First day of fasting.
By noon my head is spinning and my stomach is rumbling. Luckily, the crisis passes. As soon as my organism realizes that food isn’t coming, it calms down and stops emitting alarm bursts.
I head back to the Chitchat shop. I want to tell Massimiliano that I’ve taken his advice.
“Good, I’m glad to hear it,” he replies as he makes me an herbal tea.
“Even if it’s late, I want to give it a full try.”
“That strikes me as the right approach.”
I look ravenously at the cookies we dunked in the tea last time. I can feel my mouth salivating, just like the Big Bad Wolf when he looks at the Three Little Pigs. I ask him if he wouldn’t mind hiding the cookies in the cabinet. What the eye doesn’t see: that’s always the best policy.
“You’ll see,” says Massimiliano as he locks away the precious delicacies, “eating less and better will increase the energy available to you day after day.”
“I hope so. I’m already tired the minute I get up in the morning.”
Just then, a new customer rings the doorbell, a tall skinny gentleman in his early fifties with a beaten-down appearance. I’d forgotten I was in a public establishment, and not at a friend’s house.
“Do you mind coming back in half an hour or so?” Massimiliano asks the newcomer. “Or else, if you feel like it, you can sit and watch a little TV with us.”
The thin man accepts. So there we are, all three of us, watching a rerun of Happy Days. The memorable episode in which Fonzie water-skis over a great white shark on a bet.
“The story is so absurd,” Massimiliano explains, “that in the U.S., to ‘jump the shark’ is the moment when a television show has started to go downhill.”
“I liked that episode,” says the thin man, who it turns out is named Giannandrea. Maybe the reason he’s sad is the name he was given as a baby.
“I liked it too,” I agree.
“Everyone liked it. The truth is that our eyes were different than they are today.”
Hunger pangs grip my belly. I say good-bye to Massimiliano and Giannandrea and head home.
The phone call from Umberto catches me by surprise.
“She wrote me on Facebook!”
“Who did?”
“What do you mean who? Martina, the tour guide. Miss Marple!”
I hurry over to his house. I can’t wait to tell my father-in-law the news. But in the meanwhile, we need to answer the lady’s none-too-friendly message.
“Hello, I’m the lady in the photograph. But I’m not your grandmother and I don’t know what kind of stupid game you’re playing. If you don’t remove my picture from your profile immediately, I’m calling the police.”
That’s what you call a downhill beginning to a love story.
I decide to tell her the truth. I write back and tell her that my father-in-law is the slightly overweight German mute from the tour two weeks ago, and that he’d like to see her again. We tried to track her down through the tour operator but they didn’t know about any Martina. The lady is online and she replies immediately.
“They didn’t know my name because every once in a while I substitute for my granddaughter. The tour operator doesn’t know anything about it. You can tell your father-in-law I knew immediately that he wasn’t mute at all, and that I’d be happy to let him take me out to dinner. He can write me at this e-mail address. Thank you.”
Two hours later, they have a date for the next evening in a little restaurant in Trastevere. Oscar can’t stop thanking me and asking me for advice about how to dress.
As a Cupid, I really do deserve an A plus.