100 Days of Happiness

by Fausto Brizzi

  In other words, after growing up on dreams of Olympic gold medals draped on my chest as the captain of the Italian national water polo team, the Settebello, with the national anthem blaring out over the crowd and goosebumps running up and down my arms, I found myself forced to settle for the job that life had saddled me with. That is, six hours a day spent in a calisthenic subbasement where the scent of sweat blended magically with the odors from the Vietnamese restaurant next door. But in my spare time, I did manage to achieve a little dream of mine: coaching a boys’ water polo team. All of them between fourteen and fifteen, the worst of all ages. I recruited them at the school where my wife teaches, and I coach them at a city pool a couple of evenings a week, with results that I have to admit have been pretty disappointing. Last year, after lots of hard work and lots of goals put through at our expense, our ranking in the boys’ water polo league championship for our province was a brilliant second from bottom. And luckily, we couldn’t be kicked down to the minor leagues because we were already as minor league as it gets. This year, though, we’re bobbing along in the middle of the league: could be better, could be worse. I can’t complain: teaching kids to love sports is the most wonderful thing there is.

  * * *

  So that’s my life in professional terms, and then there’s the more important aspect, which I’ve already mentioned in passing: my family. I met Paola when I was twenty, at a pub; she was the girlfriend of a girlfriend of a girl in my class. Usually the girlfriends of the girlfriends of the girls in my class were uninteresting unlovely skinny runts. But when Paola walked into the place, it was like she was radiating with the phosphorescent glow of a yellow highlighter that called her out over all the other women there that night. A bright yellow aura gleamed around her entire silhouette, identifying her as the one thing I wanted to be sure not to forget. Like a phrase you need to commit to memory, learn by heart. Ten minutes later I’d already extended a pickup artist’s smarmy invitation to come watch my water polo team compete (and I’d already made a mental note to go down on my knees and beg the coach to let me play at least two minutes in that match). At the time, I was still a professional player and she worked in her parents’ little pastry shop, which, over time, played a fundamental role in the loss of my fighting trim and my abs. The house specialty was ciambella fritta con lo zucchero—sugar doughnuts. Fragrant, yielding—the taste of childhood. There’s a tradition that dates back at least thirty years: at two in the morning, Paola’s father, Oscar, rolls up the metal shopfront shutter to half-mast, so that the good-for-nothings and roving vampires from all over Trastevere can sink their fangs into sugar doughnuts that are still hot and greasy. Now that Oscar’s wife is dead, there’s no one running the pastry shop but him and a Sri Lankan assistant who laughs constantly. Paola ended up getting her degree in literature and philosophy, and, after substitute teaching for a while, she now has a tenured position at a good high school with a liberal arts focus.

  After a couple of months together (everybody knows the first two months of any love story are always the best), I successfully got myself dumped by Paola in the way only men seem to know how—for flirting with a certain Monica, a good-looking girl from the Marche who studied psychology and sneered at the idea of shaving her armpits.

  I lost sight of Paola for nearly ten years. Love is simply a matter of timing and we hadn’t been properly synchronized at first: she already wanted a family, while what I wanted was more along the lines of bedding every fertile woman on earth, with or without shaved armpits. It was a challenge to reconcile the two objectives.

  Then one day, fate chose to bring us together in a supermarket checkout line. Actually, on account of her transformation from long blond hair to brunette pageboy, I hadn’t really recognized her at first, and for the first ten minutes I was convinced I was talking to the granddaughter of one of my grandmother’s friends. But I never told her that.

  I immediately invited her to dinner and unleashed my consummate tarot-card technique on her. Let me explain.

  There’s an aged and venerable tarot card reader known as Zia Lorenza who works in Piazza Navona. She has a tattered deck of cards, white hair tied back in a bun, and a glib line of patter. Obviously, she doesn’t know anything about the future, but she can still hoodwink anyone, especially when she plays dirty. I regularly used her to impress girls. The tactic was as follows (by all means, feel free to use it; it’s not patented): a romantic stroll arm in arm through the most beautiful piazza in Rome, a pleasant talk, a pleasant walk, and as we pass by the old fortune-teller’s stand, I secretly toss Zia Lorenza a crumpled ball of paper with all the biographical details—her tastes and whatever information I’ve already managed to cull—about the girl in question. On our next circuit of the piazza, I’ve already adroitly brought up the subject of the “paranormal”—taking a skeptical approach if she’s a believer, and a more accepting stance if she’s a skeptic. That’s when phase two of the plan comes into play: I invite her to have her cards read—just for a laugh, my treat. No woman on earth is going to say no. And sure enough, Zia Lorenza puts on her show, reconstructing with stunning accuracy the present and past, and of course creating a future life where, she states, “The name of the man of your dreams starts with an L.” “L,” as in Lucio. I take advantage of her bewildered emotional state: witnessing a paranormal event together can only unite our spirits and, in most cases, our bodies as well. I will say that no one can predict the future.No one but me when I’m squiring a young lady around Piazza Navona. In that case, I know exactly how the evening will end. And Paola was no exception. But I swear to you, that’s the last time I used the trick. That night, caressed by a gentle westerly wind, we kissed for our second first time. We became officially engaged then and there, and in less than three months, we were living together in a studio apartment overlooking Tiber Island. A classic rekindling of the flame. But this time, we were finally fully synchronized and in love.

  As I’ve already mentioned, we were married outside Milan, in the little church of Saint Rocco Flagellated Martyr—a considerable inconvenience to all our guests from Rome. But there was a romantic motivation behind that choice of church. Roughly fifty years earlier, my grandparents (on my mother’s side), the glorious apartment building concierges Alfonsina and Michele, were married in that same church. After I lost my parents (more about them later), my grandparents were all the family I had.

  I believe that on the seventh day God didn’t rest: He dreamed up my grandparents, and realizing that this was the best thing He’d come up with yet, decided to take the rest of the day off to hang out with them.

  I lived with them for almost fifteen years, and the dinners the three of us had, with chicken-fried turkey and mashed potatoes with gooey mozzarella, remain an indelible memory. In fact, even now, if I close my eyes I can smell the aroma of frying from the kitchen and the distant voice of my grandmother calling, “Dinner’s ready and it’s getting cold!” Whenever I go by the concierge’s cage where the two of them worked and practically lived, I expect to see them still there, Grandpa with his glasses on, sorting through the mail, and Grandma lovingly watering her geraniums.

  Alfonsina and Michele stood by me as my witnesses when I married Paola, and I have to say I believe it was the best day of their lives. I’ve never seen a couple of octogenarians cry for joy like that. At a certain point, the priest, Don Walter, skinny as a beanpole with a strong Calabrian accent, even interrupted the ceremony to scold the two of them, while everyone laughed.

  A few years ago my grandparents passed away, a couple of weeks apart. They died in their sleep, undramatically.

  They just couldn’t stand to be apart. They’d only just met my son and daughter: Lorenzo and Eva.

  It’s not fair.

  Grandparents are like superheroes. They should never die.

  A few months later I finally cleared out the two-room flat next to their concierge’s cage, and at the back of a high shelf I
found an old-fashioned cardboard suitcase, the kind the traditional Italian emigrant carried. In it were pictures, lots and lots of photographs. Not the classic assortment of snapshots from vacations on the beach, strangers’ birthday parties, and so forth. No. Grandpa had taken a photo of Grandma every day for the past sixty years. Every single day. He never missed one; on the back of every picture was a different date, first black-and-white and then, in time, full color, Polaroids, and the last ones printed from digital files. The pictures were taken in all sorts of different places, in their concierge’s cage, on the street, at the beach, at the bakery, at the supermarket, in front of the Teatro Sistina, on Piazza del Popolo, on the old Ferris wheel at the Luneur amusement park, at Saint Peter’s, wherever fate took them over their long lifetime. I couldn’t stop looking at them. First Grandma as a young woman, then gradually the first wrinkles and expression lines, the graying hair, the extra pounds, but the smile never changed. But what impressed me most wasn’t the aging, it was the backgrounds. Behind Grandma was Italy being transformed. Behind her was History. You could glimpse blurry symbols and personalities of every era: the old Fiat 1100 and the Citroën “shark”; long-haired hippies, Timberland-wearing bomber-jacket-clad paninari, and punks; concert posters for Paul Anka, Charles Aznavour, and Robbie Williams; Lambrettas, Vespas, and other scooters; Big Jim dolls and Graziella folding bikes, Rubik’s Cubes; SIP phone booths, yellow taxis, shops with hand-painted signs. By the way, the first photographer—though almost no one seems to know this—was a Frenchman named Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, one of the absolute geniuses of the nineteenth century. But once again, the earliest experiments were done by good old Leonardo da Vinci. There are even those who claim that the Holy Shroud of Turin was a rudimentary experimental “photographic plate” contrived by the hyperactive Tuscan inventor. A fascinating theory.

  * * *

  Forgive me, I’m losing the thread.

  So, I was saying: the characters . . .

  MY FAMILY

  Five 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.