100 Days of Happiness (29 page)

T
he Ligurian Sea at dawn is always in the mood for a chat. I look down on it from the window of our two-star little hotel at Arma di Taggia and I listen to its stories while Paola and the kids, behind me, are still fully immersed in high-quality REM sleep.

The wind tosses my head of graying spaghetti and whispers in my ear the unbelievable tales of the adventures of an Ottoman corsair who actually lived, a certain Turgut Reis, known in this part of the world as Dragut. I remember his story very well; my grandpa told me all about him when I was Lorenzo's age. I even remember what Grandpa was wearing that night, where I was sitting, what Grandma was cooking. I remember everything, suddenly. It was a Sunday. My favorite concierges had given me, for no reason or special occasion, a deluxe copy of
Treasure Island
. I still remember the emerald-green cover, with a drawing of Jim Hawkins hiding from the cruel Long John Silver behind a barrel in the inn. It was a hardcover book, with heavy pages, full of color illustrations, and I read it that afternoon at a single sitting. It's the only book I've brought with me on this journey. Even though I know already that I won't read it. Ever since that Sunday afternoon so many years ago, stories about pirates, corsairs, and buccaneers have become my preferred form of reading. If I could be reincarnated, I'd come back as a pirate, one even more mendacious and pitiless than the valiant Dragut my grandpa told me about all those years ago.

I turn around. Paola is still in bed. The kids are camped out on a little trundle bed and didn't hear the cannon fire.

It seems like a vacation. And maybe it is.

I curl up next to my wife. I wrap my arms around her and nuzzle her. I need to fill up on this.

 * * * 

The day begins a few hours later, with a visit to the lookout towers of Civezza, built by the townsfolk half a millennium ago to warn of the arrival of the pirate Dragut, so I take advantage of the fact to start my story. Lorenzo and Eva, the former strangely well behaved, the latter strangely interested in a war story, sit between pairs of battlements of the fortress and listen to me with bated breath. Paola is a short distance away, taking pictures and perhaps listening to me in the background.

“The corsair Dragut was the most terrifying freebooter that ever infested Italian seas.”

“What kind of a name is Dragut?” Lorenzo interrupts immediately.

“An Ottoman name. Which means Turkish. He came to Italy in search of cities and ships to loot.”

“And did he find them?” asks Eva with her usual precision.

“Yes. The cities and the islands that he put to the sword and the torch still stand: Olbia, Portoferraio, Rapallo, Vieste, as well as the isle of Elba. Dragut was a big fan of the Italian seas, Italian food, and even Italian women. In fact, he had a dozen wives.”

“And how did he support them?” Eva asks.

“He worked as a pirate, so he was very rich.”

I put on a serious, sober voice to try to rivet their attention and keep them from interrupting me again. I decide to insert a series of imaginary variants on the true story of the Ottoman pirate.

“You should know that my great-grandfather's great-grandfather's great-grandfather's great-grandfather, et cetera, et cetera, a certain Igor “One Eye” Battistini, a fat man who was exceedingly handy with the sword and the saber, was actually Dragut's lieutenant.”

“I don't believe it,” Eva says immediately.

“But it's true.”

“Are you trying to tell me that we have a great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather who was a pirate?” asks Lorenzo, piling on.

“Well, he wasn't actually a pirate; at first he ran a tavern, but then one day a giant crow plucked out his eye and flapped off toward the sea. Igor took ship on the first passing vessel, in pursuit of the crow. That first ship was Dragut's. Little by little, he came to be the perfidious Ottoman's right-hand man. But he never did find the crow, or his eye.”

“Now you're just making things up,” says Eva brusquely.

“Go on,” Lorenzo says, conceding his interest.

They don't actually believe it, but still the story has caught their fancy and now they want to know how it ends. My self-respect as a narrator swells.

Paola smiles from a distance. And I continue enthusiastically.

“His bitterest enemy (every pirate has an official enemy) was Andrea Doria, a name we normally assign to an ocean liner that sank. Actually, though, Andrea Doria was a valiant admiral who was born just a few miles away from here, in Oneglia. The two rivals battled fiercely for years.”

“So Andrea Doria was as cruel as Lord Brooke, Sandokan's sworn enemy?” Lorenzo asks.

“No, technically Admiral Doria was the good guy and Dragut was the bad guy.”

“I'm rooting for Dragut,” Lorenzo decrees.

“So am I,” I explain. “Sometimes we root for the bad guys. One morning in late autumn, after a pursuit that crisscrossed a thousand seas, Dragut is captured by none other than Doria and taken prisoner after a sea battle that lasted ten days.”

“Anyway, he probably escapes,” my firstborn speculates.

“Dragut is sent to row as a galley slave in the admiral's fleet. But a pirate of his stature certainly couldn't end his brilliant career like that.”

“So he escapes,” Lorenzo insists.

“No. A few years later Barbarossa—”

“Frederick Barbarossa?” asks Paola, who's finally taken interest.

“Not Frederick, but a fellow Barbary corsair named Barbarossa—or Redbeard—for the color of his beard. In any case, this pirate Barbarossa pays Andrea Doria a huge ransom for Dragut's release.”

Murmurs of disappointment. My minuscule audience would clearly have preferred a daring and ingenious escape.

“By no means repentant, the unsinkable Dragut goes back to his old maritime pursuits. He attacks numerous Italian towns and ships, and finally works his way to here, in 1564, close to Arma di Taggia, in a mountain hamlet still called Civezza. Which is where we are now. The bold corsair in fact loved to roam widely, and he never limited his raids to galleons or ports. He was a creative practitioner of the art of piracy. But in this case, he hadn't taken into account the heroic resistance of the people of Civezza.”

“Do they kill him?” Lorenzo asks with a note of concern in his voice.

“No. In spite of his repeated looting and sacking, the people of the little town defend themselves. They build this fortress and they oblige the corsair to suffer great losses. At the end of this raid, the Ottoman pirate decides that Italy has become a dangerous place for evildoers and he moves to Malta, which strikes him as less perilous. In 1565, along with the Turkish fleet, he takes part in the siege of Fort St. Elmo.”

“What kind of name is Elmo? They all have terrible names in this story.”

“It's an ancient name. Anyway, Elmo is just the name of the saint they named the fort after. In mid-June, just when Dragut is getting ready to enjoy a well-deserved summer vacation, he's wounded in the
head by a piece of flying rock, shattered by a large iron musket ball fired by an enemy sniper.”

“And does he die?” This time, the question is asked by both children in unison.

“Hold on. Our favorite corsair doesn't retreat, he courageously continues to lead his men to the attack, but he's bleeding badly from both ears and his mouth. So they carry him back from the front lines and put him to bed in a tent, where he dies two days later.”

“And is he reborn, like Jesus?” Lorenzo asks hopefully.

“He is not reborn. His body is taken to Tripoli, and there he is buried with full military honors in a mosque. Legend has it that his archenemy Andrea Doria felt such respect for him that he named his own cat Dragut, after learning of the death of the Ottoman corsair.”

“What about One Eye?” Eva wonders.

Maybe, just a little, she believes me. I pile on and season the finale with an array of wholly invented details.

“One Eye moved to Malaysia, where he met Sandokan and Yanez and formed an alliance with the two of them. He also changed his nom de guerre: in fact, in Salgari's novels, he's called Tremal-Naik.”

“Tremal-Naik had both eyes and was Indian,” Lorenzo points out, catching me red-handed.

I've put my foot in it. I try to find my way out of this narrative maze by explaining that in reality there were two Tremal-Naiks, but I get more and more tangled up in the knots of my second-rate creativity. I'm saved by a zealous watchman who announces that the fortress will be closing soon for the lunchtime break.

There's no question about one thing: my grandpa was a much better storyteller than I am.

 * * * 

That afternoon, after a massive snack made up of a bowl heaped high with
trofie al pesto
, we're struck and sent to the bottom by a classic
seaside enemy, a summer thunderstorm. It catches us while we're still half a mile from the car, just the right amount of time to drench us to the bone. Once we're finally in the car, we all giggle helplessly. We can't seem to stop laughing for a good solid ten minutes. Paola looks over at me, and for the first time on this journey, gives me her real smile.

And so the ramshackle pensione Gina, where we take shelter that night, seems like a deluxe Four Seasons hotel.

I
chose to stay off the highway so we could keep the windows open and enjoy the countryside. We're having an on-the-road morning, to the tunes of one of my favorite Italian pop compilations: singer-songwriters from the seventies. We reach our destination before lunch.

“Well, here we are.”

“Where's the hotel?” asks Paola.

“There's no hotel here. We're camping!”

The overjoyed cries of the kids drown out Paola's “No-o-o!” She closes her eyes with resignation. I went on camping trips for years in Boy Scouts and with my other musketeers. I only stopped when I met Paola. If there's one thing she hates, it's camping. When we got engaged, she promised me that one day she'd go tent camping with me. That was a wild card that I could have played at any moment. So I decide to play it today.

Our station wagon rolls triumphantly into the campgrounds.

I reserved a camping site right on the lakeshore. We park the car and start assembling the supertent that I bought at the Via Sannio street market. I'm a whiz when it comes to pitching tents, a born prodigy. There are people who play tennis, or paint, or play the piano, or cook: well, what I know how to do is pitch tents, of all and any kind. The one we have is a giant pop-up super Igloo that basically pitches itself when you throw it into the air. I show my young assistants how to dig a trench around the tent to keep it from flooding in case of
sudden showers, how to drive the stakes without slamming the mallet down on their thumbs, how to blow up the air mattresses. I've secretly brought everything we're going to need.

Paola allows herself to be sucked into the fun and assembles a very efficient camp kitchen.

“Shall we try lighting it with a couple of rocks again?” asks Lorenzo, with the irony that he's by now mastered far too well.

“No. I bought a fire starter. You're hungry, aren't you?”

We canvas the grounds for branches and twigs, and in just five minutes, we have our campfire crackling merrily, safely corralled in a circle of stones. We bake potatoes wrapped in aluminum foil, we roast sausages, and we make a bean-and-egg stew. Even Roy Rogers and his friends would have been staggered by the sheer mass of food. But we eat greedily, accompanying it with bread. Just a few days from the end, I've cast aside all of my naturopath's advice. I apply one single criterion: I eat everything I feel like eating. We're almost done when the sky starts to drizzle. For the past few years, the climate in Italy has been turning tropical, but no one dares to make it official: it rains in the summer.

A minute later, the downpour is raging, accompanied by flashes of lightning and claps of thunder. We barely have time to break down our improvised camp kitchen and take shelter in the Igloo.

To be safe and dry inside a tent when it's raining is always magical. The power of the elements comes pounding down to within an inch of you, but you're protected by a bubble that really does seem like the work of some passing wizard.

The noise is deafening but all four of us lie there listening to it as if it were a concert of symphonic music. When the downpour ends, we emerge to evaluate the aftermath: the tent remains untouched, thanks to the drainage gutters that I dug with the kids, and even the camp kitchen, covered by a waterproof tarp, has emerged intact.

“That was an adventure!” Eva exclaims.

I turn and smile at her. I ask all three of them to pose in front of the tent, and I set up my Polaroid for a self-timed shot. Then I hurry over to stand beside them and force a smile onto my face.

Click!

Just then, although I didn't know it, we were taking our last group picture.

M
y favorite attraction at Gardaland is called Space Vertigo. It's a tower that stands 130 feet high, and your car plummets down from the top at supersonic velocity, coming to a halt just before it hits the ground. Each side seats just four people. Us.

We stand in line surrounded by a large group of young Austrians, vacationing on the lake. I get into an argument with the ticket taker because Eva isn't tall enough, and so, for safety considerations, she's not allowed to board the ride. We entrust her to Parsley, the dragon who's the park's mascot—a dragon containing a young man with a strong Calabrian accent.

Lorenzo, Paola, and I wind up sharing a seat with a high school‒age girl from Bergamo who's so terrified that her reasons for boarding this ride are hard to imagine. She sobs and protests the whole way up while the three of us laugh euphorically. Up, up, up, up . . . Instead of looking down, I look up. The sky, and heaven, seem to be coming closer. Who knows why the paradise of the afterlife has always been identified with the sky. In fact, in Italian it's the same word:
cielo
. I'd actually prefer to spend my eternity by the beach.

Suddenly the ride plunges downward, my heart pops into my throat, and I feel an electric charge go surging up my spine. A four-second drop that seems to last a month. When we reach the ground we're all laughing like lunatics, caught up in the typical fun-park frenzy. The girl beside us is still crying. We wave to Parsley, who's playing with Eva, and we immediately get back into line for another
ride. We have to do it again. As we ride up, this time accompanied by a taciturn young Japanese guy, I cough the whole way. Maybe they should have put a sign at the entrance saying: prohibited to children under forty-eight inches, people with heart problems, and
morituri
. My stomach hurts. I feel a pressure on my chest as if I'd been working out on a weights machine and the bar had dropped and pinned me. A sense of nausea comes over me and my heart beats like an out-of-control metronome. The descent is a pure liberation. I get out, I walk away from Paola and the kids, saying that something I ate must have disagreed with me. I signal to my wife not to worry as I lie down in a little park area, on my back on the grass. And I breathe slowly, trying to slow my heartbeat like you do in yoga.

Only an idiot would take a trip to Gardaland four days before the end. But I love amusement parks. In fact, if I had to choose my own personal idea of paradise, I wouldn't ask for the sky, and actually I wouldn't want the beach either. I'd want Gardaland, I'd want the Land of Toys.

I go back to Paola fifteen minutes later. The three of them are sitting in a restaurant chomping on cheeseburgers and French fries.

“How are you feeling?” my wife asks me, with concern in her voice.

“Better. Practically okay.” I smile at the kids.

I always have to remember to smile. I imagine they find it reassuring.

Eva offers me a chewed-over piece of sandwich. I thank her and say no. I'm not hungry. But I'm terribly thirsty and I gulp down a bottle of water. I know it's a bad sign when hunger vanishes from the appointments calendar of your ordinary day.

I get up from the table and I persuade everyone to go on the pirate ship ride. I even start singing the old chantey from
Treasure Island
: “Fifteen men, fifteen men on a dead man's chest!”

We haven't even reached the pirate ship when I realize that I'm
having a hard time breathing, that my head is spinning, that I'm about to fall down on the ground. I sit on a bench and tell Paola to go ahead with the kids.

“I've already seen the pirate ship a thousand times . . .”

I sit there, surrounded by a thousand childish voices, the smell of cotton candy, the sounds of happy ditties and distant screams of joyous fear. I half close my eyes. No one is paying the slightest attention to me. An old man, forty years old, sprawled on a bench in the Land of Toys, without so much as a pigeon to keep him company.