100 Days of Happiness (16 page)

T
hree more matches until the final playoffs. We need all the points and all the extra goals we can muster to qualify.

In the locker room, I stare all my boys in the eye, one by one, doing my best to instill motivation in them. Last of all, our goalkeeper, Soap-on-a-Rope, and then Martino, our only decent striker (and that's more because of his nerve than his unerring aim). We can do this. This isn't the Olympics but we need to put our hearts into it. Today, moreover, we'll be in a direct face-off with a team we lost to in an away game. A defeat that cries out to be avenged. Lorenzo and Eva are in the bleachers with Umberto. I see them from a distance, playing something, but I can't figure out what. My friend is as good with kids as he is with animals.

This time the match runs smoothly. We immediately pull ahead by two goals and we manage to keep our lead until the final whistle. Solid, impeccable performance. If we'd always played like this, we would have won the championship. I praise the boys in the locker room and then catch up with Umberto and the kids in the parking lot.

“Good work, Papà!” Eva comes running toward me.

“You were great. Even that pussy Martino was playing like an Olympic athlete,” Lorenzo points out.

I decide not to scold him for his less than gentlemanly language and I load everyone into the car. Then I feel the pain. The main tumor is pressing harder and harder against the other organs; I feel like an
athlete running a long race, and the pain in my spleen and then in my liver sends me the signal that my energy is about to flag and give out. I have a harder and harder time breathing, but my cough has become less frequent; it's been replaced by a kind of asthmatic fit that squeezes my lungs, which have turned into a pair of sponges drying out in the hot sun.

We all leave together to get a
cremolato,
an Italian ice. We stop at the Café du Parc, a place near Rome's only pyramid, which makes some of the best. Once I met the director Nanni Moretti there, enjoying his
cremolato
. It must be a passion that unites all water polo players.

The children are especially excited about the fig-flavored ices, hard to find when they're handmade. Eva teases a piece of fig out of her scoop and holds it out to me. I come closer to put my lips to the upheld spoon when the fruit slips off the spoon and lands on the floor. “You weren't quick enough!” Eva says, frowning at me.

“I'm just a slow, slow person,” I say. “Slower than a turtle.”

“Even slower,” Eva says.

I feel moved by her gesture. I see her digging deeper into the cup, looking for another piece of fruit, Disappointment fills her face and this time it's my heart, not my liver, that feels the pain.

They know knothing about the cancer. And I'm not going to tell them. I still haven't decided what to do when day zero arrives. But I know that I want to spend as much time as I can with Lorenzo and Eva, with my friends and, of course, with my wife. It seems like the only important thing.

 * * * 

When I get home, I make a notation in the Dino Zoff notebook, just a single word:
Cremolato
. I make a mental note to go back there with Paola.

I
watch my wife on the terrace. She's watering her plants. I've seen her do it a thousand times, but now I can't tear my eyes off her. She's wearing gray tracksuit pants that used to be mine, and a faded T-shirt. Her hair is pulled back, and she's wearing gardening gloves. Every so often she puts down her watering can and plucks off a withered leaf, or she ties a bougainvillea branch to the railing, or scoops out the leaves that have piled up inside a terra-cotta vase, smothering the dirt. Skillful gestures, Zen-like in their calm. Taking care of the terrace is as good for Paola as an hour of yoga. She is so real to me, out there, doing what she loves.
She's mine,
I think fiercely, even as I know I still have to win back her love.
She's mine
.

I get out my Dino Zoff notebook, by now somewhat wrinkled and creased. I sit in an armchair from which, through the curtains on the window, I can see my wife moving around the terrace.

I title today's page:
The things I'll miss about Paola
.

On Sunday mornings, her pear, raisin, and cinnamon tart.

When she eats cherries and then rattles the pits against each other, like a castanet for gnomes.

Spying on her when she changes clothes before going out, because she never likes the way she looks.

Seeing her sleepy eyes slide shut while she's reading in bed, braced up on her pillow.

In the summer, when she gathers her hair up and makes pigtails, like a little girl.

Her calm voice from the next room as she reads the good-night fairy tale to the children, which often manages to make me go to sleep too.

Arguing about what to buy at the supermarket. I fill the shopping cart with crap and then she takes it out.

Putting up the Christmas tree together. She takes care of the ornaments, the children do the colorful festoons, and I'm in charge of the lights.

The woolen blankets on the bed, because there are never enough of them for her in the winter.

Watching her run on the beach in her one-piece, the silk, strapless swimsuit that leaves her shoulders bare.

At night, when we're on the couch watching TV, and she puts her ice-cold feet into my hands so I can massage them.

The scent of her freckly flesh, hot from the sun, after a day at the beach. It smells like something very very good, hard to explain—a wholemeal croissant with honey, fresh from the oven.

When we're having a fight—you already know this one—she'll stop everything and tell me, in all seriousness, that she's a cat, and as a cat, she can't understand the language I'm speaking, so that even a bitter fight dissolves into laugher.

Her Italian derriere.

When she wrinkles her nose because she has a decision to make.

Finding the kitchen table covered with her students' compositions, which she reads and marks with an almost sacred attention.

Her tears, real and salty, when she watches the evening news with its assortment of cruelty, injustice, violence, desperate pensioners, and poverty-stricken part-time workers.

Her teenage passion for Renato Zero.

Her silvery laughter, and the way it makes the dimples in her cheeks a little deeper.

The way she grabs my right arm like a koala, after we turn out the lights and just before we fall asleep.

Her slender, muscular legs, which she too often covers up with long skirts.

When, in the morning, before leaving for work, she says good-bye: “
Ciao amore
,” reminding me that “
amore
” was just me, me and no one else, her one and only love. She hasn't done it in a while. And it's my fault, all my fault. I wonder if I'll ever hear her say it again.

 * * * 

I could go on. I never realized how long the list was. I know her by heart, and that doesn't make me love her any less. Like a Dante scholar who learns the entire
Divine Comedy
and then just appreciates the poem even more profoundly.

Paola is my
Divine Comedy
.

T
hese days I'm sleeping just four or five hours a night. From four to seven in the morning, I am alone.

Books. I've drawn up a list of the novels I've bought but never read. I always seem to stop reading after the first ten pages. My maximum attention span is no longer than a Diabolik comic book.

Movies. I've been watching everything made by Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Spielberg. The rest is all superfluous fluff, made by hobbyists or paid professionals. Yesterday, I watched
Duel
. It really pulled me in. I was the one fleeing and my buddy Fritz was chasing me, at the wheel of the killer semi.

When dawn comes, I always find myself camping out on the Internet.

And I'm always Googling the same deadly words.
Death
.
Birth
.

This morning I discovered that every day, around the world, roughly 365,000 babies are born and about 155,000 people of every age die. In other words, every day we increase by 210,000 individuals, almost twice the population of the city of Latina. We're at an eternal subway stop, with people getting on and off. A subway car that's getting more and more packed until one day, inevitably, it's bound to explode. An obvious but effective metaphor.

I've even found a fantastic site that promises to calculate, with uncanny precision, the exact day of your death, thanks to a series of cross-referenced statistics. You have to fill out a questionnaire with your date of birth, the city where you live, your profession, the
operations you've undergone, the diseases you've had, and even your allergies. Then you have to add the dates of death of all the close relatives you know and the respective causes.

I input all my details and hit Return.

I wait.

Out comes my expected date of death.

July 2, 2038.

This site is defective.

I sit there, motioness, staring at the computer screen.

I Google.

July 2, 2038.

The World Cup will be under way. The quarterfinals will just have been played. I'd miss the semifinals and the finals. It's not fair.

It's a good thing I'm going to die first.

C
orrado is trying to talk me and Umberto into making a parachute jump with him. He's already done more than a hundred jumps—he has a parachute instructor's license, though he doesn't actually work as an instructor. I allow myself to be persuaded. Umberto's not going for it. He'll watch us jump from the ground and film our landing. Corrado explains that when we jump, we'll be hooked together. I realize that he's treating me like a sick child. I don't like it. I tell him and he's slightly offended.

“I was just trying to help you have a different kind of a day!”

I skate over the topic and reiterate my intention to make this leap into the void. I ask Paola if she wants to come with us, but she has class compositions to mark. She wouldn't have come anyway. Ever since the unfortunate event with Signora Moroni, she really doesn't seem to care much for Corrado.

Before heading out for the airport, I have an irresistible question: Who invented the parachute?

I should have guessed: Leonardo.

In the Atlantic Codex, my favorite inventor made a note to the effect that with a pyramidally shaped linen tent whose base was held open by rigid supports, and each of the four supports measuring twelve armlengths (circa seven meters) in length, “anyone can leap from any height without any risk.”

 * * * 

The jump that Corrado has arranged for a beginner like me is called a tandem because, as he's already explained, he'll be jumping into the void along with me, and we'll be fastened together. We'll fly to an altitude of fourteen thousand feet aboard a Turbo Finist prop plane, and then we'll jump. A minute of free fall and then Corrado will open the parachute, roughly five thousand feet above the earth.

The description alone terrifies me.

Corrado reassures me as we climb into the tiny aircraft.

“Skydiving is like making love to the world.”

“Thanks, friend, I appreciate the metaphorical finesse, but I'm still scared.”

“Cut it out, we're practically there.”

The little airplane takes only a quarter of an hour to reach the appropriate altitude.

As we get into the harness, someone swings the door open.

Without warning Corrado shoves me into the empty air. I swear that if I survive, I'll strangle him with my bare hands.

After a moment, though, I discover something that can't really be explained in words. “Hurtling downward” is nothing at all like “falling,” in spite of what people think. It's much more like “swimming.” I manage to maneuver in midair and turn in all directions just like I do underwater. I'm swimming at thirteen thousand feet and I'm drunk on the thrill and the sensations. Corrado shouts something but I can't hear a thing. For sixty seconds I'm in a trance, an air swimmer having fun doing pike dives, forcing my Siamese instructor to follow my every move. Then Corrado opens the chute, and one kind of magic ends while another begins. The world seen from high above, a landscape that we're all accustomed to seeing from an airplane, is much more exciting when viewed without the filter of a Plexiglas window. We slip downward gradually, dropping earthward under the expert guidance of my old friend, heading straight for the airport we took off from.

“Well?” he asks. “Did you like it?”

“Why haven't you ever taken me up before?” I ask him, in a state of exaltation.

“Because you're a chicken!”

He's right. I suddenly realize that I've been a scaredy cat all my life. He shows me the footage from the GoPro I had strapped to me, pointing at my face. It's the best video I've ever been in since the one of my wedding. I watch myself in the footage, I'm laughing for one minute solid. I hadn't even noticed. I'm swimming in the air and laughing like a newborn being tickled.

Paola was beautiful all the way through her pregnancies. In the hospital, she smiled widely as they brought Lorenzo, all cleaned up, into the room. He arrived quickly, a few pushes, and there he was, a glistening new arrival in the world, as if he couldn't wait to be here. He was five minutes old, the time it took to cut the umbilical cord, rinse him off, and let Paola hold him first.

I stood by her bedside, a proud father, adrenaline surging through my system, totally unsure of my role in the baby's life. Paola said, “Pick him up.” I felt my hands trembling under the soft wool blanket that held him. Then they steadied. He looked up at me with milky eyes, his face as fresh as morning dew, and I just melted. I couldn't believe life had brought us this gift, that this smiling baby was ours, all ours, to take home.

Then the miracle repeated itself when Eva came into our world. She was the most alert baby I've ever seen, already poised to fight battles, to take on the world in unexpected ways. And she loved to be tickled. I held her in my arms and caressed the soft skin under her chin. She looked happy, so I kept on doing it. I seemed to live for her smiles. And I still do.