Catastrophe

by Dino Buzzati

  But the police didn’t appear, days passed and no one in the Goggi household or the porter’s lodge—as if word had been sent around to avoid the subject—made any mention of the monster in the attic; all of which added to Ghitta’s feeling of unease. She had difficulty sleeping at night, and no amount of rational thought could any longer persuade her that the horror in the attic was, in fact, nonexistent. By now the agonizing memory, which had been in some way blurred or attenuated by her immediate panic, rose again in her mind very distinctly; she pictured the minutest outlines of the incredible body: its folds, its revolting color, until she saw that hallucination was quite out of the question. The top of the house seemed weighed down almost unbearably: at night she felt this weight pressing down on her all the way from the attic above while the rest of the house, accomplices or innocents, slept on in blessed peace.

  Until, about two weeks later, she felt she could ask for the key again without arousing suspicion. The portress told her that the attic was no longer available for the use of tenants; a firm had taken it over as a small storeroom; and her husband had taken everything that was in it to another attic; that was why the door had been padlocked.

  “But that’s impossible!” exclaimed Ghitta, smiling to hide her dismay. “You remember the day I had that fright? It was open then. But the padlock was put on that very evening . . .” (even before she’d finished the sentence she realized how unwise she was being). Gina in fact looked at her in surprise.

  At that moment her husband came in from another room. “Enrico,” said the portress. “You remember the time when Miss Freilaber had such a fright in the attic? She says the padlock was put on that same evening. Do you remember?”

  “The same evening?” repeated Enrico with his unruffled good humor. “How should she know? Don’t you remember, miss, that it was I who went up there when it was already dark? No, no, you’ve got it wrong. . . . I can’t remember offhand, but we must have emptied it the next day or the day afterward, shortly afterward anyhow. . . . Why did you want to know? Have the Goggi lost something? . . . Or did you want to have a quick look at your monster?” But was his laughter really sincere?

  “Did you need something from up there?” Enrico insisted.

  “Oh, no,” said Ghitta, relieved. “We were just talking.” So the porters had been a little alarmed. Possibly they understood her suspicions, but they had also been afraid. But on whose behalf had they taken action? For whose benefit were they so eager to avoid all inquiries about, or visits to, the attic? Why was Enrico standing there looking so undecided? Why was he no longer joking? This time it was Ghitta who smiled. She looked at her watch. “Gracious, how late it is,” she said. “Goodbye.” But she felt that the whole world was against her because she was blundering and indiscreet, because she had discovered its secrets by chance and had not known how to keep them.

  Seven Floors

  ONE MORNING IN MARCH, AFTER A NIGHT’S TRAIN journey, Giovanni Corte arrived in the town where the famous nursing home was. He was a little feverish, but he was still determined to walk from the station to the hospital, carrying his small bag.

  Although his was an extremely slight case, in the very earliest stages, Giovanni Corte had been advised to go to the well-known sanatorium, which existed solely for the care of the particular illness from which he was suffering. This meant that the doctors were particularly competent and the equipment particularly pertinent and efficient.

  Catching sight of it from a distance—he recognized it from having seen photos in some brochure—Giovanni Corte was most favorably impressed. The building was white, seven stories high; its mass was broken up by a series of recesses which gave it a vague resemblance to a hotel. It was surrounded by tall trees.

  After a brief visit from the doctor, prior to a more thorough one later on, Giovanni Corte was taken to a cheerful room on the seventh and top floor. The furniture was light and elegant, as was the wallpaper, there were wooden armchairs and brightly colored cushions. The view was over one of the loveliest parts of the town. Everything was peaceful, welcoming and reassuring.

  Giovanni Corte went to bed immediately, turned on the reading lamp at his bedside and began to read a book he had brought with him. After a few moments a nurse came in to see whether he needed anything.

  He didn’t, but was delighted to chat with the young woman and ask her questions about the nursing home. That was how he came to know its one extremely odd characteristic: the patients were housed on each floor according to the gravity of their state. The seventh, or top, floor was for extremely mild cases. The sixth was still for mild cases, but ones needing a certain amount of attention. On the fifth floor there were quite serious cases and so on, floor by floor. The second floor was for the very seriously ill. On the first floor were the hopeless cases.

  This extraordinary system, apart from facilitating the general services considerably, meant that a patient only mildly affected would not be troubled by a dying co-sufferer next door and ensured a uniformity of atmosphere on each floor. Treatment, of course, would thus vary from floor to floor.

  This meant that the patients were divided into seven successive castes. Each floor was a world apart, with its own particular rules and traditions. And as each floor was in the charge of a different doctor, slight but definite differences in the methods of treatment had grown up, although initially the director had given the institution a single basic bent.

  As soon as the nurse had left the room Giovanni Corte, no longer feeling feverish, went to the window and looked out, not because he wanted to see the view of the town (although he was not familiar with it) but in the hopes of catching a glimpse, through the windows, of the patients on the lower floors. The structure of the building, with its large recesses, made this possible. Giovanni Corte concentrated particularly on the first-floor windows, which looked a very long way away, and which he could see only obliquely. But he could see nothing interesting. Most of the windows were completely hidden by gray venetian blinds.

  But Corte did see someone, a man, standing at a window right next to his own. The two looked at each other with a growing feeling of sympathy but did not know how to break the silence. At last Giovanni Corte plucked up courage and said, “Have you just arrived too?”

  “Oh, no,” said his neighbor, “I’ve been here two months.” He was silent for a few moments and then, apparently not sure how to continue the conversation, added, “I was watching my brother down there.”

  “Your brother?”

  “Yes. We both came here at the same time, oddly enough, but he got worse—he’s on the fourth now.”

  “Fourth what?”

  “Fourth floor,” explained the man, pronouncing the two words with such pity and horror that Giovanni Corte was vaguely alarmed.

  “But in that case”—Corte proceeded with his questioning with the lightheartedness one might adopt when speaking of tragic matters which don’t concern one—“if things are already so serious on the fourth floor, whom do they put on the first?”

  “Oh, the dying. There’s nothing for the doctors to do down there. Only the priests. And of course . . .”

  “But there aren’t many people down there,” interrupted Giovanni Corte as if seeking confirmation, “almost all the blinds are down.”

  “There aren’t many now, but there were this morning,” replied the other with a slight smile. “The rooms with the blinds down are those where someone has died recently. As you can see, on the other floors the shutters are all open. Will you excuse me,” he continued, moving slowly back in, “it seems to be getting rather cold. I’m going back to bed. May I wish you all the best . . .”

  The man vanished from the windowsill and shut the window firmly; a light was lit inside the room. Giovanni Corte remained standing at the window, his eyes fixed on the lowered blinds of the first floor. He stared at them with morbid intensity, trying to visualize the ghastly secrets of that terrible first floor where patients were taken to die; he felt relieved that he w
as so far away. Meanwhile, the shadows of evening crept over the city. One by one the thousand windows of the sanatorium lit up, from the distance it looked like a great house lit up for a ball. Only on the first floor, at the foot of the precipice, did dozens of windows remain blank and empty.

  Giovanni Corte was considerably reassured by the doctor’s visit. A natural pessimist, he was already secretly prepared for an unfavorable verdict and wouldn’t have been surprised if the doctor had sent him down to the next floor.

  His temperature however showed no signs of going down, even though his condition was otherwise satisfactory. But the doctor was pleasant and encouraging. Certainly he was affected—the doctor said—but only very slightly; in two or three weeks he would probably be cured. “So I’m to stay on the seventh floor?” inquired Giovanni Corte anxiously at this point.

  “Well, of course!” replied the doctor, clapping a friendly hand on his shoulder. “Where did you think you were going? Down to the fourth perhaps?” He spoke jokingly, as though it were the most absurd thought in the world.

  “I’m glad about that,” said Giovanni Corte. “You know how it is, when one’s ill one always imagines the worst.” In fact he stayed in the room which he had originally been given. On the rare afternoons when he was allowed up he made the acquaintance of some of his fellow patients. He followed the treatment scrupulously, concentrated his whole attention on making a rapid recovery, yet his condition seemed to remain unchanged.

  About ten days later, the head nurse of the seventh floor came to see Giovanni Corte. He wanted to ask an entirely personal favor: the following day a woman with two children was coming to the hospital; there were two free rooms right next to his, but a third was needed; would Signor Corte mind very much moving into another, equally comfortable room?

  Naturally, Giovanni Corte made no objection; he didn’t mind what room he was in; indeed, he might have a new and prettier nurse.

  “Thank you so much,” said the head nurse with a slight bow; “though, mark you, such a courteous act doesn’t surprise me coming from a person such as yourself. We’ll start moving your things in about an hour, if you don’t mind. By the way, it’s one floor down,” he added in a quieter tone, as though it were a negligible detail. “Unfortunately there are no free rooms on this floor. Of course it’s a purely temporary arrangement,” he hastened to add, seeing that Corte had sat up suddenly and was about to protest, “a purely temporary arrangement. You’ll be coming up again as soon as there’s a free room, which should be in two or three days.”

  “I must confess,” said Giovanni Corte, smiling, to show that he had no childish fears, “I must confess that this particular sort of change of room doesn’t appeal to me in the least.”

  “But it has no medical basis; I quite understand what you mean, but in this case it’s simply to do a favor for this woman who doesn’t want to be separated from her children. Now, please,” he added, laughing openly, “please don’t get it into your head that there are other reasons!”

  “Very well,” said Giovanni Corte, “but it seems to me to bode ill.”

  So Giovanni Corte went down to the sixth floor, and though he was convinced that this move did not correspond to any worsening in his own condition, he felt unhappy at the thought that there was now a definite barrier between himself and the everyday world of healthy people. The seventh floor was an embarkation point, with a certain degree of contact with society; it could be regarded as a sort of annex to the ordinary world. But the sixth was already part of the real hospital; the attitudes of the doctors, nurses, of the patients themselves were just slightly different. It was admitted openly that the patients on that floor were really sick, even if not seriously so. From his initial conversation with his neighbors, staff and doctors, Giovanni Corte gathered that here the seventh floor was regarded as a joke, reserved for amateurs, all affectation and caprice; it was only on the sixth floor that things began in earnest.

  One thing Giovanni Corte did realize, however, was that he would certainly have some difficulty in getting back up to the floor where, medically speaking, he really belonged; to get back to the seventh floor he would have to set the whole complex organism of the place in motion, even for such a small move; it was quite plain that, were he not to insist, no one would ever have thought of putting him back on the top floor, with the “almost well.”

  So Giovanni Corte decided not to forfeit anything that was his by right and not to yield to the temptations of habit. He was much concerned to impress upon his companions that he was with them only for a few days, that it was he who had agreed to go down a floor simply to oblige a lady, that he’d be going up again as soon as there was a free room. The others listened without interest and nodded, unconvinced.

  Giovanni Corte’s convictions, however, were confirmed by the judgment of the new doctor. He agreed that Giovanni Corte could most certainly be on the seventh floor; the form the disease had taken was ab-so-lute-ly negligible—he stressed each syllable so as to emphasize the importance of his diagnosis—but after all it might well be that Giovanni Corte would be better taken care of on the sixth floor.

  “I don’t want all that nonsense all over again,” Giovanni Corte interrupted firmly at this point, “you say I should be on the seventh floor, and that’s where I want to be.”

  “No one denies that,” retorted the doctor. “I was advising you not as a doc-tor, but as a real friend. As I say, you’re very slightly affected, it wouldn’t even be an exaggeration to say that you’re not ill at all, but in my opinion what makes your case different from other similarly mild ones is its greater extension: the intensity of the disease is minimal, but it is fairly widespread; the destructive process of the cells”—it was the first time Giovanni Corte had heard the sinister expression—“the destructive process of the cells is absolutely in the initial stage, it may not even have begun yet, but it is tending, I say tending, to affect large expanses of the organism. This is the only reason, in my opinion, why you might be better off down here on the sixth floor, where the methods of treatment are more highly specialized and more intensive.”

  One day he was informed that the Director of the nursing home, after lengthy consultation with his colleagues, had decided to make a change in the subdivision of the patients. Each person’s grade—so to speak—was to be lowered by half a point. From now on the patients on each floor were to be divided into two categories according to the seriousness of their condition (indeed the respective doctors had already made this subdivision, though exclusively for their own personal use) and the lower of these two halves was to be officially moved one floor down. For example, half the patients on the sixth floor, those who were slightly more seriously affected, were to go down to the fifth; the less slightly affected of the seventh floor would go down to the sixth. Giovanni Corte was pleased to hear this, because his return to the seventh floor would certainly be much easier amid this highly complicated series of removals.

  However, when he mentioned this hope to the nurse he was bitterly disappointed. He learned that he was indeed to be moved, not up to the seventh but down to the floor below. For reasons that the nurse was unable to explain, he had been classed among the more “serious” patients on the sixth floor and so had to go down to the fifth.

  Once he had recovered from his initial surprise, Giovanni Corte completely lost his temper; he shouted that they were cheating him, that he refused to hear of moving downward, that he would go back home, that rights were rights and that the hospital administration could not afford to ignore the doctors’ diagnosis so brazenly.

  He was still shouting when the doctor arrived to explain matters more fully. He advised Corte to calm down unless he wanted his temperature to rise and explained that there had been a misunderstanding, at least in a sense. He agreed once again that Giovanni Corte would have been equally suitably placed on the seventh floor, but added that he had a slightly different, though entirely personal, view of the case. Basically, in a certain sense, his con
dition could be considered as needing treatment on the sixth floor, because the symptoms were so widespread. But he himself failed to understand why Corte had been listed among the more serious cases of the sixth floor. In all probability the secretary, who had phoned him that very morning to ask about Giovanni Corte’s exact medical position, had made a mistake in copying out his report. Or more likely still the administrative staff had purposely depreciated his own judgment, since he was considered an expert doctor but overoptimistic. Finally, the doctor advised Corte not to worry, to accept the move without protest; what counted was the disease, not the floor on which the patient was placed.

  As far as the treatment was concerned, added the doctor, Giovanni Corte would certainly not have cause for complaint: the doctor on the floor below was undoubtedly far more experienced; it was almost part of the system that the doctors became more experienced, at least in the eyes of the administration, the further down you went. The rooms were equally comfortable and elegant. The view was equally good; it was only from the third floor that it was cut off by the surrounding trees.

  It was evening, and Giovanni Corte’s temperature had risen accordingly; he listened to this meticulous ratiocination with an increasing feeling of exhaustion. Finally he realized that he had neither the strength nor the desire to resist this unfair removal any further. Unprotesting, he allowed himself to be taken one floor down.

  Giovanni Corte’s one meager consolation on the fifth floor was the knowledge that, in the opinion of doctors, nurses and patients alike, he was the least seriously ill of anyone on the whole floor. In short, he could consider himself much the most fortunate person in that section. On the other hand, he was haunted by the thought that there were now two serious barriers between himself and the world of ordinary people.

  As spring progressed the weather became milder, but Giovanni Corte no longer liked to stand at the window as he used to do; although it was stupid to feel afraid, he felt a strange movement of terror at the sight of the first-floor windows, always mostly closed and now so much nearer.