The last couple of lines seem to have been inserted just to keep me from getting depressed.
“Are you going to give it a try?” asks Madonna, finally flashing me a smile.
−81
First day of fasting.
By noon my head is spinning and my stomach is rumbling. Luckily, the crisis passes. As soon as my organism realizes that food isn’t coming, it calms down and stops emitting alarm bursts.
I head back to the Chitchat shop. I want to tell Massimiliano that I’ve taken his advice.
“Good, I’m glad to hear it,” he replies as he makes me an herbal tea.
“Even if it’s late, I want to give it a full try.”
“That strikes me as the right approach.”
I look ravenously at the cookies we dunked in the tea last time. I can feel my mouth salivating, just like the Big Bad Wolf when he looks at the Three Little Pigs. I ask him if he wouldn’t mind hiding the cookies in the cabinet. What the eye doesn’t see: that’s always the best policy.
“You’ll see,” says Massimiliano as he locks away the precious delicacies, “eating less and better will increase the energy available to you day after day.”
“I hope so. I’m already tired the minute I get up in the morning.”
Just then, a new customer rings the doorbell, a tall skinny gentleman in his early fifties with a beaten-down appearance. I’d forgotten I was in a public establishment, and not at a friend’s house.
“Do you mind coming back in half an hour or so?” Massimiliano asks the newcomer. “Or else, if you feel like it, you can sit and watch a little TV with us.”
The thin man accepts. So there we are, all three of us, watching a rerun of Happy Days. The memorable episode in which Fonzie water-skis over a great white shark on a bet.
“The story is so absurd,” Massimiliano explains, “that in the U.S., to ‘jump the shark’ is the moment when a television show has started to go downhill.”
“I liked that episode,” says the thin man, who it turns out is named Giannandrea. Maybe the reason he’s sad is the name he was given as a baby.
“I liked it too,” I agree.
“Everyone liked it. The truth is that our eyes were different than they are today.”
Hunger pangs grip my belly. I say good-bye to Massimiliano and Giannandrea and head home.
The phone call from Umberto catches me by surprise.
“She wrote me on Facebook!”
“Who did?”
“What do you mean who? Martina, the tour guide. Miss Marple!”
I hurry over to his house. I can’t wait to tell my father-in-law the news. But in the meanwhile, we need to answer the lady’s none-too-friendly message.
“Hello, I’m the lady in the photograph. But I’m not your grandmother and I don’t know what kind of stupid game you’re playing. If you don’t remove my picture from your profile immediately, I’m calling the police.”
That’s what you call a downhill beginning to a love story.
I decide to tell her the truth. I write back and tell her that my father-in-law is the slightly overweight German mute from the tour two weeks ago, and that he’d like to see her again. We tried to track her down through the tour operator but they didn’t know about any Martina. The lady is online and she replies immediately.
“They didn’t know my name because every once in a while I substitute for my granddaughter. The tour operator doesn’t know anything about it. You can tell your father-in-law I knew immediately that he wasn’t mute at all, and that I’d be happy to let him take me out to dinner. He can write me at this e-mail address. Thank you.”
Two hours later, they have a date for the next evening in a little restaurant in Trastevere. Oscar can’t stop thanking me and asking me for advice about how to dress.
As a Cupid, I really do deserve an A plus.
−80
Soap-on-a-Rope, our unreliable goalie, comes up to me in the locker room of the swimming pool and asks me, unexpectedly:
“How are you, Coach?”
“What do you mean?”
No one on the team has ever asked me how I’m doing. If anything, I’m the one who asks them after practice or before a match.
“Well, I mean . . . I saw that you were coughing.”
I was afraid that he’d found out about my illness. The team doesn’t know. The only one I’ve told is Giacomo, my assistant coach, and he’s sworn to secrecy. His partial autism helps him keep it to himself.
“I’m fine, thanks, just a touch of bronchitis.”
“You must have caught a chill. Any advice for today’s game?”
“Just one piece of advice: block all the balls that head toward you. Okay?”
Today we’re taking on the lowest-ranked team in the league, a team we call Atletico Colabrodo—the Colander Athletics—instead of Atletico Casalpalocco. They lose by an average of fifteen goals per match. They’ve never even tied a game.
We drop into the water, relaxed, confident of our superiority. And sure enough, by the end of the third quarter, we’re down by a goal, 8 to 7 in the Colanders’ favor. I’m in a raging fury at poolside. I shout and urge my boys into the fray, calling for them to grow some balls. If we lose this match, then we can kiss our hopes of qualifying for the playoffs good-bye. Even Giacomo, usually so reserved and British in style, displays an uncustomary rage and even tosses out a few swear words.
We start the last quarter with a ferocity that is quite unlike us. We win by one goal at the very last second, but no one celebrates. I’m furious. We underestimated our opponents and ran the risk of undermining the whole season. In the locker room, I rip the team a new one, in a memorable dressing-down. Then everything goes black and I keel over.
I wake up in the tiny swimming pool infirmary. With me are Giacomo and a young female swimming instructor.
“Don’t worry,” she tells me. “We’ve called an ambulance. You just lost consciousness for a couple of minutes.”
I don’t want an ambulance.
“It was nothing but a bout of high pressure,” I say, getting up from the cot. In reality, though, I’m afraid it’s due to my fasting or the last session of chemo. Or both together.
I emerge from the infirmary and find my boys loitering in the swimming pool lobby. They look at me strangely. For a coach, for a fighting general, the worst thing is to show weakness in the eyes of his soldiers. Today my career as a coach without blemish or fear has come to an end. Or perhaps this just marks a new beginning.
−79
As the first shadows of evening stretch over Rome, my father-in-law, Oscar, prepares for his date and I set off, like a condemned man walking to the gallows, to a meeting of the condo board.
The real question is this: Why should a man with only seventy-nine days left to live waste time at condo board meetings?
I say hello to my neighbors, already catching a glimpse of the mayhem that is about to be unleashed in their eyes. One second later I decide to spend the evening differently and walk right out of there. I call Umberto and Corrado. Immediately afterward, I call a restaurant. The very same restaurant where, just half an hour from now, Oscar has a date with Miss Marple.
* * *
When Oscar walks into the dining room, leading Martina with unaccustomed gallantry, we’re seated at the table next to his. He glares at us with hatred.
“What are you doing here, damn you?” is the subtitle to his thoughts.
I give him the faintest of smiles. I certainly didn’t want to miss the show.
I order a plateful of vegetables, to the disgust of my friends, who gobble down their mixed grills, and we spend the rest of the evening eavesdropping on the tall tales that Oscar is spouting to make a good impression on the lady, who is really quite nice. There are unforgettable moments when he claims to have volunteered in Africa for two years and
, again, when he claims to be fat solely as a matter of public image: “A pastry chef can’t afford to be skinny, otherwise what kind of cook will his customers take him for?”
By the time they’re eating their entrées, I’m sure that the retired grandmother is interested and I decide that my father-in-law may well have found, in this unlikely escapade, a new companion. When he pays the check and heads for the door with Martina, we decide to leave them alone. Oscar winks at me on his way out, and I stay there with my friends, joking and laughing.
* * *
I return home and find Paola fast asleep in front of the TV; I wake her up with a kiss on the top of her head. Oscar has asked me to keep her in the dark for the moment as far as his amorous activities are concerned. I pull my notebook out of my dresser drawer and strike out the entry: “Track down Miss Marple.” I take a shower. I’ve eaten nothing but vegetables today and, in effect, I’m feeling a little better. I feel more energetic and optimistic. But what I feel most of all is a desire to make love. It’s been three months since Paola and I last had sex. A record for us. Even when she was pregnant, we were never so distant sexually. My wife comes to bed ten minutes after me, with a mug of herbal tea in her hand. I pretend I’m already asleep. Then I try to brush her with my arm. She pushes me away.
“Lucio, please.”
Lucio, please.
Let me scan that sentence.
“Lucio” is a complementary vocative. The fact that she calls me neither “my love” nor “amore” nor “sweetheart” indicates distance and hostility. She’s never called me just Lucio before.
“Please” is a functional adverb, and a highly eclectic one. We use it in many ways. But in this particular instance, it clearly denotes annoyance or impatience (Cut it out, please!) or else beseeching (Please, will you do this, or stop that). It is clear my wife is annoyed with me. If it weren’t for my buddy Fritz, I’m afraid that these days we’d be spending all our time in lawyers’ offices, instead of hospitals.
I turn away and dream of the day when we’ll make love again.
I’ll immediately add it to the list of the most important days of my life.
−78
“Lucio, I’ve fallen in love.”
That, of course, is Oscar talking. His audience, aside from me, is the Sinhalese sous chef who listens as he deftly assembles rows of mini tiramisus.
“That’s certainly a piece of good news.”
“Yes, it is, but there’s also a piece of bad news to go with it.”
“What’s the bad news?”
“She has a boyfriend.”
The word “boyfriend” used in relation to Martina/Miss Marple makes me smile.
“What do you mean ‘She has a boyfriend’? Didn’t you say she was a widow?”
“She’s a widow with a boyfriend. He’s a retired engineer who lives in Milan. They see each other once a month.”
“So?”
“So last night we kissed, but then she ran away. This morning she texted me. She said that she really likes me, but she’s confused.”
The plot thickens. It sounds like a puppy-love story between a pair of fifteen-year-olds.
“That’s a classic. What did you text back?”
“I might have been a little direct. I wrote her: ‘I love you. Dump the guy from Milan.’”
“Nice, that’s the way you do it—manly and decisive. Did she reply?”
“No, but it was because she’d used up the credit on her phone card, but then she called me back on her grandson’s cell phone.”
Oscar’s ability to build up suspense in the stories he tells is well known.
“Oscar, get to the point.”
“Well, so now I’m on probation. This is a runoff election with the engineer.”
“A runoff election?”
“That’s right, she says that she’s undecided, that she doesn’t know me, that she’s not sure she’s ready to leave a man she’s been seeing for two years for what might be a flash in the pan. And that she doesn’t even know if there’s sexual chemistry between us.”
“The lady really talk like that?” asks the Sinhalese, his interest piqued only by the spicier aspects of the conversation.
“You mind your own business and get back to work,” Oscar chastises him. “She said that she’d really like to go to bed with me, but that she’s not sure she’s ready to cheat on the Milanese.”
“I’ve heard the same excuse ever since I entered puberty. But after a while, if you court them a little, their objections give way.”
“You think I don’t know that? On Saturday night I’m taking her out to the movies. And we’ll see what happens. You haven’t said anything to Paola, have you?”
“Not a word.”
“Let’s see how things go before worrying her. I don’t know how she’d react if I started seeing another woman.”
“I think she’d just be happy for you.”
“I certainly hope so, Lucio mio. How are you doing?”
“I’m surviving,” I reply with a forced smile.
“Is there anything I can do for you?”
“I’m afraid not.”
We stand there looking at each other for a moment.
“It’s not right, Lucio. This should be happening to me. I’ve lived my life, done what I wanted to, I’m seventy and some change. It should be my turn to die. I swear, if I could do it, I’d take your place.”
I sense that he’s speaking the truth. We hug. I’ve never hugged my father-in-law. I sink into him. And I feel right at home.
−77
My heart recently beat for the billionth and a half time. An important occasion given the fact that, statistically speaking, our most important organ beats three billion times before starting to sputter and die. The heart has a specific sell-by date, just like an alkaline battery, and that’s why athletes often die earlier: they raise the number of heartbeats per minute and therefore consume more vital energy. My heart has already pumped along for forty years, which is to say, 14,540 days (including leap years), which is very respectable mileage.
In these past forty years I’ve slept 116,320 hours, watched 31,410 hours of television, eaten 4,945 pounds of bread, 9,452 bananas, and, unfortunately, 11,234 doughnuts.
I’ve owned four cars, six bikes, and seven mopeds.
I own 342 books, a thousand or so comic books, 58 vinyl records, and 153 CDs.
I’ve made roughly twenty-five thousand phone calls.
I’ve gotten 327 haircuts (one time I had it all shaved off).
I’ve watched 2,316 movies and been to see 288 plays and shows.
I’ve gotten drunk only four times: once was in Paris.
I’ve lusted after my neighbor’s wife every single day of my life.
I’ve been to bed with 43 different women. I’ve made love with Paola roughly six hundred times, and she beats them all as the absolute unrivaled winner.
I’ve attended nine funerals of close relatives and friends, and thirty-one weddings.
Doing all these calculations cost me an entire afternoon.
Why I bothered to do them I couldn’t say. I started out thinking “Now I’m going to add up the numbers of my life,” then I got sucked into this childish game. And I discovered that my life, reckoned in cold data, makes me feel kind of sad.
It’s seventy-seven days to the end, and all I did today was waste time. Right now, the only number that matters is seventy-seven. The diet I’m on is making me lose weight visibly and I feel like a lion. A wounded lion, but a lion nonetheless.
−76
“Lucio! I won the race!” Oscar shouts into the phone. “Martina has decided to break up with the guy from Milan and let me court her.”
“Didn’t she want to see if there was sexual chemistry first?” I ask, my curiosity aroused.
“We checke
d it out last night. And don’t worry, we’ve got it,” my enthusiastic father-in-law replies.
I smile. I’m truly happy for him.
“Listen,” he continues, “what do you say I come over for dinner with Martina tonight? At midnight we could drink a toast to Paola’s birthday and then you both could meet her.”
Tomorrow is my wife’s birthday. I’ve always arranged something for her. But this time I don’t know what to do.
“Very gladly. What should I tell Paola?”
“That I’m bringing a friend. Just say it’s a woman I know. Keep it vague.”
“Does she have any dietary requirements I should know about?”
“Thank God she’s an omnivore.”
“Excellent. We’ll see you at nine.”
I hang up and talk to Paola about it. I keep it vague but she figures it out instantly and the questions come with rapid fire.
“Just who is this Martina? What does she do? Do you like her? Do you know her?”
She seems like a mother worried about her son much more than a daughter concerned about her elderly father. The good thing is that she seems to be okay with the idea that Oscar is seeing another woman. That wasn’t a given, in spite of the fact that it’s been ten years since her mother died.
* * *
At nine o’clock, we’re anxiously awaiting the two lovebirds. We’ve put out the good silver and the cloth napkins. I’ve cooked a chicken curry worthy of MasterChef and a side dish of wok-fried tender green vegetables. A light dinner to keep me feeling good and, especially, to keep my father-in-law from falling asleep over dessert. The children—who, unfortunately for them, never met their real grandmother—are excited. The new arrival has been announced to them as “grandpa’s girlfriend,” and without ever having met her, they’ve already adopted her as their own. Eva asks whether she likes animals and Lorenzo wants to know if an adopted grandmother gives Christmas presents.
100 Days of Happiness Page 11