100 Days of Happiness

by Fausto Brizzi

  His arrogant Roman way of acting as if he knows more about everything than you ever could.

  His gigantic shadow looming up on the walls of the pastry shop.

  The way he slaps me on the back, so that I always stagger a little.

  His overamplified voice.

  The way he philosophizes with his customers.

  His secret passion for Britney Spears.

  The way he pats every dog he meets in the street.

  His size thirteen shoes.

  The way he looks at me without speaking and I know he’s already understood everything.

  When he recycles a Christmas present without remembering that you gave him that same thing a couple of years ago.

  His ability to fall asleep anywhere.

  And, of course, his doughnuts.

  I really will miss him.

  −42

  Corrado has an amusing habit that, at least until today, always struck me as funny: for their birthdays, he gives his friends a framed, dummied-up front page of Il Messaggero, with a fake obituary of the birthday boy or girl and a commemorative article. His affectionate and hilarious obituaries are devoted to office clerks, mailmen, newsstand owners, pizza chefs, pharmacists, cleaning women, and bus drivers. He’s done one for me as well.

  * * *

  A few years ago, when he gave it to me for my birthday, I laughed all night. Today, of course, it doesn’t make me laugh a bit.

  The headline reads:

  Farewell to Lucio Battistini, a Lifetime Devoted to Sports

  (By our special correspondent Corrado Di Pasquale)

  Sometime in the past few hours, heaven’s water polo team recruited a new coach: Lucio Battistini. After the dismissal midway through the season of Jesus Christ, found culpable in the cheating scandal over his team’s habit of walking on water, the new coach, Battistini, may perhaps succeed in turning around this badly limping paradisiacal team. In his luminous career as a player, we all recall the ninety-eight consecutive days spent on the bench (a national record) and the four goals inflicted upon him in just three minutes during his last appearance in the highest series. In the years that followed, Battistini left professional competition and continued with his successful career as a personal trainer, successfully helping Signora Dora Loriani of Rome to lose 7 kilos and Commendator Casalotti to lose 4.5 kilos. These spectacular achievements justifiably led to his appointment as the coach of the newly established water polo team at Machiavelli High School. During the first season, the coach was promptly crowned a success, and on the last day of school, the Roman team was able to celebrate its ranking—second from last—with a gala evening of music at the Circus Maximus.

  We’ll miss his cheerful smile, his perennially burned pot roasts, his reckless incompetence at driving motorcycles, his overabundant waistline, his enigmatic sense of humor. This morning at the funeral no fewer than twenty-three people gathered around his lovely widow, Paola, already hotly contested by her numerous suitors, and his two children. During the funeral service, the priest got his name wrong three times, once calling him Luca, another time Luciano, and finally, to the astonishment of one and all, Ferdinando. After the sermon, the water polo team burst into a spontaneous round of applause, excited at the prospect of being entrusted to a real coach. For this and for a thousand other reasons, today, in the world, we’re all just a little relieved. Farewell, Ferdinando. Excuse me, Lucio.

  Corrado is implacable; he manages to outline the lives of others in such a lucid and cynical manner that it proves irresistibly comic for the readers, and never overwhelmingly tragic for the subject. I’ve read and reread my obit. Unfortunately, my friend has once again hit a bull’s-eye. He may be sarcastic but he’s not lying.

  Maybe I need to get busy and try to improve my impending, and all too real; obituary. In fact, strike the “maybe.”

  −41

  The student was seen rummaging through the supplies in the biology laboratory, where he had already taken possession of a liter of glycerine, a flask of concentrated nitric acid, and two flasks of sulfuric acid that are kept in a special locked cabinet, which the student broke into.

  Beneath that text was the official, unappealable verdict: two days’ suspension from school.

  I can’t say I’m surprised. Sooner or later, I was sure, Lorenzo would be suspended. In elementary school that’s a rare thing, but I knew he’d manage to pull it off. His teacher called me immediately on my cell phone and I rushed straight over to the school—one of the advantages of being a moriturus with nothing to do. I’m sitting across the desk from her in the classroom, while the defendant waits for us in the hallway.

  “Your son has committed a very grave infraction, Signor Battistini. He stole a number of objects that belong to the school.”

  “‘Very grave infraction’ seems to me to be overstating the case. Haven’t you ever stolen a book from a library or candy from the supermarket?”

  “No,” she retorts sternly.

  “From the list of stolen goods I’d have to guess that he had one of his usual experiments in mind.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of: his usual experiments. Last year the classrooms were overrun with insect larvae thanks to him.”

  “He was just experimenting with reproduction in a damp environment, in this specific case with the pond in the school garden.”

  “And that strikes you as normal? What did he want to do this time? Burn down the school?”

  “Excuse me for a moment. I have to reply to a message from work.”

  I pull out my iPhone. I lied. I Google: glycerine plus nitric acid plus sulfuric acid. Nitroglycerine. Those are the basic components of that dangerous compound. The little chemist I sired was trying to make nitroglycerine and I have no doubt that he would have succeeded. He wouldn’t have burned down the school. He would have blown it up.

  I downplay the seriousness of the situation in my conversation with his teacher. Clearly, she didn’t do the same research I just did. I promise her I’ll punish my young heir with exemplary severity.

  When I walk out into the hallway, I find him sitting on a bench, eyes downcast and ears drooping like a truant who knows he’s in big trouble. He silently trails after me to the car. While I drive, I try to discuss the topic.

  “What were you trying to blow up?”

  He’s astonished that I’ve ferreted out his true intentions. Clearly, he underestimates me.

  “I didn’t want to destroy anything, I just wanted to make some fireworks for the end-of-year show.”

  “Don’t you think these fireworks might have been a little too, shall we say, . . . powerful?”

  “I wasn’t going to put in much nitroglycerine.”

  I make him promise that he will never, ever try any further experiments with explosives, incendiary devices, or anything dangerous.

  Then I consider the issue of the two-day suspension. The only thing that really scares him is his mother’s reaction. I decide to tell Paola myself.

  Paola shouted so loud she could be heard all the way out to the Rome beltway.

  “Nitroglycerine? Your son was making nitroglycerine at recess?”

  When she says “your son,” that means she’s well and truly pissed off.

  I explain to her that the compound is very difficult to make without the appropriate equipment, and I minimize the whole incident as nothing more than a childish prank that, happily, had no bad consequences. And as a result? The one who gets the dressing-down is me. I am described as, in order of denunciation, a bad example, an irresponsible father, an underminer of education and good manners, and someone trying to poison her own children against her. When people lose their tempers, they say things they don’t really mean. I hope. I try to be a cat and this time I get the result I hoped for: Paola tries to keep going but her rage sputters and dies out. A few minutes later we f
ile away the day with a smile. We label it “the day our son tried to manufacture nitroglycerine.”

  But I am aware of something a lot more sinister. I might have lost him, earlier than my hundred days allowed. The thought makes me want to howl.

  −40

  There’s something about me you don’t know. I don’t usually talk about it much. My son, Lorenzo, and I are exactly the same. As a child, I was a young terror too. Ever since early elementary school, my teacher (Miranda De Pascalis, ditzier than most people on earth, and capable of explaining the multiplication tables with exactly the same words three days running, while never once remembering that she’d done it) would regularly call my grandparents to complain about my conduct. But it was never my fault alone. I had a bad influence, a fellow student who led me down the road to perdition, my own personal Candlewick. His name was Attilio Brancato, but everyone knew him as Branca; we were never in the same class together, but he attended the class next door, from elementary school to high school. An ordeal and a blight upon my record. A genuine living legend in the Rome municipal school system, a hooligan of rare quality, capable of sabotaging vending machines to provoke cascades of snacks, falsifying class attendance records, and even wrecking teachers’ cars.

  Grandpa hated him. One time he even decided to switch schools to get me out from under Brancato’s influence.

  Luckily, once Brancato managed to finish high school, he vanished. Nobody ever heard a thing from him again. I was free at last.

  Many years later, the day that Grandpa passed away, I couldn’t hold my terrible secret in a minute longer.

  Grandpa was in bed, dressed in his pajamas, flat on his back and in appearance miles away, but I knew that he could hear me. I lean over close to the bed and whisper to him, with no need for any preamble: “Grandpa, Brancato never existed.”

  Silence.

  “I just invented him. He was my scapegoat. A perfect alibi for any and all occasions. A fictitious individual.”

  Silence.

  “Forgive me if I never told you. Brancato was me, and I was Brancato.”

  I think back to all the punishments, and maybe even smacks, I avoided thanks to Brancato. Then I look over at Grandpa, whose eyes are open and staring unblinking at the ceiling.

  Suddenly he smiles. In fact, he laughs. He feels like laughing. Not the usual thing with someone who’s about to die, a moriturus.

  He turns to look at me with glistening eyes and reveals the truth: “Lucio mio, I knew it the whole time.”

  I smile back at him.

  “Sometimes it’s best for a son,” he adds, “and to me you’re a son, to underestimate you. It makes for a happier childhood.”

  He squeezes my hand. Hard. Then I feel his energy slip away, like the water dribbling out of a garden hose.

  Those were his last words to me.

  * * *

  I had made a resolution not to think about death.

  It doesn’t look like I’m going to be able to keep it.

  −39

  One of the worst things that can happen to you is to faint on the street when you go out to buy a newspaper with ten euros in your pocket but no wallet and no ID. It had been months since the last time I’d passed out, that afternoon at the pool. I was told later what happened. A passerby saw me drop like a sack of potatoes to the sidewalk. I banged up my arm and my head, which caused a nasty cut to the forehead and a badly scraped elbow. An ambulance rushed me to the emergency room, where a couple of hours later I came to, when my family had already tipped over into panic. Paola, after I’d been gone for two hours, started calling all the hospitals and had tracked me down there. The doctor told her that they’d given me a CAT scan and that the bang to my head hadn’t caused any cerebral trauma. Then the doctor had lowered his voice and told her that he had some very bad news

  “I suspect your husband may have a widespread tumor in his lungs. Let me repeat, I suspect, I’m not an oncologist. I just thought it best to warn you.”

  Paola’s nonchalant response astonished the doctor.

  “Thanks, you did the right thing. Any breaks in the elbow?”

  “No.”

  When Paola acts out the dialogue for me, including the doctor’s high-pitched voice, I laugh until my belly aches and I immediately feel a stabbing pain in my liver and surrounding areas. The clinical progression is starting to become unpleasant. I can no longer laugh.

  Nicolas Chamfort, a French author, used to say that “a day without laughter is a day wasted.”

  How tragically true.

  The doctors detain me overnight for observation. Paola stays with me until a nurse tosses her out in a fury. But before the draconian move, Paola and I stare at each other like two honeymooners. I can’t believe my luck; she, bemused, sympathetic, lovely, wants to give me what I need from her. Yet she can’t. I want to talk to her. But something stalls as if this is hers to work out, hers to decide. I can’t force her to forgive me. That decision, like mine about telling the children, has to come from her.

  I stay there in my room alongside an old man with a leg in traction who heaves a painful-sounding breath every ten seconds, a little boy who bumped his head pretty badly jumping down off a wall, and a guy in his early twenties who received multiple fractures in a traffic accident. I’m in excellent company. In fact, I feel almost healthy alongside my roommates. Tomorrow, I’ll walk out of here on my own two legs and I’ll go jogging. I only manage to fall asleep very late, rocked to sleep by the old man’s moaning. I dream I’ve gone back in time, to the moment I first kissed Signora Moroni. Today I’m sure I’d be capable of resisting.

  −38

  How many days of your life do you remember clearly? The special days that you could narrate in detail years and years later. And how many days are just normal ones when nothing worth mentioning happens and they slip away unnoticed? What makes a day special?

  I leave the hospital with a single fixed thought. I want today to be a day I can put alongside the other three I told you about at the beginning of this story. If I had died yesterday, forty days ahead of schedule, with my skull cracked open on the sidewalk, I couldn’t have forgiven myself. It was a supernatural alarm bell: “Hey, Lucio, you think you’re the master of your fate, and that you have forty days left to live, but that may not actually be the case.”

  If I analyze the special days in my life I realize that what made them different was almost always an unexpected event, or one that couldn’t have been planned: the time Lorenzo lost a baby tooth; the first time I kissed Paola; the way my grandmother hugged me good-bye when I went on my first camping trip with the Boy Scouts; that time I got a good grade on some class homework that I’d copied; the night that Corrado and Umberto and I slept in the car overnight in Florence, and the next morning when we woke up we were in the middle of a street market; the surprise party that Paola threw for me for my thirty-fifth birthday. Little things that are the concentrated essence of my life. I decide not to do anything special today and just let the day surprise me. I call Massimiliano and I tell him about my night out with Giannandrea. He tells me that he already knew all about it and he agrees that our favorite depressive needs help.Massimiliano wants to ask Giannandrea to help him out in the shop, in his spare time, when he’s not working as a tailor, doing alterations.

  “If you come in and you find two friends to chat with instead of just one, all the better, no?”

  I tell him it’s an excellent idea.

  The day continues to be nondescript until seven o’clock. Then I leave the pool and head home, open the front door, and see Eva doing her homework, sitting at the dining room table, both feet dangling inches above the floor. She turns around and, in slow motion, opens her blue eyes and looks at me. She gives me a smile.

  “Miao, Papà!”

  An instant flash of joy washes away all my aches and pains.

  It’s the magic touch that
makes today a special day.

  −37

  When the glass door of the Chitchat shop swings open and Giannandrea welcomes me in, I can’t help but smile.

  “Massimiliano will be right back,” he says, “come on in.”

  He tells me that he started working there that morning. Massimiliano offered him half the take, after daily expenses. A very generous offer that the much-cheated-upon alterationist couldn’t turn down.

  “I’m happy you’re working here,” I tell him.

  “I’m not really working—it’s more like I’m helping out a friend when I get a chance. I think I’m pretty good at giving people advice.”

  I don’t object.

  “Shall we have a cup of tea?” I suggest.

  Ten minutes later, there we are, sitting in our armchairs like a couple of spry little old New England ladies, sipping our Pu-Erh tea, which tastes vaguely like wet soil. This time it’s my turn to confide a secret. I tell him that I’m already two thirds of the way through my final journey and that I’m actually pretty pleased with how it’s been going. I’ve had moments of uncontrollable joy, which have alternated with other moments of profound melancholy. An emotional roller coaster.

  “So it’s absolutely hopeless?”

  “Unfortunately, that’s right,” I reply in an untroubled voice. “All the tests agree that my physical state is deteriorating with dizzying speed.”

  I’m astonished at how I’m able to talk dispassionately about my disease. I’ve become accustomed to it. That’s just human nature: given time you can get used to anything.

  “Shall we play some Subbuteo?” I propose. “I owe you a rematch.”