As God Commands (40 page)

As he opened his case Furlan took a quick glance around the room.
Heaps of dirty laundry. Shoes. Big boxes. Hanging on one wall was
a large flag with a black swastika.

He stopped himself flying into a rage. This wasn't the first and
it wouldn't be the last bloody Nazi skinhead he'd happened to help
while doing this job. How I hate these bastards...

He bent over and grasped the man's wrist. "Sir? Sir? Sir, can you
hear me?"

No response.

Furlan got out his stethoscope. The heart was beating. And the
rhythm was regular. He took a pencil out of his jacket pocket and
pricked the guy's forearm with the point.

The man didn't show any reaction.

He turned toward the boy, who was leaning against the doorpost, gazing at him listlessly.

"Who is he? Your father?"

The boy nodded.

"How long has he been in this state?"

The boy shrugged. "I don't know. I woke up and found him like that."

"What did he do last night?"

"Nothing. He went to bed."

"Was he drinking? There are a lot of beer cans here."

"No."

"Does he take drugs?"

"No."

"Please tell me the truth. Does he take drugs?"

"No."

"Did he take any medicine?"

"No, I don't think so."

"Is he suffering from anything? Illnesses?"

"No... " Cristiano hesitated, then added: "Headaches."

"Does he take anything for them?"

"No."

Furlan couldn't make up his mind whether the boy was lying.

It's not your problem, he said to himself, as he always did in such
cases.

The doctor said to Ristori, pointing to the boy: "Take him outside, please."

He untied his tunic. Then he lifted the man's eyelids and with the
help of his flashlight examined his pupils. One was dilated, the other
contracted.

Ten to one a brain hemorrhage.

The Nazi, in his misfortune, was lucky: the Sacred Heart Hospital
in San Rocco had opened a new intensive care unit barely a year
earlier and the guy might even live to tell the tale.

"Let's ventilate him, pack him up and deliver him," he said to
nurse Sperti, who quickly put the endotracheal tube down the
patient's throat. He in the meantime cannulated his forearm.

They put him on the stretcher.

And carried him away.

In later years, Cristiano Zena remembered the moment when they
carried his father away on a stretcher as the one that changed his
life.

More than when he had pedalled through the rain believing that
the exit for San Rocco had been closed off, more than when he had
found his father lying dead in the mud, more than when he had
seen Fabiana Ponticelli's corpse.

The world changed and his life became more important, worthy
of having its story told, when he saw old baldy's head disappear
into the ambulance.

They've entered your name in a big game.

Edoardo Bennato, "Quando sarai grande"

In the early hours of the morning the storm that had raged all night
over the plain moved out to sea, where it worked off what was left
of its anger by sinking a couple of fishing boats and then, tired and
enfeebled, died off the Balkan coast.

The eight o'clock television news barely mentioned the storm and
the fact that the Forgese was flooding, because during the night a
well-known TV presenter had been kidnapped on the outskirts of
Turin.

A watery sun spread its rays over the gray, sodden countryside,
and the inhabitants of the plain, like crabs after the passing of the
backwash, stuck their heads out of the holes where they had taken
shelter and, like little accountants, began to assess the damage.

Trees and billboards blown down. A few old farmhouses stripped
of their roofs. Landslides. Flooded roads.

The habitues of the Cafe Rouge et Noir thronged around the
marble counter and looked at the glass display where the famous
croissants filled with white chocolate were kept. They were there.
And if the croissants were there it meant that life was going on.

The front page of the local paper was occupied by a photograph
of the waterlogged fields taken from a helicopter. The Forgese had
broken its banks a few miles upstream of Murelle and had overflowed, swamping factories and farms. In one vineyard a group of
Albanians sleeping in a cellar had narrowly escaped drowning. A
boy in a canoe had rescued an entire family.

Luckily, nobody had been hurt apart from one Danilo Aprea,
forty-five years old, who, either through drunkenness or through
falling asleep at the wheel, had lost control of his car and crashed
at high speed into a wall in Via Enrico Fermi, Varrano, and been
killed.

Professor Brolli was bent over a table in the bar of the Sacred Heart
Hospital, quietly drinking a cappuccino and watching the pale sun
melt like a knob of butter in the center of the gray sky.

He had a short torso, a disproportionately high neck and long,
gangly limbs.

His curious physical conformation had earned him many nicknames: flamingo, breadstick, goofy, vulture (undoubtedly the most
appropriate given the almost total absence of hair on his head and
the fact that he often operated on near-corpses). But the only nickname he liked was "Carla'. After Carla Fracci. They called him that
because of the almost balletic grace and precision with which he
handled a scalpel.

Enrico Brolli had been born in Syracuse in 1950, and now, at the
age of fifty-six, was head neurosurgeon at the Sacred Heart.

He was tired. For four hours he had had his hands inside the
skull of a poor devil who had been brought in with a brain hemorrhage. They had got to him in the nick of time. Half an hour
more and he would have had it.

While he was finishing his cappuccino he thought of his wife Marilena,
who was probably already waiting for him outside the hospital.

He was free for the rest of the day and they had arranged to meet
up to go and buy a new fridge for their house in the mountains.

Brolli was exhausted, but the idea of strolling through the shopping mall with his wife and then going to have a picnic in the
country, with the dogs, appealed to him.

He and Marilena loved the same little pleasures. Going for walks
with Toto and Camilla, their two labradors, sleeping in the afternoon, having an early supper and staying at home, on the sofa,
watching films on DVD. Over the years Enrico had smoothed away
his rough edges till he and Marilena were like two cogs in a single
mechanism.

In the mall he also wanted to buy some osso bucco to cook with
saffron risotto, then drop in at the video store to rent a copy of
Taxi Driver.

Before the operation, the sight of the patient's gaunt face and
shaven head and all those tattoos had reminded him of Robert De
Niro in Taxi Driver, and he would have been prepared to bet that
the poor devil's condition was the result of a fight. But then, on
opening his skull, he had discovered a subarachnoid hemorrhage
due to the bursting of an aneurysm, probably of congenital origin.

He joined the scrum of nurses around the cash desk, rummaging
in his corduroy pants for some small change. In the pocket of his
white coat his cell phone started vibrating.

Marilena.

He took it out and looked at the display.

No, it was from inside the hospital.

"Yes? Hello? What is it?" he grunted.

"Professor, this is Antonietta ...

It was the second-floor nurse.

"What's the matter?"

"The son of the patient you just operated on is here..."

"And?"

"He wants to know how his father is."

"Get Cammarano to speak to him. I'm on my way out. My
wife..."

The nurse hesitated for a moment. "He's thirteen years old. And
as far as I can tell from the documents he has no other relatives."

"You want me to do it?"

"He's in the second-floor waiting room."

"Have you told him anything?"

"No."

"Hasn't he got anyone-friends, perhaps-that I could speak to?"

"He said there are only two friends of his father's. He's tried
calling them, but he can't get a reply from either of them."

"I'll be right up. In the meantime, try calling them yourself. If
you can't get hold of them, call the carabinieri." He hung up and
paid for his cappuccino.

Quattro Formaggi woke up immersed in a lake of pain.

He lifted one eyelid and a ray of light blinded him. He closed it
again. He heard the sparrows twittering too loudly in the yard. He
put his fingers in his ears, but the movement gave him a sharp twinge
that took his breath away. He was overwhelmed by the pain. When
he finally succeeded in opening one eye he recognized the dingy
wallpaper of his bedroom. He was pretty sure he had fallen asleep
beside the nativity scene, so during the night he must have put himself to bed, which he didn't remember doing. He was finding it difficult to breathe. As if he had a cold. He touched his blocked-up
nose and realized that it wasn't mucus but congealed blood. His
beard and mustache, too, were encrusted with blood.

Now he noticed that in addition to pain there was thirst. His
tongue was so swollen it seemed too big for his mouth. But in order
to drink he would have to get up.

He jumped to his feet and almost passed out with the pain.

Finally, struggling along on his knees, he set off toward the bathroom. "Oh ... Oh ... Rino ... Rino ... You hit me ... You hit me really
hard..."

He grabbed hold of the basin, pulled himself up and looked in
the mirror. For a moment he didn't recognize himself. That monster couldn't be him.

His chest was covered with big bruises, but what fascinated
Quattro Formaggi was his shoulder, which was as swollen and
bloody as a Florentine steak.

He hadn't got that from Rino. That was Ramona's work. He
pressed his finger on the wound and tears of pain ran down his
cheeks.

So it was all true. It wasn't a dream. His body told the truth.

The girl. The woods. The cock in the hand. The rock on the head.
The beating. All true.

He put his face up against the mirror, so that the tip of his nose
touched the glass, and started spitting mucus and blood.

Cristiano Zena was sitting in the waiting room of the intensive care
department. He had his head against the drink machine and was
trying desperately to keep his eyes open.

He had arrived on the first bus and a nurse, after asking him a
stream of questions, had told him to wait there. Professor Brolli
would come and speak to him. He had the shivers and was so
tired ... his eyelids were drooping and his head was lolling, but he
mustn't fall asleep.

The nurse hadn't recognized him, but he remembered her well.
She was the one who did the night shift.

Cristiano had already been in that hospital two years before,
when they had removed his appendix. The operation had gone well,
but he'd spent three days in a room next to an old man who had
lots of tubes coming out of his chest.

It was impossible to sleep because every ten minutes the old man
had a fit of coughing, it was like his lungs were full of pebbles. His
eyes would bulge and he would start slapping his hands on the mattress, as if he was dying. He never spoke, not even when his son
went to see him with his wife and his two grandchildren. They
would ask him a lot of questions but he never answered. Not even
with a nod of the head.

As he sat on that chair, waiting to find out if his father was alive,
Cristiano remembered that during the second night, while he was
dozing immersed in the yellowish gloom of the ward, the old man,
quite suddenly, had spoken in a hoarse voice: "Boy?"

"Yes?"

"Listen to me. Don't smoke. It's too horrible a death." He spoke
staring at the ceiling.

"I don't smoke," Cristiano had defended himself.

"Well, don't ever start. Do you hear?"

"Yes."

"Good boy."

When the next day Cristiano had woken up, the old man wasn't
there. He had died, and the strange thing was that he hadn't made
a sound in passing away.

Now, as he felt the drink machine vibrating against his temple,
Cristiano said to himself that he was going to smoke a cigarette and
to hell with the old man, but instead he took his father's cell phone
out of his pocket. He had dried it under the jet of warm air in the
hospital bathroom and it had come back to life. For the umpteenth
time he dialled Danilo's number. No answer. He tried Quattro
Formaggi. His phone was switched off, too.

As he walked along the corridor of the second floor Professor
Brolli thought about the young shaven-headed man covered with
tattoos who he had operated on. When he had opened his skull
and aspirated the blood he had discovered that the brain hemorrhage, fortunately, had not affected the areas that controlled his
breathing, so the patient could inhale and exhale for himself, but
in other respects his brain was out of order, and it was impossible
to say if or when it would start working again.

In the difficult economic situation in which the hospital found
itself, cases like this were real disasters. Comatose patients required
the constant attention of the medical staff and monopolized the
machines that were necessary for maintaining their vital functions.
In that state, moreover, the patient always suffered a general lowering of his immune defences, with secondary infective complications. But that was all part of his work.

Enrico Brolli had chosen this profession and this particular specialization in the full knowledge of what he was getting himself into.
His father had been a doctor before him. What Brolli hadn't given
much thought to, during his six years at university, was the fact that
afterward you had to speak to the patient's family.