100 Days of Happiness (21 page)

T
here's something about me you don't know. I don't usually talk about it much. My son, Lorenzo, and I are exactly the same. As a child, I was a young terror too. Ever since early elementary school, my teacher (Miranda De Pascalis, ditzier than most people on earth, and capable of explaining the multiplication tables with exactly the same words three days running, while never once remembering that she'd done it) would regularly call my grandparents to complain about my conduct. But it was never my fault alone. I had a bad influence, a fellow student who led me down the road to perdition, my own personal Candlewick. His name was Attilio Brancato, but everyone knew him as Branca; we were never in the same class together, but he attended the class next door, from elementary school to high school. An ordeal and a blight upon my record. A genuine living legend in the Rome municipal school system, a hooligan of rare quality, capable of sabotaging vending machines to provoke cascades of snacks, falsifying class attendance records, and even wrecking teachers' cars.

Grandpa hated him. One time he even decided to switch schools to get me out from under Brancato's influence.

Luckily, once Brancato managed to finish high school, he vanished. Nobody ever heard a thing from him again. I was free at last.

Many years later, the day that Grandpa passed away, I couldn't hold my terrible secret in a minute longer.

Grandpa was in bed, dressed in his pajamas, flat on his back and in appearance miles away, but I knew that he could hear me. I lean
over close to the bed and whisper to him, with no need for any preamble: “Grandpa, Brancato never existed.”

Silence.

“I just invented him. He was my scapegoat. A perfect alibi for any and all occasions. A fictitious individual.”

Silence.

“Forgive me if I never told you. Brancato was me, and I was Brancato.”

I think back to all the punishments, and maybe even smacks, I avoided thanks to Brancato. Then I look over at Grandpa, whose eyes are open and staring unblinking at the ceiling.

Suddenly he smiles. In fact, he laughs. He feels like laughing. Not the usual thing with someone who's about to die, a
moriturus
.

He turns to look at me with glistening eyes and reveals the truth: “Lucio
mio,
I knew it the whole time.”

I smile back at him.

“Sometimes it's best for a son,” he adds, “and to me you're a son, to underestimate you. It makes for a happier childhood.”

He squeezes my hand. Hard. Then I feel his energy slip away, like the water dribbling out of a garden hose.

Those were his last words to me.

 * * * 

I had made a resolution not to think about death.

It doesn't look like I'm going to be able to keep it.

O
ne of the worst things that can happen to you is to faint on the street when you go out to buy a newspaper with ten euros in your pocket but no wallet and no ID. It had been months since the last time I'd passed out, that afternoon at the pool. I was told later what happened. A passerby saw me drop like a sack of potatoes to the sidewalk. I banged up my arm and my head, which caused a nasty cut to the forehead and a badly scraped elbow. An ambulance rushed me to the emergency room, where a couple of hours later I came to, when my family had already tipped over into panic. Paola, after I'd been gone for two hours, started calling all the hospitals and had tracked me down there. The doctor told her that they'd given me a CAT scan and that the bang to my head hadn't caused any cerebral trauma. Then the doctor had lowered his voice and told her that he had some very bad news

“I suspect your husband may have a widespread tumor in his lungs. Let me repeat, I suspect, I'm not an oncologist. I just thought it best to warn you.”

Paola's nonchalant response astonished the doctor.

“Thanks, you did the right thing. Any breaks in the elbow?”

“No.”

When Paola acts out the dialogue for me, including the doctor's high-pitched voice, I laugh until my belly aches and I immediately feel a stabbing pain in my liver and surrounding areas. The clinical progression is starting to become unpleasant. I can no longer laugh.

Nicolas Chamfort, a French author, used to say that “a day without laughter is a day wasted.”

How tragically true.

The doctors detain me overnight for observation. Paola stays with me until a nurse tosses her out in a fury. But before the draconian move, Paola and I stare at each other like two honeymooners. I can't believe my luck; she, bemused, sympathetic, lovely, wants to give me what I need from her. Yet she can't. I want to talk to her. But something stalls as if this is hers to work out, hers to decide. I can't force her to forgive me. That decision, like mine about telling the children, has to come from her.

I stay there in my room alongside an old man with a leg in traction who heaves a painful-sounding breath every ten seconds, a little boy who bumped his head pretty badly jumping down off a wall, and a guy in his early twenties who received multiple fractures in a traffic accident. I'm in excellent company. In fact, I feel almost healthy alongside my roommates. Tomorrow, I'll walk out of here on my own two legs and I'll go jogging. I only manage to fall asleep very late, rocked to sleep by the old man's moaning. I dream I've gone back in time, to the moment I first kissed Signora Moroni. Today I'm sure I'd be capable of resisting.

H
ow many days of your life do you remember clearly? The special days that you could narrate in detail years and years later. And how many days are just normal ones when nothing worth mentioning happens and they slip away unnoticed? What makes a day special?

I leave the hospital with a single fixed thought. I want today to be a day I can put alongside the other three I told you about at the beginning of this story. If I had died yesterday, forty days ahead of schedule, with my skull cracked open on the sidewalk, I couldn't have forgiven myself. It was a supernatural alarm bell: “Hey, Lucio, you think you're the master of your fate, and that you have forty days left to live, but that may not actually be the case.”

If I analyze the special days in my life I realize that what made them different was almost always an unexpected event, or one that couldn't have been planned: the time Lorenzo lost a baby tooth; the first time I kissed Paola; the way my grandmother hugged me good-bye when I went on my first camping trip with the Boy Scouts; that time I got a good grade on some class homework that I'd copied; the night that Corrado and Umberto and I slept in the car overnight in Florence, and the next morning when we woke up we were in the middle of a street market; the surprise party that Paola threw for me for my thirty-fifth birthday. Little things that are the concentrated essence of my life. I decide not to do anything special today and just let the day surprise me. I call Massimiliano and I tell him about my night out with Giannandrea. He tells me that he already knew all
about it and he agrees that our favorite depressive needs help.Massimiliano wants to ask Giannandrea to help him out in the shop, in his spare time, when he's not working as a tailor, doing alterations.

“If you come in and you find two friends to chat with instead of just one, all the better, no?”

I tell him it's an excellent idea.

The day continues to be nondescript until seven o'clock. Then I leave the pool and head home, open the front door, and see Eva doing her homework, sitting at the dining room table, both feet dangling inches above the floor. She turns around and, in slow motion, opens her blue eyes and looks at me. She gives me a smile.

“Miao, Papà!”

An instant flash of joy washes away all my aches and pains.

It's the magic touch that makes today a special day.

W
hen the glass door of the Chitchat shop swings open and Giannandrea welcomes me in, I can't help but smile.

“Massimiliano will be right back,” he says, “come on in.”

He tells me that he started working there that morning. Massimiliano offered him half the take, after daily expenses. A very generous offer that the much-cheated-upon alterationist couldn't turn down.

“I'm happy you're working here,” I tell him.

“I'm not really working—it's more like I'm helping out a friend when I get a chance. I think I'm pretty good at giving people advice.”

I don't object.

“Shall we have a cup of tea?” I suggest.

Ten minutes later, there we are, sitting in our armchairs like a couple of spry little old New England ladies, sipping our Pu-Erh tea, which tastes vaguely like wet soil. This time it's my turn to confide a secret. I tell him that I'm already two thirds of the way through my final journey and that I'm actually pretty pleased with how it's been going. I've had moments of uncontrollable joy, which have alternated with other moments of profound melancholy. An emotional roller coaster.

“So it's absolutely hopeless?”

“Unfortunately, that's right,” I reply in an untroubled voice. “All the tests agree that my physical state is deteriorating with dizzying speed.”

I'm astonished at how I'm able to talk dispassionately about my disease. I've become accustomed to it. That's just human nature: given time you can get used to anything.

“Shall we play some Subbuteo?” I propose. “I owe you a rematch.”

He accepts the challenge happily. I take Italy and he arranges the green-and-gold players of Brazil on the green felt cloth.

After a few midfield flicks of the forefinger, I'm already ahead 2 to 0. Once again, the good Giannandrea has shown that he's a careful player and an excellent technician, but I am a prize racehorse when it comes to Subbuteo, forgive the vanity, but a world-class contender. I win without any such exaggeration—5 to 2. As we're shaking hands to seal the results, Massimiliano comes home.

“You're not trying to take my job, I hope!” he says to Giannandrea with a smile, then adds: “So who won?”

“He did,” the depressive replies. “I don't understand why he never played this game professionally.”

We don't have time to finish commenting on the match before a new client shows up, a good-looking female executive in her early forties with the word
stress
practically stamped on her forehead. When she sees three men sitting around a Subbuteo board, she's taken aback.

“Sorry, I just came in to find out something more about the interesting name of this shop. What do you sell?”

“Chitchat, signora. Just like it says. Would you like some tea? Or an herbal tea?”

She's stumped, but she seems unable to leave.

“Yes, thanks.”

We get right to work. I rinse the mugs, Giannandrea fills the electric kettle and turns it on, while Massimiliano welcomes the woman in and entertains her affably as only he knows how to do.

If I had a longer life expectancy, I'd try to start a chain of Chitchat shops. And maybe I'd save the world.

As the new arrival confides to Massimiliano that she's just lost an important contract, I smile and inquire, like a perfect English butler: “Madam, milk or lemon in your tea?”

“Milk,” she replies, already relieved. “No sugar, thanks.”

I shoot a glance at Massimiliano and Giannandrea: we're a perfect team.

I
've changed the settings on my cell phone so I have a different ringtone for everyone who calls. For Umberto I chose the soaring trumpet fanfares of the
Indiana Jones
theme song. It's his favorite movie.

“Are you coming to Fregene tonight? Everyone's going!”

“Everyone who?”

“All three musketeers!”

I'm already apprehensive: I can just envision the booby trap. A mosquito-ridden discotheque on the beach, with drinks both obligatory and expensive, or wait, even worse, some Roman comedian doing a show with recycled material stapled together into a routine.

“What are we going to do there?”

“We're going to watch the sun set over the water!”

He tells me that it's a bit of a craze, a vaguely New Age trend, to go and bid the sun farewell.

I let him talk me into it, and at eight that evening, I park by the boardwalk and join Corrado and Umberto at the entrance to the free beach. There are at least a thousand people lining the water, and instead of a warm westerly breeze, an unseasonably chilly north wind is blowing.

“What time does it start?” already starts to be heard from the audience. I hear ragged bursts of applause, and a few people start to spread blankets on the sand. Others have picnic tablecloths, tents, and guitars. It's a little bit of Woodstock on the Roman coast. Dylan songs I remember from my days camping as a Scout
ring through the air, and one daring soul even tries a Joan Baez number.

We three musketeers have taken a spot to the side, sitting on a beach towel. We've taken off our shoes and Umberto even has a bandanna on his head. I don't know whether to succumb to the nostalgia or just feel like an idiot surrounded by idiots.

At a certain point a religious silence descends.

The star player has begun his show. It's a fiery orange one, and it leaves us breathless.

When the sun has left the stage (the finale, though a bit predictable, was still very effective), I find that I'm crying. Even Corrado sniffles a little bit and then, taking advantage of the darkness, huddles in the shadows with a depressed shampooist from Maccarese.

As everyone straggles away from the beach, just like at the movies when they're running the end credits, Umberto stays behind to stare at the sea. The two of us stay silent. On certain nights when I swing by and pick him up, and we go to the movies or to the theater, we can go back home practically without having exchanged a word. Only great friendships and great love affairs are comfortable with silence.

The silence is broken by Umberto.

“We're going on a trip.”

“I don't understand.”

“We're going on a trip.”

“Who is?”

“You, me, and Corrado. I'll shut the clinic down for a week, Corrado will get someone to take one of his flights for him. And we'll go on a trip. Like in the old days.”

“But I can't . . .”

“Why not? The kids have ten more days of school, and so does Paola. What's so important about wandering around Rome by yourself every morning? Is that how you want to spend your last days on earth?”

The question is straightforward and the answer is obvious: no.

“A whole week, just the three of us traveling around Europe,” he continues. “We'll have fun and it'll improve your mood.”

“And where would we go?”

His confident reply astonishes me: “We'll get a Eurail pass again. A discount version.”

I stand there starting at him, openmouthed.

A Eurail pass.

It's a compound word that immediately conjures up memories of the penetrating smell of train tracks, steaming in the hot summer sun with freckled young Scandinavian girls, and calls home from train station phone booths. It's practically another way of saying “eighteen years old.”

“At age forty we're going to go take the train with a Eurail pass?”

“Tell me one reason why we shouldn't.”

“I have cancer.”

“That's just one more reason to do it. Tell me another.”

“I need to coach the team for the playoffs.”

“You'd only miss one game.”

I start to suspect that this evening's booby trap really is about to snap shut. Corrado returns from his bushy alcove. He's already done with his shampooist.

“Well, are we leaving?” he asks, with the tone of someone who knows more than he's letting on.

Obviously, this trip wasn't a spur-of-the-moment thing, but an organized plan devised by these two lunatics.

“He said yes,” Umberto replies.

“I didn't say yes. We were just going over the pros and the cons.”

“There are lots of pros, there are no cons. So we're leaving on Sunday,” Corrado concludes.

“No, guys, I'm not coming.”

They try and try to talk me into it, for a good ten minutes. But it's
no good. This idea of a journey appeals to me in one way, but frightens me in another. I'm not at all well, and every so often the pain becomes too intense. I don't think that my detested oncologist would be in favor of it. Or my wife, for that matter.

 * * * 

I head home alone. Fifty-five miles per hour.

I call Massimiliano to talk a little, hoping to avoid driving into a bridge abutment.

He picks up after the first ring, cheerful as always.

“Ciao, Lucio! How are you?”

“Are you with a customer?”

“No.”

“I'll be there in half an hour.”

He has no objections. By the time I reach the Chitchat shop it's practically midnight. Rome is starting to empty out. No matter how bad the economy gets, the average Italian won't give up the luxury of fleeing the sticky heat of the city in summer, even if all he can do is travel to his in-laws' country house.

 * * * 

I tell Massimiliano about the suggested trip.

“Seems like a pretty good idea to me,” is what he has to say.

“They suggested it out of pity.”

“I don't think so. They suggested it because it's something they wanted to do. And it'll be good for them too. They're your friends, and even if they're not letting you know how hard it is, your disease is something they're dealing with too.”

I'd never considered over the past few days how my sickness might have affected the people I love. Perhaps a significant portion of Paola's bad mood is a product of how hard it is to process her impending widowhood.

Paola's going to be a widow. What a horrible sentence.

I have one that's even worse.

Lorenzo and Eva are going to be orphans.

In all these months, I've only considered this sad situation from my own point of view, the one that features my inglorious death; but there's another side to the coin, a side that features the tears and sorrow of those I'll be leaving behind. She said it best of course, my Paola. Those who leave can't decide what's best for those who are left behind. Yet their sorrow eats at me now. The closer my time comes, the more I feel their pain. And yet, it gives me great satisfaction to know that I did what I had to do in order to leave. I told Umberto it was okay. Okay to want my wife. Okay to share her bed. Okay to be father to my kids.

It hurt then. It really, really hurts now. But it was the right decision. Paola shouldn't be alone. I can't bear the thought of her crying after I'm gone.

And among those who will cry longest and hardest, of course, are my longtime companions, Athos and Aramis, even though one of them will be the luckiest bugger in the world after I'm gone.

 * * * 

“In any case,” Massimiliano goes on, “I've never told you this, but as far as I'm concerned, this countdown you're doing is actually the smartest thing you've ever done. Marcello Marchesi used to say: ‘The important thing is to make sure that when death comes, it finds us still alive.'”

I wasn't familiar with this phrase. But it's wonderful. Perhaps the finest axiom of all time. Something that even Oscar Wilde would have envied.

“The important thing is to make sure that when death comes, it finds us still alive.”

I look hard at Massimiliano as he prepares a pot of lemon balm
herbal tea. His presence seems to have a mystical healing effect on me—he's a magical hybrid of an Indian shaman and an old wise man. I'm sorry I didn't meet him earlier. Imagine how many mistakes he could have helped me avoid.

A yawn from Massimiliano reminds me it's time to let him get some sleep. This time I put down thirty euros. He's earned them all.

I've made my decision.

On Sunday we leave.

I just have to explain it to Paola.

It won't be easy.