Corrado and I swing by to pick up Umberto at the clinic. We’re going to enjoy an aperitif suitable for certified good-for-nothings in a bar in the center of town.
I haven’t yet told my friends what I’ve decided.
I’ll do it after our first Spritz.
“In sixty-nine days I’m going to Switzerland.”
“That’s great, are you going to take a little spin?” Corrado doesn’t get it. I might not have made myself clear.
“I’ve made a reservation at a clinic for assisted suicide.”
At the word “suicide” a surreal silence descends on the table. For a couple of minutes there’s no sound except for the distant notes of a hit by Oasis. Even my cough stands shyly on the sidelines.
“Why sixty-nine days?” asks Umberto, just for something to say.
“I’ve run a countdown. From a hundred to zero. It’s symbolic but it has a certain statistical meaning. Sometime in the days around zero, my situation is going to reach a critical point. The weeks after that are only going to be deeply humiliating for me. So I’m going to make sure day zero will be my last. I’ve made up my mind.”
“Are you giving up?” Corrado can’t wrap his head around it.
“No. It’s just that I don’t want to watch my body fall apart. And I don’t want my children to remember a withered father who’s a prisoner of a recliner chair.”
“Does Paola know?” Umberto asks me.
“Not yet.”
“Tell me that you’re not serious!” Corrado insists, incapable of taking the idea in.
“I wish I could. Can you imagine? Friends, I don’t have cancer at all; it was all just a practical joke to get a little more affection. No, it’s true. And now I’ve decided to enjoy to the fullest the remaining two months and change that remain to me.”
“That remain to us,” a melancholy Corrado corrects me. “There were three musketeers, after all.”
“Actually, there were four. And D’Artagnan was the most important one of all,” Umberto points out.
We launch into a heated debate over Dumas’ mistaken choice of a title and we fondly think back to Andrea, an old friend of ours from high school days, who was our D’Artagnan but who emigrated many years ago. With him, we made an unbeatable quartet. Then we drink another Spritz and comment on the derriere of a girl leaning against the bar in a position that lets us glimpse her thong. A conversation split into two parts, as if we were deliberately steering clear of the topic of my buddy Fritz.