‘As soon as I feel really ill and know that I’m done for, I’ll send you word, doctor. Then you must come at once. I live up in Firenze Nova, near the Jewish cemetery. You must come before the women in my house get hold of everything, and you must take away the block which I have reserved for you.’
Salvatore managed to pronounce the correct words of thanks, but he was nearly stifled with irritation.
On all these subjects of concern, as the summer’s heat mounted, he was rational, but threatened to become less so. That was because it was obvious that even chance acquaintances were in a conspiracy to drive him crazy. Take, for example, Andrea Nieve, the lawyer, a man he scarcely knew — this Nieve had, without warning, congratulated him on his interest in the flood warning system and had asked him whether he did not feel like devoting some of his abundant energy to politics. He seemed taken aback by the violence with which Salvatore replied that the subject nauseated him. They had met entirely by chance and stood there in the Piazza della Repubblica, raising their voices to be heard against the traffic.
‘Then, doctor, you agree with the philosophy of Gentile, you believe in the ethical state? You consider, that politics is nothing more than a mania?’
‘Much better if it were,’ shouted Salvatore. ‘If it was a mania, there would be an appropriate treatment.’
Nieve had another go. ‘A supposition. If the Italian Communist Party had been able to keep going in the spirit of Antonio Gramsci, if Togliatti had taken more of Gramsci’s advice than he did, I imagine that the Party might have appealed to you.’
‘What you’re saying doesn’t interest me in the least. Either you think I’m someone else, or more probably you haven’t been listening to me.’
‘But tell me, what other solution is there? Politics may be deplorable, but short of violence, we have no other remedy.’
‘Not a remedy, a drug,’ said Salvatore, three inches away from his ear. ‘By “physical dependence” we describe a condition where the body feels unable to tolerate existence without the drug. In my opinion, Nieve, you must be at that point. Worse still, you’re a pusher in the middle of a public street, you’re trying to involve me in your monstrous addiction.’
Nieve told him that he was putting things too strongly. He also reminded him that if the background noise level is high, it’s more practical to lower the voice than to raise it.
Evidently Nieve saw him as a lapsed Communist, possibly one who had resigned after the XXth Congress, but in any case engaged in a warm-hearted dialogue with the have-nots. In the same way, presumably, his colleagues were beginning to see him as a sentimental hothead, a relief to them, no doubt, they could dismiss him so much more easily. Everything that he had done since he had met Chiara had run counter to his own resolutions for the conduct of his life, which, in turn, had been specially designed to run counter to what was expected of him. The least important incidents troubled him most. What did he care about the widow and her defunct husband and her bizarre bit of statuary designed to immortalize her, at least from behind? Why should he give a fuck for old Jocz, or squander his time in writing to the Nazione? Why, going back a little, should he bother about his poor behaviour at the Gentilini home, when he had never in the least wanted to go there in the first place? These, however, were answers rather than questions, or at any rate not questions of the order of, When are the Ridolfi likely to come back to Florence?
Their goings and comings made no contribution to society as a whole and were therefore of no significance. They might be on the coast, they might be abroad. People of that sort were herded about, like cattle, according to the season by forces outside their control. He himself had volunteered to take on extra duties all through the summer and had no intention of going away at all.
21
On the 24th of June, the feast of St John, Gentilini, in an advanced state of exhaustion, was driving his battered Fiat, containing the entire family, back from Impruneta to the Fortezza del Belvedere, where they would get the best view of the fireworks in Piazzale Michelangelo. A point came, as it usually did, when all the children pleaded to get out and relieve themselves at the same moment, and he drew up where there was a bit of fallen stone wall to give them shadow. ‘No delay!’ called the Signora, as the boys began to compete with each other to see what patterns they could make by peeing into the dust. On the other side of the road, on higher ground, there was a house, set well back, and Gentilini recognized it as the Ridolfi place, the Ricordanza. He got out of the car, restraining his wife from following him, and looked through the locked iron gates. Above them he could read at least part of the inscription
Maggior dolore è ben la Ricordanza —
senti’ dir lor con sì alti sospiri —
o nell’ amaro inferno amena stanza?
The villa was one of those with a double staircase, probably added in the eighteenth century, mounting to the first floor where the main entrance now was. The ground floor was used for storage and was lit only by two round windows. This raising up of the front door made the whole house look unwelcoming and inaccessible. The lemon trees in their terracotta jars, each balanced on an empty one turned upside down, dispensed their bitter green smell: their dark green leaves were startlingly fresh against the blank, bleached, cracked and faded house. Luca, from across the road, was already pointing at the statues of the dwarfs and saying that at night they got down off the walls and came down into the city to hide in little girls’ bedrooms and stick their stone fingers up their bottoms. From the passenger seat the Signora tried to control him with threats. At the far corner of the surrounding wall there was a movement. A man, not a gardener, coming slowly towards the main gates as though he had been making a circuit of the whole building. Gentilini abruptly called the children back to the car. He would rather they didn’t see their father’s respected friend, Dr Rossi, hanging about in this senseless fashion.
22
By September Salvatore was able to tell himself that he was over and done with his obsession, quite free from it. Impossible to overestimate the therapeutic value of daily work, although an obsession is also hard work of a kind.
The wash of tourists and visitors was beginning to recede, leaving behind it the rich fertilizing silt of currency. The shops and small businesses which had faintheartedly shut in the August heat now reopened, those which had stayed open closed and the owners left for the country. Dense piles of hazel-nuts, with their leaves, appeared in the Central Market, and large mushrooms covering the counter with their wrinkled yellow dewlaps, just as earlier that morning they had covered the tree-trunks. Festoons of satchels and fountain pens hung in UPIM’s windows. At the last possible moment, the names of the books to be studied in the coming academic year were given out, and the parents went humbly to queue in the scholastic bookshops. These could be considered as beginnings of a kind. Indeed, the Amici della Musica had even announced the programme for the forthcoming autumn concerts. But autumn is, all the same, the appropriate season for storing what is harvested and putting away and forgetting what will never be of use.
Salvatore’s clinic — he preferred to call it an office, because it was really no more than that — was not so bad, after all, being on the third floor of the building and overlooking a plane tree growing in what was hardly a piazza, more like a widening in the Vicolo dei Semplici. On warm evenings, and they were still warm, he opened the windows and admitted the breeze which ruffled the plane’s topmost boughs while the rest of its fading greenery was trapped motionless in the street below.
Between 17.00 and 18.00 he saw private patients who could afford the going rate. After 18.00 came those whose fees were paid through industrial insurance, Previdenza, the Ministry of Health, and so on. The 18.00 to 19.00s were mostly from workshops and factories, obliged to make appointments after their working hours.
In the consulting-room all the patients had a good deal in common. All of them had a certain pride in their suffering, and were inclined to resent whatever authority ha
d diagnosed it as ‘of nervous origin’ and sent them on to Dr Rossi. The word ‘nervous’ seemed to belittle them, and yet if they could be convinced that it was correct they showed a perceptible relief since nerves, like shadows, aren’t real. All of them, no matter where they came from or why they came, were quite certain, at least before diagnosis and sometimes after it, that they knew better than any so-called professional how to cure themselves. Salvatore couldn’t recall this phenomenon, or not anyway to such an extent, during either his childhood or his years of training. Nerves (the 1700 to 1800 knew) needed nothing more than total rest and relaxation and unfailing sympathy. Some of them had been reliably informed that part of the nerve, or one that joined up to it, could be surgically removed without pain and the operation would work wonders. The craftsmen and small shopkeepers, if they were elderly, told him that there would be no harm, now that the season was over, in their being sent to take the waters in some spa or other. If they were young, they wanted antibiotics. The country people also demanded antibiotics, but with a good dose of aconite to mix them with, no rubbish. Sometimes they asked to be blistered.
Only after he had listened to the self-healers, with a careful eye on the time, did Salvatore assert the serene will-power, of which he was incapable in his personal affairs, but which he knew was his greatest professional gift. But as soon as he began to do this and its effect was noticeable he was conscious of being the bland prototype of the ‘beloved doctor’, the trusted giver of advice and doer of good, so that he had to struggle, as though with a demon, with the impulse to self-contradiction. Fortunately the patients very often played into his hands with the strangely comforting words, ‘doctors don’t know everything’. But they would not have said this, at the very moment when Dr Rossi was making his examination, if they had believed it was true.
At just past seven o’clock on the 20th September a patient was exhibiting, for the second time, his large coarse-skinned middle-aged durable hand. The ball of his left thumb was a little wasted away, as though it had shrunk a size or two. Salvatore asked him if he felt any pain.
‘No, it doesn’t hurt, and I can tell you what it’s due to, it’s because I’ve changed my work, I don’t use my hands in the same way that I used to.’
‘You came from the country?’
‘Yes, from Mercatale.’
‘Where do you work now?’
‘At Mobili Spic.’
‘What’s your job?’
‘I am in the warehouse. We pack the bits of furniture into cardboard boxes, then with each box there’s an instruction card that tells you how to put it all together again. You have to be sure to put in the right card.’
‘Do you use your right hand more than your left?’
‘Of course.’
The receptionist looked in from her cupboard-like outer room to ask if she could go home. Salvatore nodded. He told the patient that without fail he must come back in a month’s time.’
‘But it’s nothing much?’
Salvatore was silent for a minute, writing out the appointment card.
‘I can’t say yet whether it’s nothing much.’
‘They gave me some liniment to rub in.’
‘Who did?’
‘The doctor at Spic. I don’t know why he sent me here.’
Salvatore looked again at the case notes. ‘Yes, well.’
‘Why has it got to be a month before you can tell me anything?’
‘You probably think that I’m a slow worker. I expect I am. But I have to see how things go. You have my word that I will tell you as soon as I can.’
The doctor’s honesty made its effect. The atmosphere in the consulting room was as tranquil as it might be in a field, under the open sky.
‘Well, doctor, my thumb may get that much weaker, but at a pinch I can manage without using it . . . after all, if it’s the nerves, it can’t be anything much.’
‘I can’t say as yet whether it isn’t anything much,’ Salvatore repeated. ‘But I can tell you that it won’t help to worry about it.’
‘And I’m to tell my wife to rub in the liniment?’
‘Yes, let her do that.’
Salvatore showed the patient out himself, and watched him walk with a heavy, even tread up the Vicolo dei Semplice. It was dusk, raining a little, a string of lights shone hazily from the branches of the plane tree. During the day someone had pasted a fly-poster to its trunk, advertising a racing pool. Occhi alla pista, millione in vista. The poster gleamed red and white against the patched shadows of the gently moving tree.
He went back upstairs, made up the day’s notes and then shook himself like an animal freed from its cage, putting out of his mind the probable future of the patient from Mobili Spic. While he was looking round the receptionist’s room to see that the files weren’t left out as a hint that she had been kept till the last minute, the bell rang once again. A boy of fifteen in the street below had got off his bicycle and pounded up the stairs in one continuous movement, probably to conform with his own idea of himself as an athlete.
‘Signor dottore!’
‘I’m leaving.’
‘The account for your last quarter’s electricity.’
He produced a bill written in violet ink, with its duplicate, for 20,721 lira. Salvatore felt obliged to say something, if only to calm him down.
‘You’re not from Florence, are you? Where does your family come from?’
‘Borgoforte, dottore.’
‘I have a friend who comes from there, a colleague, Dr Gentilini. Do you know that name?’
The boy looked as though he was about to burst into tears. ‘Dottore, there are so many names.’ It was important for him to please, his livelihood depended on his commission for collecting payment on the spot. Salvatore went back into his own office and took a handful of notes out of the petty cash. At the sight of ready money the boy, trembling with excitement, took out a biro and struck the last three figures off the bill. ‘Your concession, dottore.’ Perhaps, Salvatore thought, I’m witnessing the first stage of a promising business career.
It was the end of his day, although he sometimes went back to the hospital to check that everything had been done according to instructions. As he stood outside his office door, trying to decide whether to go to the hospital or not, dangling his keys, ready to lock up and be done with it, Chiara came up the stairs. She was pale and shining, untidy in a frightful tweed coat, eager, unexpected, totally inappropriate to his state of mind, to the time of the evening, to everything imaginable.
‘The clinic is shut,’ he said coldly.
‘I know it is. It’s written up outside — 17.00 to 19.00. I’ve been waiting until it was seven.’
‘You’ve been hanging about outside, then.’
‘No, I went to Benediction in that church across the way and afterwards I sat there until it was seven by my watch.’
‘But in that case you’re late,’ Salvatore said furiously. ‘It’s ten minutes past. You could have come ten minutes earlier. You have wasted ten minutes.’
‘That was what I was thinking,’ said Chiara, but he was not appeased.
‘Why did you come here anyway? These are my consulting rooms. You have no right here, you’re not one of my patients.’
‘But this is the only address you’ve got in the book.’
‘Of course it is. I live in a furnished room and eat in a café or at the hospital. How many addresses do you expect me to have? Listen, I am Dr Rossi, a neurologist, quite successful, thought to be getting on quite well, but of course it’s not at all difficult to destroy my self-possession and upset my balance and disconcert me by turning up suddenly without warning. If that was what you intended, I congratulate you.’
Chiara refused to lose confidence. ‘You remember me, don’t you?’
‘Yes, we met for a few moments at the Teatro della Pergola. It was raining then, and now it looks like a fine evening. How the seasons pass. You could have paid this visit at any time during the past f
ive months.’
They were still confronting each other on the stairway. The floor below was silent, but in the basement a hand printing-press was cranking away as it did every evening after working hours.
‘Oh, but I couldn’t,’ Chiara said. ‘I’ve been in England, then I had to go to Scotland, I’ve only just got back, and so I thought I ought to come and see you at once.’
‘Whatever for? Whatever made you think that you ought to come and see me at once?’
Whatever happened he was going to hold out against asking her back into the building. He wouldn’t open up for her and allow her to invade his particular space, quietly ordered and settled down for the next day’s work.
Innocence Page 8