Lives of the Saints

by Nino Ricci

  When I came to I was lying on the other side of the deck, my pyjamas pulled half-way down my buttocks, my feet only a yard from the rails. Through some instinct my hand had reached out to clutch a handhold; when I pulled myself up by it I found myself at the foot of the stairwell that led to the upper deck. The ship was just beginning another roll to port, but I managed to pull myself up the first few steps, free of the flood that was rushing again across the deck. I sat a long time clutching the stairwell’s railing, coughing up salt water and bile until it seemed I had torn my insides. Slowly my mind emerged from its stupor and I became conscious again of the wind and rain lashing at me, and when I had gotten my breath again I stood and lurched upstairs to the upper deck.

  The captain’s door slammed inward when I turned the handle; a flurry of wind swept into the room, setting the glass pendants of the chandelier chiming wildly. I could not get the door closed again and left it banging against the wall. But two white-stockinged feet were protruding undisturbed over the end of one of the captain’s couches: the doctor was snoring there peacefully as a lamb, an empty wine bottle clutched to his chest and a thin stream of spit drooling from a corner of his open mouth.

  I clutched the arm of the couch to support myself against the ship’s roll and nudged the doctor’s shoulder.

  ‘Doctor,’ I said, shouting to be heard above the wind and the banging door, ‘my mother wants you to come.’

  The doctor twisted his shoulder away from me.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ he muttered. Little beads of sweat glistened on his forehead.

  I nudged again, harder.

  ‘My mother wants you to come.’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ he muttered again, rolling over heavily towards the back of the couch. ‘I did the best that I could.’

  ‘Doctor, my mother’s sick.’ I shook him now with both hands. ‘She said you should come.’

  ‘Hmm? … Who is it?’ He rolled flat again, bringing both hands up to rub his eyes. His bottle tumbled to the floor with a thud.

  ‘My mother’s sick.’

  ‘Eh? … Why are you shouting like that, per l’amore di Cristo?’ The doctor wiped at the stream of spittle on his chin with the back of his hand, then raised himself upon his elbows and peered at me through squinting lids. ‘Ma chi sei tu?’

  ‘Vittorio.’

  ‘Eh? Look at you—stand back, you’re dripping all over my suit.’ He began to ease himself up slowly from the couch. ‘Ma sei scimunito? What, have you been out in this weather? In your pyjamas, che stronzo. And all this wind, you didn’t even close the door—were you born in a stable? … Who, Vittorio?’

  ‘Vittorio Innocente. My mother’s sick, she said you should come.’

  ‘Sick?’ The doctor rubbed the back of his neck with a grimace. ‘It’s just the weather. Go shut the door, for the love of Christ, I have a headache that would kill a whale.’

  ‘I couldn’t get it closed,’ I said. I’d begun to tremble now with cold. My body ached as if a thousand hammers had been pounding at it.

  The doctor rose with a curse and lurched towards the door.

  ‘You’re that woman’s son, aren’t you, the pregnant one who thinks she’s a princess. Look at the mess on the floor now.’ He slammed the door shut with a heave of his shoulder; immediately the room became calm, and the pendants on the chandelier gradually ceased their mad ringing. Leaning against the door the doctor pulled a small bottle from the inside pocket of his jacket and took a swig of the golden liquid inside, then lurched back to the couch.

  ‘Beh, so what is it?’ He fell heavily onto the couch and reached down for his shoes. ‘Look, now my socks are soaked. Addio.’

  ‘My mother told me to call you,’ I said, my teeth chattering. ‘She said to say about the pains. She was throwing up and making noises even after she stopped. I was throwing up too but I wasn’t making any noises, anyway not the same ones.’

  ‘Noises? Look at you without any shoes. If you die from pneumonia you’ll have yourself to blame.’ He’d stood now and was moving towards a doorway opposite the one I’d come in through. ‘Everyone gets sick in a storm if they’re not used to it, nothing to worry about. I’ll give you some pills. Nowadays they have pills for everything—constipation, diarrhoea, malaria, hangovers. Pretty soon they won’t need doctors any more, only pharmacists.’

  The door we went through led into a narrow hallway that ran the length of the upper deck, a high line of windows looking onto the sea—I remembered now having been down the hall once with Antonio, when he’d taken me with him on his rounds. But I did not see Antonio now among the crewmen and officers who were lurching in and out of doorways or hurrying down the hall in one direction or other, casting backward glances at me as they passed.

  ‘Where did you pick this one up, dottore? Don’t tell me he’s been outside in this weather—if the captain finds out he’ll have someone’s balls.’

  ‘There’s no problem,’ the doctor said casually. ‘Everything’s under control.’

  The doctor led me down an indoor stairwell and we came out on the main deck not far from the infirmary. The door I’d opened to get outside was closed now, though the hall was still deserted.

  ‘How did you get outside?’ the doctor asked. His body swayed like a great bending sail as he walked, though he kept to the centre of the hall, ignoring the handrails along the wall. ‘I don’t know what got into your head to go out there. Why didn’t you go to the nurse? Luisa!’ The doctor flicked on the lights as he stepped into the infirmary’s reception room. He popped his head into the ward. ‘Luisa! What, are you sleeping? You’re on duty tonight, get up, and with half the ship probably trying to find you. How can anyone sleep in weather like this?’

  The doctor pulled a key from his pocket and opened a door behind the reception desk. Through the doorway I caught sight of a bed-like table upholstered in black, a dark lamp stretching up from the table’s head like a blind eye.

  When the doctor came out he was holding a small glass pill bottle.

  ‘Here,’ he said, handing it to me. ‘Tell her to take a couple of these every few hours. And change out of those clothes.’

  ‘But she wants you to come,’ I said, close to tears; I was beginning to despair of ever getting him down to the room. ‘She’s making noises. She said you should come. She said to say the pains are only a few minutes away.’

  ‘The pains?’ A roll caught the doctor by surprise and he stumbled backwards against the reception desk, its bolts groaning under his weight. ‘What pains?’ I shrugged helplessly.

  ‘She said to say about the pains.’

  ‘Madonna,’ the doctor said, paling, ‘she’s having her baby. Luisa! Luisa, per l’amore di Cristo get out of that bed! We’re having a baby!’

  The doctor hurried back into the room behind the reception desk. I heard him rummaging through drawers, heard cupboards slamming shut, and a minute later he emerged again carrying a small black bag. A bleary-eyed Luisa—she was little more than sixteen or seventeen, I saw now, a small slip of a girl with large black eyes and a tiny upturned nose—was standing in the doorway of the ward, her uniform creased and puckered and her bonnet askew.

  ‘A baby?’

  ‘Bring some ether, Luí, sbrigati. And a basin!’ The doctor and I were already rushing headlong down the hallway. A moment later I saw Luisa following behind us, a basin clutched to her chest with one hand and her other still reaching down to slip on a shoe as she stumbled out of the infirmary doorway.

  XXXI

  My mother lay in the same position I’d left her in, knees up and hands clutched to the bedposts. Her breathing, though, seemed calmer than before.

  ‘A few minutes more,’ she said weakly as we came in, ‘and I would have had to do it myself. The water broke.’ The doctor felt the mattress between my mother’s legs. His hand came away wet.

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘A few minutes.’

  ‘The baby’s early?’

  ‘About a m
onth.’

  ‘Luisa, we’ll have to put her on the floor. Spread some blankets out. And you’—the doctor turned to me—‘stand over there in front of St. Christopher and keep out of the way. And get out of those clothes.’

  Luisa stripped the upper bunk and arranged the blankets and pillow in the narrow aisle between the beds and the sitting area. The lights had stopped flickering now and the rolling of the ship seemed to have eased, though rain and waves were still lashing at the portholes. Luisa had set the basin she’d brought with her on the coffee table; a quart-sized silver canister was shifting inside it with the ship’s roll, metal against metal.

  With the doctor and Luisa each taking one of her arms, my mother rose slowly from her bed and settled herself onto the blankets Luisa had set out for her. She was still breathing steadily but her face was stippled with sweat.

  ‘Get her ready, Luisa,’ the doctor said. He took off his jacket, turning away from my mother to slide out his bottle and take a quick pull from it. He draped the jacket over a chair and rolled up his sleeves, then reached into his black bag and pulled out a thick bar of brownish soap wrapped in clear cellophane.

  ‘Do you want me to shave her?’ Luisa said. She had knelt between my mother’s legs and reached under her night-gown to pull off her underwear. The underwear was dripping wet.

  ‘There’s no time,’ the doctor said, stepping around my mother to the bathroom. ‘The baby could start coming any minute now.’

  As if on cue, my mother’s breathing became suddenly quick and sharp. Her body tensed and she stopped breathing for a few long seconds, her fists clenching the blankets beneath her. Finally a long, open cry passed out of her, dying down in slow degrees, like a wave spending itself on a shore. Her breathing did not calm down now, though, and only a moment passed before she cried out again.

  The doctor had come out of the bathroom.

  ‘Give me my bag.’

  When Luisa had handed it to him he pulled out a small package and tore it open with his teeth. The package held a wad of cotton; the doctor poured some of the contents of the silver canister onto it and knelt at my mother’s head.

  ‘What are you doing,’ my mother said, between breaths. ‘You smell—like a liquor factory.’

  ‘It’s just the anaesthesia.’

  ‘No. No anaesthesia.’

  ‘Signora, be reasonable,’ the doctor said, his hand still hovering above my mother’s head. ‘Why would anyone want to put herself through this pain?’

  ‘I want—to see—everything.’ But another spasm gripped her, and the doctor brought the cotton down over her face. Her cry came out muffled. The doctor held the cotton to her for a long moment; finally my mother’s body seemed to relax a little, the muscles around her eyes easing as if she had fallen into a troubled sleep, her breathing growing more calm and rhythmic.

  ‘Luisa, come up here and give her a dose of this every few minutes.’

  The doctor knelt between my mother’s legs and pushed her night-gown up to her belly, then slipped a hand under each knee and spread her legs apart until it seemed he would split her open. He pulled a slim package from his bag and slipped out two gloves of thin, translucent plastic; these he drew over his hands with two deft tugs, the gloves stretching over his thick fingers and palms like an extra layer of skin. He leaned forward and began probing with his fingers in the dark spot between my mother’s legs. I looked away.

  ‘The head is already starting to come through. Thank God it’s not a breach like that damned Calabrese.’ My mother was still moaning, not the open cries of before but the half-stifled groans of someone crying out from a dream. Several minutes passed when everything was quiet except for these half-cries; even the ship’s creaking had died down, the rain and waves no longer pounding at the portholes. Everything seemed poised at a point of stillness, on the edge of some yawning chasm.

  The hunch of the doctor’s broad shoulders blocked my view of my mother; but when he shifted position I saw that his gloved hands were clutching the top of a cheesy bluish-black sphere that was pushing itself out from between my mother’s legs like an egg.

  Luisa, seeming now tired and dreamy, her long eyelashes drooping, was still kneeling at my mother’s head, bringing her wad of cotton down every few minutes.

  ‘Go easier on the ether,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s not coming out.’

  But when several more minutes passed and nothing happened, the doctor seemed to grow impatient.

  ‘Get my forceps from my bag,’ he said.

  Luisa rummaged with her free hand in the doctor’s bag.

  ‘They’re not here.’

  ‘They’re there, I put them there.’

  Luisa set down her wad of cotton and searched more thoroughly.

  ‘I can’t find them. Do you want me to go up and get them?’

  ‘No, I want you here,’ the doctor said, irritated. ‘I’ll send the boy. Come ti chiami, ragazz’?’

  ‘Vittorio.’

  ‘Yes, yes, that’s right. Beh, Vittorio, I want you to go upstairs to the infirmary and into my examining room, the room at the back. Inside the third drawer of the first cabinet on the right you’ll find something that looks like two big spoons joined together so you can open and close them like a mouth. Like this.’ He pulled his hands from between my mother’s legs to flap them open and closed like jaws. ‘Understand?’

  I nodded.

  ‘O.K., go. And be quick. And when you come back change out of those clothes.’

  Maintenance people had begun to come out into the halls now to mop up floors and run wet rags along railings and walls, grey-overalled men who grinned at me through crooked teeth and thick-waisted women in hair nets and rubber gloves.

  ‘Oh, giovanotto, where are you going in such a hurry?’

  But I kept running, breathless by the time I reached the infirmary. The walls in the examining room were lined with cabinets and cupboards; but the doctor’s instructions had gotten jumbled in my head. I began to search through each drawer and cupboard, desperately seeking the mouthlike spoons. I found scissors, packets of cotton, odd glasses, strange instruments of polished steel; and, at the bottom of one drawer, a small magazine whose cover pictured a dreamy-eyed woman wrapped in a shroud of translucent gauze. But no mouth-like spoons. Finally, using a small step-ladder I found wedged in a corner, I climbed up onto a counter to check the cupboards above it. Here were all manner of bottles and metal containers, arranged in wooden racks that held them in place; but no spoons. But with the third cupboard I opened a loose bottle came rolling off a shelf; it struck the edge of the counter and then shattered finally on the white-tiled floor, splattering a reddish-brown liquid that filled the room with a strong sickly-sweet smell.

  In a panic, I scrambled to the floor and ran back down to room 213.

  ‘I can’t find it!’ I cried as I opened the door, bursting into tears. But another cry answered my own from the bathroom, small but strong. The doctor looked over at me from where he still knelt between my mother’s legs.

  ‘Some assistant you are, eh? You’re lucky your mother was only playing with us. She gave an extra push, and that was that.’

  Luisa came out of the bathroom carrying a small bundle swaddled in a sheet.

  ‘Say hello to your sister.’ She leaned towards me, and I started back. Only the bundle’s face was showing, small and ugly, the skin sickly blue and wrinkled like a dried olive; but I was flooded with relief to see that all its features were human, the tiny nose and eyes and ears, that it was not the snake-headed child that Alfredo Girasole had warned me about.

  When Luisa brought the face up closer to me so I could have a better look it screwed up into a grimace and let out a cry. Luisa laughed.

  ‘She doesn’t like you,’ she said. ‘Brothers and sisters never get along.’

  ‘Bring it upstairs and make up a bed for it,’ the doctor said. ‘And bring down some new sheets.’

  My mother was lying peacefully now: she seemed asleep, her eye
s closed, her head rolled to one side on her pillow. The doctor was still crouched between her legs, holding a dark tube that coiled down inside her, his gloves stained with brownish blood and with a white substance that looked like soft cheese. Beneath his hands sat the metal basin Luisa had brought.

  ‘Che spettacolo, eh?’ the doctor said. ‘Now we’re just waiting for the dessert.’

  We waited for a few long moments without speaking or moving, my mother lying peacefully on the floor, her breathing now calm and steady, the doctor on his knees with his fist closed around the dark cord. Finally, as if he could bear waiting no longer, the doctor gave a small tug, as slight as a twitch; immediately a fleshy mass, dark and bloody, flowed out from between my mother’s legs into the waiting basin. I turned away, my stomach churning.

  ‘It’s done,’ the doctor said. ‘She might bleed a little, but it’s nothing to worry about.’

  Luisa came in now with the sheets.

  ‘Madonna, what a mess you made up there! He spilled iodine all over the floor—I’ll never get those stains out.’

  Luisa made the beds, then helped the doctor lift my mother, who was still sleeping peacefully, into the lower one. It seemed a long time had passed; but outside the portholes the sky was still night-dark. The storm, though, seemed to have passed completely, a thousand stars glinting again overhead. It all seemed a dream now, the storm, the few terrible minutes I’d spent on the deck; but my skin still itched under my damp pyjamas, as if tiny worms were crawling beneath it.

  ‘For the last time, get out of those clothes,’ the doctor said. ‘Take a hot bath and then go to bed. I’ll come in the morning to check on your mother.’

  He turned to pick up his coat from where he’d draped it, but stooped suddenly to pick something off the floor: my mother’s orange.

  ‘Breakfast,’ he said, peeling into it. A gush of juice squirted up at his shirt and he wiped at it with a curse. When he’d finished peeling he portioned the orange out among us; for a moment the three of us stood silently eating in the centre of the room, like farmers taking a rest in the fields.