PEOPLE WHO HEAR THAT I’M A BLACK BELT are intrigued to know why, and how, a slight, congenial Venetian saloonkeeper like me ever got involved in karate. Like many things in my life, this did not come about in any rational, normal way.
What is karate?
A perfect coordination of body and mind. The wonderful discovery that we have gestures concealed in our bodies until the very moment someone shows us how to perform them.
It is probably the most difficult thing that I have ever done, but studying karate changed my whole life.
At the age of thirty-five I began to feel a strange weight at the top of my stomach. I went to see several doctors. All of them pronounced me fit and healthy. They could find nothing wrong with me. I mean nothing really wrong, thus suggesting that something was wrong but that they had not really figured out what it was. Most agreed that my feeling of heaviness had to be blamed on the malfunction of my liver, even if the blood tests had not shown anything particularly odd about the level of my transamination.
They prescribed a cocktail of thirteen pills a day that I would have to swallow before and after every meal for the rest of my presumably short life.
Three months after this mad routine began, a man, whose name I later learned was Bruno de Michelis, came into Harry’s Bar one night to have a drink. De Michelis, it turned out, was the karate champion of Italy. He sat at the bar, slowly sipping a whiskey sour, apparently paying little attention to what was going on around him. Even seated, he was the biggest man I had ever seen. And there was a calm air of detachment about him.
Intrigued, I asked about him, and upon learning who and what he was, I went over and introduced myself, but got no real reaction. After a while I asked him if he would give me karate lessons in his spare time. Rather annoyed, he looked over at me and said that if I really wanted to learn karate, I could find him in his dojo every afternoon from three to six.
The very next day I went and began what was probably the most extraordinary experience of my life. Bruno was standing in the middle of the room wearing a kimono that made him look even bigger and stronger than I had remembered. During his visit to Harry’s Bar, he hadn’t spoken much; here he did not say a word. Talking with gestures, he made me understand that the lesson had begun. For an hour I tried to make my arms and legs follow his movements. At the end of this incredible effort I was ready for the hospital. Never before had I attempted anything so hard.
A few months after my first lesson, we started to have physical contact. I got so beaten up that for a long time I did not dare get undressed in front of my wife, who would have asked me all sorts of questions about where I had gotten all those bruises!
But the point is, before many weeks of this physical training — and abuse! — had elapsed, my internal physical ailments miraculously disappeared.
A few years later Bruno de Michelis told me that during our first six months, he had tried to throw me out of his dojo by beating me up in a very special way. He didn’t know me at the time. The only effective way to make me leave would have been to ask me politely to do so.
So I never left.
After he saw that no matter how much he beat up on me, I was never going to leave, he gave up and we became great friends. Three years later I got my black belt. Two years after that I became an instructor in his dojo. I ended up teaching karate to seventy youngsters. Two of them, Diana Luc and Chris Gonzales, became European champions in their specialty.
So, the moral of this story is, if ever you feel a strange weight at the top of your stomach, and your friendly family doctor can’t for the life of him—or her—figure out what it is, I suggest you not despair but repair to your nearest dojo. Becoming a black belt is so much better than becoming a patient.