100 Days of Happiness (14 page)

D
id you know that, in the seventies, there was a movement to change the name of the astrological sign Cancer to eliminate the negative association with the disease of the same name? The alternative name suggested was “Moonchild.”

When you spend all your free time on the Internet searching the same few words, you wind up discovering twists befitting the puzzle magazine
Settimana Enigmistica
.

 * * * 

Did you know that a study done by researchers in the Department of Applied Climatology of the University of Duisburg-Essen shows that one of the most carcinogenic places on earth is a church. Churches contain high levels of toxic microparticles, which are generated by candles and incense. The concentration of these substances in churches is eight times higher than outdoors, and it remains elevated until a full day after the end of Mass.

 * * * 

Did you know that there are smart bras that can diagnose cancer? In clinical testing, the Breast Tissue Screening Bra attained a rate of accuracy of roughly 92 percent; it functions by monitoring temperature variations in various points of the breast. This makes it possible to identify tumors six years earlier.

 * * * 

Did you know that oral sex can cause cancer? This is the oropharyngeal tumor, whose frequency has been increasing exponentially over recent years. Use of prophylactics reduces but does not eliminate the risk of infection.

 * * * 

Did you know that marijuana fights cancer? In this case, we're in the presence of a paradox: the cannabidiol that marijuana contains reduces the pain and nausea and slows the growth of the tumor cells, but the fumes produced when you smoke the marijuana contain nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, cyanides, and nitrosamines, all of which are potentially carcinogenic. The classic serpent biting its tail.

 * * * 

But I never do find the news report I've been hunting for more than a month now: “Japanese scientists discover a new and infallible cure for tumors.”

Still, I don't give up—somewhere out there must be a modern Leonardo da Vinci who, one fine day, will wake up and say: “Hey, guys, I just figured it out: all you need to do to cure cancer is to take two tablets of ginger, thyme, and garlic together before every meal!” Maybe the cure has always been there, right out in plain view, just like Edgar Allan Poe's purloined letter.

 * * * 

The closer I get to summer, the more Rome seems like what it once was. I feel the urge to walk. I wander around through the ghetto, then I walk down the steps to the banks of the Tiber. I sit down to watch this cloaca of a river flow through the city I love best.

And I happily smoke a joint.

I
've always made fun of my friends who see psychologists. Now here I am, sitting in an armchair across from Dr. Santoro, a little man who looks like a Disney raccoon, and who looks at me without speaking as he jots down notes. I feel as if I've wandered into an episode of
In Treatment
. Since therapy requires me to talk and him to listen, I'm forced to chatter away, even though it's the last thing I feel like doing.

I don't know why I don't mention the cancer straight off.

 * * * 

The first time I was afraid I was about to die was in 1993 and I was twenty years old. Back then, there was no law requiring a helmet while riding a scooter and so I gunned my Ciao moped at top speed through the streets of Rome. I felt invincible, until the day some idiot doored me as he got out of a parked car. The moped slammed to a stop and I kept flying. I did a forward pike straight onto the asphalt. I don't remember the impact, though it was reconstructed by the police accident team, but I do remember what happened ten seconds later. I was on the ground, with ten people standing over me talking, though their voices were muffled.

“He's dead!”

“No, his eyes are moving.”

“Call an ambulance.”

“What's the point? He'll be dead in a couple of minutes.”

Why were they so confident in their diagnosis? I couldn't feel any
particular pain. Then a thought occurred to me and I touched my head. My hair was dripping with blood. My skull was pressed hard against the pavement, in a pool of red blood cells. I really am a goner, I decided.

It's a sensation everyone ought to have at least once in a lifetime: the thought that it's all over.

There I was, covered with my own blood, and I felt somehow lighter. Everything had regained its natural weight. I don't even remember where I was going on my moped. Maybe to practice, or else to a pub, I couldn't say.

Ten minutes later, in the ambulance, I discovered that I had a bad cut on my scalp, I'd be left with a large scar, but I was certain to survive with ease. The abundant array of blood vessels that run to the scalp had created the illusion of a much more serious injury than was actually the case. Ten days with a bandaged head and I was good as new.

 * * * 

Dr. Santoro has listened to the whole story with apparent attention, every so often scribbling a note. I realize that I still have a good twenty minutes before the session is over and I go on talking. But this time I just invent out of whole cloth.

The first time I killed a man, I was in third grade . . .

The raccoon doesn't blink an eye. Either he's fallen asleep with his eyes open or he's not impressed. I go on.

The victim was a custodian at my elementary school. Not one of the friendly ones, the ones who joke around with the kids. No, this was a bitter, nasty old man, a failure in life who hated young people and everything about youth . . .

I can't figure out whether the psychologist has painted-on eyes, like in a TV cartoon, or whether he's just staring at me with chilly scorn. He's stopped taking notes. He looks like a wax statue at Madame Tussauds.

I lay in ambush, waiting for him after class, and hit him in the head with a chair. He didn't die immediately, so I had go on beating him while he screamed. His screams attracted another custodian, an older woman, and I was forced to kill her as well . . .

He blinks twice. So he's alive.

At this point I decide to go on; after all, it's just a few more minutes.

The following day the school was closed while the police investigated the killings. It took a week before classes resumed, but no one ever suspected me. No one, that is, except for a classmate of mine, Umberto, who became a veterinarian. I'd told him what I planned to do, and he's still blackmailing me, all these years later . . .

He starts at the mention of his patient's name.

“So you're saying that Umberto . . . knew?”

I realize that he's been frozen solid with fear. He believes every word I've said and he's taken me for a deranged murderer for the past five minutes. A psychologist who's not much of a psychologist. A really stupid psychologist.

“Do you mind if I leave five minutes early?” I ask, laying the agreed-upon 130 euros on his desk.

“No,” he replies, in a daze. He's in my hands: he doesn't even know whom he's talking to, a depressed man or a bloodthirsty killer.

I leave and buy myself an ice-cream cone, with three flavors of gelato.

Pistachio, chocolate crunch, and vanilla—together.

If you ask me, much more useful and cheaper than a psychologist.

B
y now the Dino Zoff notebook is full of notes, sketches, and projects. It's become my inseparable companion in my misfortunes. I check off the days as they rush past in the countdown to oblivion. A countdown that has only had a statistical meaning. Until today.

The first person to know is Massimiliano, my new friend at the Chitchat shop, and by now my preferred confidant. As he knows so little or almost nothing about me, he's often able to give me better advice than Umberto and Corrado, who are emotionally involved and therefore less objective.

The first words I say to him are pretty self-explanatory: “I've decided to kill myself.”

“What are you saying?”

“Don't worry, I'm not about to jump out the window, and I'm not going to hang myself from the ceiling of your shop. I'm talking about assisted suicide, in Switzerland. I've already researched it thoroughly. I've even picked a clinic; it's in Lugano.”

“Why?” he asks, with heartfelt concern.

“A thousand good reasons, but here are the main ones: I don't want to watch myself fall apart physically, but most of all, I don't want to make my wife and children witness that. I want them to remember me in tiptop shape, or something close to it. I think that's my right.”

“What about the diet?”

“It's working. I'm losing weight and that's helping to alleviate the pain. But the tumor markers in my bloodstream are rising constantly,
I'm afraid. I received new test results just the other day. I discovered my buddy Fritz too late.”

“Your buddy Fritz?”

“That's what I call my cancer. It takes some of the sting out of it, no?”

“It sure does. I have to say, I hope you change your mind about this.”

“Not a chance. I've been trying to come to this decision for a month now. It's the only possible way out. I don't want to rot in a hospital bed.”

“Have you told your wife?”

“No. We're having a pretty hard time of it lately, you know.”

He pours me a glass of iced peach tea. Homemade, by him. Organic peaches and mineral water. Even Madonna would approve.

A minute later the depressed Giannandrea from last week joins us. By now he's a regular client. This time I learn that he's a tailor and his wife left him for a gas station attendant from Udine.

We play cards, an Italian rummy game called Scala Quaranta. I hadn't played Scala Quaranta in I can't remember how long. I can barely even remember the rules. It's a recurring motif of my new life, that I do things I haven't done in years or that, in some cases, I've never done at all. At last, an upside.

C
orrado and I swing by to pick up Umberto at the clinic. We're going to enjoy an aperitif suitable for certified good-for-nothings in a bar in the center of town.

I haven't yet told my friends what I've decided.

I'll do it after our first Spritz.

“In sixty-nine days I'm going to Switzerland.”

“That's great, are you going to take a little spin?” Corrado doesn't get it. I might not have made myself clear.

“I've made a reservation at a clinic for assisted suicide.”

At the word “suicide” a surreal silence descends on the table. For a couple of minutes there's no sound except for the distant notes of a hit by Oasis. Even my cough stands shyly on the sidelines.

“Why sixty-nine days?” asks Umberto, just for something to say.

“I've run a countdown. From a hundred to zero. It's symbolic but it has a certain statistical meaning. Sometime in the days around zero, my situation is going to reach a critical point. The weeks after that are only going to be deeply humiliating for me. So I'm going to make sure day zero will be my last. I've made up my mind.”

“Are you giving up?” Corrado can't wrap his head around it.

“No. It's just that I don't want to watch my body fall apart. And I don't want my children to remember a withered father who's a prisoner of a recliner chair.”

“Does Paola know?” Umberto asks me.

“Not yet.”

“Tell me that you're not serious!” Corrado insists, incapable of taking the idea in.

“I wish I could. Can you imagine? Friends, I don't have cancer at all; it was all just a practical joke to get a little more affection. No, it's true. And now I've decided to enjoy to the fullest the remaining two months and change that remain to me.”

“That remain to us,” a melancholy Corrado corrects me. “There were three musketeers, after all.”

“Actually, there were four. And D'Artagnan was the most important one of all,” Umberto points out.

We launch into a heated debate over Dumas' mistaken choice of a title and we fondly think back to Andrea, an old friend of ours from high school days, who was our D'Artagnan but who emigrated many years ago. With him, we made an unbeatable quartet. Then we drink another Spritz and comment on the derriere of a girl leaning against the bar in a position that lets us glimpse her thong. A conversation split into two parts, as if we were deliberately steering clear of the topic of my buddy Fritz.

“I
n sixty-eight days I'm going to kill myself.”

Paola freezes.

“What are you saying?”

“My buddy Fritz has practically beaten me. Every day I feel a little weaker. According to the doctor, in a couple of months I'll have to live flat on my back in bed, filled to the gills with painkillers, and then the final phase will begin. That wouldn't be a pretty sight. I'll leave before that can happen. Elephants do it. I'll do it too.”

She's devastated. I know it, I can see it in her face. I should have come up with a better way to tell her. I didn't think.

“I don't understand . . .”

“I made a reservation in a clinic in Lugano.”

“Euthanasia?”

“Assisted suicide is the more accurate term.”

“When did you decide this?”

“A week ago.”

“Why didn't you say anything to me about it?”

“It's not like we've been talking much lately.”

“You're out of your mind.”

We remain in silence for an unbelievably long time. Then Paola grabs her purse and leaves.

I remain in the apartment.

Mourning over our lost complicity. I want it back. But I have to wait. For Paola.

I've lost so many people because of my criminal affair with Signora Moroni, and all of them live inside Paola: my wife, my best friend, my lover, my accomplice in life, my biggest fan, my everything.

My everything.

Paola is my everything. That's the correct definition.

But right now, what am I for her?

A burden, a roommate, the father of her children, a traitor.

I know that she still loves me—I can feel it.

That's the main force driving me forward.

The phrase in the Dino Zoff notebook.

Get Paola to forgive me.