The Human Body (27 page)

I didn't catch on at first, yet it was quite simple. For a professional like Ernesto Egitto, a respected physician who had always denied the existence of anything in man other than the workings of the body and the mental will that allows him to use it, there could be only one diagnosis: he had watched Marianna sitting at her desk for entire afternoons; therefore, if her determination wasn't at fault, it necessarily had to be something in her body. Hadn't his little girl always been tops in her class? The most persevering, the only infallible one?
Oh, but I have to go to school!
she used to say to Musona. Something in her ability to function had to be jammed and he would find out what.

I have only indirect knowledge of what took place in the various hospital wards over the following months, reports that Ernesto delivered for my benefit on the infrequent occasions when I spent my leaves at home. He would reel off the tests he'd subjected Marianna to and summarize her medical record, which grew more and more sizable, as if he were gathering experimental data for a scientific publication or wanted to present me with real-life examples of what I was meanwhile studying in my college textbooks. Marianna did not participate, did not comment; it was as if she were transparent, absent. Once in a while she would nod or smile briefly, without feeling.

To start with, Ernesto had an X-ray taken of her head. For several days we listened to him comment on the merits and limitations of my sister's cranial structure. The electrocardiogram revealed a slight extrasystole and Ernesto insisted on repeating the EKG under stress. Having ruled out skeletal and vascular abnormalities, he conjectured a malfunction of the lymphatic system and that avenue as well was pursued to the most improbable consequences, then proven to be fruitless. Based on blood and urine analyses he excluded a number of common ailments, although the high level of bilirubin led him to consider some serious pathology related to the liver. He accused Marianna of drinking too much alcohol, but it was such a ridiculous supposition—she hardly ever drank—that not even Nini, always very attentive to the developments of the testing, gave it any credence. So he settled for labeling my sister with Gilbert's syndrome, another possible concomitant cause of her recent collapse (that's what he called it now: her
collapse
).

Another deciliter of blood was drawn from Marianna's occluded veins, looking for evidence of rare diseases or autoimmune disorders. By the second month spent following Ernesto around from one outpatient department to another, Marianna looked anemic more than anything else, although her red blood cell count indicated the contrary. Her case was now in the public domain and we'd almost forgotten the symptom that had sparked the search: a university exam gone awry. By now we saw her as ill, in danger. She was simply too weak and tired to object. Or, as I figured out later on—and as I should have intuited by certain spirited glances she occasionally threw me—she wanted to see how far Ernesto would go to show the entire world how grave his insanity was, even at the cost of wrecking her own body.

It was after the gastroscopy report came back negative that Nini unexpectedly said, That's enough, they couldn't torture her any further. She'd known long before that there was nothing wrong with her daughter's constitution, but found it too arduous to oppose her husband's intentions. Now, however, he had to stop. An argument broke out. On the rare occasions when Nini countered him, Ernesto routinely withdrew into unremitting silence. He spent hours and hours in the dark and Nini sometimes found him lying supine on the bath mat, his arms crossed over his chest like a dead pharaoh. One evening he didn't come home. That's when Nini ordered Marianna to do what some time later she would ask me to do. “Go call him. Apologize. Tell him to come home.”

“Me, apologize to him?”

“Yes, you.”

“Why should I?”

“That's how he is.”

Nini said no more. In the Egitto family you had to know what was necessary without someone having to explain it to you. Marianna didn't have to be asked twice. As though considering for the first time the bizarre, predictable evolution of what she herself had triggered, but through a bulletproof glass, she walked resolutely to the phone, dialed Ernesto's number, and in a monotone said, “I apologize. Come home.”

University, meanwhile, was a problem of the past, which no one dared bring up again, just like the senseless interlude of the medical tests: swallowed up forever by silence. Marianna barricaded herself in her room for the rest of the academic year. It was a kind of quarantine. When I saw her, I thought she seemed happier and more carefree than she'd been for a long time.

When summer came we left on a trip, she and I together with some friends. The final destination was the bleak coast of the Baltic Sea, but when we'd crossed the border between Austria and the Czech Republic, Marianna said she wanted to go back and asked to be taken to the nearest station, where she would take the first available train. “I don't feel
comfortable
, okay? I don't like these places—they make me feel
anxious
.”

She forced the group to stop for a day in a small, nondescript village near Brno; in the end the others continued on, annoyed by the delay and by the fact that they would now have to crowd into the remaining cars. “I don't understand why you didn't go
with them
,” Marianna protested, but it was clear she was grateful to me and, in a sense, considered it appropriate. I convinced her not to ruin the vacation entirely: we'd gone that far, we could at least visit Vienna. “Vienna won't make you feel anxious,” I promised.

I have a confused, fragmented recollection of those last days together, the patchy memory you might have of a hurricane that catches you asleep. Marianna was intractable, seemed constantly on the verge of tears. She ate little, almost nothing. At restaurants or the small kiosks where we stopped for lunch, she stared at the food as if questioning it, until she pushed it aside, bored.

After a few days I gave up eating too. The feeling of hunger is the only unifying element of the otherwise disjointed episodes of that trip. I was hungry as Marianna, her expression fierce, viewed the tormented female bodies in Egon Schiele's watercolors and then declared, “Let's get out of here, right now. I
hate
this museum.” I was hungry as we lay awake, lying on the double bed we shared with some embarrassment, dredging up a series of old anecdotes that left us smiling or feeling really bad. I was faint from hunger, and nauseous, during our silent ride on the Ferris wheel, when Marianna turned to me, her eyes devoid of everything I knew of her, and said, “I'll never have anything to do with them, ever again.” And I was hungry during the interminable trip back, under a rain that was incessant from start to finish. Without realizing it, we had resorted to the most fundamental form of purification that Ernesto had taught us: keeping the stomach empty for the greatest number of consecutive hours we were able to endure.

After our return Marianna became inscrutable to everyone. She carried out the strategy she had in mind with the meticulous style that I had always admired in her. She went back to the young man she'd been seeing halfheartedly until a few months earlier, a dull, adoring type whom Nini disapproved of with all the silent force of her demeanor; she moved in with him, and a year later married him. She rejected any invasive attempts by our parents and any mediation on my part. She was successful in the virtuoso endeavor of never saying another word to Nini and Ernesto, not even by mistake, not even to say, Leave me alone. She performed her descending scale once and for all, at a dizzying tempo and without a false note, down to the lowest notes on the keyboard.

That's how it had all ended up: Ernesto's invectives, the celebratory rituals, the love lavished and withdrawn, Nini's admonitions, the cautions, the fierce, unflagging study, the math Olympics where she finished second, the endearments, the music drills, the pounded chords that traveled down through the five floors of the building to the garage and from there sank underground, the syntactically perfect, glacial high school compositions—each element had played a part in winding Marianna up like a spring. A million turns of the key behind the back of the tin soldier she'd been. When fully wound, she'd started marching swiftly toward a finish line. It didn't much matter if that finish line coincided with the edge of the table: in our family, we all had a certain familiarity with going over the brink.

After the wedding we hardly ever talked about our parents anymore, or about our friends, about anything we had in common. When I went to see her, Marianna was always with her husband. I didn't understand how a vendetta could be carried out so coldly and kept up with the same dogged persistence. She had decided on everything long before. A little maneuver had triggered a disastrous course. There hadn't even been a real battle; everyone remained motionless in his trench, watching. On the other hand, I must have learned at least one lesson from the study of bones: the worst fractures are the kind that occur while standing still, when the body decides to go to pieces and does so in a fraction of a second, splintering into so many fragments that reassembling it afterward is unthinkable.

At Ernesto's funeral not many people asked me about Marianna. Some avoided asking out of a natural tendency to be wary, but over the years most had formed an idea of the situation that was bewildering and shocking enough to make them keep their mouths shut. Apparently rumors could even leak out of a house as well sealed up as that of the Egitto family.

A few days after the burial I turned to a psychiatrist colleague at the military hospital. I asked him for a prescription without allowing him to examine me first or explaining any of the reasons that had brought me there. I just said that I had never felt so weary in my entire life, and that an equally great agitation, combined with the incredible fatigue, kept me from sleeping. It was up to him—any substance capable of knocking me out for a while was fine; all I wanted was to rest, to disappear. “If you won't do it, I'll ask someone else. Or I'll sign it myself,” I threatened.

The colleague reluctantly wrote out the prescription, urging me to see him again in a month. I did not go back. I found it more convenient to order a supply of the drug for the army, a sufficient number of boxes to get by for a long time. One pill a day, each to erase a single question to which over time I had found no answer: Why do wars break out? How does one become a soldier? What is a family?

T
he soldiers' return home from the mission in Gulistan coincides with the arrival of spring. This is unfortunate for them: the season is too heartrending. The days never end and they convey a sense of insatiable frenzy, while the air laden with scents brings only painful memories to the surface. Marshal René is fighting it with everything he's got. He knows that with a little discipline you can survive any degree of pain; you just have to plan, you just have to keep busy.

He turned down his leave and the week after their return he was at his post in the barracks. His relatives in Senigallia were offended, but having to face their sympathetic faces was right at the top of his list of things to avoid. He wakes up at six thirty with his running clothes ready on the bedroom chair, at work he fills his days even if it means performing the same tasks twice, and at the end of his shift he stays at the gym as long as he can. Monday evenings he plays squash with Pecone, on Thursdays he has his aikido class, on Fridays he finds someone to go out with or else goes out alone. For the weekends, which are also the hardest time, he plans long motorcycle rides, or schedules time to clean out the garage, or any other unnecessary chore that comes to mind. Thanks to video games, he's also managed to fill the smaller, more insidious holes in his days. He follows the schedule with discipline and makes no significant variations, day after day, week after week. A man like him could go on like that forever.

A hardly pleasant activity that has occupied him, among others, consists of the round of visits to relatives of the deceased, which he's tackled systematically and which is about to conclude, today, in his meeting with Salvatore Camporesi's wife. The fact that he's kept her until last, that he's procrastinated for so long, is undoubtedly significant; it would merit reflection, but the marshal has no intention of examining the subject too closely.

They've been sitting together in the shade of the porch, in front of the Camporesi home, for almost two hours, while the child Gabriele plays quietly, crouched on the steps. From the outset Flavia has been determined not to do anything to make the conversation less difficult than it is. The fruit juice she offered him was warm and the bag of cookies she placed in front of him was an unfamiliar, worrisome brand that he didn't dare touch. It's clear that, at this moment, she's not prepared to pay much attention to formalities.

They've smoked more than they've talked, nonstop. After asking permission for the first few cigarettes, Flavia has gone on helping herself to the packet without asking. There are only three left and when they run out, the marshal imagines, it will be time to end the visit. Despite his discomfort, he's not looking forward to saying good-bye: Flavia Camporesi is the youngest and certainly the prettiest widow he's come across. The word itself,
widow
, seems to clash with her figure.

“Look—what a mess,” she says suddenly, pointing to the garden, as if to distract his insistent gaze away from her.

René pretends to be surprised, although, walking the few feet between the outside gate and the house, he'd already noticed the neglected state of the yard. The grass comes halfway up their legs, green spikes have shot up here and there along with some wild poppies that look lethal, and the hedge that runs along the fence is overrun with wild, unruly new growth.

“I told him we shouldn't get a house like this. But for him it was like an obsession. His parents live in a place like this. Salvo always wanted to replicate his earlier life—he drove me out of my mind. By summer it will be a jungle here.”

“There's no one to help you?”

Although they'd made an appointment, Flavia hasn't bothered to put on makeup and her curly hair, tied back with a rubber band, could maybe use a washing. None of this is enough to detract from her face.

“For a while his father came. He took care of it. But after the accident he always wanted to talk about Salvo. He kept me in the kitchen for hours—it was exhausting. I told him to let it go.” She pauses. “I'm sure he mostly wanted to check up on me. He has no right.”

“I could help you myself. Cut the lawn, I mean.” He says it impulsively and is immediately afraid he's made a mistake, like stepping into quicksand.

Flavia looks into his eyes for a split second, with a mixture of tenderness and pity. The cigarette burns down between her fingers. “Never mind, René. Thanks just the same.”

“I'll gladly do it.”

“You'd do it because you feel sorry.”

“That's not true. And besides, there's nothing wrong with that even if it were true.”

“If you mow the lawn this time, in a month the yard will be in the same condition and I'll find myself back at square one. Then I won't know who to call and I'll call you, and you won't dare say no to a desperate widow, even though you won't feel much like doing it anymore. And so on, every month, until you get sick and tired of it and come up with an excuse not to come. You'll feel guilty and I'll feel abandoned. Let's not get into a predicament like that, René. Unfortunately, grass keeps growing. There's nothing we can do about it.” She pauses a moment, then adds: “It's not your fault that Salvo is dead.”

The marshal feels a twinge in his chest. If she only knew! If she knew how mistaken she was and how many miles of lawn he'd have to mow to make amends for what he took from her. He'd have to fell a forest with a penknife. “And if I don't mind?” he insists.

Flavia flicks a bit of ash off her sweater. “Do you at least know how to use a mower?”

“Tell me where it is. I'll show you right now.”

She blows smoke upward. “No, not now. Today isn't lawn day.”

“When would it be, then?”

“Saturday, in the morning.” She crushes the partially smoked cigarette in the ashtray and stands up, as if it were suddenly late and she wanted to end the visit. “You have time to change your mind, though. You don't have to let me know. And please don't do it.”

But René is not one to back out. He keeps his promise—in fact, in the days leading up to it he thinks of nothing but that. On Saturday he shows up early at the Camporesi house. Flavia is still in her robe. She'd forgotten about their appointment, and he registers her failure to remember with unexpected regret.

He lied to her: he's never done any yard work before—he's always lived in an apartment. In any case, it doesn't seem all that difficult. Relying on certain amateur videos he's studied on the Internet, he gets to work.

He runs the lawn mower over the grass, in one direction and then the other. He imagined it would leave strips in different shades, like on soccer fields, but something isn't right. There must be a special technique that he's not aware of. He notices Flavia watching him from the porch with a faraway look, as if seeing someone else in him as he moves about. She's now wearing a low-necked T-shirt, without a bra. She's standing in the exact spot where the sunlight shines directly on her face. “You've never done this before, right?” she says.

René looks over the portion of the yard he's already mowed. “Is it that obvious?”

Flavia smiles. “It's still better than before.”

He ends up staying for lunch and for a good part of the afternoon. Then, like the first time, Flavia's mood suddenly changes and she sends him away abruptly, without warning. She promises to call him if she needs further help, but from the way she says it, it doesn't seem like she means it.

As he drives home, René is unsettled. The day has taken an unexpected turn. He's left with a chunk of the afternoon to fill;
Halo 8
is waiting for him at home, but he doesn't think he'll be able to lose himself in the game. He has the feeling that all he'll be able to do is indulge in the disgraceful, perilous longing that has overwhelmed him since he shut the gate behind him: longing for the garden of one of his fallen soldiers and for his unapproachable wife, standing on the porch.

Two days later, he gives up his squash date with Pecone so he can station himself in his car outside Flavia Camporesi's house. He stays there until it gets dark, staring at the lights that turn on and off and wondering whether the months in the valley haven't really turned him into a wack job after all.

He goes back the next night and the one after that. Soon enough his evening watches outside Flavia's house become a routine finale to his days in the barracks, so that, at a certain point, he plans for it by bringing his supper along. He parks close enough to see everything, and far enough away to not be spotted. He doesn't know what he's watching for. All he has to do is glimpse Flavia, or her son, behind a curtain, steal a moment of their shattered family life, to feel better and at the same time to renew the apprehension that keeps him riveted there. As if he needs to continually make sure that nothing bad has happened to those two defenseless creatures. As for the physical thrill he feels toward the widow Camporesi, it has nothing to do with the kind of infatuation for certain girls he'd experienced a long time ago, as a teenager. It's a more complicated feeling that he can't—or doesn't want—to decipher.

Sitting in the car with the radio turned off, his thoughts don't dwell on anything for long, but are always more or less the same: the phone call from Delaram base camp, too late, to Rosanna Vitale; the garbage bags with the men inside; little Gabriele who finally decides to imitate him, getting down on his knees like him to pick up the dead leaves under the hedge, but one at a time, because his small hands can't grasp more.

The marshal's routine falls completely apart and he doesn't give a damn. He just wants to keep watch, period. He's considered the fact that sooner or later a police car could pull up alongside and ask him why he's been parked there for so long, but there's not a chance he'll give up being near the purple house that Salvatore once bought to prolong his life as a child. There's still a very long time yet—too long—before he'll have to mow the lawn, and meanwhile there's nothing else he can do to keep his anxiety at bay. Grass keeps growing, but not fast enough.

He receives a phone call from an old acquaintance, Valeria S., a client from the days when he used to supplement his income. No one has called him before her. They must have found a replacement during the months he was gone, or they heard about what happened and decided to stay away. He agrees to an appointment out of his usual impeccable courtesy and also because he wants to have sex (the last time was in a previous incarnation, with a woman who was pregnant by him).

In front of the door he begins to think he splashed on too much cologne, a sign of insecurity, an obvious clue that he's now out of practice. It doesn't matter; much of the scent will disappear along with his clothes. Valeria S. gets right down to business. They jump each other's bones while they're still in the living room. Both seem ravenous and desperate. The woman has a nice lithe body and after shrugging off her blouse she arches her back over his forearm and offers her taut breasts to his mouth. Not one wrong move, not a single wasted glance, gets in the way of their hasty migration toward the bedroom. They yank and kiss and rouse and stroke each other, not letting go for an instant. Not even the nuisance of putting on protection ruins the synchronization; René quickly takes care of the job with one hand while keeping her distracted with the other.

He's playacting, but it's such a familiar act that it doesn't require any effort. He pins Valeria beneath him. Her eyes are closed and her face has a vague expression. She demands a little pain and he gives it to her. He squeezes a nipple between his front teeth until she cries out. He even slaps her on the face.

When the coupling settles into the repetitive rhythm of penetration, though, he realizes that something is wrong. He seems to see Valeria shrinking, slipping away from him. But it could also be the opposite: he could be the one slipping away. The girl, a few inches from his eyes, becomes an indistinct object and the sounds in the room are cushioned as well.

A distasteful clot forms in the marshal's chest and rises to his throat. Nothing like this has ever happened to him before today, yet his body seems to have a primal knowledge of what is happening. All of a sudden he's sure he won't climax, that in a few seconds it will even be intolerable for him to continue. And the very instant he thinks it, the premonition comes true down in his groin.

Later, Valeria insists that he accept the money anyway: “Even though you didn't come, I did, so the service is valid just the same.”

René is hesitant, crushed, not so much by shame, but by the vestiges of the anxiety that gripped him a little earlier in the bedroom. They agree on half the amount: half pay for half a fuck. It seems fair. Before sending him off, the girl tosses him one last consolation: “It's normal, René. After what happened to you. You'll go back to being the man you were. You'll see.”

But that's just the point, René thinks as he rushes down the stairs to at least spare himself the awkwardness of waiting there for the elevator: Does he really want to go back to being the man he was before? And who the hell was the man he was before?

He stops running in the morning, stops lifting weights in the gym, stops roaming around on his motorcycle. Now all he does is keep watch over Flavia Camporesi and her son. He realizes how risky it is, but he can't resist the powerful, burning need to keep that amputated family in his sight. The rolling shutters raised in the morning and lowered in the evening, the unfailing way Flavia takes Gabriele's hand as soon as they pass through the gate, her extreme caution when she drives the car out of the garage, then immediately glances into the mirror to check her face—all this is soothing and at the same time fuels his anxiety.

Occasionally, more and more often, he ventures out and rings the doorbell. Flavia welcomes him, though sometimes she goes back to sit on the couch and forgets about him. She still conveys the sultry negligence of the first day. Since the muggy heat settled over Belluno, she hasn't worn anything but a cotton nightdress, always the same one, very short on her thighs and with a wayward shoulder strap that stubbornly slips down to her elbow, partially revealing her breasts. Most of the time she doesn't even notice. Flavia's nudity attracts René with a power that he can't deny. If he gazes at her for long, he's forced to get up, find some manual task, or rinse his face with cold water.