100 Days of Happiness (11 page)

O
n Sundays, Oscar's pastry shop is closed all day; it opens again at two in the morning to start making the treats for the next day. My father-in-law is bored on Sunday. Since he was widowed, or since he's become a whiplash single, as he likes to say, he only comes home to sleep. When his wife was still alive, they'd often come to our house to eat or else we'd go over to their place. Now he hangs out in Trastevere, sitting in a bar to watch the A. S. Roma game, striking up conversations with anyone capable of helping him spend a cheery fifteen minutes.

“So you know what I did last Sunday?” he asks me with uncommon cockiness.

“No, what?” I reply, following the script.

“While I was out on my walk, I saw a huge crowd of tourists emerge from the Ottaviano Metro station: a couple of classes of Scandinavian students on a field trip, a horde of Japanese photographers of all ages, and a swarm of German retirees wearing shorts. And you know what I wound up doing?”

“No, what did you wind up doing?” I hate it when he asks questions just to make sure he has the attention of his audience, which in this case is just me.

“I trooped in with the Germans. The tour includes the Colosseum, the Dome of Saint Peter's, and the Vatican Museums. The tour guide, a certain Martina, is Italian but talks to them in German so I don't understand a word. So you know what I come up with then?”

“No, what do you come up with then?” I ask in a resigned voice.

“I pretend I'm mute! Which makes everyone like me.”

I smile at the thought of him munching sauerkraut sandwiches offered by coquettish Bavarian eighty-year-olds, laughing at jokes he doesn't understand, making his way up the stairs inside the big Dome of Saint Peter's, and worming his way into crowded souvenir pictures.

“And the tour guide didn't notice a thing?”

“Not a thing. But she was an interesting type. I overheard a phone call she was making in Italian, to her daughter, I think. She's a widow and works as a tour guide strictly in her spare time.”

“Did you like her?”

“I didn't talk to her. I was a German mute.”

“Oh, right.”

“But anyway, yes, I did like her. Otherwise, I wouldn't have spent the whole day with them,” he adds with a wink.

“Did you spend the whole day with them?”

“I even had dinner with them, in a restaurant over by Campo de' Fiori. I rode back to the hotel with them on the tour bus, went upstairs, and took a back exit. Then I followed Signora Martina out to the parking lot. I wanted to catch up with her and confess to my fraud. Maybe even ask her if she wanted to get a drink.”

“But?”

“How do you know there's a but?”

“There's always a but. Go on.”

“But a young man came to pick her up. I'd guess her grandson. They got in his car together and then she vanished into the night.”

“And now you want to find her again?”

“I called the company who ran the tour, but there wasn't any Martina. And anyway they went on and on about issues of privacy.”

“Maybe Martina is a nom de plume.”

“For a tour guide?”

“What other clues do you have?”

“I have this.”

He shows me a snapshot of him standing next to a sprightly seventy-year-old woman who looks like Miss Marple, in front of the Colosseum.

“Pretty, eh?”

I nod in response to the rhetorical question. Ever since his wife died, I haven't seen my father-in-law so interested in another woman, except for that time Catherine Deneuve came into his pastry shop to ask directions. That day is just one of a number of favorite stories that always start “When Catherine and I.” So I know it's important to find this Martina or whatever her name is.

I e-mail myself a copy of the photo, pull out my Dino Zoff notebook, and jot down:

Track down Miss Marple.

H
ow do you track down a person just from a picture of her?

I get my first suggestion from Umberto.

“I could post it on Facebook and say that it's my grandmother Martina and that she's lost. It always works for dogs.”

We post the photo on my friend's cluttered time line and, after an hour, we already have dozens of sightings. Someone saw her on the Janiculum, someone else saw her on Piazza Trilussa, she was spotted in a supermarket in Prati, or on the island of Fiji, or in a karaoke bar in Tokyo. If we were going to check them all out, it would take a lifetime and the logistical resources of Interpol.

“Hello, Interpol, good morning! I'm calling from Rome. Because my father-in-law is a widower and I'd like to find him a new girlfriend, I was wondering if you could help me track down this lady whose name I don't know?”

It's an unmistakable defeat. The only thing that can help us is a piece of blind luck. I make copies of the picture and post them in the local bars, including our café. Underneath is a vague note: “Contact this number for an urgent message.” We'll see how that goes.

In the meanwhile, this investigation has at least obtained an initial result: it has distracted me. Tomorrow afternoon is my second chemotherapy appointment. The side effects have subsided, but by now I've become an authority on the subject—each time they'll return with greater virulence and persistence. I decide to go meet Paola at school, forgetting that today is her day off. I wait for her like an idiot,
until the last teacher emerges from the building and she recognizes me.

“Signor Battistini!”

I can't even remember her name, but I pretend to remember her perfectly.

“Teacher!”

“Today's your wife's day off, what are you doing on this side of town?”

“What am I doing here? Right around the corner there's a first-rate pastry shop, I was just going there to pick up a tray of pastries.”

“Doesn't your father-in-law have a pastry shop?”

I hate nitpicking schoolteachers.

“Sure, of course he does, but he doesn't make Sicilian cannoli because his wife cheated on him with a fisherman from Caltanissetta, so, since I felt like having some cannoli today, well that's why I'm here.”

“A fisherman from Caltanissetta? Caltanissetta isn't even on the water!”

Now I'm ready to strangle her with my bare hands, right there, on the street.

“True, in fact, he was out of work, and had to look for a new line of work.”

She seems dubious. I try to break away, but she starts back in: “I heard you weren't well.”

I hate schoolteachers who know I'm not well.

“Yes, but I'm over it already, I'm practically cured . . .” I minimize with unusual nonchalance.

“Ah, that's good, because cancer killed both my brother and my uncle, as well as a teacher here at our high school.”

I also hate this conversation.

“Listen, Teacher, I'd love to stay and talk for hours, but I'm just afraid when I get there they'll be out of cannoli; they're the most popular pastry of all. Sorry to talk and run.”

 * * * 

By now it's clear to me that having cancer has something in common with a funeral. Everyone comes up to you and expresses condolences. The only difference is that because the person in question isn't yet in a casket, instead of expressing condolences to the widow or the next of kin, the comforter just hands them straight to the soon-to-be dearly departed. If I ever have cancer again, I swear this time I'm going to tell everyone that it's just a bad case of tonsillitis.

As I walk, I give Paola a call.

“My love, where are you?”

“I'm at the hairdresser's.”

“Do you want me to come by and pick you up?”

“I drove here; I have my car.”

“Ah, great. Then should I run by and pick up the children at school?”

They attend full-time, a wonderful new invention designed to reduce the divorce rate.

“That would be great, thanks.”

“Listen . . . tomorrow I'm going in for my second round of chemo.”

“I'll go with you. See you later.”

End of conversation. She will go with me—that's a good thing. Yet as I hear our conversation in my mind—routine and humdrum, polite, yet without affection—I feel sick. I want to win back her love, I want her to forgive me. Every day, I expect to be closer to my goal. Yet I am further away from it than ever.

S
econd session of chemo. In the waiting room I strike up a conversation with a talkative guy my age who confides, with a certain pride, that he's already on his third round. Twenty seconds later, he says it again. This treatment isn't helping him. From the inner room, another patient emerges, leaning on what would seem to be his wife. He's not even fifty, but he can barely walk; he's skinny as a rail, and his eyes are dull and blank.

Now it's my turn. The same nurse who looks like Stromboli comes out to call my name. Paola stays in the waiting room and I walk into the little room that I already know so well. Two minutes later, there I am again, with a needle in my vein and thousands of thoughts whirling through my head.

 * * * 

When I was little, there were three possible lines of work that caught my imagination.

The first, as documented by my historic essay “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up,” which Grandma carefully stored in the top dresser drawer, was an amusement park ride inspector. Clever child that I was, I'd decided to mix business with pleasure. After all, there must be a man whose job it is to say, “This ride works perfectly, it's fun and it's safe, go ahead and open it to the public.” I always assumed that man would have a lifetime ticket so he could come back to the amusement park whenever he liked.

The second line of work, and this takes us into the realm of criminal endeavors, was to be a cat burglar. Maybe it was because of my fascination with Diabolik, but I've often dreamed of sneaking into a jewelry shop by night and cleaning the place out. This is an ambition I've never pursued, though I confess I've stolen bathrobes from more than one hotel.

The third profession—and here I have to say that I was ahead of my time—was that of a life coach, or as I called it back then, with a naive but still very accurate term, a
recommender
. I imagine a figure who, much like Cardinal Mazarin or Richelieu for the king of France, works with his clients on the more complicated choices in life.

“Is the girl I'm dating the right one for me?”

Zap, and the recommender arrives on the scene and provides a confident answer.

“What should I do, should I take this job?”

Zap, here's the recommender ready to offer the best advice.

In the end, I didn't wind up in any of these lines of work: I neither inspect amusement parks, nor do I steal, nor do I give advice to anyone, least of all myself.

Suddenly I feel like a loser.

In the meanwhile, the needle has done its dirty work and injected me with the usual dose of poison. I no longer know whether I'm making the right decision.

“How are we doing, Signor Battistini?” the nurse inquires.

By now, I always give the same answer.

“Rotten, thanks.”

I step out of the claustrophobic little room and as I walk through the waiting room, I run into the talkative patient who insists on telling me once again that he's on his third round of chemotherapy. If I were him, I wouldn't do a fourth round. I grab the arm that Paola offers me and we walk out into the fresh air. I feel like crying.

N
o longer going to work at the gym is a strange sensation. I stroll through Villa Borghese at an unusual time for me, eleven-thirty in the morning. I feel like a privileged soul. I think of a Latin word that we all associate with the Colosseum and its bloodthirsty games, a blend of the feral and the athletic:
moriturus,
“one who is about to die.” Not bad. It's accurate and evocative, and has a nostalgic tang straight out of an elementary school textbook. Moriturus. I who am about to die: I'm a
moriturus
. I like it. It almost makes me feel like a heroic gladiator ready for the final battle in the presence of a jubilant audience. My man-eating tiger is called Fritz. A tiger with a name like that could hardly be dangerous. He's just a big harmless cat.

I feel better already.

Moriturus.

I who am about to die.

It would look pretty good on a business card: Lucio Battistini,
moriturus
.

I head down toward Piazzale Flaminio, through the pedestrian island of Piazza del Popolo with its vast encampment of tourists in shorts. I stop to look at a woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty, her face painted white and a hat with a sunburst on her head. She stands motionless at the foot of an obelisk; the paint on her face is starting to run. I sit down next to her, on the steps. I'm a perfect practitioner of the art of doing sweet FA.

Then I head off toward Piazza Venezia, zigzagging a little through
the back streets. I spot a little shop I've never noticed before. The sign outside is new. I walk in, attracted by the name: Chitchat. I'm welcomed in by Massimiliano, a former policeman, now retired. Inside the shop are a fireplace with no fire, a couple of ragtag couches and an armchair facing a wide-screen TV, a fridge, a galley kitchen with a steaming teakettle, and a small table. It looks like the living room in an old-fashioned apartment, with furniture thrown together by chance. In fact, that's exactly what it is.

Massimiliano is seventy years old and looks much younger; he's never been married, he has no living relatives. He's well read and intelligent. He explains to me that after retiring, he quickly became bored; he spent his days in his ground-floor apartment, watching old movies and indulging his longtime passion for cooking. But it wasn't enough. He felt horribly lonely and his pension was too small to allow him to travel around the world. So he painted the Chitchat sign and put it out over his front door, replacing his normal door with a glass shop door. Then he waited for someone to bite.

“It's a pretty simple idea,” he explains to me. “I welcome perfect strangers into my home, I make them tea with a plate of cookies, we exchange a little chitchat, as the name suggests, we watch a little TV together, that kind of thing. In other words, we keep each other company.”

A chitchat shop. Simple but brilliant. Not even Leonardo da Vinci ever came up with this one. It's like a pharmacy that stocks friendship.

He adds that when the time comes to leave, his customers can pay him whatever they think is right, as a way of covering expenses (usually five euros).

“So how's business?”

“Excellent. These days, people don't lack a thing, except for someone who has the time to listen to what they have to say. I almost never have any free time for myself.”

“And what kind of customers do you get?” I ask.

“It's a grab bag. Rejected lovers, retirees like me, even the occasional executive at lunchtime looking for an hour of relaxation with a ‘faux grandpa,'” he says with a smile.

Massimiliano entertains all patrons with his cheerful running patter and his cookies and cakes, and now he's built up a numerous and faithful clientele in the neighborhood. It's highly therapeutic to spend a couple of hours with him; I'd recommend it to anyone—forget about shiatsu massages and antidepressants. I believe that, sooner or later, some multinational will steal his idea and open a chain of fast friends outlets, with the slogan “You deserve a friend today!”

I spend a couple of hours with him. We even watch an episode of
Happy Days
on his satellite TV and I tell him about my cancer and the treatments I've just started. Only as I'm talking to him does it dawn on me that I've already made up my mind not to go back and have another needle stuck in my vein so it can turn me slowly into a vegetable. Arrivederci, chemo. Just the thought makes me feel better.

Massimiliano explains that he's been a vegetarian for years and that his food choices help him ward off cancer. He's no expert, but he suggests I look for some alternative solutions, though he adds that I should avoid charlatans and only talk to those who use natural methods.

“I would advise you to see a naturopath.”

“What does a naturopath do?”

“A naturopath will show you how to lead a healthier life. Let's say that a naturopath is a cross between a dietologist and a psychologist.”

I take note of the recommendation, and then we go on talking about nothing in particular for another hour or so.

When I leave, I put ten euros down on the table.

I already feel better. I'll be back.