‘Did you hear that?’ she whispers.
I nod. I haven’t time to worry about the cat lady. I go over to the door and throw it open. Eleonora stands behind me.
‘Eleonora, please!’ I say, rather tactlessly.
She murmurs something and steps backwards. I ring the bell even though my hands are shaking more than usual. If this business doesn’t end this evening, I swear I’m going to the police.
Emma doesn’t reply. I should hurry inside, but I stay in the doorway. Something holds me back, and it isn’t Signora Vitagliano, who is almost pushing me in with her eyes. I’m scared, and it’s the real fear that you only feel a few times in your life, which paralyses your muscles and your thoughts. The problem is that at my age you can’t afford to pay it too much heed, or you end up in an armchair studying the world from a distance, like Marino. So I push open the door and slip into the house.
The hallway is in darkness, the only light coming from a room at the end on the right. I want to run to it to check that Emma is all right, but my legs won’t carry me, my head is spinning and my cataracts won’t let me defeat the darkness. Then I calmly confront the corridor, my uncertain hands preceding my footsteps and opening up a path among the furniture.
Emma isn’t in the kitchen. There are broken plates and glasses, an upturned chair, three open drawers. Then I notice red stains on the floor. Blood. The drops form a trail like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs, showing me the way.
‘Emma,’ I whisper.
She doesn’t reply.
God, I pray, let her be well. Let me die without witnessing yet another tragedy. I turn on the light in the corridor.
The trail of blood leads me to the bathroom. The towels are on the floor, like the soap dish, the toothbrush mug and the shower curtain. The drops have turned into prints left by bare feet.
I need a pee.
The cat lady’s voice reaches me from the landing, but I can’t make out her words. I feel as if I’m in a cotton-wool world, as if I’ve turned back into a foetus surrounded by amniotic fluid.
‘Please,’ I hear myself whispering, ‘help me, as you’ve always done!’
But Caterina is far away, like the voice of Signora Vitagliano, like my children, like Rossana and Marino. They are far away from me and from everything that’s happening here. The stench of shit can’t reach them where they are.
Outside the bathroom there’s an overturned washstand, and water and shards of glass on the floor. A little further on, a goldfish wiggles and gasps. If I could, my friend, I would run and save you. I would put you in the basin and turn on the tap. No one should be denied their oxygen. I understand you – you have no idea how well I do – but I can’t help you, not now.
I’m sorry.
I turn around and step into the room opposite, the bedroom. The wardrobe doors are open, and there are some clothes scattered on the floor. On the mattress a half-full suitcase; at my feet a bloodstained shoe. My legs are about to give, and if they did I would slump on to the bed and not notice a hand protruding from behind it.
I don’t know how I do it, but in a flash I’m kneeling beside Emma. Her eyes are open and she is panting. Blood is coming from her mouth, her face is swollen, one arm beneath her pelvis is in an unnatural position and a big pool of blood is spreading beneath the nape of her neck. All around her lie fragments of the wall mirror, giving a clear vision of the exact point where her head met the glass. Some streams of blood run thickly down the walls and trickle on to the floor, a few inches away from what remains of Emma.
You think you’ve seen everything in almost eighty years of life. You think you’re prepared for every eventuality and that you can intervene with your experience, and instead you realize that you don’t know anything – that the illnesses, the regrets and the traumas that have marked you didn’t strengthen you in any way. You never learn how to confront grief – you go on living and that’s that. As I am doing, without even being aware of it.
I take her hand and study her eyes.
She wants to speak, but she can’t.
I look up. Eleonora is standing in the doorway, watching the scene with her mouth wide.
‘Call the emergency services,’ I tell her.
She doesn’t move.
‘Did you hear what I said?’ I shout.
The cat lady nods and disappears from view.
‘The ambulance is on its way, don’t worry. You’ll see, a few days and you’ll be right as rain.’
There’s a towel on the bed. I pick it up and place it under her head, trying to stop the haemorrhage. I don’t know the right thing to do, but I act out of instinct; I have no time to reflect. I force myself to smile at her and not to look at the pool of blood that is spreading as far as the eye can see. Except that, as I have said, I’m not very good at pretending any more, and she must notice that, because she stares at me with clear eyes that seem to be begging me not to abandon her.
I know that look: it’s the same as the one with which Caterina used to leave me speechless. So I struggle to open my mouth, even if I don’t know what I’m saying. Life is giving me a second chance. It doesn’t happen often.
‘Don’t think about anything. We’re going to the hospital now. They will make you better, and a new journey will begin. I swear you will have what you deserve, even if it’s the last thing that this foolish old man ever does!’
This time she smiles and gently clutches my hand. Her clotted blood makes our grip even firmer.
The cat lady appears in the doorway again and gives us a pitiful look. I nod and turn back towards Emma. I think the light is fading from her eyes.
‘Do you know what I think, in fact? Once you’ve recovered, we’ll take a little trip. I haven’t moved for years. If you’re well, of course. I understand that an old man’s company isn’t your highest aspiration, but you’re going to have to get used to it, because I’m not going to let you go that easily!’
She smiles again. At least, it seems to me that she does. Or so I like to think. In fact, her grip is starting to weaken, and the towel is red and drenched through. I feel the need to cry and go to the bathroom. Another few minutes and I’m going to disgrace myself. So I go on chatting, waiting for the ambulance to come.
‘But, I warn you, I’m not a great travelling companion. I’m lazy, I can’t take a picture because my hands shake, my guts play up every now and again, and I can sometimes be cranky. But, you know, you’ve got to be patient with old people.’
This time I’m the only one smiling at my words. Signora Vitagliano has summoned the courage to step inside the room and look at us as if we were two ghosts. Emma is pale and it looks to me as if she’s having a cold sweat. She’s shivering. I take the sheet off the bed and cover her up, then approach her ear, a few inches from the dark pool that is inexorably continuing on its journey towards the skirting board. The blood scares us. Our bodies scare us – we find them dark and unknown, like space – and we try not to give too much weight to either, so as not to be crushed by them.
‘You want to know a funny thing? A secret I’ve never told anyone?’ I whisper. ‘That Emma I was telling you about, the woman I was hopelessly in love with…’
Emma moves her pupils. So she is listening to what I’m saying.
‘She was younger than you when I met her, and I never managed to win her. Don’t look at me like that. I was married, but I’ve never told you I was a good man.’
The cat woman turns her head slightly to try and hear my words, but she’s too deaf to pick up anything.
‘However…I haven’t told you the worst thing.’
I wait a few seconds. I thought I was going to take this secret with me to the grave, and instead I find myself confessing it to a girl I’ve only just met.
‘Emma is my wife’s sister…’
This time I’m sure she heard me. Her hand, however lightly, clenches around mine. Perhaps if she could Emma would call me a bastard; women show a lot of solidarity in these matters. That�
��s why I’ve never talked about it to anyone, not even Rossana. Perhaps that’s why I decided to do it now, to the only person who can’t reply.
‘In any case…’ I try to go on, but at that moment two orderlies come into the room and shove me brusquely away from her.
I sit on the floor, watching Emma being helped by some individuals who move in unison and seem to know what they’re doing. They don’t talk to each other. One of them gets to work; the other checks her heartbeat, then her pupils. ‘No, don’t look at those eyes,’ I want to shout. ‘They’re dark right now, but they’ll come on again in a second. Please don’t notice that Emma is dying.’
I try to get up, but I’m immediately forced to rest against the bed. The world is spinning around me. The two orderlies are still getting to grips with Emma; they take her arm from under her pelvis and rotate it. I decide that’s too much. I leave the room and the flat and find myself on the landing, where the tenants have gathered in the meantime.
I hold up my hand to stop Marino, who is coming towards me, and walk over to the landing window, open it and throw up. A gust of fresh air strikes my face, and it’s only then that I feel I can breathe again. A few feet down below, the light of a police car colours the faces of the few people standing down there looking up. I come back inside.
Emma is on a stretcher with her eyes closed. I don’t ask any questions – I don’t want to hear the answers.
Two policemen arrive, look around the place and then call for backup. One of the two of them stares at me. I think he might want to come over to me, but luckily the doctors distract his attention with a question.
‘Are you coming with us?’ they say, turning to me.
I nod; the police will have to wait. But they know it can’t have been me – an old man hasn’t the strength to do something so terrible. Insanity should wait for the third age to manifest itself – it would do a lot less damage.
I follow the stretcher. Emma isn’t conscious any more.
Outside the bedroom my eye falls on the goldfish. It isn’t wriggling any more; its suffering is over. Even in the life of a poor fish, luck counts for something – it happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. If it had ended up in my flat, right now it would be gliding calmly around in its bowl, at worst cursing the filthy conditions in which it was forced to spend its life.
No one is able to choose where their glass bowl will be placed – whether it is in the quiet kitchen of an old pensioner or on the side table in a house where a tragedy is about to be played out. It is chance, they say, that decides. And sometimes it can decree that our world will shatter into a thousand pieces and all we can do is gasp in the hope that some pious soul will pass by and pick us up.
The problem is that, in almost every case, the wait is longer than the death struggle.
Chapter Twenty-six
‘The Fifth of May’ from Memory
According to the clock it’s twenty-one minutes past one. Last time I looked up the hands showed eighteen minutes past. Three minutes, and yet to me it has seemed like an eternity. The passageway is empty, my only company the hum of the coffee machine at the end of the corridor and the smell of alcohol floating in the air. She is inside – they’ve been operating on her for about two hours. Before closing the door in my face, a doctor took me aside and told me to expect the worst. I didn’t have the strength to reply, and yet I should have done; I should have grabbed the doctor by the shirt and thrown him against the wall before shouting, ‘Go away and save that girl’s life. And don’t try to tell me what to expect and what not!’
No one should take the trouble to tell other people what they should not expect from life. I expect Emma to come out with her eyes open; I expect her to look at me and smile, and then let me take her hand. I expect the child inside her to be able to emerge into this crazy world, and for that shitbag to be caught and thrown in a cell. I expect life not to make me witness another tragedy, perhaps the worst of all. I expect too many things already for a man I don’t even know to dare to give me advice on what to expect.
I look at the blood-drenched cuff of my shirt, then turn back to the clock. How long is it going to take? How long do you need to save a girl’s life? In whose hands does the responsibility lie? Who knows what those hands have been doing during the day. They will have gripped other hands, forks, napkins, maybe cigarettes, a pen, a steering wheel, a bar of soap, a book, a child’s fingers, a scalpel.
Emma’s parents should be out here, or some relative, at least some distant uncle, but I’m alone, as she was behind that door. We try to surround ourselves with people in the illusion that we will feel less exposed, but the truth is that you go into the operating theatre on your own. Just us and our bodies. Nothing more.
One thirty-one.
They say that when you get old you become selfish. I always have been, and yet now here I am, waiting for news of a woman I’ve only recently met, and who I thought I could help. Unfortunately life has taught me that no one can help anyone. We save ourselves on our own, if we want to.
I get up and walk towards the coffee machine. I shouldn’t drink it, not at this time of night and at my age, but there are so many things that I shouldn’t do – coffee isn’t the first and it won’t be the last. I down it in one gulp and go outside to smoke a cigarette. There are a few orderlies outside, talking in turn beside an ambulance. Hospitals are strange places, where joy is restrained so as not to cause too much annoyance to grief. On the floor above there is a happy girl with an infant on her breast, and in the operating theatre a woman of the same age fighting to keep hold of life. I take three puffs and go back to my seat. Sometimes one should switch one’s brain off – another of those things we have no control over.
I hear footsteps. I look up and meet the distracted eye of a passing doctor. It’s only when he’s gone by that I realize he was the doctor who asked us lots of questions that evening. Luckily for him, he walks straight on and doesn’t seem to recognize me, otherwise I would have had to explain what happened, and now one would find oneself having to sidestep a whole wagonload of regret. He, like me, could have avoided all that.
I get up again and go to the toilet. The mirror reflects my gaunt face, my glasses, my unkempt beard and Emma’s blood all over me. After my heart attack the doctor told me I needed to take medicine, stop drinking, stop smoking, get regular sleep and avoid stress. In the course of three years I can confess that I violated four rules out of five, and only taking the medication stopped me from getting the full house. I would like to have that doctor in front of me now to ask him how he would abolish stress, if he knows a trick to manage that one.
For human beings anxiety is a physiological state; to get rid of it you would need to eliminate consciousness, as in the minds of babies and animals. I have a theory of my own about that. I maintain that things worked perfectly well until the creation of the monkey, after which something clogged the mechanism and out came man, a creature too intelligent for the tasks assigned to him. Intelligence is a precious quality. For us, however, it serves hardly any purpose except to invent stranger and stranger things that give us the illusion of being perfect. It doesn’t help us understand why we are here; it doesn’t make us less exposed than other creatures. It doesn’t supply answers, but rather creates new questions. And too many questions increase unhappiness. I don’t know if there are any living creatures apart from man who take their own lives, but if there are we’re still the only ones who do it because we’re weary of life. Why? Because whoever moulded us got the mixture of ingredients wrong, that’s why.
But while we’re on the subject of reckless theories, let’s get back to doctors. I have to be honest, as a group they get on my nerves a bit. Not all of them, obviously, but most of them are walking on air most of the time. Saving a human life may give you a bit of a high, that much is true, but each of us should be able to bear in mind one small but crucial concept: we are moving around on a little ball that’s rotating around a small yellow star like m
any others, in a tiny solar system in a peripheral zone of a little cigarette-shaped galaxy that moves majestically slowly. And there are still some people who waste their time feeling more important than the ants beside them.
I’m going mad – I wasn’t made for waiting. If I spend too long staring at a wall, winged dragons start appearing, and two-headed harpies that feast on my unease in order to grow and leave the forced hibernation in which I normally keep them.
I need a beer.
It’s damp outside and the streets are deserted. Luckily there’s a bar still open just opposite the hospital; behind the bar there’s a woman in her sixties, her hair dyed some months ago and held up with a hairband, a prominent belly and a grim expression on her face. I ask her for a beer. There, she’s weighing me up: a decrepit old man having a lonely Peroni at two o’clock in the morning. In a squalid bar, I would add. Don’t judge me, fat ugly woman who knows nothing about me. What, do you want me to judge your flabby arm with its tribal tattoo? It’s a pathetic spectacle, but it’s your own business – there must have been some reason why you decided to get a tattoo without thinking that your forearm would end up looking like a leg of pork.
I pay and leave. Vesuvius is still in front of me, with those thousands of lights climbing almost to the top. They say that in Naples wherever you turn you see the sea. In fact, I think the volcano is a more imposing presence. It’s there wherever you happen to look. It’s the two humps we look for when we’re trying to find our way home. It’s the energy of Vesuvius which, like lava, wedges itself among the buildings and sets the alleyways alight.
I would happily stay here to enjoy the city at night, slumbering placidly and contentedly, but I don’t dare: I know that at first light the creature will awaken, hungry again. So I come back and sit back down on my chair.
The Temptation to Be Happy Page 18