100 Days of Happiness (12 page)

“T
here are two types of treatments for a tumor, Signor Battistini: conventional oncological treatments and those that are referred to as ‘alternative' treatments, a word I don't particularly like. . . . Alternative to what? I prefer to call them natural treatments, because they follow the course of nature.”

I listen without interrupting Dr. Zanella, a naturopath in her early fifties, practically the spitting image of Madonna.

“The first type of treatment chiefly concerns the sickness,” the pop star tells me, “while the second type follows a holistic approach, which is to say, it treats the person as a whole.”

I still can't say whether I'm in the presence of a charlatan, a genuine Madonna, or an enlightened guru of deeper understanding.

“The conventional approach,” she continues, “attempts to restore a state of health with pharmaceuticals, pills, drugs, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy, and focuses little or not at all on the patient's lifestyle and diet. How do they think they're going to save a sick person by stuffing his body with chemicals? By continuing to poison him? The word
pharmaceutical
comes from the ancient Greek word
pharmakon,
and it's no accident that it means ‘poison.'”

If I'd been listening when we studied ancient Greek at school, I never would have set foot in a pharmacy.

“A tumor almost always consists of a proliferation of cells due to a discharge of internal poisons, such as polluted air, alcohol, tobacco smoke, unhealthy foods, foods contaminated with pesticides, and
other foods that are bad for the human body, such as dairy products, meat, refined sugars, and so on.”

“Wait, I don't understand . . . dairy products, meat, and sugars . . . are bad for you?”

“Very bad for you, for various reasons. What do you usually eat, on an everyday basis?”

“I eat normally. Mediterranean diet . . . pasta, tomatoes, steaks, cheeses.”

“That's terrible. What about breakfast?”

I hesitate.

“For breakfast I usually have a . . . a doughnut.”

“Deep-fried?”

“Sure, deep-fried, the classic sugar doughnut. My father-in-law is a pastry chef.”

The singer looks at me as if I'd just told her I eat roast babies every morning.

“Let me explain, Signor Battistini. A doughnut is made of superfine baking flour that has been refined so that there are no vitamins in it, because it has been bleached and industrially processed. Superfine baking flour—like all refined food products—causes an increase in your glycemic levels and a resulting rise in insulin, and therefore a general weakening of the organism, which thus becomes increasingly subject to disease and tumors.”

I can't figure out whether she's serious or is just kidding me. She insists on dismantling all the foundations of my daily diet—from eggs, which, she informs me, come from farm-raised, antibiotic-fed hens; to milk, which has too much casein, creates inflammation, and deprives the body of calcium; to sugar, which is simply malevolent; to heated oil, which is cancerogenous.

“Can-cer-og-e-nous,” She repeats the word with a perverse satisfaction. “Your morning doughnut is your worst enemy!”

I'm in shock. This may be the biggest shock of my life since my
parents abandoned me and Italy was defeated in the 1994 World Cup. Doughnuts are bad for your health. I ask if I can go to the bathroom. Actually, I'm just hiding out so I can do some quick online research with my smart phone. I need to know. I'm thirsty for knowledge.

My good friend Google helps out as usual. The naturopath is perfectly right. Everything she says has a solid basis in scientific fact.

I return to Dr. Zanella's office and decide to dig a little deeper. The main question is, as always, straightforward: “Am I too late to do anything?”

“Perhaps not. A body falls ill because it's been poisoned over the course of time. With toxic foods, pharmaceuticals, drugs, alcohol, and repressed emotions.”

“I don't drink, I don't smoke, and I don't take drugs, except for maybe a joint twice a year.”

“But you eat doughnuts. And who knows what other crap.”

I feel like an elementary school student sent to stand in the corner.

“You see, to treat cancer, you need to change the way you eat and live, and that means raw foods, vegetable drinks, plenty of sunlight, yoga breathing exercises, and the total abandonment of carcinogenic foods, medicines, and other products. If the tumor isn't too far advanced, then it's possible to limit it or even put it into remission.”

“What can I do?”

“Let's start with two days of total fasting. Cancer is a parasite that lives inside you. If you don't eat, it doesn't eat either. But you have stores of energy that will let you live longer.”

A question seems quite natural.

“Why doesn't everyone do it?”

“Pharmaceutical houses. Is that a sufficient answer? If people knew that the most purifying substance there is is nettle extract, what would pharmacists sell?”

“So two days of diet?” I ask, in sheer terror.

“Not diet, fasting. After the first two days of digestive rest, I'd start the diet proper. A food regimen designed to cause the tumor to regress is a partial fast on the basis of raw, organic, fresh vegetables.”

She goes on drawing up a list of things that I can and cannot eat. Practically speaking, it's a vegan diet.

“At night, before going to bed, I'd recommend a plaster of cabbage leaves and spa mud, applied to the liver and the torso in correspondence to the lungs.”

I interrupt her. “What are my chances of recovery?”

“I want to be straight with you. If you'd come to me a year ago, with a tumor in an embryonic state, without ever having had chemotherapy, I would have told you that the odds in your favor were ninety-nine percent. But at your present state of development of this disease, your chances are slim. Still, you do have a chance to improve the quality of life in the time remaining to you, to feel more energetic . . . and after all, you never know. The human organism is an unpredictable and complicated machine, preprogrammed to heal. It can always surprise us.”

The last couple of lines seem to have been inserted just to keep me from getting depressed.

“Are you going to give it a try?” asks Madonna, finally flashing me a smile.

F
irst day of fasting.

By noon my head is spinning and my stomach is rumbling. Luckily, the crisis passes. As soon as my organism realizes that food isn't coming, it calms down and stops emitting alarm bursts.

I head back to the Chitchat shop. I want to tell Massimiliano that I've taken his advice.

“Good, I'm glad to hear it,” he replies as he makes me an herbal tea.

“Even if it's late, I want to give it a full try.”

“That strikes me as the right approach.”

I look ravenously at the cookies we dunked in the tea last time. I can feel my mouth salivating, just like the Big Bad Wolf when he looks at the Three Little Pigs. I ask him if he wouldn't mind hiding the cookies in the cabinet. What the eye doesn't see: that's always the best policy.

“You'll see,” says Massimiliano as he locks away the precious delicacies, “eating less and better will increase the energy available to you day after day.”

“I hope so. I'm already tired the minute I get up in the morning.”

Just then, a new customer rings the doorbell, a tall skinny gentleman in his early fifties with a beaten-down appearance. I'd forgotten I was in a public establishment, and not at a friend's house.

“Do you mind coming back in half an hour or so?” Massimiliano asks the newcomer. “Or else, if you feel like it, you can sit and watch a little TV with us.”

The thin man accepts. So there we are, all three of us, watching a rerun of
Happy Days
. The memorable episode in which Fonzie water-skis over a great white shark on a bet.

“The story is so absurd,” Massimiliano explains, “that in the U.S., to ‘jump the shark' is the moment when a television show has started to go downhill.”

“I liked that episode,” says the thin man, who it turns out is named Giannandrea. Maybe the reason he's sad is the name he was given as a baby.

“I liked it too,” I agree.

“Everyone liked it. The truth is that our eyes were different than they are today.”

Hunger pangs grip my belly. I say good-bye to Massimiliano and Giannandrea and head home.

The phone call from Umberto catches me by surprise.

“She wrote me on Facebook!”

“Who did?”

“What do you mean who? Martina, the tour guide. Miss Marple!”

I hurry over to his house. I can't wait to tell my father-in-law the news. But in the meanwhile, we need to answer the lady's none-too-friendly message.

“Hello, I'm the lady in the photograph. But I'm not your grandmother and I don't know what kind of stupid game you're playing. If you don't remove my picture from your profile immediately, I'm calling the police.”

That's what you call a downhill beginning to a love story.

I decide to tell her the truth. I write back and tell her that my father-in-law is the slightly overweight German mute from the tour two weeks ago, and that he'd like to see her again. We tried to track her down through the tour operator but they didn't know about any Martina. The lady is online and she replies immediately.

“They didn't know my name because every once in a while I
substitute for my granddaughter. The tour operator doesn't know anything about it. You can tell your father-in-law I knew immediately that he wasn't mute at all, and that I'd be happy to let him take me out to dinner. He can write me at this e-mail address. Thank you.”

Two hours later, they have a date for the next evening in a little restaurant in Trastevere. Oscar can't stop thanking me and asking me for advice about how to dress.

As a Cupid, I really do deserve an A plus.

S
oap-on-a-Rope, our unreliable goalie, comes up to me in the locker room of the swimming pool and asks me, unexpectedly:

“How are you, Coach?”

“What do you mean?”

No one on the team has ever asked me how I'm doing. If anything, I'm the one who asks them after practice or before a match.

“Well, I mean . . . I saw that you were coughing.”

I was afraid that he'd found out about my illness. The team doesn't know. The only one I've told is Giacomo, my assistant coach, and he's sworn to secrecy. His partial autism helps him keep it to himself.

“I'm fine, thanks, just a touch of bronchitis.”

“You must have caught a chill. Any advice for today's game?”

“Just one piece of advice: block all the balls that head toward you. Okay?”

Today we're taking on the lowest-ranked team in the league, a team we call Atletico Colabrodo—the Colander Athletics—instead of Atletico Casalpalocco. They lose by an average of fifteen goals per match. They've never even tied a game.

We drop into the water, relaxed, confident of our superiority. And sure enough, by the end of the third quarter, we're down by a goal, 8 to 7 in the Colanders' favor. I'm in a raging fury at poolside. I shout and urge my boys into the fray, calling for them to grow some balls. If we lose this match, then we can kiss our hopes of qualifying for the
playoffs good-bye. Even Giacomo, usually so reserved and British in style, displays an uncustomary rage and even tosses out a few swear words.

We start the last quarter with a ferocity that is quite unlike us. We win by one goal at the very last second, but no one celebrates. I'm furious. We underestimated our opponents and ran the risk of undermining the whole season. In the locker room, I rip the team a new one, in a memorable dressing-down. Then everything goes black and I keel over.

I wake up in the tiny swimming pool infirmary. With me are Giacomo and a young female swimming instructor.

“Don't worry,” she tells me. “We've called an ambulance. You just lost consciousness for a couple of minutes.”

I don't want an ambulance.

“It was nothing but a bout of high pressure,” I say, getting up from the cot. In reality, though, I'm afraid it's due to my fasting or the last session of chemo. Or both together.

I emerge from the infirmary and find my boys loitering in the swimming pool lobby. They look at me strangely. For a coach, for a fighting general, the worst thing is to show weakness in the eyes of his soldiers. Today my career as a coach without blemish or fear has come to an end. Or perhaps this just marks a new beginning.

A
s the first shadows of evening stretch over Rome, my father-in-law, Oscar, prepares for his date and I set off, like a condemned man walking to the gallows, to a meeting of the condo board.

The real question is this: Why should a man with only seventy-nine days left to live waste time at condo board meetings?

I say hello to my neighbors, already catching a glimpse of the mayhem that is about to be unleashed in their eyes. One second later I decide to spend the evening differently and walk right out of there. I call Umberto and Corrado. Immediately afterward, I call a restaurant. The very same restaurant where, just half an hour from now, Oscar has a date with Miss Marple.

 * * * 

When Oscar walks into the dining room, leading Martina with unaccustomed gallantry, we're seated at the table next to his. He glares at us with hatred.

“What are you doing here, damn you?” is the subtitle to his thoughts.

I give him the faintest of smiles. I certainly didn't want to miss the show.

I order a plateful of vegetables, to the disgust of my friends, who gobble down their mixed grills, and we spend the rest of the evening eavesdropping on the tall tales that Oscar is spouting to make a good impression on the lady, who is really quite nice. There are
unforgettable moments when he claims to have volunteered in Africa for two years and, again, when he claims to be fat solely as a matter of public image: “A pastry chef can't afford to be skinny, otherwise what kind of cook will his customers take him for?”

By the time they're eating their entrées, I'm sure that the retired grandmother is interested and I decide that my father-in-law may well have found, in this unlikely escapade, a new companion. When he pays the check and heads for the door with Martina, we decide to leave them alone. Oscar winks at me on his way out, and I stay there with my friends, joking and laughing.

 * * * 

I return home and find Paola fast asleep in front of the TV; I wake her up with a kiss on the top of her head. Oscar has asked me to keep her in the dark for the moment as far as his amorous activities are concerned. I pull my notebook out of my dresser drawer and strike out the entry: “Track down Miss Marple.” I take a shower. I've eaten nothing but vegetables today and, in effect, I'm feeling a little better. I feel more energetic and optimistic. But what I feel most of all is a desire to make love. It's been three months since Paola and I last had sex. A record for us. Even when she was pregnant, we were never so distant sexually. My wife comes to bed ten minutes after me, with a mug of herbal tea in her hand. I pretend I'm already asleep. Then I try to brush her with my arm. She pushes me away.

“Lucio, please.”

Lucio, please.

Let me scan that sentence.

“Lucio” is a complementary vocative. The fact that she calls me neither “my love” nor “
amore
” nor “sweetheart” indicates distance and hostility. She's never called me just Lucio before.

“Please” is a functional adverb, and a highly eclectic one. We use it in many ways. But in this particular instance, it clearly denotes
annoyance or impatience (Cut it out, please!) or else beseeching (Please, will you do this, or stop that). It is clear my wife is annoyed with me. If it weren't for my buddy Fritz, I'm afraid that these days we'd be spending all our time in lawyers' offices, instead of hospitals.

I turn away and dream of the day when we'll make love again.

I'll immediately add it to the list of the most important days of my life.