The Human Body (26 page)

I
n the final days Ernesto would leave the house in the late afternoon to take the same invariable walk along the riverbank. He bundled up more than necessary, layering woolen sweaters and pullovers, as if to restore volume to a body that was losing it. He walked with his gaze turned upward, his expression skeptical, until he came to the bend where the waters widened into a stagnant cove. There he would sit on a lacquered metal bench not far from the river's edge. He would catch his breath, measuring his jugular heart rate with the help of a wristwatch. When the levels returned to normal, he took a paper bag out of his pocket with some dry bread, which he crumbled slowly between his fingers, clearing his throat. Sometimes, instead of bread, he brought apple slices.

The nutrias he fed were filthy animals: a kind of large rat with a rheumy snout, long white whiskers, and glittering wet fur. They lived between the backwater and the muddy shore, piled on top of one another. “You see?” he said to me one day. “They're like children. Ready to step over each other for a little something to eat. They're so innocent. And needy. Shameful opportunists.”

As the rodents crowded around the food, Ernesto spoke about Marianna, about when she was a little girl. He repeated the same secret word games I'd heard dozens of times, somewhat worn-out by now in the telling. He couldn't manage to reconcile them with the retaliation his daughter had inflicted on him; maybe he wasn't even able to recognize it as such. Retaliation for what? he would have asked. But he'd never been very inclined to question the matter. He preferred to settle for a collection of fantasies. As for the daughter who still existed somewhere, he didn't mention her. As the crow flies she must not have been too far away from the nutrias' pond, but she was certainly light-years away from his heart. In retrospect, the astounding transformation in the last days I spent with my father was precisely that: I had always believed he didn't have a heart. Only now was I able to see that it was hopelessly broken.

When his condition suddenly worsened, I took three weeks' leave and moved home. I was Nini and Ernesto's guest, a guest in the room where I'd grown up. Lying on the bed, I could see the door to Marianna's room, the same door I'd stared at countless times trying to guess what was happening on the other side, full of apprehension when she'd lock herself in with her friends on afternoons when our parents weren't home.

I had my own personal set of towels and a toothbrush in my toiletry kit. Each time, after using them, I put them back in my suitcase. I didn't feel like leaving something that belonged to me in the bathroom or anywhere else. Every surface of every piece of furniture was so imbued with the past that it would certainly have swallowed my item up instantly, transporting it to another temporal dimension, no longer reachable. At night, when I studied my face in the mirror, my gaze fell on the giraffe and elephant decals.
Here's my toothpaste, here's my brush, I won't hurry, I won't rush. Working hard to keep teeth clean, front and back and in between
. I recited their nursery rhymes silently to myself, feeling neither rancor nor nostalgia.

Nini's discreet, inflexible order still governed the apartment. A few weeks later, on the very day my father died, she would leave with a small suitcase, move in with her sister (widowed before her), and never return. Only then would I realize how slight her attachment had been to the house where we'd all lived together. If she'd ever really loved it, at some point she'd stopped, and none of us had noticed it. I might have picked up some signals, might have noticed, for example, that household chores tired her out more and more (she'd given in and hired a foreign woman who helped out every other day, violating three or four articles of her Fundamental Charter of Sobriety at once), but it had been some time since I paid attention to Nini's decline.

After Marianna's mutiny she'd begun failing, day after day, in mind and body. She still reacted to stimuli as you'd expect she would or, more precisely, as you'd expect an automaton resembling a small, sixty-year-old woman would do. When she smiled, rarely, her smile was vacant and reminded me that I, in any case, would never be sufficient motivation to rekindle joy in her. Not even Ernesto could anymore; Nini witnessed the rapid course of his illness as if it were the manifestation of a divine retribution that concerned them both. At one time she would have voiced that unspoken feeling with words like: “Well, we
certainly
deserved this!”

Mornings were taken up by Ernesto's hospital visits and by the vast, daunting bureaucracy that went with them. He had worked in the same hospital for thirty-one years, in a ward scarcely forty yards and two flights of stairs away from the urology department where he was now being treated. He'd been a step away from being appointed department head, yet he enjoyed few privileges. He waited his turn like any other patient, on the row of blue plastic chairs in the corridor, fidgety, talking nonstop. At that time he was obsessed with chemical solvents found in the pigments used to paint the walls of that hallway and others, with electromagnetic pollution, and with the abundance of phthaleins in the plastic packaging of the hospital meals, which, in fact, caused prostate cancer. He estimated having ingested more than eight thousand pounds of contaminated food. As if knowing it now made any difference.

From time to time a younger colleague recognized him and would stop to exchange a few words. Ernesto took advantage of it to corner the doctor and criticize the treatment he was being subjected to. He expounded on alternative therapies he'd come up with overnight, citing exotic and somewhat dubious sources from recent oncological literature. He could never trust a specialist as much as he did himself and his own insights, not even in an area that was not within his province. In those impromptu medical lessons, which often strayed into general didactics, he was still persuasive enough often to win me to his side. But clearly he had a hold over me by then and that's all there was to it. The man in the white coat would nod impatiently, only seemingly caught up. And if he were to pass by again in the course of the day, he wouldn't stop a second time.

“Life doesn't give back much,” I said to him one morning, since I was sure a similar thought was haunting him. Ernesto shrugged. He didn't feel like answering. Age had chipped away at various aspects of his persona, but not his respect for reasoning, which always had to be logical, deductive. He wouldn't tolerate ranting about what reality was or wasn't, unless there was tangible evidence. Besides, he seemed to answer me with his silence: it's
clear
life doesn't give back what you deserve.

One night in February he had a respiratory attack. The ambulance came for him and took him to the hospital. He was admitted to intensive care, intubated, and put on a drip. They were considerate enough to give him a single room, with a window that afforded a view of snowy mountains that turned pink at dawn. When it was evident that he didn't have very long, Nini, fairly composed, told me: “Go call her. Please.”

I left the building. I had forgotten to put on my heavy jacket and the cold surprised me. I walked over to a bare birch tree and laid my hand on its trunk; inside the sap flowed slowly and persistently. I thought about the silent struggle of plants and all of a sudden I was seized by anger. Is this the way it was to end, then? Two individuals declare war for the rest of their lives, consuming everything around them, and eventually death brings them together again in a hospital room, as if nothing had happened. What became of the threats, the long faces, the intransigence of everything
I
had gone through?

Marianna replied groggily: “It's six fifteen, Alessandro. What do you want?”

“They admitted Papa.”

“Are you talking about Ernesto?”

“About Papa, yes.”

I heard my sister reassuring her husband—“Go back to sleep; it's nothing”—then the rustling of sheets, a few steps. She resumed speaking in a louder voice: “And what am I supposed to do about it?”

“He's dying. He might not have long. He has an effusion of blood in his—”

“I don't care
what
he has. Don't tell me. Did he ask you to phone me?”

“He's sedated. He can't talk.”

“He talked enough when he was conscious.”

“Marianna, this is no time for—”

“For
what
? Give me a break, Alessandro. The alarm clock goes off in an hour and I don't want to look like a
total
wreck when I get to work.”

“Are you serious?”

“Does it seem to you that I'm joking? You know full well how hard it is for me to get back to sleep, so I guess at this point I'll just lie in bed with my eyes
wide open
until seven o'clock.”

I kicked the tree trunk. A spiral of white outer bark broke away and fell to the ground. The inner bark beneath it was smooth and clean. I bent down to run my hand over it. The anger vanished as abruptly as it had come. It gave way to a great anguish, something like a last hope for salvation, which you'd forgotten about until a moment ago and which suddenly appears before you. Marianna had to join me, right away—it was essential. If she didn't jump into the first taxi as quickly as possible, if she didn't make it to Ernesto's room in time to see him still breathing, if tears didn't flow from her eyes, if she didn't hug Nini and hold her close, if none of this happened, then there would be no redemption for us. We'd survived an overdose of pain and might endure still more, but we wouldn't make it through the realization that there was no sense to all that travail.

“Please come,” I begged her. “Our father is dying.”

For a moment Marianna was silent. I listened intently for a sign of tears that would finally save us, all of us.

“For me, he doesn't exist.”

 • • • 

E
ight years earlier another phone call, equally grave though more submissive in tone, had marked the culmination of my sister's dark period and confirmed her conclusive severance from Nini and Ernesto's asphyxiating universe. Looking back on it now, it seems to me that the decisive chapters in the family life of us Egittos were all brought to a close in the same way: on the telephone. Only miles and miles of cables, buried deep in the ground, made it possible to confront subjects that, face-to-face, were too intense even to be mentioned.

After Marianna had racked up an impressive series of As and A-pluses on her report cards, which Nini kept in a folder in the top drawer of her dresser, after she'd garnered wide-ranging merit citations, Marianna's scholastic career had come to an abrupt standstill. Not that there hadn't been any warning signs. In high school Marianna had gone through months of languid, unwholesome indolence during which her average lagged, but each time she'd made up for those periods in which she'd slacked off with tremendous effort, regaining her preeminence. The decline was almost imperceptible. Still, if Ernesto had applied the same strictly quantitative methods to her performance that he used to assess the rest of the world, if he had plotted a graph of her final exam results from first grade to the brink of graduation, he would immediately have noticed that they formed a descending curve.

For my part, I noticed that slight, continuing transformation by the way Marianna's freckles seemed less apparent each time summer rolled around. I had always thought that the pigmented spots on her cheeks were responsible for my sister's miraculous powers: after all, weren't they what differentiated her from the rest of us mediocre beings? But each spring they appeared less distinguishable. Since she'd gotten into the habit of getting a head start on her summer tan by resorting to tanning beds, afterward they were barely visible. By the time she reached her fourth year of university, nearly graduating with a degree in art history—a subject that didn't interest her much, but that complied with the creative bent that we liked to attribute to her—the freckles had disappeared entirely, like stars above a polluted city. And she herself simply stopped.

The exam wasn't even the most challenging, a paper on William Blake. On the first attempt she got a C and decided to retake the test. She made a brief fuss about it, but her despair and fierce railing against the teaching assistant who had questioned her obscure interpretation of the
Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun
seemed like a pose, aimed at masking a more serious, fundamental indifference. When she tried again, a month later, she was rejected by the professor herself. We sat at the table dumbfounded while she described the professor as an incompetent bitch, a frigid old hag who needed a good you know what; Nini clutched the silverware fretfully meanwhile, not daring to contest those views.

I was rooting for Marianna, as always, but it didn't help much. There was a third failure, then a fourth, in circumstances that were never very clear. The fifth time Marianna showed up for the exam without her blue book, sat down in front of the professor and her teaching assistant, and remained silent, staring at them until they grew impatient and dismissed her.

After the exam she came looking for me, wanting me to come home that night at all costs—yes, it was
essential
. The year before I had allowed the deadline for deferring the draft to pass, defying the family's general opposition and initiating the first of my unspoken getaways. I now resided in the barracks, but, in exchange for a favor to a superior, I was able to satisfy her.

At dinner, between sobs and hysterical tears, Marianna announced that she was dropping her studies. No one went to her; no one caressed her distraught, tearstained face. We watched her writhe like an animal caught in a trap. Her pain resonated in me with equal intensity, but I could do nothing to mitigate it. Nini expected me to say something. Ernesto went on eating, taking small bites. Finally, at the end of what he must have considered to be a childish display typical of his daughter, he said: “In the morning you're coming to the hospital. With me.”