‘That’s enough about me,’ he added resolutely, with his hinged, toothless, tender smile. ‘What have you got in your pockets?’
There was a silence. ‘Answer, boy,’ said Domenico, threatened with humiliation. He repeated the question in their own dialect. ‘Answer.’ Salvatore did not at all like this concentration on his own case. The smell in the room was, he thought now, of something gone bad, or at any rate of something on the turn. Even if he didn’t say anything, he could go some way towards pleasing everyone simply by putting his hands in his pockets and turning them out. But with all the force of his being he didn’t want to do so.
‘Bene, it doesn’t matter,’ Gramsci said. ‘How could it matter? Perhaps, anyway, you think I’m not strong enough to be a good friend for your father?’
‘No, sir, I don’t think that.’
Now Gramsci moved again, sidling a little towards the right and establishing himself fairly securely against the washstand with its jug and basin of enamelled tin. There he held out his hand.
‘Children don’t like sick people. Are you afraid to touch me?’
‘I don’t want to touch you if I’m going to catch anything,’ Salvatore said. ‘With my cousins, there are seven of us in the house at home.’
‘Seven!’ shouted Domenico. ‘What has that to do with it, why do you mention that?’
‘You won’t catch anything,’ said Gramsci, and the child stepped forward and felt his hand crushed as though the bones were being ground together under the thin skin. When the travelling fair came round in autumn there was a machine called ‘The Initiation’ which gave you, as you gripped the handle, an electric shock. But that was not for anyone under the age of twelve.
‘Now it’s your turn. Since you didn’t answer, I’m doing you more than justice. You can ask me anything you like.’
Another chance not to fail his father. It was a moment when he could do him real credit, and he knew very well what kind of credit was wanted. Immediately he could picture the two of them, their visit over, back in the station refreshment room where they had gone when they arrived, the street lights on by now, his father praising him for his good question while he himself melted a lump of sugar in a long-handled spoon, slowly, feeling satisfaction and pity.
‘Ask anything you want,’ Gramsci repeated. In his present position he could take out a cigarette, although his disease had eaten so far into the vertebrae that he had difficulty in balancing his head well enough to smoke it. Patiently Domenico struck match after match, trying to get the tobacco alight.
Salvatore knew by now the question he ought to put. He regretted that he hadn’t wanted just now to say what he had in his pockets. That had been a mistake. He was quite well used to being told to put questions, as well as answering them, in the presence of a school inspector. That was simply a matter of knowing what was wanted. The more important these men were, the easier it was to reply. One of them had told the whole class to remain standing and to answer the question in the first lines of the Fascist Chorus of Youth: ‘Duce, Duce, when the time comes, who will not know how to die for you?’ Impossible to go wrong there. But Salvatore had also half-absorbed from the long droning evenings in the passage room, and from what they had earnestly tried to explain to him, the concerns of his father and Sannazzaro. Supposing he tried: ‘Comrade Gramsci, sir, when the time comes, who will not want liberty?’
Courage. But the words he had formed in his mind suddenly made themselves scarce, and still wanting and intending to say something quite different he asked loudly: ‘Why are you bleeding?’
And in fact a trickle of blood had appeared at the corner of the mouth of his father’s friend. Gazing at the hunchback in his niche, seeing the first drop ooze past the clamped cigarette to the edge of the chin, Salvatore knew that everything could be saved if only it wasn’t allowed to fall. Blessed Mary, Mother of God, Shelter of the Homeless, don’t let it fall. But as Gramsci opened the other side of his mouth to answer as he had promised, and possibly even to smile, something final and disastrous happened, he leaned forward and dark liquids began to make their escape from several parts of the body. Domenico Rossi put his whole fist on the bellpush and with his other hand threw open the door. ‘Get help!’ The boy clattered down the shining corridors, weeping. So far in the clinic he had seen no women, but a woman was needed now. Behind one of the shut doors with their squares of frosted glass he might find one.
12
Domenico was right in believing that this visit to Rome would provide a lasting memory for his son. Salvatore’s resolution, as soon as he began to be able to translate his impressions into terms of will and intention, was this: I will never concern myself with politics, I will never risk imprisonment for the sake of my principles, I will never give my health, still less my life, for my beliefs. He also resolved to be a doctor. In the end we shall all of us be at the mercy of our own bodies, but at least let me understand what is happening to them.
The sight of his father’s tears as they walked back to the station was also disagreeable to Salvatore. He was reluctant to admit to himself that, for the moment, he was older than his parent, and ashamed that they hadn’t got a handkerchief between them. There had been a napkin, but that was left behind with the basket and the unwanted presents at the Clinica Quisisana. Eventually they stopped in front of a little shop, and Domenico, still much moved, sent his son, by himself, to ask for a handkerchief. The man behind the counter told him that he must buy three, they were only for sale in packets of three. Salvatore stood there, solidly occupying his ground. ‘My father only needs one. You must sell him what he needs.’ The shop-keeper put his hand to his ear, pretending not to understand. Salvatore repeated what he had said in clear Italian. ‘It’s the law,’ he added. He paid for a single handkerchief and counted his change with insulting care. On that afternoon he decided that as soon as possible he would be emotionally dependent on no one.
13
Hard work and opportunism are the secrets of biological success. Gramsci himself was fond of the proverb ‘Where one horse shits, a thousand swallows feed.’ But from the usual source of help, the family, Salvatore received very little. All that it really came down to was that during his years of medical training he was able to lodge at a reasonable rent over a greengrocer’s shop belonging to his great-aunt’s step-daughter’s niece.
As a medical student his call-up was deferred, and just before the Allies landed in Sicily he got himself transferred to Bologna. The following spring the great neurologist, Professor Landino, returned from a long exile, and Salvatore expected to be deeply influenced by him, but was disappointed. Honourable men are rare, but not necessarily interesting. Landino was not interesting. Neurology, however, made its appeal in the simplest possible way, for its own sake. As a junior he made notes on case after case of back injuries which had been caused two or perhaps three years earlier when the patients had come to grief in a truck or some military vehicle which had run over a mine or a pot-hole. The surgeons had removed the injured disc from the spine and fused the vertebrae above and below it to make as neat a job as possible. And now there was no inflammation, nothing to be read from X-rays or tests on the cerebrospinal fluid, and yet the patients complained of agonising pain. There were women, too, admitted to the hospital who were unable to move one arm or both, who couldn’t stoop down to lift their children, whose faces were distorted and fixed into a singer’s open-mouthed grimace. The pain was in their imagination, but as real, of course, as if it wasn’t. In fact, it was impossible in these circumstances to attach any meaning to ‘real’ or to ‘imagination’. There was no acceptable diagnosis to make. He was in the face of pain which left no trace, and healing without explanation. The specialists, however confident, knew no more, perhaps less, than a dog who lies down in the shade until it feels better. But whatever exists, can be known. Salvatore didn’t delude himself that he was capable of great discoveries. But he thought he might set himself to see why no discoveries had been made so f
ar. ‘Gentlemen,’ Professor Landino began, with a smile which acknowledged the women students but implied that he was too old to learn new tricks, ‘not for nothing is neuralgia associated with artists, sensitives and degenerates.’ He paused on these last words, giving them equal weight. ‘We define neuralgia as pain whose origin is not clearly traceable.’
14
Salvatore’s natural associates in Bologna should have been the small group of students from the South, predictable in their habits, the civilian brothel on Saturday nights, on Sundays their thick best suits which in some cases had been inherited or borrowed from their fathers. Since they could not get used to the Bolognese food in the university cafeteria, which seemed to them designed to poison the first generation of post-war doctors, they made an arrangement with a café run by a Neapolitan, where places were kept for them every day. During his first year Salvatore considered these habits and set himself up against them. ‘Any behaviour that is expected of you,’ he argued, ‘makes you less of an individual. As a doctor I shall have to know what is normal and take any variation from it as a danger signal. As a human being, I should do the opposite.’
In 1946 the little group gave up their black suits and either sold them or sent them back to their villages. They continued to eat at Palumbo’s, and now Salvatore went with them. He had realized that if he set out to be unpredictable he would end up, as before, a slave to public opinion. He must leave Bologna as a man typical of nowhere and nothing, young Dr Rossi pure and simple, self-created, self-determined, forewarned and unclassifiable. A new city was necessary, and he went to Florence.
15
It was one of his rules never to waste time. He believed, indeed, that as a rational man he had trained himself to a point where it was impossible to waste any. The amount of time, therefore, that he spent in thinking about Chiara Ridolfi since his visit to the Teatro della Pergola in the spring of 1955 must, he thought, be in some way biologically useful.
In order to sum up his position in what seemed to him a controlled, logical and dispassionate manner, he made a written note. ‘The Ridolfi family. Information about them can of course be obtained without difficulty. They have two or perhaps three houses too many, the Ricordanza, the flat on via Limbo, no doubt a farm somewhere or other. These people should be avoided until they can be analysed correctly. I am thirty. By the time she is my age she will probably have deteriorated very little except for a slight shrinkage of the breast tissue. I shall then be forty and shall almost certainly have suffered hair loss, and (judging from my mother’s physique, not my father’s) shall have put on a certain amount of weight. When admiring a slender or meagre physique people talk about a good bone structure, by which they mean the skeleton. What is attractive about exhibiting one’s skeleton?
I doubt whether she is fitted to be a doctor’s wife, therefore she should be put out of mind.
Perhaps, however, not in this particular case.’
16
At this time Salvatore was working at the S. Agostino hospital, where he was a junior consultant. He might become head of the neurology department, possibly quite soon, and on merit only. Politics and business can be settled by influence, cooks and doctors can only be promoted on their skill.
His closest friend was one of his colleagues. Gentilini, an older man, grey-moustached, not promoted, not envious, close to him professionally, which must be the strongest bond of all except that of having been young together. Gentilini was from Borgoforte, where he had only to sit down for a drink in his own piazza, even now, to be surrounded with friends, calling from table to table, while others wheeled in on their Lambrettas like late returners to a hive. In Florence he was always, and expected always to remain, a little homesick, whereas Salvatore was determined that under no circumstances would he ever be dragged back to Mazzata.
In Florence they went to the Caffé Voltaire, in Via degli Alfani, and discussed the purpose of life. This, undeniably, was reproduction. All forms of life exhaust themselves in the effort to reproduce their kind, after which, if not happy, they must at least be considered satisfied. Salvatore felt, in the course of this conversation, that he was being got at. Practically any subject, since the evening on which he had met Chiara, could make him feel this. There was little point in asking Gentilini, who had four children to support, whether he considered himself ‘a form of life’. ‘Contentment is an unattainable ideal,’ Salvatore declared, emphasizing his points on the tablecloth. ‘It’s strange, to say the least, that the body is content when it loses itself in its own experience and forgets itself, while the mind is only satisfied while it is absolutely conscious of itself and its own workings.’
‘Why is that strange?’ Gentilini asked. ‘Things are in a bad way if the mind and the body demand the same things.’
‘But why “demand”?’ Salvatore cried. ‘What a choice of words, you speak of them as though they were bank managers.’ Gentilini looked with a certain amount of anxiety at his young colleague, and asked him whether at the moment he was finding existence hard. Salvatore, raising his voice to the night sky, replied that he wasn’t troubled or worried by what did exist, but by what didn’t. He was threatened at every turn by the cheap stereotypes of the popular imagination — let us say the ambitious young, or youngish, arrival from nowhere, hoping to make good connections, the innocent young girl of good family, and on top of that all the stale antitheses, dark, fair, excitable, cool, South, North, the whole boiling.
‘You don’t consider yourself excitable?’ asked Gentilini.
Salvatore replied, ‘I had my first lesson in total self-discipline when I was ten. You only like to think I’m excitable because I’m from the Campania.’ A new profession, he went on, should be created, to work in collaboration with medicine and experimental science, a profession devoted to clearing the human mind from preconceptions.
‘In the manner of Encyclopaedists,’ said Gentilini mildly.
‘Not at all, they were intellectuals, and the sole task of the intellectual is to make people despise what they used to enjoy. I don’t want more contempt in the world, I want none.’
The obsessed are blind to their obsessions. To them it seems no more than a coincidence that so many unrelated things seem to refer to their one and only concern. Or it may be that the senses have become preternaturally selective, and detect it everywhere. To give an example, at an international symposium on diseases of the lung, organized by the University of Florence, the first slide of the first lecture was a close-up of the so-called dwarfs of the Ricordanza. The lecturer, an American, had wanted to provide a catchy opening to his paper on the effects of a low concentration of oxygen in the blood. Perhaps he fancied that a murmur of appreciation and recognition might go round the hall. Pale with the desire to please, he bent his head towards the audience like a tame animal let in on sufferance so long as it behaves decently. Because of a defect in the amplification system, very little of what he said could be heard. Gentilini, whose interest in the subject was marginal, saw, when the interval came for questions and discussion, that his friend was about to get up from his seat. He took a slip of paper from Salvatore’s hand and saw written on it: Will Professor Swanston kindly inform us why, out of all the available representations of deformity in the history of art, he had to select this one? Has he any special interest in the Ridolfi family: I challenge him to tell us that. Gentilini tore the paper into a number of small pieces, and took Salvatore’s arm. ‘I am forty-five,’ he said. ‘Allow me to know what is relevant. I have torn up your question, let’s go.’ On the evening of the very same day, they heard one of a group of people, not at the next table, but close enough, saying: ‘Poor thing, she wants to please everybody, but she doesn’t know a thing, she doesn’t know how to come in out of the rain.’ There was no reason, absolutely none, to think they were talking about Chiara Ridolfi, but Gentilini was alarmed, with a weary feeling that this kind of thing might go on indefinitely, when his friend rose to his feet, apparently ready to do violence
. The waiter, however, like a partner in a dance, came forward from behind a pillar to add up their bill, retreating only when Salvatore sat down, or rather was replaced in his chair by Gentilini, who gripped the edge of his linen jacket.
‘My feelings are perfectly in control,’ Salvatore shouted. ‘I simply wanted to point out, speaking with respect . . .’
‘I’ve just realized what you remind me of,’ said Gentilini. ‘The old Ridolini comedies. Perhaps you’re too young to remember them.’
‘I remember them. We got plenty of old films in Mazzata.’ For a moment both of them sat in silence, thinking of themselves at the open-air ciné on a hot summer’s night.
‘But surely,’ said Salvatore, ‘if one overhears something said in public which is manifestly and ludicrously untrue, one has a duty to put it right immediately. You must grant me that. I appeal to your sense of responsibility.’
Gentilini wondered whether to order another Campari. They never had more than one on ordinary working days, and took it in turns to pay. He decided instead to turn the subject a little and reminded Salvatore of his project to reform mankind’s prejudices by scientific means.
‘How would you describe your own present state of mind?’ he asked.
‘I’m aware that I’m displaying unusual symptoms. I could describe them, I think, as a variant of hyperaesthesia. Professor Fregone once told me about the case of a man, I think a Russian, or perhaps Armenian, who could read what was printed on the back of a page by feeling the outlines of the letters with his fingertips, I mean through the thickness of the paper. Well, I am at the point when the faintest of sounds, sounds which would have no significance for you, affects me almost unbearably, and the lightest touch can be torture. Now, we’re agreed, of course, that this kind of pain is as genuine as pain with a recognizable physical origin.’
Innocence Page 6