100 Days of Happiness

by Fausto Brizzi

  I should tell you, privately, that someone about to die of cancer probably shouldn’t travel by couchette sleeping car. They told me that I coughed all night long, and I imagine that my friends considered the possibility of suffocating me in my sleep more than once. The absurd thing is that, by now, when I cough, it doesn’t even wake me up anymore. That night was no exception. A night train is like a magic cradle for me. The rhythmic clacking sound resembles a lullaby sung to you by a loving nanny. I slept and slept and when I woke up, the train was pulling into the Munich train station. And that’s when our trip really began to pick up.

  −32

  The first contact with Germany is always slightly troubling. The German language is so different from ours that when I hear the voice come over the loudspeaker, I can’t even tell the difference between advertisements and station announcements.

  There’s a surprise waiting for me at the end of Track 4.

  A man walks toward us with a smile on his face. He’s put on a few pounds, he’s lost some hair, but I recognize him instantly. He’s a cadet of Gascony, the fourth musketeer, the youngest of us all, the most skilled with a sword.

  D’Artagnan.

  Our D’Artagnan—known in civilian life as Andrea Fantastichini, last desk in the back of the classroom, on the left. I can’t believe my eyes, and I practically burst into tears. I haven’t seen him in twenty years. Twenty Years After, just as that great genius Dumas foretold, the three musketeers become four again. We hug trackside, first taking turns, and then in a long group hug. Seized by uncontrollable euphoria, we shout out a “one for all, and all for one!” Four Italian imbeciles making fools of themselves in the Munich central station.

  A few minutes later I discover that it was Corrado who persuaded Andrea to join us on our trip. Our old friend left Denmark, where he’s lived for all these years, and come to meet us. He’s going to do the whole Eurail trip with us.

  D’Artagnan was the best one of the four. A couple of years after finishing high school he took off for London with his guitar in search of fame and fortune. Now I can state with some certainty that he never found it. After a few years of London nightlife, he fell in love with Birgitte, a Danish fashion model who looked as if she’d stepped out of a Playboy centerfold, and followed her back to Copenaghen. I never heard anything more from him; only Corrado maintained sporadic contact, first by mail and later via Facebook. His carefree songs used to brighten our summer nights. These days he gives private guitar lessons in the Danish capital, while his wife, Birgitte—with whom he had two kids and who now looks like Miss Piggy—divorced him a couple of years ago. He lives in a little cottage by the sea which, from the pictures, resembles the witch’s house in a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. He tells me that, what with the cost of life in general and his alimony payments, he barely makes it to the end of the month. Back in high school I would have bet anything that Andrea, or Andy as everyone called him, would become a rock star. As on so many other occasions, this time I was also sadly mistaken.

  I admit it: I’m happy to see him, and I’m happy I’ve come on this trip. But that happiness lasts only for an imperceptible instant until I notice that my friends walking a few steps ahead of me look like three old men. Three elderly musketeers hunched over beneath the burden of their backpacks and their age. Nowadays, a man who is forty and some change is hardly old. But if he pretends he’s eighteen and dresses accordingly, he’s old, and how.

  * * *

  I still haven’t phoned home. I do it as we’re walking toward the bed-and-breakfast where Umberto made a reservation. Eva answers: “Battistini residence!”

  The formality of her telephone manners has always made me laugh.

  “This is Papà. How are you? How was school today?”

  “I got an A plus on my class composition.”

  “Good job!”

  I never got an A plus in my life, except in phys ed. I’ve always thought that people who get A pluses in school are losers, destined to miss out in life. But my daughter is again proving me wrong.

  “Let me talk to Mamma.”

  “She’s out grocery shopping. Do you want to talk to Signora Giovanna?”

  Signora Giovanna is our neighbor, a prodigious producer of marmalades and children. She is an impassioned believer in UFOs, she sees mysteries everywhere, and she is certain that the ghost of a long-ago tenant who was brutally murdered lives on in our apartment. In spite of this weird passion of hers, every once in a while we trust her with our children. As a babysitter, given her many years of motherhood, she’s better than Mary Poppins.

  “No, thanks. Tell Mamma that I’m in Munich and that I love her.”

  “I’ll convey the message. Miao, Papà!”

  “I’ll convey the message.” Her formality is no longer making me smile. I have to do something for my daughter. At age six and a half, “I’ll convey the message,” even when it’s followed by a “Miao” that does something to mitigate it, ought to be against the law. I wonder again if she knows about Fritz, and that’s why she was so cold. Perhaps she’s thinking, how could he leave us and go off to have a good time now? I don’t blame her. But the Papà who would have stayed would have become more and more depressed and surly. These few days away might change me, might make me a more fun person to be around. There’s no reason why my little girl should know that. Her coldness was justified, even if it hurts.

  * * *

  There’s one more thing that ought to be illegal, and which I’d gladly add to the wall in Trastevere under the section THINGS I HATE: seeing men cry. I’ve almost never cried in public in my life. I have an inborn shame that keeps my tears from displaying themselves in all their natural splendor.

  I’d never seen Andrea cry before. He was our general, my North Star, my absolute personal myth. A man without fear, without rivals, and above all, a man who never wept.

  When I saw the first tear roll down his cheek, it was like watching an absurd and supernatural event for me, like seeing the apparition of the Archangel Gabriel during a World Cup finals match.

  We were left behind, alone, for half an hour in the tiny lobby of the bed-and-breakfast, waiting for Corrado and Umberto, who’d gone out to buy some souvenirs.

  “I’m not a happy man, my friend,” was his opening phrase.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask him gently.

  “What’s wrong is that I haven’t achieved any of my childhood dreams. And life has no meaning if you never achieve them.”

  Andy has always been good at boiling things down to essentials.

  Childhood dreams. What you write in second grade in the composition “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up.” The only things that really matter in life.

  I know, and I’ve always known, but only now does the truth of this concept explode in my face like a New Year’s Eve firecracker. If you don’t achieve your childhood dreams, you’re a failure. My childhood dream, as you know, was to be a ride tester in an amusement park. So straight up: I’m a failure.

  Andy’s composition, on the other hand, was far more original than mine. From his mumblings, between one sob and the next, this is more or less how I picture it.

  In the year 2000 I’ll be twenty-seven years old. When you’re twenty-seven you’re an old man who has to work to make money for your kids. I’ll urn lots of money and I’ll be plenty welthy enough. I’ll also be plenty handsome and tall and smart and inturesting. Like, the year before I’ll have married a pretty girl, like an actress, and I’ll live on the beach, but I mean right next to the beach and the café where they sell ice cream bars. My job is going to be a very famous singer. I’ll sing at the Festival of Sanremo and I’ll win four times, no wait five times, once with another singer. My most famous song is going to be You Who I Don’t Love You No More and it will be at the top of the charts for a whole year. I’m also going to be very happy because all of italy loves me and smiles at me
in the streat. If they smile at you in the streat then you’re happy. If they don’t smile at you in the streat then you’re sad and you jump out a window. But when I’m thirty-seven I’ll be happy. And just to be safe I’m going to live on the grownd floor.

  I can also imagine his grade: a C minus minus, partly because of the repetitious content, but also because of the spelling mistakes scattered liberally throughout.

  “I haven’t achieved anything worth mentioning in my life,” Andy goes on, after blowing his nose. “I don’t have any money for my kids, and I hardly ever see them because that bitch can’t stand me. My songs never made it onto the charts. And nobody smiles at me in the street,” he concludes with an ironic glance that I know all too well.

  “Your songs are wonderful,” I say, trying to buck him up.

  “But you’ve never even heard them.”

  “Yes, I have, I remember a couple of them clearly. . . . What was that one about the guy waiting at the station for a train that never came?”

  “‘The Train Station of Life,’ and it was a depressing dirge if ever I’ve heard one. It might have been the worst song I’ve ever written.”

  “Well, I liked it. Andy, you’re forty years old, why don’t you start over? Lots of artists have been successful when they were no longer young.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like . . . I don’t know . . . Van Gogh!”

  “But he was already dead!”

  “Okay, it was just an example. . . . Why don’t you go back to Italy? Have you ever considered that possibility?”

  “Because I could never live far from my children. If they need me, I have to be there for them.”

  I sit in silence.

  Andy has given up everything for love of his children. I’ve been underestimating him. He’s still my hero.

  We grab each other in a bear hug. This one’s not like the ones at the end of some soccer game, one of those hasty, virile warrior hugs. This is a very different kind of embrace. Only now does it become clear to me that our bond has never broken in the past twenty years. Andy is still an absolute legend to me. Even if he’s sobbing on my shoulder. Actually, precisely because of it.

  Porthos and D’Artagnan stand there embracing for a couple of minutes, then our friends come back and the games resume. But Andy’s words stay with me.

  “I could never live far from my children.”

  The world’s simplest concept.

  I try to imagine what Lorenzo and Eva are doing right now. Maybe they’re building a Lego Eiffel Tower, maybe they’re having a Wii dance-off, or maybe I just don’t know. I realize that, being so preoccupied with my disease as I am, I’ve sort of lost touch with them.

  * * *

  I can only describe the last part of our first night in Munich with this image, and the only memory I have: the four of us walking into a beer hall singing songs in Roman dialect with extremely vulgar rhymes. Alcohol has erased all the rest. The last time I got drunk I was nineteen years old, I was with my team, and we’d just won the Serie A championship. I don’t even remember when, how, and in what condition we returned to the bed-and-breakfast.

  −31

  My stomach hurts, I have a hard time breathing, and there’s a rock concert going on in my head. I feel like Ringo Starr is pounding with his drumsticks inside my head, to the tune of “Ticket to Ride.”

  I wake up before anyone else. In the twin bed next to mine, Umberto snores like a warthog with adenoids.

  In the bed-and-breakfast’s tiny dining room I’m greeted by a tray piled high with a pyramid of Krapfen and doughnuts. I taste one, but it doesn’t come even remotely close to Oscar’s. I leave it on my plate after the first bite. Only now do I realize that my little morning habit is one of the most treasured moments of my life.

  * * *

  The hyperactive Andrea has tracked down the riding stables outside of the city where we went on our first trip. A sensation of déjà vu accompanies me for the rest of the morning. And a word rattles around in my head, shoving Ringo aside: remake.

  Actually, remakes make no sense. You might be able to go back to the same city, but to go back and do the same things is a rare and peculiar occurrence. Demented may be the word I’m looking for.

  * * *

  The riding stables are just as I remembered them. Wood, iron, and that distinctive scent you can imagine perfectly well. Leading our heroic little squadron is none other than Thomas’s son, Thomas Jr., every bit as much of a Neanderthal as his father, but much less likable. He gives us thousands of tips on what to do and not to do while on horseback in the interests of our personal safety. We spot a trail and set off at a gallop to the horror of my sorely tested spinal cord, strained by the unnatural posture. After a hundred feet or so, my horse, the disquietingly named Attila, decides to throw me with a sudden halt. I go head over heels and fly straight off. My fall lasts no more than a couple of seconds, but it’s enough time for me to realize what an idiotic death I’m about to die. Waiting for me as a landing pad is—not a murderously rocky crag or a picket fence—but a stinging nettle bush. It saves my life but ruins the rest of my afternoon.

  The result of our outing: skin rashes all over my body, sunstroke for Andrea, lumbago for Umberto, and a sprained ankle for Corrado, whose foot got caught in the stirrups as he was dismounting. We’re four slightly rusty musketeers.

  * * *

  All males have a shared trait: when they’re twenty years old, they admire and court twenty-year-old women; and when they’re forty years old, they do the same thing. It’s a scientific law. But I believe that there’s a nostalgic factor at work deep down. We continue to love the same movies, books, and places we loved when we were kids. The same thing applies to twenty-year-old women. Have I talked you into it?

  We immediately discover that the infamous Bier und Liebe has been replaced by an aggressive little pub, the Tot oder Lebendig, which literally means “dead or alive.” Inside are hundreds of German youths between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, juggling beers, sweat, and pills of all kinds. I swear that I’ve never once felt so out of place. The music is too loud, preventing any form of verbal interaction, the lighting is too dim, keeping anyone with shortsightedness from reading the menu, and the air is short on oxygen, which prevents the brain from attaining adequate mental lucidity. In spite of this we do our best to enjoy ourselves. I’m immediately branded a “ball and chain” because I have no interest in getting drunk or trying to pick up a German woman young enough to be my daughter. I decide to drink a couple of fruit cocktails and allow myself to be hypnotized by the music videos that stream across a transparent wall.

  Corrado takes care of livening up the evening’s entertainment by getting into a fight with the boyfriend of the young woman he’s chosen as the object of his desire. The guy in question is a muscleless ninety-eight-pound. weakling, but he also has lots of friends who are already several drinks in. We escape before a brawl breaks out in the beer hall and find ourselves wandering aimlessly around Munich like four classic Italian vitelloni. We talk until four in the morning.

  I’ve forgotten to call home. So far away from them, I hear their voices all the time—Paola’s strong, decisive one; Lorenzo’s thoughtful one, with its pauses, and its “ums”; Eva’s sweet girly one turning prosecutorial as she tries to convince, making me wonder what she’ll sound like when the girliness goes. Hearing their voices in my head, I miss Paola and my kids so much it’s killing me.

  It’s a sleepless night. A dreamless night.

  −30

  At breakfast, Umberto describes the next leg of the trip: Vaduz, capital of Liechtenstein. Twenty years ago we won a hundred dollars or so at the casino in that picturesque little city, and we felt like wizards of the roulette wheel. I suddenly interrupt the reminiscing with a thought that’s been keeping me company all night long: “What am I doing here?”

  My question se
ems to tear into my friends like a burst of machine-gun fire.

  “How do you mean?” asks Corrado.

  I don’t know the words to use to avoid offending them.

  “I mean that I want to go home. Forgive me, but this isn’t the trip I want to take. Or what I mean is, it’s not the trip that I need to take.”

  D’Artagnan smiles at me: he’s the only one who’s understood.

  “Your wife will never agree to it, after the mess you made,” he warns.

  “I’ll try anyway.”

  “I don’t understand what you two are talking about,” Umberto says.

  “I want to take a trip with my kids. And with Paola. I want to spend all the days that are left to me with them. Not with you.”

  I try to soften the blow.

  “Don’t get me wrong; you’re my best friends in the world—we’re the four musketeers. I know everything there is to know about you, your best and worst qualities, and you know the same about me. This time left to me now? That’s my kids’. Right now what I need is them. And they may not know it, but what they need is me.”

  Silence.

  “I don’t have even a minute to waste.”

  I look them in the eyes one by one.

  “Forgive me. If you want, you’re welcome to finish the tour.”

  Corrado is the first to speak. He’s always been the fastest decision maker of the group.

  “There’s a flight for Rome at 10:30 a.m. The pilot’s a friend; he’ll get all three of us on board.”

  Umberto checks the time: “We have ten minutes to pack our bags, guys. Let’s get moving.”

  Andy, who really has no desire to go back to Denmark and his failure of a life, is the most obviously disappointed.

  “Will I see you again?” he asks.

  “Of course we’ll see each other again,” I reply, knowing perfectly well that it’s a lie.