100 Days of Happiness

by Fausto Brizzi

  I did a little Internet research before we left Rome. I found one charming text that described a place with a mysterious name: Neosapiens Village.

  This is a decidedly idiosyncratic amusement park, built to resemble an actual prehistoric village, allowing visitors to experience survival techniques of ancient times and test their skills at such activities as archery, hut building, endurance courses, and spear chucking.

  I decided instantly that this would be a perfect stop on our journey. To sample for a day life in a bygone era, before the discovery of electricity or the invention of lighters or supermarkets, seems like a good idea.

  When we get there, we are greeted by a good-natured guide who explains the rules: for the rest of the day, we will be forbidden to use cell phones, cigarettes, or electronic equipment of any description. He asks us to make a special effort to think and act the way primitive humans would have.

  “Will there be dinosaurs too?” Lorenzo asks hopefully.

  “No, there won’t,” the guide replies. “And let me add, luckily for us. Even with today’s weapons, there’s no way we could survive an attack by a Velociraptor or a Tyrannosaurus rex.”

  “When you say primitive, exactly what evolutionary stage would you be referring to?” Eva asks, in typical questioning mode.

  “How do you mean?” blurts the astonished guide.

  “Well, for instance, do we already have a shared language? Do we know how to write? Have we already invented the wheel?”

  The young man gives me a puzzled look. I can see in his eyes that he’s wondering if my daughter is actually a midget professor of anthropology disguised as a little girl in pigtails. Then he manages to put together a reasonable answer.

  “Well . . . you have a shared language; you don’t know how to write; you do use fire, but you haven’t yet come up with the wheel.”

  “Thank you,” Eva politely replies.

  After an hour of striking “rock against rock” to light a fire, we give up. All around us, the other families taking part in the day of living primitively have nearly all succeeded. Lorenzo pulls a pack of matches out of his pocket and suggests we cheat. I refuse and go on clacking the rocks together, hoping to coax that long-awaited spark out of them. Paola watches me with the same sense of affection mixed with pity that is normally reserved for watching a hamster running in its wheel. After fifteen minutes, I manage to light a twig, but the flame dies out before I can get it to spread to the entire pile. I suggest we try to win back our self-respect in the next activity: archery. To shoot an arrow is a violent, instinctive act, buried deep in our DNA. An act that comes as naturally as if we’d done it every day of our lives. The best archer of us all is Paola, who seems like a latter-day Robin Hood. She hits a succession of bull’s-eyes with the confidence of a multimedaled Olympic champion. I stare at her as if I were seeing her for the very first time. She looks like a Sioux woman warrior and perhaps, in a previous life, that’s exactly what she was. Lorenzo and Eva work hard with their miniature bows and have more fun than I’ve seen them have in years.

  We don’t exactly excel in the javelin toss. Spear chucking requires a significant component of technique and strength that dumb luck will do nothing to help. Our spears land harmlessly just a few yards away. In the hours that follow, we watch a falconing display, I teach the kids how to read a map, we make two terra-cotta vases, and we design a sleeping hut that we don’t have time to build because the park is about to close. Eva particularly wants to show off her ecofriendly construction knowledge in the building of the hut, which quickly becomes our new imagined home, and I promise her there will be room for both Oscar and Martina in the hut, should they decide to visit us. Both Lorenzo and Eva are having such fun doing these things we’ve never done together, I see them reappraising me, their new hands-on dad. We leave with the vases in a tote bag and a number of souvenirs, including a couple of flints. Today, for the first time since we left, I saw Paola get involved to a certain extent. Maybe she’s beginning to thaw.

  −14

  The next stop on our journey is the Pinocchio Park in Tuscany. This isn’t a supertechnological theme park with roller coasters and 3D movies, and I have to say that’s a large part of its appeal. It’s a nineteenth-century kind of place where it feels as if you really can breathe the air of one of the world’s most famous fairy tales. The restaurant is called the Osteria del Gambero Rosso, the original Italian name of the Red Prawn Inn, and there are lots of statues and paintings depicting scenes and characters from the story.

  I feel completely at home: I know everything about Pinocchio.

  “Kids, did you know that Pinocchio actually isn’t a puppet at all, but a marionette? Puppets are the ones you stick your hand inside, while marionettes are the ones on strings that you move from above. The mistake comes from Collodi’s own writing, and, in fact, he calls Pinocchio a puppet throughout the book.”

  “So was Collodi a dummy?” is Eva’s impertinent question.

  “No, but he does get a lot of things mixed up. For instance, he calls the monster who swallows Pinocchio a shark, but then he describes it as more of a whale. And, in fact, in the Walt Disney Pinocchio it’s depicted as a whale.”

  “I don’t like Pinocchio. I like Peter Pan,” says Lorenzo, still filled with the excitement of his role in the school play.

  “They’re not really all that different,” I argue. “They’re both little boys who don’t want to grow up. They even become friends.”

  “But if they’re made-up storybook characters, then how could they ever become friends?” asks my little one.

  “No one knows it, but the two of them met in the Land of Toys.”

  “There’s no such place as the Land of Toys!” Lorenzo exclaims.

  “There is so, and how! I’ve even been there. That’s where I met Romeo.”

  “Wait, who’s Romeo?” asks Paola: even she is getting involved. Little by little, I’m drawing her deep into my web.

  “Romeo is Pinocchio’s friend, though we all know him as Candlewick, his nickname.”

  “Did you meet Candlewick?” Eva asked, in astonishment.

  “I didn’t just meet him, we were friends.”

  “The Adventures of Pinocchio is a novel from the late nineteenth century. Just how old are you, Papà?” Lorenzo does his best to destroy all shreds of poetry with a question.

  “I met him in the seventies. I was just a little boy, and he was almost a hundred.”

  “You were friends with an old man?” Eva asks, baffled.

  “Of course! Age doesn’t count among friends.”

  “So you were friends with a hundred-year-old donkey?” Lorenzo insists.

  Oh, right, I’d forgotten that in the book Candlewick turns into a donkey.

  “True, in fact, he was a donkey, then after a few years he was forgiven and changed back into a boy. I met him many years later. I wound up in the Land of Toys once when I got lost while I was out on a bike ride.”

  “Where is the Land of Toys?” Lorenzo asks, starting to come around.

  “No one knows. The only way to get there is by accident. I immediately recognized the lit-up entrance, it looked like the way into an amusement park. Inside were thousands of children and just one little old man: Candlewick.”

  “So why was he still there?” Eva’s curiosity is piqued by now.

  “Because he didn’t have any friends in the outside world. Pinocchio had moved away—no one knew where—and he’d found a job as a custodian of the Land of Toys.”

  “How did you become friends?” asks my little girl.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I’ll tell it to you,” Paola jumps in, to my surprise.

  I’m speechless. The relay-race fairy tale is a specialty of the house. Paola and I have told dozens of these call-and-response bedtime stories to our children, but today this was completely unexpe
cted. Something on the order of a miracle.

  Paola continues.

  “I was on vacation with my parents in the countryside. I was about ten, I think, and I was flying a kite. It came down in the forest, and when I went in to find it I got lost. The sun was setting.”

  I seize the baton in this narrative relay race and go on.

  “At the same time, I had just arrived in the Land of Toys and Candlewick had stopped me at the entrance because my name didn’t appear on the guest list.”

  “Just then I show up and I pretend that Papà is my brother. And that I’m very worried about him because he has a few screws loose.”

  “At first, Candlewick was a little skeptical, but he finally comes around, decides he likes us, and invites us to dinner. An excellent dinner consisting of chocolate, cotton candy, and various assorted hard candies, all of them treats made by a very skillful pastry chef who worked there.”

  “After dinner, he takes us on a tour of the Land of Toys in his mouse-drawn carriage, purchased secondhand from the Blue Fairy. Everywhere we looked there were amusement park rides, movie houses, theaters, fun of all kinds to be had. And thousands of children just like us. An earthly paradise.”

  “We play all night, until the sun rises the next day, while Candlewick falls asleep on the coachman’s box of the carriage. The next day he tells us that, for our own health, it might be best if we leave now. A second day in the Land of Toys is invariably fatal.”

  “Because you turn into donkeys?” Lorenzo asks.

  “Of course,” Paola replies, “that’s no fairy tale, the way we thought it was. And to convince us, he shows us the stalls where they keep all the children who have been turned into little jackasses.”

  “That day we leave together and go back home. A few years later, Candlewick turned one hundred and retired. I grew up and never managed to find my way back to the Land of Toys.”

  “Too bad,” Eva comments.

  “Right,” I say. “Luckily, though, many years later I found Mamma again.”

  I try to catch Paola’s eye and manage to, but only for a fleeting instant. She’s enjoyed the relay-race fairy tale as much as I have. But my children haven’t: they’re a little disappointed in a story that lacks at least a dragon, an ogre, or a mysterious horseman.

  Lorenzo says, “If that’s a true story, it’s a miserable one. If you just came up with it now, it’s not much—you can certainly do better.”

  At last Paola and I look at each other. We can’t help laughing. I start to wrap my arms around her, but she dodges me and changes the subject.

  “Let’s all go get something to eat at the Red Prawn Inn. Aren’t you hungry?”

  The small chorus of yeses is explicit and unequivocal. We all go out to eat. I watch Paola as she steers the kids toward the restaurant, helps them order—“No, you can’t start with dessert, sorry”; and “Spinach it is. You’ve had no greens for two days.” I feel like a striker who’s just scored a goal. But the emotional match still has a long time to run.

  −13

  Argentario. A glittering, silvery word that has a magical significance for me and for Paola: it was here, ten years ago, that we conceived Lorenzo. I’ve reserved the same small hotel we stayed in ten years ago; it’s under new management but it remains a deeply romantic little place. It’s on the promontory between Porto Ercole and Porto Santo Stefano, in the part of Argentario least frequented by tourists. I remember it as a piece of heaven, and I can’t say for the life of me why we’ve never gone back since.

  “Did you know, Lorenzo, that Mamma and Papà conceived you here?”

  “So I’m not from Rome?”

  “You were born in Rome, but you were conceived here.”

  Eva breaks in: “What does it mean to be conceived?”

  Here we go.

  “That means that this is where Papà and Mamma kissed each other lots of times and decided to have a baby. Lorenzo, to be specific.”

  “Kisses aren’t enough to make a baby,” Lorenzo points out; “you have to have sex.”

  I take it in stride. “That’s right, in fact, we had sex and nine months later Lorenzo was born. And we were right here, in this hotel.”

  “Was Papà already fat?” Eva asks.

  Paola, who up to now has been uncomfortable, breaks into a smile.

  “Yes, he was already, let’s say, solidly built.”

  “We’re here,” I announce brusquely as we turn in at the hotel gate.

  As we unload the luggage, I say, “Tonight Papà and Mamma are going to have dinner by themselves. I’ve found someone to look after you.”

  Paola immediately raises objections. “I have no intention of leaving my children with some teenage girl I’ve never met.”

  I savor this moment that I’ve been anticipating for days now.

  “Actually,” I begin, “it’s definitely not a teenage girl, but especially it’s not someone you’ve never met.”

  I point to someone behind her. Paola turns and sees Martina waving hello, at the hotel entrance. And behind Miss Marple, there’s Oscar, beaming happily in a pair of sunglasses. They both look ten years younger.

  “Are they acceptable babysitters?” I ask with a smile.

  The children run straight at their grandparents, shouting happily.

  “The pastry shop is closed today,” I explain, “so I asked your father to take a trip to Argentario with Martina. I must say I didn’t have to ask twice.”

  Paola surrenders. But it’s like pulling teeth.

  * * *

  At sunset we entrust Lorenzo and Eva to the babysitters and I take Paola to dinner in the hotel’s cozy restaurant, a romantic paradise overlooking the water. We order an antipasto of raw fish.

  “Why did you bring me here?” she asks while we wait.

  “Because I wanted to show Lorenzo the place where he was conceived.”

  “Let me repeat the question. Why did you bring me here?”

  I give her a straight answer to a straight question.

  “Because it’s an important place to the two of us as a couple, and you can’t imagine how badly I want to make peace with you. Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me, forgive me, a thousand times forgive me.”

  “You know something, Lucio?”

  When she calls me Lucio and not amore, that’s always a bad sign.

  “If I’d married someone like Corrado, I’d have counted on his cheating on me; in fact, I’d have expected it on a regular basis. Let’s just say that it would have been less of a letdown. But I would have sworn you weren’t the type, that it wouldn’t happen to us.”

  “I made a mistake—what can I do about it now?”

  “Don’t keep after me, I need more time.”

  “That’s one thing I don’t have.”

  She realizes what she’s just said. She falls silent for a few moments, then goes on.

  “I wish I could just forget everything. You don’t know how much I wish that. But I closed a door emotionally when you did what you did. I know that you can’t understand it, but that’s how it is. That’s how it is right now.”

  A big platter of shellfish comes to the table and cuts the tension. As we sample the prawns and shrimp, Paola continues: “Do you remember a year ago, when I went to see a new orthopedist because I had that persistent pain in my shoulder?”

  “Yes,” I say, suddenly suspicious at this abrupt change of topic.

  “He wasn’t a kind and elderly specialist, like I told you. He was forty-five years old, movie-star handsome, and incredibly fit. And he was an obvious lady-killer, a real son of a bitch. I was attracted to him.”

  I’m glued to my chair.

  “One day, after an exam, he kissed me.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I was surprised, and then I kissed him back and then . . .”
r />   “And then?”

  “I ran out of the room. I got a new orthopedist without telling you anything about it.”

  “There was just one kiss?”

  “Just the one kiss. I resisted. At least, I did.”

  The first-person pronoun repeated twice draws the curtain on our conversation. I can’t help the angry blur of adrenaline that fills me. Is this jealousy or just male pride? I don’t know. Do I have the right to be jealous after what I did to her? I don’t know where to go from here. We eat the rest of our dinner in silence, like an old and disgruntled married couple.

  When we return to the lobby, we find our babysitters in the thick of a game of hide-and-seek being played not only by our children, but those of the hotel’s owners as well.

  “Everything okay?” Oscar asks me, when he sees the defeated look on my face.

  “Everything’s fine,” I lie.

  A little later, we say good night to him and Martina, thanking them for their lightning visit. They’re staying in the same hotel, but tomorrow morning at dawn they’ll head back to Rome.

  “Don’t get used to this door-to-door service,” Oscar mutters.

  “Enjoy the rest of your trip, kids,” Martina calls out. Lorenzo notices I hold Oscar in a longer embrace than usual.

  “Papà, you know we’re going to see Grandpa again in two weeks, back in Rome!”

  I break out of the hug as if I’ve been caught red-handed being sentimental. When the two old people move away, arm in arm, upstairs, a piece of me goes with them.

  −12

  Here’s the moment I’ve been waiting for the whole trip: the men-only day. Lorenzo and me.

  We leave Paola and Eva in the hotel, both of them amply occupied, Paola for a spa day, Eva for a mini volleyball tournament, and we set off, shouldering our backpacks along the Argentario promontory. We’re wearing T-shirts and bermuda shorts, we’re carrying fruit and water, we have plenty of suntan cream and beach towels. We’re two perfect day-trippers.

  “An hour’s walk from here,” I explain to Lorenzo, “there’s a way down to the water, carved out of the rock, that no one knows about.”