Second session of chemo. In the waiting room I strike up a conversation with a talkative guy my age who confides, with a certain pride, that he’s already on his third round. Twenty seconds later, he says it again. This treatment isn’t helping him. From the inner room, another patient emerges, leaning on what would seem to be his wife. He’s not even fifty, but he can barely walk; he’s skinny as a rail, and his eyes are dull and blank.
Now it’s my turn. The same nurse who looks like Stromboli comes out to call my name. Paola stays in the waiting room and I walk into the little room that I already know so well. Two minutes later, there I am again, with a needle in my vein and thousands of thoughts whirling through my head.
* * *
When I was little, there were three possible lines of work that caught my imagination.
The first, as documented by my historic essay “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up,” which Grandma carefully stored in the top dresser drawer, was an amusement park ride inspector. Clever child that I was, I’d decided to mix business with pleasure. After all, there must be a man whose job it is to say, “This ride works perfectly, it’s fun and it’s safe, go ahead and open it to the public.” I always assumed that man would have a lifetime ticket so he could come back to the amusement park whenever he liked.
The second line of work, and this takes us into the realm of criminal endeavors, was to be a cat burglar. Maybe it was because of my fascination with Diabolik, but I’ve often dreamed of sneaking into a jewelry shop by night and cleaning the place out. This is an ambition I’ve never pursued, though I confess I’ve stolen bathrobes from more than one hotel.
The third profession—and here I have to say that I was ahead of my time—was that of a life coach, or as I called it back then, with a naive but still very accurate term, a recommender. I imagine a figure who, much like Cardinal Mazarin or Richelieu for the king of France, works with his clients on the more complicated choices in life.
“Is the girl I’m dating the right one for me?”
Zap, and the recommender arrives on the scene and provides a confident answer.
“What should I do, should I take this job?”
Zap, here’s the recommender ready to offer the best advice.
In the end, I didn’t wind up in any of these lines of work: I neither inspect amusement parks, nor do I steal, nor do I give advice to anyone, least of all myself.
Suddenly I feel like a loser.
In the meanwhile, the needle has done its dirty work and injected me with the usual dose of poison. I no longer know whether I’m making the right decision.
“How are we doing, Signor Battistini?” the nurse inquires.
By now, I always give the same answer.
“Rotten, thanks.”
I step out of the claustrophobic little room and as I walk through the waiting room, I run into the talkative patient who insists on telling me once again that he’s on his third round of chemotherapy. If I were him, I wouldn’t do a fourth round. I grab the arm that Paola offers me and we walk out into the fresh air. I feel like crying.