“She’s that one there,” the doctor said, pointing to the box on the right.
“Oh,” Dino said, nodding and staring at that little wrinkled animal he would be calling his daughter for the rest of his life.
“You found her lying on her stomach, didn’t you?” the doctor asked, watching Dino as he took a step towards the window.
“Yes,” Dino said, tearing himself away from those mesmerising folds on his daughter’s body and looking at the doctor. “How do you know that?
“From the position of the baby,” the doctor said, then let a few seconds pass while Dino turned back, spellbound, to his daughter. “Your wife’s body heat kept her alive. If she had been lying with her belly up, I don’t know how things would have turned out.”
Dino, still looking at his daughter, gave a slight laugh. “Typical,” he said.
For another moment or two, the doctor watched this strange man with his hands in the pockets of his jacket looking at his daughter in the incubator. “What do you think?” the doctor asked after a while.
Dino was silent for a few seconds. “She’s full of wrinkles,” he said.
The doctor, too, gave a slight laugh, then both he and Dino stood for a few minutes in silence, looking at the dimly lit room in front of them.
“It might be a good idea to get a bit of rest,” the doctor said after a while, leaning forward a little to see Dino from a better angle.
Dino did not move, his eyes still fixed on that transparent box and that little animal full of wrinkles. “Yes,” he said after a while, taking a little step back. “It might be.”
Dino and the doctor went back along the corridor to the sliding metal door, and the doctor again pressed the button.
“Can I see Sofia again for a moment?” Dino asked, throwing a quick glance at the doctor.
“Of course,” the doctor said. “Go right ahead.”
They went back to Sofia’s room. There she was, as still as before, surrounded by the same machines.
Dino went to the side of his wife’s bed, leant down towards her head and whispered something in her ear that the doctor could not hear. He moved a hand over her forehead, gave her a kiss, then turned, put his hands in his pocket and started for the door.
“Thank you,” he said as he passed the doctor and walked through the door. “Everything’s fine.”
For a moment, the doctor wondered what exactly was fine. But then it struck him that this was no time to be asking himself so many questions.
When they were back downstairs, across from the main entrance, Dino turned to the doctor and held out his hand. “Thank you,” he said again, with a sudden pride. “You’re a good person.”
The doctor almost felt like laughing, but managed to restrain himself, more or less. “You, too,” he said, giving Dino’s hand a firm shake.
Dino looked him straight in the eyes. “I don’t know about that,” he said, and the doctor couldn’t think of anything better to do than give a weak smile and watch Dino as he disappeared through the door.
As soon as Dino was outside, he realised that when he had arrived he had left the three-wheeler right there, and now it wasn’t there. Luckily he only had to take a few steps to see it parked in a decent spot a few dozen metres away. A good Samaritan must have moved it while he was somewhere inside. Maybe it had been the male nurse.
When he reached the three-wheeler, he saw that even the blankets he had carried Sofia in had been put back in the driver’s compartment. Unfortunately, they still had that sickly smell that had come from somewhere in her belly.
As he was looking at the blankets, Dino noticed a crumpled, dust-covered white bag under the passenger seat. It took him a few seconds to recognise. He reached down and picked up the bag and placed it on his lap. For a moment he looked at it the way we look at an archaeological find, or rather, the way we look at an object which belonged to us as children, and which we find again dozens of years later—with the same mixture of curiosity and emotion. Dino slowly unfolded the bag, until he had opened it completely, and laid it down as best he could on his thighs. Inside, there were two big slices of red meat, just a little wrinkled by the folds of the paper. Dino sat looking for a few seconds at that red, bloody meat, then actually passed a finger over it and pressed down. It was strange, it was as if he didn’t recognise these slices, as if they came from another place entirely and had somehow crossed the border. After a few seconds he lifted the whole package and even sniffed it. It didn’t smell of meat, it smelled of some bizarre synthetic material, maybe—if you dug into the matter—with a clear hint of metal.
Dino dropped the open bag and the meat on the passenger seat, next to the blankets. Then he started the three-wheeler, reversed out of his parking space, with the usual spluttering noises, and as he left the hospital car park picked up the bag with the meat and threw it behind a bush.
It was quite late by now, and Saeed must have been at the site for a while, Dino thought. In fact when he arrived Saeed was already there waiting for him. Fortunately, nobody else had arrived yet.
“How did it go?” Saeed asked when Dino got out of the three-wheeler with the blankets in his hand.
“Fine,” Dino said, almost without looking at him. “Thanks.”
“And those?” Saeed asked, indicating with his chin the dirty blankets Dino had in his arms.
“Nothing, forget it,” Dino said, already moving away with his back to the site. “Thanks, Saeed.”
Saeed watched him walk away with regular, precise steps, staring straight ahead, and for some reason he preferred not to ask himself any questions.
Chapter Twenty-Four
WHEN DINO GOT HOME, he went straight to the bathroom, threw the blankets in the bathtub, filled it with warm water and emptied a handful of soap powder into it.
Then he came back to the living room, flung the window wide open, went to the kitchen to get a rag and a bucket, came back to the living room again, shifted the sofa and bent down to clean up that pool of dark, sickly stuff that covered the floor.
In the end, he had to take the rug from under the low table in the living room and throw that in the bathtub, too. He spent all morning cleaning and tidying the apartment, even dusting the shelves and behind the jars in the kitchen. The apartment had not been so clean and tidy for years, in fact Dino couldn’t remember when. Once the blankets and the rug had been wrung out and hung outside to dry, Dino undressed and had a bath.
Then he got dressed with the first things he found in the wardrobe, closed all the windows in the apartment and set off for the billiard parlour.
He gave Sandro a hand in arranging a couple of things in the bar, looked through the accounts for a while and spent much of the afternoon tidying a box room where bundles of papers and various other objects had accumulated over the years. He also found a dusty old cup with a figure of a man leaning to shoot a ball and a plate with the words First Prize. Cirillo came in while Dino was sitting on one of the big boxes, holding the cup and dusting it off as best he could with his hand.
“Hey,” Cirillo said after a few seconds, leaning against the doorpost with his shoulder.
“Hi,” Dino said, looking up at him for a moment, then down at the cup again. “What’s this?”
Cirillo frowned a moment. “What?” he asked.
“This,” Dino asked, holding up the cup. “You said you never played in a tournament.”
He said it with an almost sarcastic smile, as if he had caught his friend with his hand somewhere it shouldn’t be.
Cirillo turned the cup over in his hands, then put it to one side and threw it a last look. “Dunno,” he said, then looked back at Dino, who had stood up and gone back to work.
“And you?” Cirillo asked.
“Me what?” Dino said.
“How are you?”
Dino bent down to pick up a large box. He hoisted it onto his knees and put it on one side, raising a new cloud of dust. “Everything’s fine, Cirì. Don’t worry.”
&n
bsp; “Sure?” Cirillo asked, peering at him from the door.
“Sure,” Dino said.
Cirillo watched him for a while longer, then, thinking it was none of his business anyway, turned to go.
Dino carried on tidying the room for the rest of the afternoon, then when he was tired and had stacked most of the papers again, he decided to call it a day.
He left the room, switched out the light, went to the bar, picked up his jacket from the stool where he had left it, calmly put it on, waved to Sandro and made to leave.
“No game?” he heard Cirillo ask behind him.
Dino stopped for a moment, turned his head just a little, then carried on up the stairs. “No,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Five
DINO WALKED BACK across town, trying to look around as little as possible and to think as little as possible about the stones he was stepping on.
He got to the hospital sooner than he had expected. As he had the night before, he went in through the main entrance, walked to the opaque glass door, pressed the big red button as if he was at home, and once inside headed for the sliding metal door.
“Excuse me,” a voice called to his left, while Dino was waiting for the metal door to open. “Where are you going?”
A nurse was quickly coming towards Dino, frowning.
“To see my wife,” Dino said, looking the nurse straight in the eyes.
“Oh,” the nurse said, suddenly slowing down, her face tightening as if she had just been slapped. “Go ahead,” she said, almost in a whisper, while the doors of the lift opened, unable to take her eyes off Dino.
“Thank you,” Dino said, disappearing behind the sliding metal door. Once inside, Dino pressed the button with the number he had seen the doctor press those few hours earlier, and for a moment wondered if there was some connection between that number and this whole business.
When the sliding metal door opened again, Dino got out and walked down the corridor to the door of Sofia’s room.
Everything was unusually silent. You could even hear the evening breeze rustling the leaves of the trees outside.
Sofia was still motionless and peaceful in her bed, but the machines weren’t there any more. Even they had gone away. Maybe she had been the one to send them away. Maybe she had wanted to be on her own for a while. Maybe she had wanted to be silent for a while. That was quite characteristic of her. Dino had often seen her walking by herself along the river. And God alone knew how many times he’d come back home and found her leaning out of the window in the living room, the one that looked out on the roofs of the town and the hills in the distance. Once, Sofia had told him that she could spend hours on end at that window. Dino had often wondered what she saw in those roofs and those hills. Then he had told himself that perhaps she saw what he saw in stones, or perhaps something else.
Dino took a few steps towards the bed. The sheet was covering Sofia up to the throat. It looked as if it was carved in marble. Only the features of his wife’s face remained. God alone knew where she was. God alone knew if she was there watching him, as so many people said, or if she had flown away somewhere else.
“I’m sorry,” Dino heard someone say behind him, and the words fell into the emptiness, like the coins he used to into the well in the centre of town when he was a young boy. He heard them clinking dozens of metres down, then that silence returned that had more the smell of nothingness.
Dino did not say a word. He stood there, motionless, looking at the statue that someone had carved using his wife’s face. The same cheekbones, the same drawn lips, the same scar over her left eye which she had got while playing as a little girl and which Dino liked so much. The same mole on the left temple and the same little lines that were starting to form next to her eyes and on her forehead. Even that funny hint of a smile she had on her face when she slept, as if every time she closed her eyes she went off to a more peaceful place. Maybe she was there now. Only the colour wasn’t really hers, in the same way that, in Dino’s opinion anyway, paintings, however beautiful, never managed to completely capture the true, vivid colour of skin, as if there was a strange iridescent mixture in skin that was impossible to reproduce. This almost greenish grey, with just a few touches of pink still left, had little to do with the soft glow of Sofia’s skin. Dino had once told his wife that her skin was a highly unusual colour.
“There must be a place where they have the colours to reproduce it,” Dino had said. “Maybe in India.”
Lying back on her pillow, Sofia had looked at him and given a little laugh. “Yes,” she had said. “Maybe.”
Then while they were making love they had told each other that when they went to India they would look for colours to reproduce her skin.
But they had never been to India. They had never been to India or the North Pole or black Africa or beyond that to the end of the world. They had never been anywhere, and now she had got fed up waiting and had gone away by herself, leaving behind her that macabre statue with the same vague smile. Dino should have known she would go away sooner or later, he should have realised that all that talk about travelling would get to her sooner or later. What was there to stay for? To see the world crumble and the roads swallowed up by the Devil’s slime and bombs explode and people with waistcoats and rosettes who didn’t know how to play billiards? No, Sofia had done the right thing, or rather, she had done the only sensible thing—she had gone away, without thinking twice. She had waited for Dino for more than ten years, what else could she do?
Dino stood there beside his wife’s body for a little while longer, trying to catch in that emptiness something that wasn’t his own breathing, something that had the slightest taste of life. Then he took a step closer to the bed and moved his finger, first over Sofia’s forehead, then over the clear lines of her nose and lips. He felt something well up inside him, and before everything exploded Dino closed every exit he knew. He took a long deep slow breath, then slowly let the breath out of his mouth and raised his head and looked straight in front of him like a soldier, out of the window and towards the hills.
“It’s OK,” he said, turning abruptly.
The doctor was there, looking at him with a vaguely worried air. “She didn’t suffer,” he said, trying to give a little smile.
“I didn’t think so,” Dino said.
The two of them looked each other in the eyes for a moment and the doctor nodded slightly.
“I’d like to see my daughter,” Dino said.
“Of course,” the doctor said.
Dino started walking quickly, preceding the doctor out of the door and towards the lift. They went up to the maternity ward and again walked as far as the window behind which his daughter was resting. She was still there, nice and peaceful, with all her wrinkles.
“I’d like to go in,” Dino said.
“That’s not possible,” the doctor said.
“I don’t give a damn,” Dino said.
The doctor looked for a moment at the man standing there in front of him. Well, he thought, he may have a point. “Come on, then,” he said. “We can go in through here.”
He walked to a thick door to the left of the window and opened it. The door led into a room with a desk and various cabinets filled with bandages and instruments and medicines, and from that room another door led into the little room where Dino’s daughter was.
“Go ahead,” the doctor said, opening the door for Dino.
“Thank you,” Dino said.
He entered the dimly lit room, and for the first time saw his daughter from close up. He thought she was the most incredible thing he had ever seen, and in the middle of all those wrinkles it seemed to him that he recognised Sofia’s lips and smile. He leant towards the glass box and whispered something, then gave his daughter a last glance, turned and left the room.
“I’m going,” he said when he was again in the corridor with the doctor. “I may be back in a while.”
“All right,” the doctor said, shaking Dino’s hand. He watche
d him start to walk down the corridor. “Oh,” he said after a few seconds, “there’s still the matter of the name.”
Dino stopped and turned to look at the doctor. He had already put his hands back in the pockets of his jacket. “The name?” he said.
“The name of the baby. We need a name for the birth certificate.”
Dino looked at the doctor for a moment. “Names are a big con,” he said.
The doctor gave a slight laugh. “Yes,” he said, “maybe they are.”
Dino nodded, then for a few seconds looked the doctor straight in the eyes, but as if he was looking at him from a long distance, still half-turned away with his hands in the pockets of his jacket. “Call her Grecia,” he said after a while.
“Grecia?” the doctor said, with a slight frown.
“Yes, Grecia,” Dino said.
“Why Grecia?”
“Don’t worry yourself about it,” Dino said, then turned and resumed walking towards the small metal door at the end of the corridor.
The doctor watched him disappear inside the lift, and wondered where he would go, if he would return to that parallel universe he always seemed to emerge from.
Chapter Twenty-Six
THE STEPS of a distinguished-looking man echoed in the silence of the night like the harsh ringing of a bell.
At the umpteenth stroke, Dino’s eyes suddenly opened wide. For a few seconds, he managed to move just his eyes— up to the gutter, over the stones of the walls, the windows and shutters of the building opposite, the pigeons sleeping on the windowsills and the closed shop shutter and the newspaper kiosk he was propped against. Searching silently for the coordinates that would tell him where he was.
Once outside the hospital, Dino’s legs had started to move automatically and regularly, wandering the town with his only concern being not to smash into the walls. Dino’s hands had never left the pockets of his jacket, and his eyes had remained fixed on a spot a couple of steps in front of him.
The Break Page 12