‘The egg-white? …’
‘No: I’m not paying. I’m not paying! Enough of this paying.’ He was raving mad.
When he went to the Cemetery, he had to pass the gate to Villa Augustoni, which was fully paid up with the Nistitúo and fully observed not only all the laws and legal decrees, and auxiliary regulations, but also the simple indications and recommendations that the alcalde blew from time to time into those zephyrous villas, whichever day, of spring or autumn, whenever the most suitable occasion arose. And the cobbled entranceway in front of the Augustoni gates ‒ where you could read ‘Salve Hospes’ in white on grey cobbles ‒ was littered with pink paper slips, like tram tickets. They were confirmation notes which the Nistitúo, via the hand of the patrolman, stuck each night, one per night, on to a spike low down on the gate: that alternated with long bars, topped by a gilded lance. And a breeze, towards dawn, from the pines, from the lime trees, quickly and quietly scattered them. ‘… I don’t believe in bits of paper …’
‘… But you’d believe in a good Browning …’
‘Not even that. Besides, two days ago I heard Peppa telling Mother a great long yarn … the sort that only she can tell, in a whisper … some kind of miracle … at the hospital at Pastrufazio … but I didn’t understand the end … I must admit … And anyway, since he’s disabled, how can he be the patrolman? …’
‘Disabled? …’ The good doctor’s eyes had suddenly opened wide. ‘But he recovered! quite some time ago! … in better health than you! … and me …’ His ears had pricked up, one might say, with a sudden spring of joy, like a young horse at the crack of the whip. A tank under pressure, with a small tap on its belly which as soon as you open it … whiish! … spurts out such a hiss that you can’t close it even with a spanner.
A joy, a pride: that brought him to life: being the best-informed ‘personality’ in Lukones or maybe, perhaps, let’s see, in the whole region. From Prado to Iglesia, to Ranchito, to Vaqueiras. Having traced back to the sources: to where it all started; the registry clerks, the officials. Allowing a large drop of palabra oficial to fall, plop, all of a sudden, out of the blue, on the thirsty curiosity of his interlocutor. He had brought the discussion around to this theme, and right to this very point, who knows!, to gain a moment of prestige and dignity, for ten minutes of self-importance, that would have apprised Marquis Gonzalo Pirobutirro d’Eltino … discreetly … of the question of the day … Oh! not of common gossip … but of actual facts in possession of the authorities, communicated to him by the authorities … to him … to him alone … in strictest confidence …
Had it not been for this man’s mood swings, the conversation might already have taken place, in the most dignified fashion, between professor and marquis … Some people, in truth, addressed him as professor rather than doctor.
At that moment, though, there was the sound of stones shooting from beneath a rubber tyre, almost like curding sparks: a bicycle: from the road up from the lakes. Someone dismounted, an official: and the gate gave its rapid screech, at the hinges, all rust. The man in uniform came in, his legs slightly bowed in his leggings; a horseman, one might have thought; his shiny leather belt, the strip of his bandolier and his gun holster had brass buckles that seemed to be polished with ‘Sidol’.
His two small eyes flashed, like a blade. ‘I was looking for the Señora,’ he said; with two fingers, calmly, at the peak of his cap. But he then removed the cap, and his scalp was round and perfectly bald, though with unexpected modulations of colour, from his tanned lower brow to the whiteness of his crown.
‘What do you want?’ said the son.
‘It was about the Nistitúo. She said that this year she’d be thinking about it too, the Señora … like the señori Augustoni, like Señora Brugnòla, behind here …’: and he pointed with his thumb. ‘I came past Wednesday before last … but she said to come back.’
‘It’s our guardian angel,’ the doctor said affably, as if to introduce him.
‘Besides … even Señor Alcalde … has advised her to take steps in time … not to forget …’
‘It’s not compulsory,’ said the son.
‘… As a matter of fact … the Law of 12 February …’
‘I don’t intend to concern myself with such business …’
‘For the Province, in any event, there’s Order N° 5888, of His Excellency the Governor … dated 22 July 1932 …’
‘And for those who haven’t joined? … I want to remain free.’
‘But the villa is registered in the name of the Señora … Pirobutirro d’Eltino … That, at least, is what the records say …’ (A hint of irony, in his voice.)
‘… What records?’
‘… The records at the tax office … And the Señora also spoke to me this spring … That this year she wanted to sign up.’ There was a firm, arrogant, glint in his eyes, beneath a first veil of deference, almost of bonhomie …
‘My mother is not here,’ said Don Gonzalo, tired, looking at his central buckle.
The man in the leather caparison turned to look at the windows and then, below, at the doorway and at the corner of the terrace, as if to be sure.
He really was a brute.
At this new insolence, Don Gonzalo’s mind was suddenly rekindled with his favourite and secret idea of the noose. His mouth gave nothing away. The ingredients of anger, in that soul, were severity and worthlessness. The bearer of Governor’s Order N° 5888 climbed back two steps (he stopped on the third), replaced his cap, straightened it on his head with both hands, and said, ‘All right … I’ll return when your mother’s here,’ but in a tone that seemed, to Señor Don Gonzalo, like a challenge, or even a taunt. So that he continued pondering for another minute or two, jaws clenched, on the breaking strength of the noose and on the various methods for hanging, lingering over the most comforting details. Indeed, he allowed the noose to break eight or nine times, before functioning as it should: then, finally, he made it hold.
But the intended villain for the Great Gibbet jumped on his bike and headed straight down towards Lukones, with tyres tweaked by the stones, that shot from beneath the wheels, like slingshots awoken in the ground.
The doctor coughed slightly: he had a fairly persistent irritation in his throat, as well as in his nose: then a monosyllable, a more successfully respiratory gutturation: such that he decided to lead the patient back to the idea of a miracle, or rather to the scientific interpretation of the supposed miracle. They went out of the gate. Don Gonzalo now looked at the bend in the lane, towards El Pinto, far away, from where he was expecting to see his mother’s black parasol reappear, accompanied, who knows, by Pina, or by Peppa. Despite this, he seemed ready to follow the wishes of his informer with sufficient seriousness and dignity: he seemed, indeed, to be regaining his composure, and the doctor was extremely pleased: this was what mattered to him more than anything else. He said: ‘But mother’s not back! … Surely she won’t spend the whole day at the Cemetery!’ The doctor had certain information not for sale, about which he was proud, given to him by Colonel Di Pascuale: to him alone, two days earlier, when he had last stocked up with peas. Bound by the strictest confidence.
It was these very facts that he began, little by little, to let drip, like drops of henbane, into the ear of the patient, with his characteristic mumble and eyelids towards the ground, combined with a certain detachment from the event, with a subterranean magnificence, like the secretary of the Secret Records Office. With a view to adjusting, authoritatively fine-tuning the whole story.
In the son’s mind, all invectives, hints of invective, frenzies, and general resurgences of anger abated: against public tax collectors or beneficiaries of public stipends, against various bipeds, male or female, who were guilty of being baptized with the name of the husband of the Virgin Mary. They were given peace from the imaginative lashing of the persecutor, as they may have had, after the puchero, at the peak hour of the day.
A tardy hen, one of those that lay their eggs
at noon, broke the silence: from the vastness of which the warm, baroque moan gurgled forth (with an urgency precipitating towards satisfaction), declaimed in euphoria and arrant obstinacy: here a cocko, here a cocko – here a cocko – do. On the ‘Salve Hospes’ at Villa Augustoni, the lizard, for sure, lay drowsily in the sun: more Augustan than that! And the dragonfly crossed back and forth as it fancied over every border. Yet the Hospes, for those mighty savers of the cent, had yet to be born. Nor, once brought into the world, would he find it easy to cross the threshold, cocko hospes, cocko·hospes, cocko do host do!, of that gateway eternally shut in the maniple of lances, in that cobbled and deserted entrance way, strewn with pink paper petals of Order N° 5888.
At the doctor’s advice, Gonzalo yielded. ‘So as not to sleep …’ Every pretext is valid, in the villa! in the villa!, to the opiated slaves of boredom. Special information! The story of the cure had gone like this.
At the Central Military Hospital in Pastrufazio, before the Second Review Board, Palumbo had related the facts already repeatedly documented by the district commissions: highlighting with a dramatic note of truth, absolutely consistent with the medical report, the terrible episodes of ‘bombardment’, culminating (for him) in the appalling explosion that had completely deafened him. This supreme tribunal, consisting of twenty-two medical superiors, assisted by a lawyer, by a secretary, by an artillery lieutenant-colonel (of the Third Siege Train), acting as adviser, and presided over by Major General Dr Huberto Ramirez y Fonseca, could find no fault in the evidence that Palumbo had presented, judging as a result that his situation of disablement was not open to challenge by the Revenue Commissioner. But Colonel Dr Di Pascuale – (descended from a family of Italian origin which had immigrated to Maradagàl towards the end of the previous century) – had a certain suspicion. ‘That ’un wants t’ fool me,’ the valiant fn3 and zealous official had stated in the dialect of his forebears.
And yet, how do you prove that a war-deaf soldier isn’t deaf? that he can hear perfectly well out of both ears? Reflecting for just an instant, one can see immediately – a moment’s thought is quite enough – that the problem is far from simple. He can’t hear. Why! Because the offending grenade exploded right by him, on Hill 131. So that he can’t hear. And, if he can’t hear, there’s no point you saying: ‘no, of course he can hear.’ How do you prove it? He’ll throw Hill 131 in your face. It’s Hill 131 that catches you out. Were you at Hill 131? Well?
Colonel Di Pascuale pondered hard, from his seat down at the far end of the table: then, having asked permission to speak, he stood up: and spoke briefly, asking for an adjournment: which after some argument was approved by the Revenue Commissioner himself. The argument had the sole effect, you might say, of aggravating Di Pascuale: exacerbating his threefold obstinacy as officer, doctor, and of Italian descent. Also because the most importunate opposition came from a young stripling of a doctor, though already a major, who presumed to know more than him. More than him? Ha! As soon as he was in his office, in his armchair, and felt his aggravation absorbed by Señora Rosa’s cushion, he said: ‘’old on!’; with two eyes!, stretching his hand towards Palumbo; who wasn’t there, of course. A clerk looked up from his desk: ‘At your command, Colonel!’
‘Whatch a’ wanna’ cumman’, whatch a’ wanna’ cumman’ … jus’ wait.’ He had the strong, level-headed mind of a Samnite, and his lower lip protruded half a centimetre below his upper lip: as though he were mulling over his own stubborn resistance, a ‘¡Aquí estamos!’, in the supreme protection of the Maradagalese revenue.
Palumbo had ‘applied’ to be discharged from the hospital, at least temporarily; he had asked for thirty or forty days at least; since he had to go home: and sort out various interests that the war had left unresolved, or so he claimed: and he had renewed the application a few days before, alleging the person he was supposed to be marrying couldn’t wait indefinitely … The doctors, in fact, believed that he had some urgent business to sort out, as was frequent at that time, especially among the rural classes, after the defeat of Parapagàl. In reality, it was a widow, with fairly solid roots, tableware, bedding, a farmhouse very spick and span; who, therefore, had no shortage of suitors. And the widow, in short, had sent word that he couldn’t keep her waiting like that: he had to decide: either to take her, or leave her. The war was now over. If he’d become deaf, she’d even take him deaf, but just so long as he made his mind up. Otherwise she’d find someone else. He, of course, was on tenterhooks, given the direction in which events were moving: for this was a great opportunity and it would have been a shame to see it slip away, like that, through the petty quibbling of Colonel Di Pascuale. But Di Pascuale refused to listen: and two days after the Board hearing he signed the order for ‘special medical observation’. ‘God damn him to hell!’ Palumbo muttered through his teeth. Two months of observation!
They seemed endless. But he became hardened to it. He wasn’t going to fall for any trick, him!, through any insincerity. Not the sudden news, given to him personally by the colonel, of the death of his Uncle Manganones, who had named him as his heir. According to the telegram. (Heir to a silver chain, several chairs, and a stuffed owl: as it later turned out.) Not the sudden shot of a blank pistol, which they fired in the office, behind his back, unexpectedly, one Sunday, during a frightening storm. Not the sight of a fifty note, on the table, or a newly minted pájaro, telling him mournfully: ‘It’s a gift from the women of the Visiting Committee take it, go on!’
Not the employment of a woman less grubby than usual, who called him, in a whisper, along the horse-chestnut avenue of the Fortaleza, one evening or other, when he didn’t have a cent in his pocket, though plenty of silver in his veins, ‘Hallo, darling, pretty darling boy, etc. etc.: but from you I don’t want nothing, ’cos I like you: I just want a bit ’v love, etc. etc.’ How that girl’s South American eyes opened wide, in the stupendous evening! They seemed like zephyrs in the night. And came for free. But, being deaf, he didn’t fall for it.
The weeks wasted away slowly, cruelly; Palumbo believed by now that he’d been forgotten at the Central Hospital in Pastrufazio through procedural delays, military bureaucracy. Tattered and grease-stained novels circulated the wards, losing a few more pages from time to time, used by indigent patients to cope with the improvisations of their bodily ailments. Accumulating more layers of grease, from one reader to the next; as well as hairs, wax, and dandruff.
Sometimes, his companions summarized the curious plot for him.
In the ward, in the yard, he told more or less everyone about his uncle, and about Hill 131, whether they wanted it or not, shouting, as deaf people do, to anyone who ‘fell for it’. So that everyone knew him by then: ‘Hello, 131!’, they shouted, though he didn’t hear them, poor thing. ‘Bye, 131! Say hello to your uncle! … and see you again on civvy street! … see you when you’ve got your pension! … Long live military service!’ Not a single trick had worked. In the end he became lethargic, as though resigned, in a kind of moral torpor: and also the widow, who, after all, had been in such a hurry … it has to be said that she was something of a tart. Better off without her, that one! ‘After all’, he tried to convince himself, ‘it’s really not so bad here, at the Central!’ But then he’d get worked up again about the wedding, the linen, the farmhouse: about sick leave, thirty days, plus four days’ travel, at least! Then he had a letter written to the widow that she had to be patient, that the last examination, the last ordeal, was very close: that the pension was certain, not even General Ramírez could do him out of it now. Sixth grade, of the fifth category. And the widow, reading those letters with a four-leafed clover inside, sob, sob!, wasn’t entirely insensitive to that cry of pain: a ‘State pension’ was always a State pension: even if it were fifth, or perhaps ninth.
And so the days went by, one after the other, maturing like insipid pears: the odd cigarette, the odd job from the duty quartermaster, to carry twenty kilos of paperwork from one floor to another, the odd brass
knob to polish, knobs on the metal doors of the verandas, with pumice, leaving them all brightly polished and scratched. Every other Friday, the peacock-coloured arrival of the ladies from the Visiting Committee of Saint John (Nepomucene) with two Tuscan cigars, and two Umbrian chocolates.fn4 This saint, venerated in the middle of the bridge at Pavia,fn5 is also the patron saint of the boatmen and bridge builders of Maradagàl. But there are no bridges to be seen in Pastrufazio, given the biblical proportions of the river flood that sweeps through, known as the Guarany: its width must be around ten kilometres. But the saint is venerated as the city’s patron saint, like St Ambrose for us. Because of the river. And, as well, for sharing the same name as General Nepomucene Pastrufacio, the second ‘founder’ of the city, the libertador of the whole pre-Andean plain, and the windswept pampas, over which he rode like a monsoon, neckerchief around his neck: terror of the Gringo and of the Indio, or rather, of one and then the other, being the constant, unfailing friend of the aboriginal Incas: the generous Incassi, as our fine poet Parini calls them.
Colonel Di Pascuale, one morning, sent for Palumbo, ‘dat boy’. ‘Which one, Colonel?’ ‘Which what! dat ’n! I jus’ said …’ ‘Ah! yes, Freguglia!’ ‘What Freguglia! dat boy … ’n 131 … dat ’n dunt ’ere! …’: and when he was at the table in front of him, standing to attention, he wrote in blue pencil on the first sheet of his pad: ‘Tomorrow we’re discharg/ing you and you’ve got/a month’s leave./Happy?’ He turned the pad around, so that he could read it. As I have noted, by reason of the application, he was aware of his ardent desire. And Palumbo, now quite sure of his sixth-grade pension, longed for nothing more than to draw it and enjoy it at the same time, living with the widow, month by month, in easy instalments: after so many ups and downs and mountain storms.
He looked up and stared the soldier in the face. The eyes of the poor deaf man radiated joy and gratitude; he moved round the table: and, having grasped the colonel’s hand, his left hand, he fell to his knees, all of a sudden, like a beggar in a plague scene by Tintoretto; and began to smother it with kisses and more kisses, to the amazement of the clerks who had been stirred, quick as lightning, from their papers, by those kisses, alas!, by a man to a colonel. Kisses upon kisses, in an ardent, unrestrainable effusion, which is that of the humble and pure of heart, as well as of the young, whose impulses burst forth so spontaneously, so ‘movingly’, that there’s no longer any proper etiquette or protocol, nor can any captain or colonel, however severe, however punctilious, hope to restrain them. That passion found in native – and I would say virgin – souls, which, by reason of its contrast, so affects we dry, faint-hearted literati (save for the brief interlude of 1915‒1918), all preoccupied with our trivia and small-mindedness and petty quibbling, far-removed from the sufferings of the people, and devoid, not just of pensions, but of any vital spirit.
The Experience of Pain Page 11