Three more matches until the final playoffs. We need all the points and all the extra goals we can muster to qualify.
In the locker room, I stare all my boys in the eye, one by one, doing my best to instill motivation in them. Last of all, our goalkeeper, Soap-on-a-Rope, and then Martino, our only decent striker (and that’s more because of his nerve than his unerring aim). We can do this. This isn’t the Olympics but we need to put our hearts into it. Today, moreover, we’ll be in a direct face-off with a team we lost to in an away game. A defeat that cries out to be avenged. Lorenzo and Eva are in the bleachers with Umberto. I see them from a distance, playing something, but I can’t figure out what. My friend is as good with kids as he is with animals.
This time the match runs smoothly. We immediately pull ahead by two goals and we manage to keep our lead until the final whistle. Solid, impeccable performance. If we’d always played like this, we would have won the championship. I praise the boys in the locker room and then catch up with Umberto and the kids in the parking lot.
“Good work, Papà!” Eva comes running toward me.
“You were great. Even that pussy Martino was playing like an Olympic athlete,” Lorenzo points out.
I decide not to scold him for his less than gentlemanly language and I load everyone into the car. Then I feel the pain. The main tumor is pressing harder and harder against the other organs; I feel like an athlete running a long race, and the pain in my spleen and then in my liver sends me the signal that my energy is about to flag and give out. I have a harder and harder time breathing, but my cough has become less frequent; it’s been replaced by a kind of asthmatic fit that squeezes my lungs, which have turned into a pair of sponges drying out in the hot sun.
We all leave together to get a cremolato, an Italian ice. We stop at the Café du Parc, a place near Rome’s only pyramid, which makes some of the best. Once I met the director Nanni Moretti there, enjoying his cremolato. It must be a passion that unites all water polo players.
The children are especially excited about the fig-flavored ices, hard to find when they’re handmade. Eva teases a piece of fig out of her scoop and holds it out to me. I come closer to put my lips to the upheld spoon when the fruit slips off the spoon and lands on the floor. “You weren’t quick enough!” Eva says, frowning at me.
“I’m just a slow, slow person,” I say. “Slower than a turtle.”
“Even slower,” Eva says.
I feel moved by her gesture. I see her digging deeper into the cup, looking for another piece of fruit, Disappointment fills her face and this time it’s my heart, not my liver, that feels the pain.
They know knothing about the cancer. And I’m not going to tell them. I still haven’t decided what to do when day zero arrives. But I know that I want to spend as much time as I can with Lorenzo and Eva, with my friends and, of course, with my wife. It seems like the only important thing.
* * *
When I get home, I make a notation in the Dino Zoff notebook, just a single word: Cremolato. I make a mental note to go back there with Paola.