Finnish, or Norwegian, or Swedish. A benign old white guy with an odd laugh. Sort of a retired Viking who liked to do technically impossible good deeds, like delivering gifts in one single night to every child in the world all at once. What today we would call a sort of super-Swiggy, magical Dunzo, a hyper-Uber Eats, a DHL on steroids, an omnipresent UPS. You get the idea.

Christmas Eve was when all the excitement happened. As usual, it is the anticipation of attaining what one desires that gives the most joy, much more than finally putting your claws on what you crave. It’s the imagination that counts, not getting your satisfaction.

The idea that a benevolent stranger would secretly be allowed into the house to deliver gifts sent electric waves of excitement down the spine of the siblings. The older sister even swore that one Christmas night she saw Santa park his sleigh, left hovering outside the window as the old benefactor hopped into the living room and swiftly and silently placed the gifts under the tree, before disappearing. It was impossible not to believe her, since her description was so detailed, and she sounded so excited about what she’d seen.

But that was not a really happy family, to tell the truth. The father was rest­less. He travelled a lot, more for pleasure than for business, enslaved by a sense of endless adventure that he needed to feed, financing it by squandering his inheritance. He was a beatnik after all.

Once he came home from his world travels and adventures, he’d be happy and cordial for the first day, and then unhappy, nervous, impatient. He was prone to end a discussion with a slap. Sometimes a punch or a kick. The chil­dren feared him. And loved him. And admired him. But mostly they feared him. That’s why for them Christmas was a fraught affair and yet at the same time filled with hope.

The fun part was preparing the nativity scene. When she married, barely 20- years-old, the mother had brought into her new home her own little nativity statuettes representing the farmers and shepherds of Palestine that had been hers when she was little, in her hometown 10km up the valley.

When she was a child, bombs kept dropping on her head, American bombs trying to smoke out the Nazis who had moved one of their headquarters into that remote valley. That’s why she’d have to shelter in an underground bunker with lots of terrified people, which explained why she was always very nervous in small elevators or in crowded small rooms. But she said that once the war was over, she had the best youth one could hope for.

It was the 1950s, a magical time for so many people if you weren’t a mi­nority in America, or anywhere else for that matter. So, she’d brought along to her husband’s house the little shepherds and farmers. It was to remind her of more innocent days. Many of them had brown skin, some black. They evoked a distant world, since at the time there were no brown people in their city, which today has 30 per cent of its population who have migrated there from Africa and Asia.

The siblings prepared the nativity scene, carefully distributing the statuettes along the freshly collected musk, making small voices to create dialogues be­tween them, at times irreverent and odd.

They always added a clay figure representing a marching soldier of the Italian mountain corps wearing a green beret with an eagle’s feather. It had been used in so many Christmases that its calves had been eroded by time. All you could see was the rusted iron wires, like bones holding up his marching thighs. The alpino soldier statuette reminded them of the soldier/pharmacist grandfather they’d never met. He looked odd with that warm green woollen uniform and those thick heavy boots marching alongside fake palm trees that were supposed to evoke ancient Palestine. Or a warm tropical place, at any rate.

The siblings invented new ornaments to put on the pine tree which spread its freshly cut scent all over the house. One of them had to climb on a ladder and put a real candle on top and the mother would then light it. In the streets, people were chanting carols that sounded both joyful and inspired.

Most of the fun was created by the shops. The windows were the most co­lourful of the whole year. Ev­erything smelled of the glue needed to put shining silver stars everywhere, the avenues were lit up with strings of lights shaped like comets, or Santa or reindeers.

But this family was a fam­ily of beatniks. So, there was nothing special to eat for Christmas dinner. Most fami­lies would be eating some type of fish, shrimp salads, and other delicacies. But the father decided otherwise. They wouldn’t be like the others, like the bourgeois. Oh, no, they would drink sweet hot chocolate milk dipped with a type of cake which magically appeared in the shops a month before Christmas.

It was, and still is, called panettone, which means simply “big ol’ loaf of bread”, and unless you’ve grown up chomping on it every Christmas you most likely will feel, while chewing its spongy chunks, that it is just that: a big ol’ loaf of bread. But to those who instead associate panettone with Christmas, it has the flavour of winter, snow, love, tension, and expectations.

At time mixed with raisins or chocolate, or candied crunches of fruit, panettone is supposed to be a sort of dessert. In this beatnik family, however, it was dipped in chocolate milk as the main dinner course. And there was nothing more delicious than filling your mouth with the sweet, milk-drenched sponge cake, filling your throat with warm de­lectable wheat flavours.

On Christmas day, if the weather was de­cent, they’d all go skiing a one-hour drive from their home, while most families were having their famous yearly feast. But this was a beatnik family. The empty slopes were all for them.

If the weather was sour, then mother would knead the dough and roll it into tortellini drowned in delicious broth. There would be a roasted guinea fowl stuffed with chestnuts or plums, assorted raw and boiled vegetables, dessert, and fruits.

WHEN THE BOY TURNED 16, HE moved to America by himself. The first year he spent as a guest in a family of Americans who were not Catholic but Methodist. But Christmas felt pretty much the same with the Methodist family. Only there wasn’t that feeling of fear that the boy’s beatnik father always instilled in him and in his sisters. So, the boy had his first relaxed Christmas. It felt easier for him to be a guest in a different family than being in his own. Something that would never go away for the rest of his life.

After a few years spent with the anger of a punk rocker, the nihilism of a Mod and the ambition of a yuppie, he would travel back to the town in the valley to have regular Christmas holidays with his mother and fa­ther, until he turned 27 and finally his parents divorced, much to the relief of everyone in­volved. Christmas was now spent only with his mother and siblings and later with their spous­es and children. Yet, somehow, the curse of the anxious Christmas was never really lifted.

Later in life, the boy who now was definitely a man, spent his first Christmas in India sick with high fever in a bed-and-breakfast in the heart of Pondicherry’s White City, which at the time felt like a place full of white buildings hosting a lot of white people. His temperature was so high that he mistook Merry Christmas for Merry Krishna and went down a rabbit hole about Brahma being like Abraham and how it was really, all, one single cohesive thing.

As he got better, or perhaps still slightly fe­verish, he met and fell in love with, and even­tually married, an Indian woman. Rather, the wife’s father was born and raised in India, the wife’s mother was born and raised in Wales, whose cultural traditions very much reminded the man of his own.

Christmas was again a jolly affair. The songs of American crooners who’d changed the soundtrack of Christmas since the 1950s were filling the house for days before the most important thing of this entire seasonal process: the Christmas party.

Once again, the man couldn’t feel any of the religious meanings of the celebration. He knew, of course, the whole story about the baby born in a manger, the donkey and the ox heat­ing him up, the three men who travelled from afar because they had seen the signs that an im­portant birth was taking place. He knew of the importance of this baby born millennia before. He kind of liked what that young man had said once he’d become a prophet with a beard and all. A message of love. A revolutionary passiv­ity which seemed to be a strength. But he still couldn’t bring himself to believe in a god.

Christmas still meant a big party. In this case, it was a party in a nice neighbourhood of one of the calmest metropolises of India, which was called Ma­dras and now was called Chen­nai. Most of the people there were friends of his in-laws, so they were all about 25 years older than him. But they had a youth­ful spirit and didn’t mind feeding it with spirits either.

That’s why he was often as­signed the role of bartender, also because of his capacity for shaking a decent martini, mixing a killer gin and tonic with a mint twist and lime, knowing how to dose the right amount of vodka, and understanding the meaning of Campari in a drink.

Because of his mother-in-law and her friends who happened to also be born and raised in England, Ireland, or Scotland, he came to discover something called a Christmas cake, which had some odd, pleasant qualities, but tasted really nothing like panettone.

There were now many grandchildren sprawling about and the Christmas party didn’t happen only on the eve but involved unwrapping gifts the morn­ing after, on Christmas Day, always a pleasant affair.

And then there was the Christmas lunch, held at the home of some friends who lived a couple of blocks away, in the heart of Madras, with more cocktails and certain rituals that the man grew to become fond of. One of those being an extremely competitive darts competition which often divided along gen­erational or gender lines, causing much ruckus and possibly some cheating at keeping score. Possibly, not surely.

ANOTHER ONE WAS THAT HIS FATHER-IN-LAW AND HIS BUDDY would suddenly appear donning funny red hats with white pom-poms, presenting themselves as Santa and Banta, armed with a large sack filled with gifts to be distributed among all the people invited, with many ho ho hos and much laughter, not necessarily induced only by the abundant imbibements generously distributed during the long afternoons which fi­nally ended at sunset, when everyone went home, perhaps somewhat tired, but also with a stomach filled with delicious food, along with a sensation of contentment that spread to the usually aching lower back, as the man now was almost reaching 60 years of age and those L4 and L5 bones in his spine were beginning to pinch the nerves into an unpleasant sciatica, and this made him think about the fact that a life, like the one described here, is in the end inevitably marked by a yearly ritual of some sort, and you can call it Diwali, Kwanzaa or Hanukkah or Christmas, and sometimes you can feel like you’re being forced to gather among different generations of people related by blood or by friendship, and at times, for some of us, it may feel like a burden more than a joy, but it also may be that you realise that you belong, and you are loved, and you are missed, even though sometimes you can sound like a cantanker­ous old Scrooge, which you really hope you’re not. Perhaps, sometimes, you can simply be a real son of a beatnik.

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