Looking at all the leftovers on the plates stacked up in the kitchen sink, Vinicio Martino feels a little bit silly for worrying about the quantity of food so much. At his age, he should have learned to deal more accurately with such trivial things by now. Here comes his grandson, crashing into the kitchen at a dangerous pace, zigzagging through the folding doors. The kid has a slightly troubling blonde curly coiffure, a hair color and style that do not run in the family of either mother or father. Luckily, everyone is always bright enough to gracefully avoid getting into this. Vinicio follows the kid’s every move cautiously. The little boy has a tendency to suddenly get in a sneak hug and, at his age, Vinicio has to brace himself for such attacks. False alarm, the boy was just looking for a snack. Having found some cheese sticks, he happily skips back to the living room. Vinicio himself of course has a healthy dose of curiosity about the hair color matter, but since the mother is his daughter, he always steers clear away from bringing it up. He has been raised on strong values of family honor, and mothering a bastard does not belong to them.
It is Vinicio’s eightieth birthday, and though everyone is really nice, he feels slightly saturnine. Partly because he realizes what lies in waiting for him after today, and partly because he feels alienated from the crowd. There are only a few contemporaries of his, and all of those are under the spell of different gradations of Alzheimer, rendering them virtually unable to talk to. Or at least about the olden days. It does not help that he is an only child, of course. The few nieces and nephews he has that are still alive he has long lost contact with and besides, they live in far-away exotic countries with odd names like Tuvalu and Kiribati (the Martinos are nothing if not adventurous). If there is one thing Vinicio has learned through his long and eventful life, it is that as far as true understanding between two human beings goes, large age differences serve as a particularly obstinate barricade. Go figure: how many true friends of a wildly different generation do you really have? The cultural frontiers you are hemmed in when growing up are mainly spoken of in terms of location, but the time factor is often underestimated. So it is that Vinicio is here mostly to entertain the rest of the crowd. He is the cause of the party and he absorbs and appreciates the clear respect they have for him, but that is all. He is not having a particularly great time. As he goes back into the living room, nobody even notices him. They are too busy sharing endless strings of holiday pictures and awful work anecdotes. Vinicio sighs a little sigh, sits down in his favorite chair – at least they have saved it for him – and nods away into far more stimulating realms.
It is an uncharacteristically vivid dream. In it, Vinicio is on a racetrack. He is waiting for the sign to start, but it takes and it takes. Infinity passes, what seems like years – though dream time is hard to assess. He’s had this dream once every year on his birthday, since he was twelve. Every year the dream seemed a little more real and a little bit more vivid. Now, however, for the first time, after eons and eons of waiting, the start sign does come. Vinicio in all his surprise is slow to respond and slow to get going. But he does get going. His body, stiff by waiting, by being in the same exact position for years, sputters and crackles but ultimately does not fail him. As he is completing his third go-around, he is rudely awakened by a boy jumping on his lap. “Sneak hug!” The blonde kid looks at Vinicio with big innocent eyes. "Davy, leave grandpa alone!” is shouted from the other side of the room. The mother walks up with hasty steps and lifts the boy from Vinicio’s lap.
“I’m so sorry daddy, I told him not to do that.”
Vinicio hardly cares. “No worries, bella”.
He ponders the dream. It does not take a lot of deconstruction to figure out its significance. There is only one thing remaining that he desperately wants to do in his life: run a marathon.
It is no accident that the dream first occurred when he was twelve. On that faithful birthday, Vinicio’s mother told him that twelve was an important age. She told him that from that day on, he should start being responsible and start figuring out what he wants out of life. His mother ripped off a piece of paper from a notepad and handed it to him, along with a pencil. On the first line she wrote in thick capital letters:
THINGS I WANT TO DO IN LIFE
Consequently, Little Vinicio was left with the impossible task of deciding what to do, right there and then. Most of the things that ended up on that list got there quite accidentally. ‘Write a novel’ was one, for instance, that was spurred by a television program the night before about the life of writers. They had an old venerable scribe on, explaining how he used to write lying down in his bed all day. That was apparently the pose that most spurred his creational faculties. To a twelve-year-old kid burdened by the weight of compulsory attendance at school, that sounds like the best thing ever. Some, however, were borne out of a lifelong fascination: ‘visiting all the Seven Wonders of the World’. Vinicio, as a small kid, was not allowed to read after bedtime, but got his flashlight and an encyclopedia out and thus absorbed all sorts of knowledge. He would just open these large books on a random page and start reading, so in a given week he might suddenly know all sorts of trivia about stuff starting with DEI (i.e., deities and deism and deindustrialization). Curiously enough, his parents never caught on to the patterns. The last two items of the list are particularly salient: ‘living to be eighty’ and ‘run a marathon’. The last one was suggested by a sixteen-year-old sport-crazy nephew of Vinicio - who told him it was a popular life goal - and it was thus adopted by Vinicio without much further consideration. At this point in time, after this milestone of eighty, it is the only item on the list that remains uncrossed.
The day after the birthday is a Monday, appropriately enough. The start of a new week, a new cycle. Vinicio has an inkling concerning the dream. The marathon had always been a problem for him in some way. Whether it was physically or mentally, something thwarted the process. His body seemed unfit for such ventures. That dream, where the race finally started, should be significant. Perhaps the race is not the marathon itself, but getting to that starting line. Can he finally really start trying now? He has let his physique slip the last few years, as is normal for people getting on eighty. In dusty corners of his closets he finds a tracksuit and some gym shoes. Once outfitted, he commences a long stretching routine, stalling, obviously not really wanting to do this. He gets out into the cold February air, runs an insincere cross over himself with his hands and sets off. Parallel to the dream, the first steps are hard, painful and ominous. Vinicio feels every bone and every muscle fail serially, but soldiers on. And, as by a stroke of magic, it gets better. All sorts of pains that were there even when he lay still in bed or sat idly in a chair are starting to float away. From the walking pace with a running motion he speeds up to a very acceptable jog. Passersby in the street watch him go by with an expression somewhat torn between amused and amazed. Mostly amazed. Within this gait, he suddenly feels twenty again.
The list has been with Vinicio ever since that faithful twelfth birthday. As kids often do, the next morning he immediately got worked up and commenced on the tasks that he had written down so frivolously the night before. He started from the top, and the first thing he had written down was to do a handstand. With the nimbleness of mind and the singleness of dedication that a twelve-year-old can muster up, such a task was easily mastered. Even though Vinicio had up till then been a notoriously bad gymnast at his school gym classes, he could come up with an admirable handstand within a week. Next on the list was the previously mentioned writing of a novel. Once he told his parents about this goal of his, they advised him to start reading some of the classics before taking on the task, for inspiration. He read one of every strand and sort. He had Dune to cover science-fiction, Gormenghast represented gothic and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings provided him with a proper introduction to the genre of fantasy. When the kid, by then thirteen, took up Don Quixote and finished it within a few days, his parents realized something extraordinary was going on here. As he kept on reading, riding to and fro the library at least thrice a week, his vocabulary and intelligence developed and so it happened that a year later, only a few months after his fourteenth birthday, he finished reading Ulysses and finally decided to put pen to paper himself. The diligence with which young Vinicio worked on his self-set task was a source of both extreme pride and severe concern for his parents. Though his grades at school did not suffer in the slightest – au contraire, his heavy reading was quite beneficial in many classes – his social life was nearly non-existent. So it was that his parents, while not wanting to cripple his devotion, carefully suggested he should spent more time with his peers. But Vinicio had neither eyes nor ears for these suggestions and never strayed from the path. He worked on the novel for a year - to the day - and when he finally finished he dropped the manuscript with an inapposite lack of bombast on the kitchen table for his parents to read. It was a pile of papers they would struggle to get through because, quite frankly, the prose of their prodigal son was way over the poor couple’s heads. Luckily, fortune would have it that a friend of the family worked at a publishing house and when he got his hands on the manuscript, things started happening very fast. The novel was published and is, to this day, still lauded and has become a bit of a cult classic. The book is called Jasper Future, and follows the exploits of its eponymous hero. Jasper, in the book, has the Cassandraic gift of prophecy, but of a very selective type: only the future that he is personally involved in. Sometimes he walks down the street, glances at a passerby and – in a spell of dizziness – sees a sequence of the person’s impact in his own life flash before his eyes. The book is of the picaresque sort in the sense that it is a series of adventures and problematic situations that Jasper – because of his gift – gets himself involved in. There is an encyclopedic scope to Vinicio’s writing, the book is peopled with ideas, terms and characters of every culture and age imaginable. Probably the most interesting aspect of the book is the consequence of such a selective prophetic ability to the life of Jasper. He knows, from a very young age, by accident, how he is going to die, which is a particularly gruesome episode. With this hanging over his head, he tries in vain to live his life without trepidation. With every person he meets, the complete future of their correspondence flashes through his head. So that he sees the betrayal in the eyes of his new friend, and the endless nights of fighting in the countenance of his love interests. What’s more, Jasper learns quickly that fighting this prophecy is no use, whatever happens will happen. As a result, he will have to befriend the people he knows will betray him, and he will have to go through the motions with his girlfriends, though he knows it to be in vain. It is an extremely heavy burden to wear, and Vinicio, with great wit and talent, thus places Jasper Future in a long list of unfortunate soothsayers and diviners. The novel, not in the least because it was written by a teenager, was extremely well received and quite popular for a short while. But oddly enough, the second he finished the novel, even before it was released, Vinicio lost all interest in writing and literature and resigned himself from it completely. He immediately moved on to the next item on the list.
In the weeks after that return to form, after the dream and the successful first run, Vinicio is jogging all the time. As long as he is in motion, he feels as if injected with a brio and élan that he has not felt for decades. He is bristling with energy every time he returns home. Then he would take a shower and it all saps away as quickly as it came. Of course, this only makes him want to run more and more often and so once again, like so many times before in his life, Vinicio is in the grips of a hearty obsession. The emotions this evokes in his nearest and dearest mirrors those felt by his parents all those years ago: they are profusely proud and at the same time concerned about the effects of such physical efforts on the body of an octogenarian. But Vinicio is his own master and virtually unstoppable. Within a month he has run half a marathon, and is aching for more. And so with restful nights and vigorous days, the day of the marathon Vinicio picked out swiftly comes. On the evening before it, Vinicio’s daughter and her family stop by his house. They know there is no stopping him, but worried nonetheless they at least want to hear him out on the matter. Vinicio himself is in a melancholic mood. He sighs and walks around like a man sentenced to death. There is a last supper kind of glow in the air. Somewhere near the end of the evening, Vinicio sits down next to his grandson. The boy, fatigued for being up way past his bedtime, sits idly on the ground, a crayon in his hand but nothing in his head. He has not drawn one stroke on the piece of paper in front of him, nor looked at it. He seems instead to be in a zenlike state, or asleep with eyes open. When Vinicio sits down next to him his eyes slowly turn. The boy sees Vinicio hand him something. It is a small piece of paper, and on the top line it says
THINGS I WANT TO DO IN LIFE
The rest of it is empty. Davy looks from the paper to his grandfather and back, and he seems somehow to comprehend. Nodding sluggishly, he creeps up to Vinicio and gives him a warm hug that lasts at least a minute. Then he abruptly breaks it, and scribbles something on the paper. It reads: “I want to become eighty years old too”.
After that faithful Year of the Novel, Vinicio had pressed on with the rest of the list with the same steady diligence. His parents started to slowly suspect that the list might be magical in some way. For his eighteenth birthday, Vinicio’s sister had the little scrap of paper that contained the entrails of his life laminated as a gift. From that point on he took it with him everywhere he went. The paper had taken on an almost spiritual aura, a relic-like quality. His parents discussed the matter with friends and family, researched the subject, but they never found a good explanation. Whether looking at it astrologically, or numerologically, or as sorcery, the pieces of the puzzle never quite fitted. They couldn’t even form a theory that was inherently consistent - let alone verify one. In the end, they embraced fate and decided their son could do a lot worse in life, were he to fulfill all the promises that the list entailed. They supported him, and after realizing both the inhibiting and facilitating effect the order of the items had on Vinicio, they found it easy to anticipate all the obstacles of their son’s life. When they died – his father, heartbroken, perished one day after his mother – he had proceeded up to the task of turning eighty. They must have realized that there was no helping him there and, though this is a bit of a stretch, it might have had something to do with their passing away. After all, from the moment that list came into existence, their purpose in life had been inextricably linked to fulfilling Vinicio’s.
The marathon itself turns out to be a formality. Vinicio runs as if aided by an escalator and the whole thing is a grand triumph. But when he is almost at the end, with just a few hundred meters to go, he starts hesitating. Just as he had realized the dream was significant, he now realizes that that finish line will be similarly so. He slows down and slows down and finally gets to a complete halt one meter before the finish. From every direction people are shouting at him, spurring him on or trying to get him out of the way. But Vinicio just stands there shell-shocked, in limbo, not knowing what to do. He fears that on the other side of that line lies death, waiting patiently. He raises a hand to his heart where, on the inside of his shirt, sits the list. Vinicio has seen many people die in his life, and some of them – the ones dying of old age mainly – found acceptance of this at some point. Vinicio is looking in his heart through the lens of his list, but cannot find a way to make peace with a ceasing to live. Even though he has had the perfect life, achieved everything he set out to do and everything anyone would want to set out to do, it turns out death is just as scary for him as for everyone else. More time passes and just at the moment when he sees some worried bystanders approaching him, he spots a blonde little kid a little ways in front of him. Davy has a serious look on his face, and when his eyes meet Vinicio’s he slowly nods at him in the same manner as he did the night before. Upon observing this Vinicio smiles, nods back, and steps forward.
