It’s an unmistakable defeat. The only thing that can help us is a piece of blind luck. I make copies of the picture and post them in the local bars, including our café. Underneath is a vague note: “Contact this number for an urgent message.” We’ll see how that goes.
In the meanwhile, this investigation has at least obtained an initial result: it has distracted me. Tomorrow afternoon is my second chemotherapy appointment. The side effects have subsided, but by now I’ve become an authority on the subject—each time they’ll return with greater virulence and persistence. I decide to go meet Paola at school, forgetting that today is her day off. I wait for her like an idiot, until the last teacher emerges from the building and she recognizes me.
“Signor Battistini!”
I can’t even remember her name, but I pretend to remember her perfectly.
“Teacher!”
“Today’s your wife’s day off, what are you doing on this side of town?”
“What am I doing here? Right around the corner there’s a first-rate pastry shop, I was just going there to pick up a tray of pastries.”
“Doesn’t your father-in-law have a pastry shop?”
I hate nitpicking schoolteachers.
“Sure, of course he does, but he doesn’t make Sicilian cannoli because his wife cheated on him with a fisherman from Caltanissetta, so, since I felt like having some cannoli today, well that’s why I’m here.”
“A fisherman from Caltanissetta? Caltanissetta isn’t even on the water!”
Now I’m ready to strangle her with my bare hands, right there, on the street.
“True, in fact, he was out of work, and had to look for a new line of work.”
She seems dubious. I try to break away, but she starts back in: “I heard you weren’t well.”
I hate schoolteachers who know I’m not well.
“Yes, but I’m over it already, I’m practically cured . . .” I minimize with unusual nonchalance.
“Ah, that’s good, because cancer killed both my brother and my uncle, as well as a teacher here at our high school.”
I also hate this conversation.
“Listen, Teacher, I’d love to stay and talk for hours, but I’m just afraid when I get there they’ll be out of cannoli; they’re the most popular pastry of all. Sorry to talk and run.”
* * *
By now it’s clear to me that having cancer has something in common with a funeral. Everyone comes up to you and expresses condolences. The only difference is that because the person in question isn’t yet in a casket, instead of expressing condolences to the widow or the next of kin, the comforter just hands them straight to the soon-to-be dearly departed. If I ever have cancer again, I swear this time I’m going to tell everyone that it’s just a bad case of tonsillitis.
As I walk, I give Paola a call.
“My love, where are you?”
“I’m at the hairdresser’s.”
“Do you want me to come by and pick you up?”
“I drove here; I have my car.”
“Ah, great. Then should I run by and pick up the children at school?”
They attend full-time, a wonderful new invention designed to reduce the divorce rate.
“That would be great, thanks.”
“Listen . . . tomorrow I’m going in for my second round of chemo.”
“I’ll go with you. See you later.”
End of conversation. She will go with me—that’s a good thing. Yet as I hear our conversation in my mind—routine and humdrum, polite, yet without affection—I feel sick. I want to win back her love, I want her to forgive me. Every day, I expect to be closer to my goal. Yet I am further away from it than ever.
−84
Second session of chemo. In the waiting room I strike up a conversation with a talkative guy my age who confides, with a certain pride, that he’s already on his third round. Twenty seconds later, he says it again. This treatment isn’t helping him. From the inner room, another patient emerges, leaning on what would seem to be his wife. He’s not even fifty, but he can barely walk; he’s skinny as a rail, and his eyes are dull and blank.
Now it’s my turn. The same nurse who looks like Stromboli comes out to call my name. Paola stays in the waiting room and I walk into the little room that I already know so well. Two minutes later, there I am again, with a needle in my vein and thousands of thoughts whirling through my head.
* * *
When I was little, there were three possible lines of work that caught my imagination.
The first, as documented by my historic essay “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up,” which Grandma carefully stored in the top dresser drawer, was an amusement park ride inspector. Clever child that I was, I’d decided to mix business with pleasure. After all, there must be a man whose job it is to say, “This ride works perfectly, it’s fun and it’s safe, go ahead and open it to the public.” I always assumed that man would have a lifetime ticket so he could come back to the amusement park whenever he liked.
The second line of work, and this takes us into the realm of criminal endeavors, was to be a cat burglar. Maybe it was because of my fascination with Diabolik, but I’ve often dreamed of sneaking into a jewelry shop by night and cleaning the place out. This is an ambition I’ve never pursued, though I confess I’ve stolen bathrobes from more than one hotel.
The third profession—and here I have to say that I was ahead of my time—was that of a life coach, or as I called it back then, with a naive but still very accurate term, a recommender. I imagine a figure who, much like Cardinal Mazarin or Richelieu for the king of France, works with his clients on the more complicated choices in life.
“Is the girl I’m dating the right one for me?”
Zap, and the recommender arrives on the scene and provides a confident answer.
“What should I do, should I take this job?”
Zap, here’s the recommender ready to offer the best advice.
In the end, I didn’t wind up in any of these lines of work: I neither inspect amusement parks, nor do I steal, nor do I give advice to anyone, least of all myself.
Suddenly I feel like a loser.
In the meanwhile, the needle has done its dirty work and injected me with the usual dose of poison. I no longer know whether I’m making the right decision.
“How are we doing, Signor Battistini?” the nurse inquires.
By now, I always give the same answer.
“Rotten, thanks.”
I step out of the claustrophobic little room and as I walk through the waiting room, I run into the talkative patient who insists on telling me once again that he’s on his third round of chemotherapy. If I were him, I wouldn’t do a fourth round. I grab the arm that Paola offers me and we walk out into the fresh air. I feel like crying.
−83
No longer going to work at the gym is a strange sensation. I stroll through Villa Borghese at an unusual time for me, eleven-thirty in the morning. I feel like a privileged soul. I think of a Latin word that we all associate with the Colosseum and its bloodthirsty games, a blend of the feral and the athletic: moriturus, “one who is about to die.” Not bad. It’s accurate and evocative, and has a nostalgic tang straight out of an elementary school textbook. Moriturus. I who am about to die: I’m a moriturus. I like it. It almost makes me feel like a heroic gladiator ready for the final battle in the presence of a jubilant audience. My man-eating tiger is called Fritz. A tiger with a name like that could hardly be dangerous. He’s just a big harmless cat.
I feel better already.
Moriturus.
I who am about to die.
It would look pretty good on a business card: Lucio Battistini, moriturus.
I head down toward Piazzale Flaminio, through the pedestrian island of Piazza del Popolo with its vast encampment of tourists in shorts. I stop to look at a wom
an dressed as the Statue of Liberty, her face painted white and a hat with a sunburst on her head. She stands motionless at the foot of an obelisk; the paint on her face is starting to run. I sit down next to her, on the steps. I’m a perfect practitioner of the art of doing sweet FA.
Then I head off toward Piazza Venezia, zigzagging a little through the back streets. I spot a little shop I’ve never noticed before. The sign outside is new. I walk in, attracted by the name: Chitchat. I’m welcomed in by Massimiliano, a former policeman, now retired. Inside the shop are a fireplace with no fire, a couple of ragtag couches and an armchair facing a wide-screen TV, a fridge, a galley kitchen with a steaming teakettle, and a small table. It looks like the living room in an old-fashioned apartment, with furniture thrown together by chance. In fact, that’s exactly what it is.
Massimiliano is seventy years old and looks much younger; he’s never been married, he has no living relatives. He’s well read and intelligent. He explains to me that after retiring, he quickly became bored; he spent his days in his ground-floor apartment, watching old movies and indulging his longtime passion for cooking. But it wasn’t enough. He felt horribly lonely and his pension was too small to allow him to travel around the world. So he painted the Chitchat sign and put it out over his front door, replacing his normal door with a glass shop door. Then he waited for someone to bite.
“It’s a pretty simple idea,” he explains to me. “I welcome perfect strangers into my home, I make them tea with a plate of cookies, we exchange a little chitchat, as the name suggests, we watch a little TV together, that kind of thing. In other words, we keep each other company.”
A chitchat shop. Simple but brilliant. Not even Leonardo da Vinci ever came up with this one. It’s like a pharmacy that stocks friendship.
He adds that when the time comes to leave, his customers can pay him whatever they think is right, as a way of covering expenses (usually five euros).
“So how’s business?”
“Excellent. These days, people don’t lack a thing, except for someone who has the time to listen to what they have to say. I almost never have any free time for myself.”
“And what kind of customers do you get?” I ask.
“It’s a grab bag. Rejected lovers, retirees like me, even the occasional executive at lunchtime looking for an hour of relaxation with a ‘faux grandpa,’” he says with a smile.
Massimiliano entertains all patrons with his cheerful running patter and his cookies and cakes, and now he’s built up a numerous and faithful clientele in the neighborhood. It’s highly therapeutic to spend a couple of hours with him; I’d recommend it to anyone—forget about shiatsu massages and antidepressants. I believe that, sooner or later, some multinational will steal his idea and open a chain of fast friends outlets, with the slogan “You deserve a friend today!”
I spend a couple of hours with him. We even watch an episode of Happy Days on his satellite TV and I tell him about my cancer and the treatments I’ve just started. Only as I’m talking to him does it dawn on me that I’ve already made up my mind not to go back and have another needle stuck in my vein so it can turn me slowly into a vegetable. Arrivederci, chemo. Just the thought makes me feel better.
Massimiliano explains that he’s been a vegetarian for years and that his food choices help him ward off cancer. He’s no expert, but he suggests I look for some alternative solutions, though he adds that I should avoid charlatans and only talk to those who use natural methods.
“I would advise you to see a naturopath.”
“What does a naturopath do?”
“A naturopath will show you how to lead a healthier life. Let’s say that a naturopath is a cross between a dietologist and a psychologist.”
I take note of the recommendation, and then we go on talking about nothing in particular for another hour or so.
When I leave, I put ten euros down on the table.
I already feel better. I’ll be back.
−82
“There are two types of treatments for a tumor, Signor Battistini: conventional oncological treatments and those that are referred to as ‘alternative’ treatments, a word I don’t particularly like. . . . Alternative to what? I prefer to call them natural treatments, because they follow the course of nature.”
I listen without interrupting Dr. Zanella, a naturopath in her early fifties, practically the spitting image of Madonna.
“The first type of treatment chiefly concerns the sickness,” the pop star tells me, “while the second type follows a holistic approach, which is to say, it treats the person as a whole.”
I still can’t say whether I’m in the presence of a charlatan, a genuine Madonna, or an enlightened guru of deeper understanding.
“The conventional approach,” she continues, “attempts to restore a state of health with pharmaceuticals, pills, drugs, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy, and focuses little or not at all on the patient’s lifestyle and diet. How do they think they’re going to save a sick person by stuffing his body with chemicals? By continuing to poison him? The word pharmaceutical comes from the ancient Greek word pharmakon, and it’s no accident that it means ‘poison.’”
If I’d been listening when we studied ancient Greek at school, I never would have set foot in a pharmacy.
“A tumor almost always consists of a proliferation of cells due to a discharge of internal poisons, such as polluted air, alcohol, tobacco smoke, unhealthy foods, foods contaminated with pesticides, and other foods that are bad for the human body, such as dairy products, meat, refined sugars, and so on.”
“Wait, I don’t understand . . . dairy products, meat, and sugars . . . are bad for you?”
“Very bad for you, for various reasons. What do you usually eat, on an everyday basis?”
“I eat normally. Mediterranean diet . . . pasta, tomatoes, steaks, cheeses.”
“That’s terrible. What about breakfast?”
I hesitate.
“For breakfast I usually have a . . . a doughnut.”
“Deep-fried?”
“Sure, deep-fried, the classic sugar doughnut. My father-in-law is a pastry chef.”
The singer looks at me as if I’d just told her I eat roast babies every morning.
“Let me explain, Signor Battistini. A doughnut is made of superfine baking flour that has been refined so that there are no vitamins in it, because it has been bleached and industrially processed. Superfine baking flour—like all refined food products—causes an increase in your glycemic levels and a resulting rise in insulin, and therefore a general weakening of the organism, which thus becomes increasingly subject to disease and tumors.”
I can’t figure out whether she’s serious or is just kidding me. She insists on dismantling all the foundations of my daily diet—from eggs, which, she informs me, come from farm-raised, antibiotic-fed hens; to milk, which has too much casein, creates inflammation, and deprives the body of calcium; to sugar, which is simply malevolent; to heated oil, which is cancerogenous.
“Can-cer-og-e-nous,” She repeats the word with a perverse satisfaction. “Your morning doughnut is your worst enemy!”
I’m in shock. This may be the biggest shock of my life since my parents abandoned me and Italy was defeated in the 1994 World Cup. Doughnuts are bad for your health. I ask if I can go to the bathroom. Actually, I’m just hiding out so I can do some quick online research with my smart phone. I need to know. I’m thirsty for knowledge.
My good friend Google helps out as usual. The naturopath is perfectly right. Everything she says has a solid basis in scientific fact.
I return to Dr. Zanella’s office and decide to dig a little deeper. The main question is, as always, straightforward: “Am I too late to do anything?”
“Perhaps not. A body falls ill because it’s been poisoned over the course of time. With toxic foods, pharmaceuticals, drugs, alcohol, and r
epressed emotions.”
“I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, and I don’t take drugs, except for maybe a joint twice a year.”
“But you eat doughnuts. And who knows what other crap.”
I feel like an elementary school student sent to stand in the corner.
“You see, to treat cancer, you need to change the way you eat and live, and that means raw foods, vegetable drinks, plenty of sunlight, yoga breathing exercises, and the total abandonment of carcinogenic foods, medicines, and other products. If the tumor isn’t too far advanced, then it’s possible to limit it or even put it into remission.”
“What can I do?”
“Let’s start with two days of total fasting. Cancer is a parasite that lives inside you. If you don’t eat, it doesn’t eat either. But you have stores of energy that will let you live longer.”
A question seems quite natural.
“Why doesn’t everyone do it?”
“Pharmaceutical houses. Is that a sufficient answer? If people knew that the most purifying substance there is is nettle extract, what would pharmacists sell?”
“So two days of diet?” I ask, in sheer terror.
“Not diet, fasting. After the first two days of digestive rest, I’d start the diet proper. A food regimen designed to cause the tumor to regress is a partial fast on the basis of raw, organic, fresh vegetables.”
She goes on drawing up a list of things that I can and cannot eat. Practically speaking, it’s a vegan diet.
“At night, before going to bed, I’d recommend a plaster of cabbage leaves and spa mud, applied to the liver and the torso in correspondence to the lungs.”
I interrupt her. “What are my chances of recovery?”
“I want to be straight with you. If you’d come to me a year ago, with a tumor in an embryonic state, without ever having had chemotherapy, I would have told you that the odds in your favor were ninety-nine percent. But at your present state of development of this disease, your chances are slim. Still, you do have a chance to improve the quality of life in the time remaining to you, to feel more energetic . . . and after all, you never know. The human organism is an unpredictable and complicated machine, preprogrammed to heal. It can always surprise us.”
100 Days of Happiness Page 10