When the doorbell rings, they look like a well-trained team, ready to swarm onto the field and put on an excellent show. I have to stifle my laughter as I open the door to the sight of Oscar in jacket and tie and Martina made up and wearing far too much perfume, stinking up the landing.
We have a great time at dinner. We learn that Martina is a former high school art history teacher, and, as she’d told me, she sometimes fills in for her granddaughter Claudia, who is a part-time tour guide. She has two children and four grandchildren, and she’s the widow of a general in the Guardia di Finanza, Italy’s financial police.
“Among other things, I found out that her husband audited me in 1991 because I wasn’t giving my customers receipts. That is, most of my customers. I found the documentation, with his signature.”
This coincidence makes Oscar laugh and laugh and it embarrasses Martina slightly; she is also unmistakably pained by the memory of her late husband. I change the subject and the evening sails merrily along for a couple of hours. Lorenzo and Eva show the lady their room and Eva overwhelms her with a river of words until Paola finally comes to her rescue.
“What do you think of her?” Oscar asks me the minute we’re alone.
“She seems nice.”
“She doesn’t seem nice, she is nice. And you have no idea what she’s like in bed. A panther.”
I look down the hall at Miss Marple and have a hard time picturing her in fishnet stockings with a riding crop.
“She’s already told me,” my father-in-law goes on, “that we can’t get married; otherwise she’ll lose the benefits from her husband’s pension. Which is fine with me.”
I love it when he mixes topics and summarizes them.
The evening continues with a game of charades, each team captained by one of the two kids, males against females. My team loses because Lorenzo and Oscar fail to guess Saving Private Ryan in spite of my particularly brilliant performance as a mime.
At midnight, Paola blows out the candles on a cake filled with exotic fruit that Oscar brought. The children applaud, I film it with my iPhone. In short, we are happy. The shadow hovering over our family has left us in peace tonight.
When the two overgrown lovebirds say good night, as Paola puts our two out-of-control heirs to bed, I stay behind and clean up the kitchen. I nibble at some leftover cake, in clear violation of my restricted diet. Then I sit down. I breathe deeply. My lungs are on fire. I can’t seem to choke back the tears. It was a great night. And that only makes me suffer more. This is how all my moments of sadness will be from now on: good and sad.
A little later I join Paola, who’s already in bed. I slip between the sheets and smell her. I’m so in love with the scent of her. She smells like apples. I don’t touch her. I know it’s not time yet. Tomorrow will be the time. For her birthday I’ve planned a special evening. This time I won’t fail.
−75
My romantic plans have already been dashed halfway through breakfast, when Paola announces that she’s made plans to go out for dinner with her best friends. The women will celebrate her birthday together. My feelings are hurt and I try to think of a way to reverse the outcome, though it’s clear that I’ve been defeated. I come up with an idea, a gift that will astound her when she comes home tonight.
I go out and head straight for the hobbyist-novelist Roberto’s bookshop.
“Do you have a copy of The Little Prince?”
“Of course!”
“I don’t mean an ordinary copy. I want an old one, a special one. A collector’s item, is what I’m trying to say.”
“I have exactly what you need.”
I never doubted it for a minute.
He ducks into a cubbyhole piled high with books, which exudes that particular smell of paper and glue I love so much. He reemerges a few minutes later with a copy in his hand, yellowed with age and slightly curved.
“This is the French first edition, from 1943. It came out just a few days after the English translation. But because the author was French, if you ask me, this is the first edition. It’s a gift.”
I insist on paying but he won’t listen. He understands it’s for an important occasion. And he’s right, it is.
I agree to accept the gift, but only if he’ll let me buy him breakfast at least once. I leave him five euros along with the twenty euros for the purchase of the new novel he’s just finished. It’s titled Unchained Love and it is the sad story of an affair between a black slave and the young daughter of the family that owns him. Once again, a plot that smacks of déjà vu, but all the same, I’m glad to buy the book.
* * *
I sit up waiting for Paola to come home. I gift-wrapped the book with a red bow and laid it on her pillow.
When she comes into the bedroom, she’s dead tired and for ten minutes she doesn’t even notice the gift. She only notices it when she’s about to slip between the sheets.
“So what’s this?”
“It’s for you. Happy birthday, amore mio.”
She doesn’t blink an eye. She opens it. She looks at it.
I feel sure her heart is swelling with emotion.
I expect her to say: “Darling, what a magnificent gift! Where on earth did you find it?”
Instead, she says: “I already have this book. And my copy’s in better shape. You need to return it; did you hold on to the receipt?”
Then she settles in for the night with a simple “Good night.”
That’s what’s called a woman with personality.
After all, that’s part of why I married her.
−74
I don’t seem able to work up a sufficient state of sadness. I try hard to be sadder than I am.
I feel apathetic, but not sad. As if this miserable turn of events had nothing to do with me personally.
Today I went upstairs to the roof deck of the apartment building and I set up a sun bed. I turned off my cell phone. I stretched out in shorts and a T-shirt. My eyes are glued to the clouds embracing in the sky, shifting into gleaming white Rorschach blots and then dissolving.
I stayed there for a good four or five hours.
Motionless as a castaway.
I’d have stayed there forever.
I’m officially depressed.
−73
Tonight Lorenzo and Eva are going over to their grandfather’s to have dinner and sleep over; Paola’s going to the movie theater with two old girlfriends of hers to see an independent film; and I’m staying home alone. It’s not something that happens often.
I phone Umberto and Corrado and I organize a super spaghetti fest, just like in the old days. A kilo of carbonara between the three of us. Yes, I know, it’s full of white flour, eggs, and plenty of other toxins. But we can’t do without it. Pasta alla carbonara is like an old lover, and it’s comforting to see it again—every now and then. It’s enjoyable before, during, and after, because the complex digestion of that funky blend of flavors works to stun and blur the mind in the way a good strong joint does. We chat, stretched out on the sofas the way we used to do in high school, with a little jazz on the stereo and my coughing in the background.
“Why don’t they let you use your cell phone during flight? Does it really interfere with the instruments?” Umberto asks our favorite airline pilot.
“If it really was dangerous, we certainly wouldn’t rely on the common sense of the passengers to make sure they were turned off; we’d simply confiscate them during boarding,” Corrado replies. “The real issue is that the speed of the plane would shift the calls from one cell tower to another and result in a series of missed calls and a jammed phone network. In the future, who knows. There are already airlines that offer wi-fi on board so you can use Skype to call people.”
I say nothing, utterly indifferent to the future of the telephone industry. I cough again.
“How’s the pain?” Umberto
asks me.
“It’s there. I’ve done some new tests. The condition of my lungs is deteriorating by the week. I’ve decided to cut out the diet. Or at least not to follow such a drastic one.”
“That’s the right thing to do,” Corrado agrees. “From what I understand, it had become a palliative.”
We’ve agreed to talk in unvarnished terms about my disease, without metaphors or euphemisms.
“I’m a dead man anyway. It’s only a matter of time. I might as well eat whatever I like. Ah, there’s one more thing you ought to know.”
“What’s that?” asks my personal veterinarian.
“I’m depressed. I’ve never been depressed in my life, but I’m pretty sure I’ve spotted the symptoms.”
“When my mother was depressed, after my father died,” Corrado tells me, “I tried to give her plenty of things to do, so she’d fill up her day. That’s the only thing you can do in these cases.”
“I have plenty of things to do—it’s just that I don’t feel like doing them.”
“Can I offer a suggestion?” Umberto breaks in.
“Certainly.”
“Go talk to my psychologist. Dr. Santoro—he’s a genius.”
“What for? So he can con me out of two hundred euros a session?”
“Aside from the fact that he charges a hundred thirty and he gives you a receipt too, so you can deduct it as a medical expense, he’s a person who actually helps you. Or at least it works for me.”
“Excuse me, but how many years have you been going to see him?” I ask him, skeptically.
“Almost ten years,” he replies, proudly.
“Just think what shape you’d be in if you’d never gone!” Corrado says with a hint of sarcasm, beating me to the punch by a fraction of a second.
I remind Umberto that I’ve always considered psychologists to be people without any true calling, more or less like politicians.
“Do as you please,” he retorts; “I think that it might do you good to talk to him.”
Just then, Paola comes home from her night out with her girlfriends. She’s kind of giddy and excited.
“Talk to whom?”
“Umberto recommended I go talk to his psychologist.”
“That sounds like an excellent idea,” says my wife, smiling at Umberto, who smiles back.
She tells everyone, as if I weren’t there, how apathetic I’ve become since I found out about my cancer and stopped working.
I sit there, lost in thought. A psychologist. Huh.
−72
Did you know that, in the seventies, there was a movement to change the name of the astrological sign Cancer to eliminate the negative association with the disease of the same name? The alternative name suggested was “Moonchild.”
When you spend all your free time on the Internet searching the same few words, you wind up discovering twists befitting the puzzle magazine Settimana Enigmistica.
* * *
Did you know that a study done by researchers in the Department of Applied Climatology of the University of Duisburg-Essen shows that one of the most carcinogenic places on earth is a church. Churches contain high levels of toxic microparticles, which are generated by candles and incense. The concentration of these substances in churches is eight times higher than outdoors, and it remains elevated until a full day after the end of Mass.
* * *
Did you know that there are smart bras that can diagnose cancer? In clinical testing, the Breast Tissue Screening Bra attained a rate of accuracy of roughly 92 percent; it functions by monitoring temperature variations in various points of the breast. This makes it possible to identify tumors six years earlier.
* * *
Did you know that oral sex can cause cancer? This is the oropharyngeal tumor, whose frequency has been increasing exponentially over recent years. Use of prophylactics reduces but does not eliminate the risk of infection.
* * *
Did you know that marijuana fights cancer? In this case, we’re in the presence of a paradox: the cannabidiol that marijuana contains reduces the pain and nausea and slows the growth of the tumor cells, but the fumes produced when you smoke the marijuana contain nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, cyanides, and nitrosamines, all of which are potentially carcinogenic. The classic serpent biting its tail.
* * *
But I never do find the news report I’ve been hunting for more than a month now: “Japanese scientists discover a new and infallible cure for tumors.”
Still, I don’t give up—somewhere out there must be a modern Leonardo da Vinci who, one fine day, will wake up and say: “Hey, guys, I just figured it out: all you need to do to cure cancer is to take two tablets of ginger, thyme, and garlic together before every meal!” Maybe the cure has always been there, right out in plain view, just like Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter.
* * *
The closer I get to summer, the more Rome seems like what it once was. I feel the urge to walk. I wander around through the ghetto, then I walk down the steps to the banks of the Tiber. I sit down to watch this cloaca of a river flow through the city I love best.
And I happily smoke a joint.
−71
I’ve always made fun of my friends who see psychologists. Now here I am, sitting in an armchair across from Dr. Santoro, a little man who looks like a Disney raccoon, and who looks at me without speaking as he jots down notes. I feel as if I’ve wandered into an episode of In Treatment. Since therapy requires me to talk and him to listen, I’m forced to chatter away, even though it’s the last thing I feel like doing.
I don’t know why I don’t mention the cancer straight off.
* * *
The first time I was afraid I was about to die was in 1993 and I was twenty years old. Back then, there was no law requiring a helmet while riding a scooter and so I gunned my Ciao moped at top speed through the streets of Rome. I felt invincible, until the day some idiot doored me as he got out of a parked car. The moped slammed to a stop and I kept flying. I did a forward pike straight onto the asphalt. I don’t remember the impact, though it was reconstructed by the police accident team, but I do remember what happened ten seconds later. I was on the ground, with ten people standing over me talking, though their voices were muffled.
“He’s dead!”
“No, his eyes are moving.”
“Call an ambulance.”
“What’s the point? He’ll be dead in a couple of minutes.”
Why were they so confident in their diagnosis? I couldn’t feel any particular pain. Then a thought occurred to me and I touched my head. My hair was dripping with blood. My skull was pressed hard against the pavement, in a pool of red blood cells. I really am a goner, I decided.
It’s a sensation everyone ought to have at least once in a lifetime: the thought that it’s all over.
There I was, covered with my own blood, and I felt somehow lighter. Everything had regained its natural weight. I don’t even remember where I was going on my moped. Maybe to practice, or else to a pub, I couldn’t say.
Ten minutes later, in the ambulance, I discovered that I had a bad cut on my scalp, I’d be left with a large scar, but I was certain to survive with ease. The abundant array of blood vessels that run to the scalp had created the illusion of a much more serious injury than was actually the case. Ten days with a bandaged head and I was good as new.
* * *
Dr. Santoro has listened to the whole story with apparent attention, every so often scribbling a note. I realize that I still have a good twenty minutes before the session is over and I go on talking. But this time I just invent out of whole cloth.
The first time I killed a man, I was in third grade . . .
The raccoon doesn’t blink an eye. Either he’s fallen asleep with his eyes open or he’s not impressed. I go on.
The victim was a
custodian at my elementary school. Not one of the friendly ones, the ones who joke around with the kids. No, this was a bitter, nasty old man, a failure in life who hated young people and everything about youth . . .
I can’t figure out whether the psychologist has painted-on eyes, like in a TV cartoon, or whether he’s just staring at me with chilly scorn. He’s stopped taking notes. He looks like a wax statue at Madame Tussauds.
I lay in ambush, waiting for him after class, and hit him in the head with a chair. He didn’t die immediately, so I had go on beating him while he screamed. His screams attracted another custodian, an older woman, and I was forced to kill her as well . . .
He blinks twice. So he’s alive.
At this point I decide to go on; after all, it’s just a few more minutes.
The following day the school was closed while the police investigated the killings. It took a week before classes resumed, but no one ever suspected me. No one, that is, except for a classmate of mine, Umberto, who became a veterinarian. I’d told him what I planned to do, and he’s still blackmailing me, all these years later . . .
He starts at the mention of his patient’s name.
“So you’re saying that Umberto . . . knew?”
I realize that he’s been frozen solid with fear. He believes every word I’ve said and he’s taken me for a deranged murderer for the past five minutes. A psychologist who’s not much of a psychologist. A really stupid psychologist.
“Do you mind if I leave five minutes early?” I ask, laying the agreed-upon 130 euros on his desk.
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