100 Days of Happiness (17 page)

D
o you know what I'm talking about when I describe one of those useless May days with a sky ready to dump waterfalls of tropical tears on the world below? Well, today.

I don't lift a finger and just sit, in my armchair, and think about death.

G
iuseppe Garibaldi has his own personal commemorative stamp. And as far as that goes, I have no objections. Others who have their own stamps include Saint Catherine, Carlo Goldoni, Pietro Mennea, Federico Fellini, Emilio Salgari, Primo Levi, Ennio Flaiano, Alessandro Manzoni, Michelangelo, Massimo Troisi, the Smurfs, Enrico Caruso, Alberto Sordi, and, of course, Leonardo da Vinci. And that's not to mention a vast array of illustrious saints, poets, and navigators.

I won't have one. Philately will blithely ignore me after my death. Oh well.

I never wrote a famous song, I know that.

I never discovered a lifesaving vaccine.

I never performed a miracle.

I never took gold at the Olympics.

I never made a film masterpiece.

I never designed and built the dome of a magnificent cathedral.

I never wrote
I promessi sposi
.

I never had an enemy named Gargamel.

I have nothing to justify a marble plaque—
LUCIO BATTISTINI
—
1973‒2013
—
NOTED
WATER POLOIST
—on the side of a building. A plaque that someone might walk by and say: “I'm going to look up this Battistini on Wikipedia and find out more about him!”

All the same, I have a wife and two children I love, a wonderful group of friends, a water polo team of boys who'd give their lives for
me. I've made mistakes, and I'm bound to make others, but at least I attended the party. I was here too. Maybe in a corner. I might not have been the guest of honor, but I definitely showed up. The only regret I have is that I had to discover I was dying in order to start really living. There was an old song by Ettore Petrolini. This was the refrain: “I'm happy to die, but I'm sorry, too. I'm sorry to die, but I'm happy, too.” Funny and very true.

I'm happy to die, but I'm sorry, too.

I'm sorry to die, but I'm happy, too.

From this day forth, that will be my motto.

T
he greatest thrill of my life was when I held Lorenzo in my arms for the first time.

Paola and I taught him to read with Mickey Mouse comics when he was three and a half, to write when he was four, to design houses with Legos when he was four and a half, to ride a bike without training wheels at five, and to cook pasta with tomatoes and basil by the time he was eight. My only abiding regret, as you already know, is that I never taught him to swim, much less kindle a passion in him for water polo. My emotions toward him are a blend of tenderness, envy, and all-encompassing protectiveness.

This morning I was watching him try to fix the leaky dishwasher. A careful five-minute examination, then he turns to look at me.

“Papà, it's just a problem with the gasket. It's a model B60, you can probably get one from the hardware store around the corner that sells spare parts. If you go get it now, I could have it working again in ten minutes.”

I do as I am told and hurry out to procure the fundamental rubber ring. On the way, my head teems with all the things I'll miss most about my favorite young inventor.

When he says, “It wasn't me,” but his face is smeared with chocolate.

The sly look he gets when he thinks he's outsmarted you.

The way he sleeps so hard that you actually have to shake him to wake him up.

The young adult books that he underlines in red and blue as if they were college textbooks.

His boundless love of pistachios.

His collection of photos of ugly people that he secretly takes at school and on the street.

When he tries to light a fire with a comic book from my Diabolik collection.

His letters to Santa Claus, invariably highly detailed.

His excitement when we go to the movies, just him and me, to see a superhero flick.

His openly avowed hatred for school.

When he tries to teach our hamster tricks.

His Spiderman pajamas, two sizes too small.

His English, which is better than mine.

When he forces me to watch
Harry Potter
again for the hundredth time.

The creative confusion of his little bedroom.

When he sits in the closet reading with a flashlight so no one will bother him.

When he floods the apartment while doing otherwise unexplained plumbing “experiments.”

When he used to caress his little sister in her crib.

The classroom compositions in which he writes that “daddy is a failed athlete” or else that he wants to “invent a machine that does homework automatically.”

When he secretly tries on my clothes.

His way of obsessively complaining when he doesn't get what he wants.

When he refuses to speak for three days because he's sulking after a punishment.

When I play tennis with Umberto and he acts as the ball boy.

 * * * 

Can you miss someone who's still around? I'm assailed by an illogical sense of apprehensive emptiness. I return home with the gasket and watch the junior plumber I brought into the world fix my dishwasher. I don't want to miss another instant of his life. I've already missed far too many.

T
oday we ended the game with an even score. All that's left to play now is the last game of the regular championship season. There's still a chance of moving up on points and being given the go-ahead. As a coach, I'm not bad at all. But as a sick man, I'm a mess. I just don't seem to know how to be sick. Paola scolds me every day, and I take the scolding willingly. It's a sign she cares about me. I never forget that I have only one main goal: to get her to forgive me. But it has to be for the right reasons.

This morning, as I was pouring milk into glasses for the kids, she suddenly, nonchalantly, asks me the most important question on my mind. “When will you tell the kids?” she says.

“Tell the kids what?”

“That you've got a short time with them, that you're, you know, dying?”

“Tell them that?” I am stunned that my wife thinks I should tell them. “That I'm dying?”

“Yes,” she says. “They should know.”

“Absolutely not,” I say. “Never. Why would I do that?”

“You don't see it,” she says.

“No. What is there to see?”

“That they will be here, in this world, without their father by their side. You just don't see it?”

“I don't see how it can help them,” I say. “There's nothing to discuss. They don't need to know.”

I ended it. I won't tell them. There's little left to me now with them. And I don't want it tainted by the fact of my dying.

T
he Chitchat shop has become my refuge, just like the tree house for Huey, Dewey, and Louie. I get back there every chance I have. Today I brought Corrado and Umberto with me too. This gave my old friends a chance to meet Massimiliano and Giannandrea. As a pilot, Corrado has plenty of free time when he isn't working, and I know that Umberto is taking more time off from his clinic so he can spend it with me. I really appreciate that.

The afternoon takes an unexpected turn when Massimiliano pulls a Subbuteo set out of a closet. The word
Subbuteo
alone, I feel sure, will send a thrill of excitement down the spine of any male reader over forty. While in females of any and all ages, it will instill a note of commiseration for the manifest inferiority of what is laughingly called the stronger sex.

No Italian in his forties can resist a game of Subbuteo football.

We lay the cloth out on the floor, make up a list of matches, and with five players that's no simple matter because you have to draw up a genuine Italian team chart with a complete ranking and the differentiated number of goals. Three unforgettable hours of play, crowned by a victory for me in the decisive match against Giannandrea, who turned out to be a wizard of the finger flick.

The more the days pass, the clearer it becomes to me that the small amount of money I've set aside won't do me any good in this life and will only be useful in ensuring a comfortable life for Paola and the kids. In any case, I'm happy when I play. And playing, luckily, doesn't cost anything.

E
va.

All my friends think that I called my second-born child Eva—Eve—after the first woman in human history, Adam's wife and the mother of, among others, those affectionate siblings Cain and Abel.

Wrong.

We named her after Eva Kant, Diabolik's beautiful girlfriend.

I've been in love with Eva Kant my whole life. I believe I experienced my first adolescent impulses in connection with the seductive blond cat burglar of Clerville.

I watch my little Eva as she plays in the living room. She's building an apartment with Lorenzo's Legos, with lots of interior decoration. She's a pro. Then she enamels a number of aluminum foil panels on the roof.

“Those are solar panels,” she explains. “It's an ecological house.”

I smile.

I sit and watch her as she finishes her fair-trade residence.

There are so many things about her that I'll miss.

Her questions, which are always specific and very difficult.

When she says good-bye by saying “Miao” instead of “Ciao.”

The smell of her, so similar to her mother's. Apples.

Her upturned nose which, luckily, looks nothing like mine.

Her unstoppable patter, like what you'd expect from a radio personality.

The special organic lettuce that she grows on the terrace and which she forces us to eat every so often.

When she fights with her brother because he's neglecting to sort his recycling.

The times she makes me buy blankets and donates them to a kennel.

Her innate sense of justice.

The date book where she jots down her daily tasks and appointments.

The bizarre way she twirls her spaghetti counterclockwise.

When she calls me “Papà” in her slightly nasal voice.

Her excellent vocabulary.

Her favorite doll, Milla, who at the moment is depressed and melancholy.

Her unusual interest in the daily TV news.

When she plays on the floor with our own personal Aristocats.

Her love of wax, which we find melted in the most surprising corners of the apartment.

Her dimpled smile that greets me every time I see her.

Eva.

My little woman.

One day she asked me this question which completely knocked me out: “Papà, why don't they make cat food that tastes like mice?”

Good point, why don't they?

I didn't know how to give her a reasonable answer.

Eva.

I'd like to answer another thousand of her impertinent and inquisitive questions. And that's exactly what I'll do. Until my lights go out.

S
ummer 1978. Who knows why, but today my neurons have traveled back to a long-ago day in July, when my grandparents had already become my parents. I was a fat and happy boy, John Lennon was still alive, and there wasn't a hole yet in the ozone layer.

We were vacationing in Ladispoli. And for those not familiar with the place, Ladispoli is no Saint-Tropez. It's famous for its Festival of the Roman-Style Artichoke and it's a sister city with the Spanish town of Benicarló because of their shared affinity for this vegetable. The distinctive characteristic of its beaches is that the sand has a surreal pitch-black color, because of the high iron content.

One of the first loves of my life, and one of my earliest romantic memories, is Stella.

Five years old, just like me.

Freckles.

Red hair.

A charming gap-toothed smile.

A goddess.

Perhaps I still love her now.

I still remember that morning as if it were today.

Stella was playing on the sand by the water with a couple of friends her age, including yours truly. The sand castle was growing, a little lopsided, but it only had to stand for a couple of hours until the high tide came in. Mamma Franca and Papà Ugo, Stella's parents, were in the shade of a beach umbrella a short distance away. He was
reading
La Gazzetta dello Sport,
she was reading a novel by Ellery Queen. My grandparents were camped out under the neighboring beach umbrella. Grandpa was catnapping on his beach recliner, while Grandma was doing crossword puzzles.

It was almost eleven when the clock struck the swimming hour: Signora Franca was obsessed with the rule of three hours after meals to digest breakfast before the kids were allowed in the water. She picked up Stella's inner tube and looked around for her daughter.

“Stella!”

But Stella was nowhere to be seen. She scanned the beach. Nothing. She called her husband and they hunted for her everywhere, increasingly alarmed, shouting her name. Her friends, me included, had seen her get up and walk away from the sand castle, but nothing more. No one had seen her for several minutes.

Panic swept over her parents.

We searched the whole beach. We had her paged over the beachfront loudspeaker system.

“A little girl named Stella Martani should come join her parents at the resort café!”

Nothing.

Stella had vanished.

Someone said they'd seen her go into the water.

Others claimed they'd seen her leave the resort facilities.

And there were a few who said they'd seen a mysterious stranger talking to her.

All of them were attention seekers who'd been out in the sun too long.

The only thing that I knew to be true was this: the one true love of my life had vanished into thin air.

An hour later her frantic parents went to report her to the police as a missing person. They searched for her, but in vain. Stella vanished from that beach between 10:58 and 11:00 that morning.

 * * * 

Today Stella would be forty years old. Ugo and Franca, now unassuming retirees, haven't heard a word from her since that day. The elderly historic bathing attendant of Ladispoli tells me that the two old people desperately, obsessively, come back every day to the same beach, now almost entirely eroded away by the unstoppable advance of the waves. They sit down on a pair of beach chairs they bring with them from home. They look out to sea and they wait. Every time they turn their gaze along the beach, they have the illusion of seeing their little girl walking along on the wet sand, running toward them with one of those gap-toothed smiles that always made them melt inside.

“Mamma, Papà, I'm back! Can we go in the water? Has it been three hours since I ate?”

They still dream of taking that swim, the three of them together. They'd give anything to make God change His mind and wind back the clock to that long-ago summer of 1978. But God doesn't change His mind, and we all know it.

When sunset comes, Ugo and Franca fold up their beach chairs and head home, hand in hand.

Today I went down to the beach and I watched them from a distance, hiding. They couldn't possibly remember me. I was five years old the last time they saw me. Ugo looked through me as if I were invisible. Franca on the other hand looked at me a moment too long, locking eyes with me. She recognized me, I'm sure of it. Women have a sixth sense. Or maybe they're just smarter. But I lacked the nerve to stop and talk with them.

I rolled up my trousers and went out onto the beach, wading in the waves. The sun had already dropped below the horizon. I only had fifteen minutes to build that sand castle I left unfinished so many years ago. My skill as an architect and builder of sand structures survives intact. I'm almost done when a rogue wave rushes in and destroys it, with indifferent viciousness.