Deviation Page 11

  After twenty days, I had even regained my right arm and chest.

  I felt clever because, while the other dying patients flailed and threw off their blankets, catching pneumonia that hastened their deaths, I stayed covered up to my chin, shouting for the nurses to tuck me back up as soon as I felt the slightest draft. In fact, it was March, the cold was back, room 18 had no windowpanes and no door, so we were in the middle of a constant stream of air.

  I began to be aware of my condition. I saw that they washed and medicated me every day, and that the fish smell wasn’t coming from my cadaver, but from the salve they smeared on my burns.

  I noticed that as soon as I felt a headache coming on, when I felt that I’d been squeezed dry inside, drained of blood and saliva, as harrowing sounds began to come out of my mouth, they always injected me with something that gradually, if only partially, restored my equilibrium. I asked about it: morphine. I no longer dozed, but listened intently to what was happening to my neighbors.

  Usually, when a patient was brought to my room, he regained consciousness and thrashed about, imploring them to take him back to the ward. Room 18 had a fatal reputation in the hospital, and everyone feared it as though it were the very antechamber of death. Exhausted by terror, these patients merely hastened their own end.

  But the nun who was head of the ward, Schwester Vincentia, soon found a way to calm them down.

  “Who said you’re going to die!” Then “Luzi! Luzi!” she would call me. And I would respond.

  “Don’t you see that Luzi is alive, hale and hearty? And do you know how long she’s been here? For a good three weeks.”

  This immediately cheered them up. And such was the power of faith that sometimes, after they dozed off, they would wake up again and anxiously call my name:

  “Luzi!”

  “Ja. Wie geht’s?”

  We even chatted. I kept talking as they entered their death throes. The first few times I fell silent as soon as I recognized death’s breath, but I sensed that this frightened them; so I got into the habit of continuing to say whatever came into my mind. That soon we would feel better, that if I died first I would protect them from up there and they should do the same for me, that I was Italian and didn’t hate anyone, and things like that.

  By now my only reason for living was to distract the dying, and this unusual activity so absorbed me that my energy soon increased.

  I awaited the new arrivals eagerly. I counted them.

  There were nineteen people, men, women, and children, whom I accompanied to their ends, by myself, eye-to-eye with them.

  At first a nurse or a nun would remain to watch over them until the final moment; then they noticed that my company relaxed those in extremis, while their presence at the bedside only made the patients nervous.

  “Luzi,” Sister Vincentia would say to me softly, “this one has a mangled belly, I leave her to you.”

  Or: “With this one it will soon be over—then, at least, he won’t suffer anymore.”

  I so identified with the dying that when I ran out of words, I would sing softly to accompany their death rattles. Sometimes tears even flowed when I sang:

  Tu scendi dalle stelle, o re del cielo,

  e vieni in una grotta al freddo e al gelo.

  I stopped when I heard their labored breathing break off and felt the silence of death pass into my soul.

  Schwester Vincentia had begun to love me. She often came close to study me; she brushed the hair off my face, gave me a quick kiss on the forehead, and withdrew, shaking her head.

  For I don’t know how long, we were bombed several times a day.

  After transporting the injured to the shelter, where most remained until the danger was over, Schwester Vincentia came back up, stationed herself by my bed, praying, and did not leave me as long as the bombs continued. She intoned the Ave Maria and I answered. In the unexpected intervals amid the thunderous roaring and rumbling, we caught ourselves chanting at the top of our lungs, like lunatics:

  Ave Maria, gratia plena

  Sancta Maria, Mater Dei

  We immediately lowered our voices, deafened, but were left with an irreverent hilarity. Once, shrapnel killed a dying woman and a bullet struck a dead man in the skull.

  There were solo airplanes, called Japos, which sometimes targeted our wing, no one knew why.

  One day, when I was chatting with my dying ones, Sister wanted to transfer me to the hospital wing, but I gave up my place, the only vacancy down there, to a little ten-year-old girl in my room whose legs had been amputated.

  “You know, that girl will be gone tonight,” Sister said to me, “but you can stay on awhile longer.”

  Schwester Vincentia was a Sister of Charity, thin, olive-skinned, maybe fifty years old; a no-nonsense, even-tempered woman, she worked day and night, lifting the wounded when the orderlies protested.

  One morning she fell: her hernia ruptured.

  She was admitted and placed in the little room next to mine. They operated immediately. She communicated with me by tapping on the wall with a cane.

  Afterward, even with her hernial truss, she would lift and turn the wounded who at night pleaded to be shifted a little to ease their pain.

  *

  “Listen,” she said to me one evening. “You don’t want to die.”

  “No.”

  “I’m saying this because you’re brave. Now you would die a good death. A patient of mine who, like you, would not die, and was less injured than you, returned to my ward ten years later, telling me: ‘If only I had died back then! Afterward all I did was suffer. I can’t take any more.’ And she finally surrendered to God the soul that she had insisted on keeping from Him for so long.”

  “Is that so? But I’m not that woman, and in ten years I will return from Italy just to tell you that I was right to live. All I have to do is heal, no matter how long it takes, and you’ll see!”

  “Will you really come back?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you mean it?”

  “Of course.”

  “We’ll see.”

  One day, the second day-shift nun, Schwester Johanna, florid, white and rosy, stood on a ladder and removed the portrait of Hitler, which she hurled to the ground and trampled frenziedly; then, clutching the crucifix at her breast and kissing it passionately, she hung it in place of the portrait.

  *

  I hope my reader won’t lose patience with me if I go on referring to “one day,” “one night,” “one time,” but I have absolutely no idea of the temporal sequence in which events occurred during this period.

  One night, a beautiful woman who appeared healthy and strong died without ever regaining consciousness. She had slept for three days.

  The night-shift nun, Schwester Petra, told me that she had been raped by Negroes. She asked me if I hadn’t heard the angry clamor rising from the city as soon as darkness fell. And, raising her pale eyes to the crucifix:

  “Lord, you are about to die on the cross for them, and men have forgotten you.”

  I asked what date it was. Eight days before Easter. The news upset me. I too had forgotten Christ. I had no quarrel with Him, or with God, because He had suffered, and now more than ever I could understand what that meant. I thought I heard drunken voices and coarse laughter in the hospital garden. Easter was approaching and no one paid any attention. His solitude, the gratuitousness of His sacrifice, wrung my heart.

  “Since You are going to die,” I told Him, “I’ll keep You company as well.”

  Schwester Petra appeared, syringe in hand.

  “What is it?”

  “Your morphine.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “You can’t go without it.”

  When I insisted, she told me that I hadn’t seen my back; it was a hollow cavity with tips of broken ribs sticking out, the thorax exposed, the lungs.

  The more she talked the more worked up I got: “Do You hear her?” I said to the crucifix. “Are You lis
tening?”

  “I’m warning you, though,” the nun said, giving in, “don’t you torment my patients with your usual screams, attracting the Negroes to us. One sound out of you and I’ll put you to sleep.”

  The first night wasn’t only a series of excruciating, stabbing pains, unbroken agony without a moment’s respite; not just torture for my entire body, which, going without food, had quickly become addicted to the morphine; it was also a time of constant vigilance during which I had to work to keep from screaming. By dawn my jaws were so tightly clenched that I couldn’t relax them; I was drenched in sweat, my heart pounding crazily. I lost consciousness and woke up with an oxygen tube in my mouth. The ward doctor was nearby:

  “You can’t go off it so abruptly. We have to reduce the dosage a little at a time.”

  I wouldn’t listen to reason.

  “It’s not up for discussion, in any case,” he said, shrugging, “seeing that you won’t make it.”

  I had a new obsession: it was now a matter of getting the better of the morphine.

  I didn’t shut my eyes for six days and six nights.

  Schwester Petra, who was very pretty, spent every free minute of her night rounds keeping me company. She wove wreaths of tiny flowers around my head, promised me she would never leave my grave without flowers, that she would always pray for me.

  On the night of Good Friday she recited the entire scene of Christ’s Passion by candlelight, changing her voice and gestures depending on whether she was representing Pontius Pilate, Peter, or Judas.

  She later told me that my face wore a look of such suffering that she no longer knew what she could do to alleviate it a little.

  The night of the Resurrection, Christ came into my room, which was at least twice as big as usual, with my bed in the middle.

  He was tall, clean-shaven, grave, and wore a green tunic.

  He closed the door behind Him and came to sit on the edge of my bed.

  He looked at me without speaking. Then He squeezed my feet with His hand and shook His head no.

  I woke up as I was about to tell Him something.

  Schwester Petra told me that I had slept one whole hour. She knelt beside my bed and together we said the rosary, which I listened to, rapt, because I didn’t know all of it.

  IV

  The deaths became less frequent.

  On the fortieth day I emptied my bowels for the first time. The fever that had been devouring me from the beginning suddenly lowered. I stopped sucking the watered-down milk—the only food that I could keep in until then!—and began ingesting broths and stewed fruit.

  I was detoxified from the morphine.

  The doctors agreed that I might even live. They gave the order for me to be placed back among the patients expected to survive. But I had become attached to those who were dying and didn’t want to leave them. Who would comfort them when they entered that room if the one who had not died was no longer there?

  A twenty-two-year-old German girl was brought in following an operation on her stomach, where she’d been stabbed. She had a friend, a handsome young Greek man, who was distraught over her. The girl, whose name was Cunegonda, was so thirsty that she managed to convince her friend to bring her some beer. When she emptied the bottle in one gulp, she quickly worsened, the wound became purulent, she turned yellow, and her family was summoned. She confessed to me that she had cheated on her boyfriend, away at war, by taking up with the Greek, and that God was punishing her; but when she got well, she said, she would atone for it all her life. She was suffering morally more than physically, and she died.

  Later on, the Greek boldly came back to see me. He had enlisted in the U.S. Army, was armed to the teeth, spoke loudly, and exuded excessive cheerfulness.

  *

  I deluged my neighbors with advice.

  For ten days I struggled with the death of a nineteen-year-old brunette, she too German, beautiful, and reticent, who had no resources but obediently did what I suggested. One day, however, she eluded my surveillance and, perspiring, tossed off her blankets on a windy night in April despite all my recommendations. She had no family. Pneumonia claimed her. At that time there was no penicillin in Europe. She called to me to the last.

  That death deeply saddened me.

  The next day they brought me a long-limbed, delicate woman. She was a doctor in a morphine-induced coma. Every fifteen minutes she implored, “Morphin! Morphiin!” with avid gasps. She died invoking her god morphine with a cry.

  The warbling of the earliest birds could be heard among the trees. I begged the nuns to take me outside and they placed wheels on my bed. Breathing fresh air after two months, I dozed off, feeling comfortable for the first time in my battered body’s skin.

  *

  I began to make plans.

  I got to know some Italian patients with whom I started negotiating to buy a bicycle. I was determined to return to Italy by bike as soon as I was able to walk, to make up for my lengthy immobility with a nice athletic trip. My inactivity was beginning to wear on me.

  “How much longer will it take me?” I asked the doctor.

  “Nine weeks,” he said, and walked away abruptly.

  I began to count the days as if there were an exact date.

  A few more people died beside me and, to distract them, two Italians with a guitar also came by.

  Once, when an extremely uneasy old granny was approaching the end, all three of us started our concert, and she gave herself up to the sound of the music. But family members arrived unexpectedly, crying sacrilege and shame and waking the old woman from her merciful stupor; taken by surprirse, now realizing she was dying, she wept and resisted as no young person ever did, with a kind of greediness that was more irritating than moving.

  Johann had arrived, meanwhile, and an inconsolable granddaughter, the most indignant of all, leaving once death had come, climbed on his bicycle and disappeared, pedaling fast. For that matter he too had stolen the bike.

  Johann brought me everything I could ask for: clothes, undergarments, table linen, wine, canned fruit, and so on, all stolen stuff of course. He also brought things for the sisters and nurses. I especially recall certain pink mortadellas, a quantity of them.

  Sometimes I caught him having a lengthy tête-à-tête with Schwester Vincentia in the corridor.

  Whereas during the first few months I never thought about him, I now began waiting for him to arrive. I got impatient if he was late, and, for whatever reason, I pretended not to like the kisses, often mixed with tears, with which he covered my face.

  The better I felt, the more I spoke about my imminent recovery, meticulously counting the days and hours of the nine weeks that had passed, and Johann would get gloomy. Sometimes he left without a word. He would show up drunk at night, get down on his knees, and, covering my hand with kisses, ask me to forgive him. He had become petulant. He had it in for the French and the Americans. He always showed up with shadows under his eyes, a shifty air. He stank of wine. He made vague, sinister threats.

  I didn’t understand. Sometimes I had the orderlies kick him out; other times I was sorry he had ended up like that just when things were looking up.

  *

  In early May, there was an inspection by the American health officials. I was in the garden, under an oak tree, one bed among a row of others. I soon noticed that the other patients, the Germans, were frightened. Without anyone asking them anything, they swore again and again that they had never been Nazis. Cowardice has always disgusted me.

  When the inspectors stopped in front of me and learned that I was Italian, the most authoritative one said, as though it were routine, “Not a Fascist.”

  “On the contrary, a Fascist,” I replied.

  They called an interpreter, and the interrogation began.

  It came out that I had been a Fascist, enrolled in the GUF (Gruppi universitari fascisti, university fascist groups), a zealot, and that while in Germany I had been a confirmed anti-Nazi; with regard to Fascist ideo
logy in particular, I couldn’t formulate an opinion—apart from my views concerning the alliance with Hitler—since Italian affairs had for too long been outside of my immediate interests.

  At the conclusion of my interview they expressed their esteem for my sincerity and dignity. The officer had them bring me a big military pack. And from that day on they took me under their wing, one of them coming to visit me occasionally with gifts. We made ourselves understood with gestures and some German.

  On another day, the ward physician, whom the patients greeted obsequiously when he passed by the beds in the garden, was arrested for having been a member of the Nazi Party, even though he hadn’t taken part in any political activity. As he walked between two policemen, everyone averted their eyes. But I called out to him:

  “See you soon, Doctor Niessen!”

  His eyes repaid me, and I saw him move on with a more confident pace.

  He was released the following day.

  He introduced me to his wife and children; the children grew fond of me and often came to play with me, bringing me flowers and cakes.

  Representatives of the French Red Cross also showed up, looking for their fellow countrymen. Schwester Vincentia led them to me. When they heard me talk about Reims and Paris and so on with a French accent, and learned that I was born in France and had spent my childhood there, they took a great liking to me and, every so often, they too brought me tobacco and chocolate.

  The last ones to turn up were the Italians, very ceremonious, they discussed my condition with Sister, sniffed disdainfully, then told me that I would soon be back in my homeland, and that meanwhile I should have my documents and medical records prepared. They took their leave with a great many words.

  Day after day I pressed the head nurse and doctor to give me my papers. The wounds from the phosphorus burns had healed, leaving a smooth, shiny new skin; my back had also scarred over. The nine weeks were almost up. They responded vaguely. I cried. Finally, I was given my documents in a large sealed red envelope.