100 Days of Happiness

by Fausto Brizzi

  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.

  SOMETHING THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING

  You 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.

  MY FRIENDS

  My 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.

  WE’RE ALMOST THERE

  Now you have nearly all the ingredients necessary to enjoy this story without a happy ending and witness the imminent arrival of my buddy Fritz. Just a few more essential details and we’re done.

  * * *

  Until a few months ago, I’d leave our apartment in San Lorenzo around quarter to eight every morning, and first I’d drop off Paola at her school, then the kids, and then finally I’d park on the banks of the Tiber about a ten-minute walk from the gym because of the much-detested ZTL, the zona a traffico limitato—Rome’s restricted traffic zone. That short walk served me perfectly as a second morning espresso. Nearly every day, as I made my way through Trastevere, I’d make a stop at Oscar’s pastry shop, which was conveniently close. A pleasant chat about the weather and politics, then my favorite father-in-law would hand me a hot, sweet-smelling doughnut, without my ever asking.

  I’d sit down at the badly painted wooden café table set up on the sidewalk out front, which looked as if someone had left it there at the end of World War Two. Those were the five best minutes of my day. The confectioners’ sugar that puffed out over my lips, begging to be licked off; the crunchy spring of the golden crust that lasts just a fraction of a second before collapsing and allowing itself to be bitten into; the hurrying strangers there to be watched as if they were actors in a play. I was never alone. Wait a few seconds and there was always an extroverted sparrow gliding down onto the table to harvest my crumbs. It was always the same bird; I knew him by sight—not exactly friends, but close to it. I’d break off a few bits of doughnut and toss them to the bird, and on a couple of occasions the sparrow actually fearlessly came to eat from my hands. When the sparrow flew away, it was like an alarm clock going off: it marked the beginning of my day.

  My “doughnut time” was a secret that remained between me, my father-in-law, and the sparrow. I never said a word to Paola, who urged me on a daily basis to go on a more balanced, healthier diet. She’d never forgive me.

  Paola and I, during the past ten years, have had our ups and downs, and a few months ago we scraped absolute bottom thanks to a completely banal event, to which I’ve already made reference and which can be summarized in a single, nondescript word: infidelity. I had a little affair with a new customer at the gym, Signora Moroni. It was, in fact, a little affair. A very little one. We went to bed maybe two or three times total. In any case, no more than five. At the very most, ten or so. All right, a dozen. But it was just sex, never anything more than sex. For us men, that’s a significant difference. And, I hope, a mitigating circumstance.

  If my female readers have not already slammed this book shut and tossed it into the fire, then let me do my best to explain the situation to their satisfaction.

  Signora Moroni.

  Thirty-six years old, four years younger than me. Measurements worthy of a pin-up queen from the fifties: 36-24-35 (I read them on her file at the gym and promptly memorized them).

  The face of a Raphael Madonna with surgically reconstructed lips.

  Fair complexion with a sprinkling of freckles.

  Funny as can be.

  She had been married for years, to a man who traveled frequently for business.

  When she chose me as her personal trainer, I immediately had one thought: “ouch!”

  Seductive married women with husbands who travel for business shouldn’t be allowed to go around on the loose, spending all the time they want in gymnasiums staffed by unfortunate trainers who have sex twice a month at most with their beloved wives of ten years plus. There ought to be a law against it. Buy an exercise bike and set it up in your living room, per favore!

  At first I remained on a strictly professional basis with Signora Moroni. Or maybe we should say a reasonably professional basis. For the firs
t few lessons I limited myself at the very most to the occasional chance brush of the knuckles against her thigh, or a grab and a squeeze here and there to test the muscle tone: I know what you’re thinking, just like the classic dirty old man. Then one evening we stayed on after regular hours, alone, in the gym. I told the receptionist that I’d lock up after finishing a series of training exercises with Signora Moroni. And in point of fact, according to the Italian dictionary, an exercise is: “an act or series of acts performed or practiced in order to keep oneself physically and mentally fit and to develop, improve, or display a specific capability or skill.”

  Well, that night we developed and improved greatly the world’s oldest capability or skill.

  And we went on training and exercising for a number of weeks. Weeks of lies, stress, and the fear of leaving telltale evidence. Usually, we did our exercising at her house, while her husband the musician was on tour with some evergreen singer or other, but a couple of times we did a series of follow-up refresher exercises in the gym. Never at home. I couldn’t have done that. I know—that doesn’t let me off the hook.

  * * *

  The serious thing is that Paola found out about it. Her investigation got started one night in February. I left my iPhone on the table during dinner. I know, it’s the act of an absolute beginner, an amateur at cheating. But when it comes right down to it, I really was an absolute beginner. While we were enjoying an excellent dish of chicken curry, my phone rang. Large as life on the display: Dr. Moroni. An absolute beginner but not completely stupid.

  * * *

  “Aren’t you going to answer that?” Paola asks.

  “No, it’s . . . it’s Moroni, the doctor at the gym,” I say, inventing freely with some embarrassment. “A tremendously tiresome guy; no doubt he just wants to talk my ear off.”