He started up again, on the right side of the avenue, and noticed he was walking beside a clearing somewhat below the level of the street, where the snow was level. He recalled that somewhere there was a pond, and near it an old historic house from the War of Independence, and that after that there were buildings again. He stopped once more, put down the valise. He had gone to visit that house with Nancy, who had called it, in her somewhat high-flown way, “a shrine.” He forced himself to plow through the murky air. No trace of the shrine. It was pointless to look for reference points. Behind him a column of cars, one after the other, was moving forward at low speed. He ran toward the road, but no one saw his frantic waving.
Here I am, marooned, he tried to joke to himself. Alone, in the middle of nowhere. America, in frontier times.
•
But if death was just a canceling out, he thought, why did he have to walk so much beforehand. Struggle, wear himself out, suffer.
He began to pull the valise behind him again, slowly, and this time he kept to the avenue. A car might stop and give him a lift. He had rediscovered America. He hadn’t recognized it, after thirteen years of expectations, conscious or not. But he had found it. His last downstroke would not land him on via del Tritone in Rome, it had to be here. And here he was, right on the spot. What happened afterward was less important. By now, Nancy was nearby, and he understood that seeing her, speaking to her, was not indispensable. First, sleep. He needed to sleep, and if he wanted to find the hospital, perhaps it was because there were beds there. The snow seemed more familiar now that it was coming straight down, it wasn’t flying into his face. It wasn’t even that deep, only a bit more than knee-high. He sat on his bag, raised one leg, then the other; once in a while for a moment the headlights disappeared and it was utterly dark. He studied the shoe on his left foot; the stitching on the seam in back had given way, he hadn’t noticed, and his heel came out easily, and the leather was shredded so that it left a reddish trace of color on the snow. He smiled at his foot, and he squeezed it, soaked and swollen around the ankle. It was begging not to have to walk any more.
He knew what there was in the valise under him: three shirts, a few handkerchiefs, the last two volumes of Nordenskiöld, yesterday’s l’Unità, a sweater, a box of chocolates bought at Ciampino for Nancy. He was coming back to America not much wealthier than twenty years ago, when he’d landed as an immigrant. Once again a convoy of automobiles came down the street. From the window of one, pop music gushed out over the snow.
He resumed walking; it was night. The broad avenue continued, curving every so slightly, among majestic trees, centuries-old trees, not like with us, where a tree never got to twenty years, thirty years, because people were greedy and cut it down. Beeches, maples, elms, white, huge. America was a vast park, that was one of its beauties.
There along the borders of Fairmount, there should be a river, somewhere. That he remembered. But who could see it. Frozen, covered with snow. The parks were America’s triumph, its symbol. America’s Wonders. And if someone died inside? Well, tough for him. You didn’t go walking in a park during a blizzard. Here the weather forecast came twelve hours ahead. Here, there was efficiency. Even the great Stalin acknowledged that. In his Foundations of Leninism. He says that Russian revolutionary sweep must be united with American efficiency. You think a Communist cannot admire America? Stupid Ferranini, who’d thought the two things were irreconcilable. Even Reparatore admired America; the American trade unions were technically the best in the world. But the newspaper had said the transport workers were scandalously underpaid. Tough luck for them. Reparatore knew what he was talking about; he had his reasons.
He was so tired, porca matina. Close my eyes for an instant and I’m done. The temptation to sleep grabbed him stupidly. Follow the ruts left by the wheels with his feet, walk and sleep. Close his eyes. But he had that ache in his neck, his shoulder, to help him stay awake. The pain was insistent, not terribly strong but regular, pulsing with his blood. He tossed the valise onto the snow, knelt down, took out the sweater and stuck it under his raincoat between his neck and his shoulder. He didn’t have a scarf. He was hoping to find his bottle of Coramine in some corner of the bag, and instead he laid hands on his bible, the Manifesto. He closed the valise. What is the family based on? On private capital. The Manifesto said that, he knew it by heart, sentence by sentence. And wasn’t that true? He had come in search of Nancy because Nancy represented private capital. Even more: the homeland of capitalism. President Leone had said he wished his wife well. Love of family meant something to Leone the Catholic: the man who loves his family loves order. Signor President, I am for order. But meanwhile he did not possess a scarf and had left the Coramine at home. The pain beat faster, the spasms branching out under his ear and behind it, shooting down his neck. He stood up, and the lights were gone. He turned, to look behind him. No lights, not even distant ones, just snow and silence. He trudged forward in the dark. My dearest Philadelphia, he thought.
•
Still, he might be in luck. When the lights returned—he’d been walking blindly for a while, stumbling over the car tracks—he saw that at a certain distance ahead the road forked. There, on the right, he saw that the trees thinned out and disappeared, while on both sides of the road the railings of a bridge could be made out. Maybe the river. After that, there might be houses. He reached the bridge; deserted, interminably long, whipped by the wind and by a hint of freezing water. Finally the road widened and descended, and the houses resumed.
Below, behind a barricade of abandoned automobiles, beside some dark, lifeless houses that looked abandoned, appeared a square. And something he hadn’t even hoped for. A telephone.
The phone booth was lit and dry. He searched the phone book for the number with stiff fingers that struggled to separate the pages, then tormented himself trying to put together the English words he needed. His poor head was empty. The phone operator at the hospital didn’t understand him. He tried speaking Italian. The operator refused to answer him.
Another man was waiting to telephone. He waved him toward the phone booth and pointed to the name of the hospital in the phone book. The man said, “It’s nearby. Less than half a mile away.” Ferranini traced the name Mrs. Demarr on the page with a pencil. The other man understood, called back, and said the name. He turned toward him to pass on the reply. No Mrs. Demarr in the hospital.
Ferranini went out. He leaned against the glass of the phone booth, and let himself sink to the ground with a groan of relief. The square vanished and everything turned black.
The man was shouting into the phone, he had lit a match. Ferranini, slouched down with his head on his chest, could hear everything (the man was speaking Spanish). He felt calm. His trial was over, there was no longer any need to keep going. Now I’ll look in the bag again to see if I can find the Coramine, he thought. He didn’t move.
The man came out and bent over Ferranini. He opened the glass door again and pushed him inside, bending his legs by force to close the door. Ferranini didn’t react; he sat there alone, on the ground, in that small space.
After a while the man returned. He got into booth with difficulty, climbing over him. He lifted the receiver. Once again he shouted and cursed, in English now, and Ferranini listened, understanding everything. He had called the police, but they didn’t take him seriously. He lit another match and tried another number, ranting into the phone, getting excited and crushing one of Ferranini’s knees. “Strike and snow, ves que malvado país!” He was unleashing his anger against the stranger there at his feet, or maybe just talking to himself; he probably thought the stranger was senseless, unconscious.
“You’re croaking and they allow you to croak. Como un perro.” He was speaking a bastard language, he didn’t care if anyone understood. But Ferranini did understand every word and said to himself, He’s Puerto Rican.
“Downtown, in front of the Garden of Allah or the Roxy, you find the police. They go to get a taxi for the cl
ients leaving. But you mustn’t envy the people with money, no sir. In America all men are equal. All equal, and all alone.”
Ferranini could feel the hem of the man’s coat grazing his face in the dark, but it didn’t bother him.
“All alone; here you have singles, not men. Each one a piece torn off from the rest, nothing to do with the life of the other. With their unions, their associations, their brotherhoods. For ten years I was a schoolteacher in the Southwest. In a village of Mexicans.”
He was happy to have the man beside him. “Amigo,” he mumbled, and the other touched his face with a hand, perhaps amazed he was still alive. “I taught my Mexicans to hold on tight to the machine. The machine that produces and consumes, and is all: family, humanity. However, sometimes the machine breaks down.”
The pain in his neck and shoulder had returned. The back of his head. Now he was breathing hard. He tried to move the valise that was weighing on his chest. The man picked it up and put it between his legs.
“All it takes is a strike, a blizzard, even less. And a person is left with nothing, whether he’s black or white, poor or rich, it’s all in pieces. He has no connection to others, everyone thinks for himself and society falls apart, or rather, you see that it doesn’t exist. All it takes is a major disaster, a fire. When there’s a fire here, half of the people die.”
Ferranini, quite clearheaded, was thinking: There are two of us in here consuming air. There’s no more air. He understood that he would have to stand up to open the door. And that wasn’t possible.
“When there’s a fire the traffic doesn’t stop, and the passersby just barely look up. In my hometown people don’t die when their house burns down. I come from Spain, from Teruel. In my town people beat each other up at the tavern, they pick fights in church, but when I left the place I had to leave in secret because they didn’t want me to go. Here instead your children, as soon as they start to earn some money, are no longer yours. I can tell you, I have three kids, three girls. If you get sick and have to leave your job, your workmate doesn’t know you anymore. You’re a foreigner. You’ll learn.”
Ferranini’s breathlessness was getting worse, he was sucking in air with his mouth open. He recognized the smell of wet shoes, wet clothes, and another, pungent odor. Alcohol, it must be.
“You’re a foreigner, you go and seek out your own kind. But they won’t speak to you in your language, and before they accept you, they’ll ask around in all the shops how many dollars you spend. Y no tendrás voz a hablar. Afterwards when you’ve found a place in the machine, and depending on what it is, they’ll accept you. And if you don’t find a place, they’ll give you something to eat, but they won’t treat you like a human being because you aren’t. You especially will not feel you are a human being. Produce things, consume them, that is your life. Produce and consume, when you’re no good for that you go back to being a spook. In the West, there are ghost towns. Cities, but cities that are empty, abandoned, that don’t serve the machine anymore, and in the same way there are ghost people. You’ll learn.”
The man was talking and drinking. He would pull out the bottle and take a swig. Liquid spilled, wetting Ferranini. He’s drunk, he thought vaguely.
“You see? The police are not coming. We’ve become savages. Worse. Lo que yo llamo polvillo social. Dust. Dirt of society. You and I are alone, abandoned this evening, alone as in the first forest, because there were primitive forests here where we stand, with a few frightened Indians in them. There are houses over there. But it’s useless to go and knock. Everyone’s in his little fortress, closed to all the others. Tomorrow they’ll play upon level green fields, and you would think they were all friends. Tonight they don’t know one another. They have every freedom, including this one: not to have to see your neighbor when it isn’t convenient to see him. You are Polish, or Italian, or Yugoslav. You’ll get used to this freedom, which didn’t exist in your own land. Last summer there was an earthquake in Colorado. People got up at night, the tourists there, and drove off in their cars. A school collapsed, with many young boarders, children were screaming under the fallen walls, and the cars just drove by. The newspapers called it “panic.” But what do you know, pobre arrastrado? Poor washed-up thing.”
Ferranini moved a hand, touched the man’s leg. He understood, the words were as if traced on a dark field in strange relief, and he seemed to read them rather than hear them. But he was quite sure he was not dreaming. The other, who seemed to be a big man, tried to bend down.
“Take it, try to drink.”
Deeper in him beat an anxious thought (not a dream); it posed a question, and he felt he must choose. Choose again, a path, a solution, decide. But against that residue of his will, physical fatigue prevailed; resignation was easy and painless. Disengagement. His cheek was resting on the bottom of the glass panel, freezing. Next to his ear, snow fluttered down thickly.
The man bent over. He put the bottle to his face. “It will keep you from dying. Drink, you idiot.”
•
John Morgan Hospital was not far away. A quarter of a mile.
They took him there without even loading him in the ambulance, and he was alert, attentive, sorry that they separated him from his companion of that night. In reality they’d been together less than two hours, and it wasn’t yet 11:00 p.m. when they took him away. The emergency-room doctor’s cursory diagnosis: ischemic cardiac event. The following morning that was revised by the head of department to which he’d been turned over. He hadn’t slept well and gave no signs of improvement.
Dr. Wiener, awaiting further tests, wrote on his chart: “Circulatory collapse due to severe fatigue. Probable chronic heart disease.” And, he added, “suspected alcoholism.” Ferranini’s wet clothes had smelled of alcohol. Wiener, a connoisseur, had hypothesized cheap Spanish brandy. As for his bag, it had already been examined by the hospital administration. It raised, along with other evidence, some doubts about whether the patient really was member of the Italian parliament, a status that had been deduced from the papers found on his person.
Elegant, gray-haired, a persistent cough, American of distant Swiss origins, Wiener had a visceral dislike for Italians. At the end of the war the army had “forgotten” him for eighteen months in Sardinia where he’d been treating malaria and trachoma.
Ferranini was alone in a two-bed room. As Wiener came in, he said loudly, “This man has a one-week visa. He has no intention of staying longer.”
Walter shifted, and moaned. He would have liked to say: I’m going as soon as I can, even tomorrow. But he lacked the breath.
Later Wiener met his colleague Newcomer, the cardiologist, in the hallway. Newcomer had Ferranini’s electrocardiogram in hand, the ink still damp. Wiener told him he’d already made things clear to the patient.
“It seems he’s a politician. But it makes no difference, as far as I’m concerned, a foreigner’s a foreigner.”
Newcomer, younger, and as can happen, wiser, fixed his eyes on the other’s face. “As far as I’m concerned, a sick person is a sick person. No matter where he comes from.”
“Someone in his condition,” Wiener shot back, “should not be traveling. We ought to get in touch with his consulate.”
“The consulate has nothing to do with it. Nor does the FBI. A man’s illness is a private matter that concerns the individual and us, so long as he’s here.”
There was no risk that news of Ferranini’s unhappy adventure would cross the Atlantic.
A second consequence of their conversation was that Newcomer took number 203 under his direct supervision, with Wiener as his partner, something the older man tacitly accepted. For nearly the whole day, the patient’s state of circulatory collapse resisted the forceful administration of cardiotonics. In severe respiratory distress, often barely conscious, Ferranini struggled over every breath, his left hand monotonously rowing back and forth, grazing his chest and then reaching out, falling back on his chest and then reaching out. For hours. There wasn’t enough
air for him. A canister of oxygen sat by the bed in its bamboo case but Newcomer, who had his ideas, didn’t like to use oxygen, which offered relief but tired the heart, and he persisted with digitalis, an old remedy that he trusted. The patient’s blood pressure had fallen sharply and there was an immediate risk of pulmonary edema, but Newcomer was not too worried about that. One symptom seemed auspicious, the sick man enjoyed eating. He sipped the orange juice avidly, swallowed the jello without being urged, and he followed the departing nurse with his eyes. Newcomer called her back and quite a few more spoonfuls went down.
“Damn, he was hungry,” he observed. Before he left for the night, he had another fortunate insight—born of clinical experience, not textbook advice—and he ordered a large dose of soporifics. Wiener, who was present, disapproved. In fact, it was risky.
“I take the responsibility, let it be. He’s a nervous type, and he must have had his highs and lows. He probably hasn’t slept for a good long while.”
By 9:00 p.m., there were already signs of improvement. For the first time Walter spoke. In English and in a voice that was not too faint.
“That man, where is he?”
“What man?”
Miss Joy, the nurse, had just come in.
“The one in the phone booth.”
“You’re speaking nonsense,” the girl said, distracted.
No, he shook his head. No.
15
JOHN MORGAN Hospital was a collection of stone and brick buildings, not large and recently built. Neo-Georgian rusticity among the genuinely sylvan ash and maple trees. The building where Ferranini was hospitalized stood close to the Green Pavilion. It was scrupulously green, entirely covered with ivy and Virginia creeper, and between the two top floors ran a covered loggia.
The Communist Page 32