100 Days of Happiness (10 page)

I
wait for the side effects from the chemotherapy to show up like a guest late for dinner. A relatively unwelcome guest. The dinner table is set, the risotto's cooking on the stove, the candles are all lit, but the expected guest never shows up; he doesn't even answer his cell phone. You start to think he'll never get there. And instead, once the risotto is overcooked, the candles have all burned down to stubs, you've spilled wine on your white shirt, and you figure out that the milk you used for cooking is a week past its sell-by date, there it is: the criminal doorbell.

“Sorry I'm late, my friend, I know it's unforgivable, but you can never find a parking place in this neighborhood!”

Try to put up with me, I'm rambling more than usual, so . . . we were talking about side effects. I know them by heart, like a poem you learned in elementary school.

“Exhaustion, digestive problems, vomiting, loss of appetite and alteration of taste perceptions, fever, coughing, sore throat, headaches, muscle pains, jangled nerves, weakening of the hair follicles, and loss of sexual appetite.”

Little by little, straggling in, nearly all of them show up.

Loss of appetite.

Only now does it occur to me that I haven't eaten anything since yesterday at lunch. I've never skipped an appointment with a meal in my life.

Got it!

Alteration of taste perceptions.

I force myself to eat an apple. It tastes a little sour. But it's just my mouth decoding it wrong.

Got it!

Coughing.

Not fair, I had a cough even before. Still, got it!

Digestive problems.

I can already taste the apple coming back up.

Got it!

Sore throat.

You know that little itch that tells you tomorrow morning you're going to be hoarse?

Got it!

Headaches.

Ibuprofen, six hundred milligrams, and my headache's gone. But it'll be back.

Got it!

Loss of sexual appetite.

In effect, I no longer seem to be obsessing over sex. I used to think about it a thousand times a day, like all males.

Got it!

Muscle pains.

Only now that I'm doing this inventory, I realize that my sciatica has come back. The sciatica is terrible, like a front door buzzer making contact at three in the morning.

Got it!

Jangled nerves.

I'm a volcano ready to erupt.

Got it!

Nausea.

Got it!

Vomiting. The apple.

Got it!

Exhaustion.

I don't feel all that different from yesterday.

I'd say I don't have that.

Weakening of the hair follicles.

I have a luxuriant head of hair, not a single white hair.

Not that one either.

The collection of side effects is still incomplete. I spend the day sitting on our little terrace. I can't even imagine going to our water polo team practice. I even lie to Oscar.

“How's it going, big Lucio?”

“Fine, so far everything's fine. I drank my chemo for breakfast.”

“Outstanding. You'll see, you're going to beat this.”

“You'll see, you're going to beat this.” A phrase that reeks from afar of pity and commiseration. It sounds like an encouragement, but it's actually an epitaph.

We finish the phone call with some idle chitchat. Then I try to do some exercise. I'm sure of it: I'm going to feel better tomorrow.

T
omorrow is today.

I do an inventory of my side effects.

I can't even get out of bed. I'm a man in such poor shape that I flop around on my back, lacking the fine-motor skills to get up. It shouldn't be hard, left leg on the floor, pop your torso upright, right leg on the floor, push with both arms, and
alley-oop
! You're on your feet. But I look like a robot whose batteries are running down.

Exhaustion.

Got it.

I walk unsteadily down the hall, and I rinse my face.

I notice a few hairs scattered in the sink. I run my hand over my head, and a lock of hair magically detaches.

Weakening of the hair follicles.

Got it.

The complete assortment.

Now I can't tell you for sure how many of these symptoms are real and how many of them are the product of autosuggestion.

The fact is I don't feel a bit well.

Paola notices it, and for the first time since I've been allowed to return home, she behaves affectionately toward me. She helps me to get comfortable on the couch and turns the channel to a rerun of the legendary Wimbledon finals from 1980. She makes a vegetable couscous and serves it to me on a tray. Then she sits down next to me and watches the fifth set, when the hammering Borg finally defeated the
brilliant and elusive McEnroe. She finds tennis boring, and I understand that sitting there with me is her way of telling me that she loves me. I've just finished my couscous when the referee exclaims: “Game, set, and match to Borg.” I realize that Paola has fallen asleep against me. I feel her weight against me and I'm suddenly missing her. The fact that she's there, leaning against me, fills me with wonder. I don't have her back yet, but the old, familiar lapse into our comfort with each other makes me hopeful that she's closer to forgiveness now. I wonder whether this is what it will be like from now on—missing everyone I'm going to be leaving even before I have to leave them. Despairing, I get up and go see what's going on in Lorenzo and Eva's room—it's too quiet for my taste.

I stop at the threshold. They haven't noticed me, so I stand quietly and watch them both. Lorenzo has dismantled a fan and is trying to put it back together with his little sister's help. I stay out of sight and watch them work. Lorenzo tries to connect parts—he says he needs glue. Eva says, “Wait! I have some.” She rummages in a plastic bucket near her bed and comes back with a tube in her hand. “Here,” she says, handing it to him. I know what Lorenzo is going to say before he says it. “That's kiddie glue. You can't put a fan together with that.”

It's a lost cause. They don't have the tools to put it back together again. But Lorenzo—my Leonardo—won't give up. I choke back tears when Eva says: “Hurry, before Papà notices!”

I know how to put that fan together again. After all, I originally assembled it. I am having such a good time watching them, I almost want to prolong their agony. But it's time. I make a little noise to announce my presence and the two coconspirators realize they've been caught red-handed. “Papà!” Lorenzo gives me a guilty look. Eva's already shaping her lips to form a strong defense of her brother. “It just fell apart when he touched it. I saw. He didn't do anything,” she says.

The first phrase out of Lorenzo's mouth is brilliant: “Papà, I swear I'll buy you a new one!”

“With what money?” I ask, my curiosity piqued and my annoyance subsiding.

“With my allowance!” he replies, seriously.

“Five euros a week—it'll cost fifty or so; it might take you all summer.”

“I'll help him,” Eva breaks in.

I love it when they pool their resources. The most moving thing that a father can see is his children teaming up together.

To their surprise, I don't begin telling Lorenzo off. Instead, I say, “Watch me while I put it together. In case it happens again.” Lorenzo's mouth falls open. He was not expecting this reaction from me. They both watch intently as I click the parts together. It's a fiddly fan—bits and pieces that need to be carefully interlocked to stay in place. Lorenzo nods slightly as each bit locks into the other. “I've got it, Papà,” he says. “Let me finish.” I let him. Eva is smiling. She knows her brother's a mechanical genius. We all look up as Paola comes into the room. “Look,” Eva says, pointing to the now intact fan. “Lorenzo did it.”

We all laugh, including Paola, who normally would have been giving Lorenzo a piece of her mind. I am grateful for this small slice of family harmony. We haven't been together like this for a while. It makes me sad. Everything, even good things, makes me sad.

I wonder how my children picture me. I've always thought that I played the good cop in our parenting dynamic, but maybe that's not how they see it.

Just seconds later, I discover that Lorenzo not only dismantled the fan, he also took apart the turntable of my old record player.

I count to ten, take a deep breath, and go back to the living room. I don't want to leave them with memories of a dictatorial father who punished them for their creative efforts. But I really cared about that record player. It was a present from Grandpa for my seventeenth birthday, and by some miracle it still worked, even though it was now starting to scratch the vinyl a little bit. I don't know why but a distant
memory resurfaces, one of Giovanni Verga's novellas, which nobody reads anymore past age thirteen:
Property
. Stop reading this book and go read the Verga instead, as adults. You can find it on the Internet easily. The Sicilian author tells the story of a farmer, Mazzarò, filthy rich and so in love with his property that, on his deathbed, he's more upset at the thought that his possessions won't be able to follow him into the tomb than at the idea that he's about to die. A simple and surprising life lesson, wrapped up in a few pages that alone are as good as anything in the rest of Verga's
The House by the Medlar Tree
.

I've been Mazzarò for years and years of my life: I've purchased useless things of all kinds; I've collected comic books and records, T-shirts, and swimsuits. Perhaps I'm still a little bit like Mazzarò—I'm sorry to leave behind my own personal property. But I have a sense that a progressive release is taking place, a slow falling out of love with my possessions. I realize it when I read a comic book and I fold back the cover, wrinkling it, without the sacred respect I would have accorded it until just a few months ago. I suddenly understand that human beings aren't divided into good and bad, southerners and northerners, the intelligent and the stupid, or any of the other thousands of distinctions that we invent to liven up our existence. They're divided into “book benders” and “non‒book benders.” The former are happier.

I
dream about my parents. Ever since I started taking industrial doses of ibuprofen to cut the pain, I've been sleeping more profoundly. I often have dreams and I always remember what happened in my mind while my body was on standby. All my dreams are of me as a child.

This time we're aboard a small red sailboat, off the coast of Ladispoli. I'm two years old, my Papà's sixty, and my Mamma's sixteen. A chronological and oneiric chaos—I never knew either of them at those ages.

At a certain point a great white shark shoots past us like a speedboat, barely a yard away, and the wake from its passage almost tosses us overboard. Even if it's a dream, a monstrous white shark 150 feet off the beach of Ladispoli remains highly unlikely. And it's not alone—there is a pack of them. They surround us, a good twenty of them, then they attack. They bare their teeth, like giant meatgrinders, an enormous razor-sharp cavern ready to take us in, chop us up, and digest us. Papà fights heroically, beating them back with his oar, and he's the first to be swallowed up, oar and all. Mamma abandons me without a second thought, diving in and trying to swim off and make her escape. A shark gulps her down like a human aspirin tablet before she has a chance to swim ten strokes. I'm left alone, it's like an Italian remake of
Life of Pi.

I hadn't dreamed about my parents for years. I really miss them. And I really hate them. I told you that I'd only talk about them when
I was ready. Well, today I'm ready. This way, you'll have a chance to hate them almost as much as I do.

After the unwanted pregnancy, for a couple of years Mamma and Papà lived with my grandparents, whom you've already met. Then my father found a job as a disc jockey (though back then in Italy that's not what it was called) in a dance hall in Lido di Ostia and even managed to get a salary high enough to afford to rent an apartment and live there with Mamma. And so it was that at the tender age of just two, I went to live with two wretched young people in their twenties in a one-room apartment in Ostia, which makes sense in the summer, but certainly doesn't in the winter. Mamma rounded out Papà's salary by cleaning beach houses during the tourist season. At night she was so exhausted that she'd almost always fall asleep next to me, just as Papà was leaving for work at the dance hall.

I was more or less three years old when I suddenly discovered the most terrible thing a child can discover: Papà and Mamma didn't love each other. The only reason they were together at all was my arrival, and they had nothing in common, no mutual respect. The spark of love between them had never even flickered into life. The law permitting abortion in Italy dates from 1978, so they'd had no choice but to accept my unwanted presence. To understand that you were “unwanted” at the tender age of three is no fun, let me tell you. I was the cause of every fight, the scapegoat whenever anything went wrong. If I'd been fifteen, I would have run away from home, but I wouldn't be fifteen for twelve more years, and even then, I wasn't exactly lionhearted for my age.

One day, Papà announced that he'd found work on a cruise ship. A six-month stint in the Caribbean as an activities leader. We didn't even go with him to the airport. Our hasty farewells took place in the kitchen. I saw him get into a taxi from our second-story window. He never came back. Mamma cried for six months. We went back to live with her parents, and that made me happy. My grandparents were the
only stable point of reference in my life. The next summer, my mother—who in the meantime was becoming an increasingly depressed hippie freak—left for India with a girlfriend to find herself. I don't know if she ever did, but I do know that we never saw her again. Motherly love was definitely not her strong suit. From that day forward, for all intents and purposes, my grandparents became my immediate family. They were everything for me. Now do you understand why I'm never really interested in talking about my loving parents?