100 Days of Happiness (3 page)

 * * * 

Forgive me, I'm losing the thread.

So, I was saying: the characters . . .

F
ive of the leading characters in my life have already shyly tiptoed on stage, namely: my wife, Paola; my father-in-law, Oscar: my son and daughter, Lorenzo and Eva: and my friend Umberto, the veterinarian who's always hungry and is missing a molar. To that list I should add Corrado, my other best friend, an Alitalia airlines pilot, divorced multiple times and very predictable (you know the type, a dark and handsome airline captain who's constantly seducing flight attendants).

 * * * 

But first and foremost, Paola. Paola. Paola.

My Paola.

 * * * 

Paola is beautiful. To me, she's beautiful. To others, she's likable. She's that girl in the third row from the front with hazel eyes, braids, and nice round hips who falls in love with you while you're stupidly chasing after the giggly little blonde who sits in the front row.

Paola is an Italian-style Bridget Jones. She's sunny, self-deprecating, affectionate, and with a self-supporting thirty-six-inch bust. A woman as rare as snow on the Maldives. She's an impassioned reader—she devours novels one after another with ravenous curiosity. Her favorite book is
The Little Prince,
and she has editions in every format and language.

As I mentioned, she's a teacher at a good high school. And not just any teacher: she's the Maradona of high school teachers. She teaches Italian, Latin, history, and geography, but with a genius and brilliance that—this time I have to admit it—not even Leonardo da Vinci could ever have equaled.

And I'm not saying this just because she's my wife. She's really a special teacher.

Let me explain.

The most important job on earth is teaching, and it's also the most monotonous one. Every year, a history teacher tells her students for what feels like the hundredth time who the Phoenicians were and why the Second World War broke out, a math teacher explains integrals and derivatives, a Latin teacher drills students in declensions and conjugations and teaches his students how to translate the poetry of Horace, and so on with all the various subjects. Sooner or later, teachers get bored and tired. And that makes them less effective and empathetic, and in short, worse teachers. Paola, who is well aware of this pitfall, has come up with an original method for combating boredom and repetitiveness: each school year she “plays” a different teacher, coming up with a set of characteristics for every course she teaches, a way of dressing and talking, and she never breaks character until the final report cards have gone out. One year she put on the show of a waspy, mean old-maid teacher, another year she became an athletic unassuming one, a different year she did a hyperactive teacher with radical mood swings, and then once she was a ditzy capricious one. Her students would watch her transform herself from one year to the next and they enjoyed it enormously. They absolutely idolize the “actress” schoolteacher, even when she gives them a demoralizing D after an oral exam. The principal, on the other hand, envies her popularity and has a dim view of her. Paola has been carrying on her one-woman teaching show for fifteen years now. I just laugh when I see her come home dressed as the sexy schoolteacher from a seventies
movie, or else as Fräulein Rottenmeier, from
Heidi
. She has a passion for teaching that she and I share, even though what I actually teach my boys is lofting shots and counterattacks.

She's a very special woman, but that didn't stop me from cheating on her a couple of months ago. I know, I know, you were just starting to like me and I've already proved to be a disappointment. What can I say in my own defense? Perhaps I could show you a snapshot of the specimen of womanhood who dragged me into temptation? No, I'm afraid that would only strengthen the case against me. To make a long story short, people, there's no point beating around the bush—after eleven years of marriage, I fell into the pathetic booby trap of infidelity. I'm sorry, but I'm going to beg you to trust me, there were some extenuating circumstances. Let's take things in order. First of all, characters: Lorenzo and Eva. My children.

 * * * 

Shaggy-haired Lorenzo is in third grade and he's the last in his class. His teacher doesn't know what else to try with him, and unfailingly, she repeats the classic of all classic lines: “He's intelligent but he just needs to apply himself.” And as if that weren't enough, my firstborn child is a discipline problem. Paola says that it's my fault because I'm never home, because I spend all my time at the gym or playing water polo, and I never really say no to him. The truth is that young Lorenzo has other interests. He doesn't give a hoot about how the ancient Eyptians fertilized the desert with the silt of the flooding Nile or whatever became of the Assyrians and Babylonians; he just wants to spend time pursuing his hobbies. The two principal ones being playing the piano and dismantling expensive electronic devices.

The upright piano belonged to my concierge grandparents, and no one ever knew how to play it, not even them. One day I heard some practically harmonic chords coming from the end of the hall in the three-bedroom apartment we live in. It was Lorenzo, hard at work on
his preliminary efforts to become a self-taught concert pianist. Now he's capable of playing by ear any pop song he hears on the radio. I'm not saying that I have Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in my living room, but my budding young musician is very promising.

The second hobby is a little more unsettling. For as long as he's been able to coordinate his little fingers, Lorenzo has been vivisecting with the deft precision of a medical examiner everything that comes within reach. But the autopsies are performed on objects that are still perfectly serviceable. From the television set, the dishwasher, and the engine of my station wagon to the snack vending machine at school, the blender, and the traffic light on the corner. He has a full-fledged passion for mechanical engineering and electronics. And as far as that goes, this pastime might be amusing and even instructive. But the problem is that he never puts anything back together again and leaves a swath of destruction worthy of Attila the Hun wherever he passes, transforming anything and everything into a still-to-be-assembled piece of furniture from Ikea, only without an instruction sheet. And so, evidently, there really isn't much time left in his day for studying. My wife, good and conscientious schoolteacher that she is, is quite worried. I'm not. What most worries me (actually, let's say, what most hurts my feelings) is that Lorenzo still hasn't learned to swim; in fact, he actually seems to be afraid of the water. He has the same flotation line as the RMS
Titanic
has currently. The minute he's put in the water, he goes straight to the bottom. It's really too bad.

 * * * 

Freckle-faced Eva, on the other hand, is in first grade and is the pet of every teacher in her elementary school. And she's a budding militant environmentalist. She strong-armed us into adopting animals and now we share the apartment with a cross-eyed limping German shepherd (which for simplicity's sake we named Shepherd), a white
hamster (Alice) with urinary incontinence, and no fewer than three lazy stray cats that we named after the Aristocats: Berlioz, Toulouse, and Marie.

At home, Eva is a hurricane of words. She talks and talks and talks. Before getting around to the point, her conversation is interspersed with a series of whys and wherefores and detailed descriptions and circumstances so tangled that not even Perry Mason mounting a difficult defense could manage to produce so much smoke and mirrors and confusing details. I feel sure that when she grows up, she'll be either a television news anchor or a politician, which, more or less, amounts to the same thing. She applies her passion for environmentalism to everything. She demands that the family undertake a differentiated waste collection that turns recycling into a high-level form of connoisseurship and collecting—classified by shape, material, odor, and color. She's cute as a bug, but she doesn't take advantage of the fact. She only uses her smile and her big baby-blue eyes the color of the mid-August sky to persuade her fellow humans to go along with her exaggerated sense of civic responsibility. When she greets people, she says
miao
instead of
ciao
because she claims that she was a cat in a previous life.

Every so often she remembers that she's just six and a half years old, and she comes and snuggles in my lap on the sofa and watches cartoons. When that happens, time slows down and stands perfectly still. They say that the love we feel toward our children is the most genuine kind of love, the kind that lets you scale mountains and write songs. And it's absolutely true. When Eva runs to greet me or when it thunders with lightning in the middle of the night and she climbs into our big warm bed, I get a smile in my heart, my wrinkles stretch out, and my muscles regain the spring and power of when I was twenty.

The best possible medicine.

Eva is also the darling of yet another star of this story. My father-in-law, Oscar.

 * * * 

Oscar isn't hard to picture: he looks exactly like the Italian actor Aldo Fabrizi, with the same balloonish physique, the same gait and stride, and he even mutters and mumbles just like him. His life is divided into two parts: before the accident and after the accident. Ten years ago or so his wife, Vittoria, the kindest, quietest woman who ever lived, was killed by a hit-and-run driver while she was out with their binge-eating Labrador retriever, Gianluca.

I can't seem to keep from arguing with him, though as soon as he starts coming out with his theories on the meaning of life, he makes me laugh so hard that I'd gladly hire him as my own personal guru. One day they'll talk about him in textbooks, and students will hate him just as much as they detest his colleagues, Socrates and Plato. I'm sure of it.

His favorite theme is life in the afterlife. His theory is that those who were good in a previous life are born into this world hale and healthy, the children of wealthy industrialists, intelligent and good-looking. Those who were bad are born ugly, crippled, stupid, and poor, or else die young or live on as invalids. A theory that, to hear him tell it, would justify all the injustices of this world. To Oscar, luck and unluck are deserved. In which case, I ask him, “you're saying it's not worth doing anything? Fate has already written all our actions?”

Oscar shakes his head and goes on making doughnuts. He doesn't know the answer. He raises doubts and offers questions but not solutions, like all philosophers, come to think of it.

“When all is said and done, Lucio, my lad, the true meaning of life is nothing more than taking a bite out of a hot doughnut.”

I smile and bite into one. As always, he's right.

Y
ou will soon find out that I'm obsessed with inventors, so we can't really go on until I've unveiled for you the solution to one of the most important mysteries in the history of mankind, namely, who invented the doughnut?

An Italian? Could it be the ubiquitous Leonardo da Vinci? No, my friends, it could not.

Leonardo did, in fact, invent a doughnut of sorts, but it was really a doughnut pool float, just a lifesaver for beginning swimmers, but, unfortunately, he had failed to invent inflatable plastic.

 * * * 

On the other hand, the doughnut has an origin that remains the subject of some controversy. It came to New York (which was still called New Amsterdam back then) from Holland, with the unappealing name of
olykoek
, which means literally “oily cake.” It described a dough kneaded with apples, plums, or raisins. According to doughnut lore, one day a cow happened to kick a pan of hot oil onto a bowl of uncooked samples of the Dutch pastry, which resulted in what we Italians call the
bomba fritta
. There ought to be a monument to that remarkably creative bovine.

So far, so good . . . but how did that hole come to be?

 * * * 

In the year 1847 a woman named Elizabeth Gregory, the mother of Hanson Gregory, a young New England ship captain, tweaked the
recipe for oily cake by adding nutmeg, cinnamon, and lemon rind, as well as inserting walnuts and hazelnuts in the center, which was the part that was always the last to cook through. The cake thus prepared became so delicious and irresistible that when her son set off for a long sea voyage, he always asked his mother to make a large batch of her oil cakes for the whole crew. The story has it that the New England captain disliked the walnuts and hazelnuts that his mother used to stuff the center of the cake, and he always cut them out before eating his, leaving a hole in the middle of the pastry. At the captain's orders, the ship's cook made all pastries from then on in the shape of a ring, removing the middle with a round tin pepper mill.

This was an invention that certainly didn't pass unnoticed. In Clam Cove, Maine, in fact, there's a plaque honoring Captain Hanson Gregory, “who first invented the hole in the donut,” and in 1934 the Chicago World's Fair declared that the doughnut was “the food hit of the century of progress.” The fact remains that the hole in the center marked the beginning of the spectacular international success of doughnuts.

Of course, we Italians, and my father-in-law, Oscar, in particular, find this story or legend—whichever it is—completely unacceptable. What? we say, doughnuts, or
ciambelle,
or better yet,
graffe,
as they call them in Naples—those aren't an Italian invention? Impossible.

 * * * 

Whatever the truth, the one thing I know for sure is that you're hungry now, and therefore, before you stop reading to get a snack, let me go back to where we were first interrupted. Characters.

M
y passion for doughnuts is one I share with my best friends: Umberto and Corrado. We've all known one another since middle school and we've been friends our whole lives, even though Umberto was held back after flunking his freshman year of high school. We've always done everything together, spent our holidays, and even gone on camping trips when we were Scouts together. The three musketeers of North Rome. I was the oversized Porthos, Umberto was the pragmatic Athos, and Corrado was Aramis—the lady-killer. All for one and one for all. I really know everything about them—all of their secrets. We've beaten each other up, laughed together, fought over girls, lent each other money, and held lasting grudges. In other words, we've done everything that best friends do. And twenty years after, just like the three legendary musketeers of France, we're still here.

 * * * 

Umberto, aside from swallowing engagement rings, is, as I described to you earlier, a veterinarian. He's single, and none of the relationships he's been in has ever lasted longer than a year. Which is mysterious, given that Umberto is the living prototype of the ideal husband. He's never in a bad mood, he's self-deprecating, he's not handsome but he's healthy, maybe just a little untutored and impulsive when it comes to his manners. His one shortcoming, if you leave aside his heavy Roman accent, is his punctuality. Which is an unforgivable defect in Italy's capital. Do you know the kind of maniac who, if you arrange to
meet in a restaurant at one o'clock actually shows up at five minutes to one? Or the kind of guy who's already waiting outside the movie theater when you get there, and has bought tickets for everyone? Or even worse, if you invite him over to dinner, when he shows up on time he catches you still in slippers and bathrobe, wandering around the apartment?

Umberto can be an inconvenient presence because most of the population of Rome lives about half an hour behind the rest of the world in time. I'm habitually late, and Umberto has always made a point of complaining about it. He claims that he's spent a total of one year of his life waiting for me. His life is just a series of wasted time periods spent waiting for other people, and so he's gotten organized and decided to find a way to fill in these stretches of dead time. He opted for the age-old but immortal lifesaver: reading books. He always carries a pocket graphic novel with him, and he calculates that the time it takes to read it perfectly matches my average delay.

Umberto often spends evenings with us. My wife and my daughter have a special relationship with him. Paola considers him sort of like the brother she never had; she confides in him and coddles him, serving him pans of eggplant Parmesan and lethally rich dishes of tiramisu. Little Eva calls him uncle and chats eagerly with him about their shared love of nature. It goes without saying that he is the trusted veterinarian of our little domestic farm. Sometimes, like so many latter-day Cupids, we set him up on blind dates with schoolteachers who work with Paola, but without ever seeing any dazzling showers of sparks.

 * * * 

Corrado, as I mentioned before, is an Alitalia pilot. In fact, he's a caricature of a pilot, a perfect archetype: tall, handsome, with a neat goatee, a gentleman, with a full mouth of straight gleaming teeth, and muscular without overdoing it. In short, any stewardess's dream. He's
been divorced several times, he has no children, and he has a tendency to set the hearts of all the women he meets afire, only to abandon them, leaving them heartbroken and depressed. To hear him tell it, he hates women because of his two stormy divorces, which have left him with nothing except the obligation to write alimony checks to his two ex-wives, whom he refers to as “the parasites.”

His main hobby is just having fun. His chief passion is statistics, and has been ever since our high school days together. We sat at adjoining desks: I had a C minus minus average, he had an A minus/A average. It was just a matter of statistics, he used to say. He never studied a bit, but he managed to foretell, with the accuracy of a Nostradamus, the day he would be given an oral exam and even the likelihood that he'd be asked this or that question. He remembered everything and he'd compute it all and draw the necessary conclusions: he invariably nailed it exactly. He applied this same method to everything, especially to women, who, as you must already have guessed, were and remain his weakness. Corrado has always gotten more girls than the Fonz. On account of statistics. This is his personal technique for hooking up: as soon as he gets to a party, he will always start chatting up all the girls there, in decreasing order of attractiveness. He'll go over to the prettiest girl there and ask her, with an overabundance of sheer nerve: “Do you want to have sex with me tonight?”

Courtship whittled down to the minimum, he gets straight to the point.

The answer is almost unfailingly: “Have you lost your mind?”

But as he checks off girls and works his way down the ranking, by the time he gets to the tenth or fifteenth entry in the improvised “Belle of the Ball” contest, he'll eventually wind up with a “Sure, why not?”

In my single days, I'd watch as he'd take her off to the nearest bed or dark corner, under my wide, sad eyes. Chalk it up to statistics. He'd
calculated that out of a hundred girls, at least thirty would be willing to go to bed with him. To find those thirty, he just had to start optimistically with the prettiest one and then settle for the first one to fall into his net, never the homeliest girl at the party, and always one who was at least cute. All this while I was furiously courting the prettiest one there and coming up empty-handed after two hours of pointless conversation in a fruitless attempt to seem interesting and sexy.

When all is said and done, Corrado is the most thrilling and amusing man in the world to spend time with as a buddy. But, and now I'm addressing my female readers, if you ever meet him, avoid him like the plague. You'll recognize him immediately: he looks like Aramis.