Lives of the Saints (25 page)

Every few minutes my mother lurched through the bathroom doorway, hands scrambling for supports, and eased herself down in front of the toilet. One hand clutching her back she’d begin to retch, with a violence that frightened me, her body jerking like a whip with each heave; in the flickering light she looked like a wild animal howling in a storm. But by her third or fourth visit she seemed to have coughed up the dregs of her supper, her heaves coming up dry. Her breathing had grown shallow and quick, and with each heave she threw her head back with a groan, as if a pain were passing up her spine. Finally her visits to the toilet stopped altogether, though I still heard her shallow breathing through the doorway, and every few minutes a pause and a groan.

Though the floor was still listing sharply, the churning in my own stomach had begun to subside; a long time had passed since I had last had to crawl to the toilet. My mother was muttering, words I couldn’t make out, her groans growing more drawn out and frequent, like the creak of a great branch slowly breaking beneath the weight of a storm. I had an image of her stretched out on her bunk with her swollen belly and matted hair, her head rocking back and forth; but I didn’t want to leave the bathroom to look at her, remained huddled on the floor there instead counting the number of times the ship rolled between each of her groans, now twenty-three, now twenty, now eighteen.

Finally she called out to me. She was lying with her knees up and her hands clutched to the bed posts; as I watched another pain passed through her and she squeezed her eyes shut.

‘
Addio
,’ she said when the pain had passed. ‘I wish we could do it just the two of us, without that drunken idiot.’

She smiled weakly, but tears had formed in the corner of her eyes. She squeezed my hand.

‘There’s nothing for it,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to go for the doctor. Tell him—tell him the pains are only a few minutes apart. Take the stairs up to the main deck and go to the infirmary, next to the swimming pool. There should be a nurse there or someone who’ll know where he is.’

I stood irresolutely a moment.

‘Go on.’ She squeezed her eyes shut again and groaned. By the time the spasm had passed I was at the door.

‘Put on some shoes,’ she called weakly, but I was already running, weaving unsteadily towards the stairwell that led up to the deck.

The hall on the main deck was deserted, the silence there broken only by the tumble and creak of furniture and loose objects shifting and straining behind closed doors. Even the maintenance staff, who usually began to come out at this hour, had kept to their rooms—in the stairwell I had had to step over a few pools of vomit that had simply been left to congeal where they had fallen. The lights on the main deck were not flickering, but the infirmary, its door propped open with a rubber wedge, was dark. When I looked into the reception room, which held a few upholstered chairs and a large metal desk, I found it deserted; but it gave onto another room, beyond a partition of frosted glass, from which I heard a low moan. Inside, from the dim light filtering in from the hall, I made out about a dozen high tubular beds tilting precariously with the ship’s roll, their
bolts creaking; and on one of them, facing away from me, lay a small woman in a nurse’s bonnet and uniform, her stomach pressed to the mattress.

‘
Scusi
,’ I said from the doorway. But the woman did not turn towards me.

‘
Scusi
,’ I said, louder. ‘My mother’s sick.’

The woman on the bed moaned.

‘Everybody’s sick,’ she said finally, her voice slurred and muffled by her pillow. She moaned again, then brought a foot up lazily to scratch her calf, her toe hissing like static against her nylons.

‘My mother told me to get the doctor,’ I said.

‘The doctor’s sick,’ the nurse said. ‘He’s probably throwing up in a closet somewhere, like everyone else.’ I stood uncertainly a moment, clutching the frame of a bed for support.

‘She said the pains are only a few minutes away.’

‘She’s lucky,’ the nurse said. ‘Mine are here right now.’

But I was suddenly sure where I would find the doctor, stretched out like a beached whale on one of the captain’s couches where we’d left him a few hours before, and already I was out the door and running again. I knew only one way to get to the upper deck, by the outdoor stairwell, and I headed towards the double doors at the end of the hall that led outside to the sun deck.

The ship was still rolling steeply, erratically, pitching sharply forward or back sometimes in the middle of a roll; but I had grown so used to the movement now, lulled by it almost, that I’d lost any sense of the storm outside that was causing it. The portholes on the doors that led out to the deck were thick with rain, but they were too high for me to peer through, and preparing myself merely for the prospect of getting wet I pushed down on one of the bars that released the doors’ catches. But the door
wouldn’t budge. I tightened my feet against the floor and leaned into the bar with my full weight, then again, harder; but still the door held firm. I stepped back about ten feet and made a running lunge; but though the door frame creaked as if about to splinter, the door did not give. Then on my second running lunge, the sea gave me a sudden boost, the ship pitching sharply forward and flinging me hard against the bar; and with a crack the door suddenly gave way, and I was hurled out into the storm.

I found myself sprawled on a deck thick with rushing water, my eyes blinded by wind and rain and my head reeling. I tried to stand but the ship was tilting to port, and a torrent of water caught me at the knees and flung me to the rails. For perhaps five seconds I stood pinned there by the roll of the ship and by the rush of water at my back, staring helpless as the ship completed its roll and the sea opened up before me like a jaw, so close I could have thrust my fist into it, the great wall of a wave building over me in a lengthening curve. But in the brief instant before the wave fell, all my fear suddenly drained away and I felt a tremendous power surge in me, as if I had grown god-like and could command the movement of the world at will; and for a moment it seemed the world had obeyed me, had become suddenly silent and still and calm again, frozen in an instant that might stretch on endlessly, give me time to crawl into the sea’s belly and find whatever spoils of storms and tempests lay half-digested there. Then as if in a dream the wave finally closed over me, and the world went black.

When I came to I was lying on the other side of the deck, my pyjamas pulled half-way down my buttocks, my feet only a yard from the rails. Through some instinct my hand had reached out to clutch a handhold; when I pulled myself up by it
I found myself at the foot of the stairwell that led to the upper deck. The ship was just beginning another roll to port, but I managed to pull myself up the first few steps, free of the flood that was rushing again across the deck. I sat a long time clutching the stairwell’s railing, coughing up salt water and bile until it seemed I had torn my insides. Slowly my mind emerged from its stupor and I became conscious again of the wind and rain lashing at me, and when I had gotten my breath again I stood and lurched upstairs to the upper deck.

The captain’s door slammed inward when I turned the handle; a flurry of wind swept into the room, setting the glass pendants of the chandelier chiming wildly. I could not get the door closed again and left it banging against the wall. But two white-stockinged feet were protruding undisturbed over the end of one of the captain’s couches: the doctor was snoring there peacefully as a lamb, an empty wine bottle clutched to his chest and a thin stream of spit drooling from a corner of his open mouth.

I clutched the arm of the couch to support myself against the ship’s roll and nudged the doctor’s shoulder.

‘Doctor,’ I said, shouting to be heard above the wind and the banging door, ‘my mother wants you to come.’

The doctor twisted his shoulder away from me.

‘Leave me alone,’ he muttered. Little beads of sweat glistened on his forehead.

I nudged again, harder.

‘My mother wants you to come.’

‘Leave me alone,’ he muttered again, rolling over heavily towards the back of the couch. ‘I did the best that I could.’

‘Doctor, my mother’s sick.’ I shook him now with both hands. ‘She said you should come.’

‘Hmm? … Who is it?’ He rolled flat again, bringing both hands up to rub his eyes. His bottle tumbled to the floor with a thud.

‘My mother’s sick.’

‘Eh? … Why are you shouting like that,
per l’amore di Cristo
?’ The doctor wiped at the stream of spittle on his chin with the back of his hand, then raised himself upon his elbows and peered at me through squinting lids. ‘
Ma chi sei tu
?’

‘Vittorio.’

‘Eh? Look at you—stand back, you’re dripping all over my suit.’ He began to ease himself up slowly from the couch. ‘
Ma sei scimunito
? What, have you been out in this weather? In your pyjamas,
che stronzo
. And all this wind, you didn’t even close the door—were you born in a stable? … Who, Vittorio?’

‘Vittorio Innocente. My mother’s sick, she said you should come.’

‘Sick?’ The doctor rubbed the back of his neck with a grimace. ‘It’s just the weather. Go shut the door, for the love of Christ, I have a headache that would kill a whale.’

‘I couldn’t get it closed,’ I said. I’d begun to tremble now with cold. My body ached as if a thousand hammers had been pounding at it.

The doctor rose with a curse and lurched towards the door.

‘You’re that woman’s son, aren’t you, the pregnant one who thinks she’s a princess. Look at the mess on the floor now.’ He slammed the door shut with a heave of his shoulder; immediately the room became calm, and the pendants on the chandelier gradually ceased their mad ringing. Leaning against the door the doctor pulled a small bottle from the inside pocket of his jacket and took a swig of the golden liquid inside, then lurched back to the couch.

‘
Beh
, so what is it?’ He fell heavily onto the couch and reached down for his shoes. ‘Look, now my socks are soaked.
Addio
.’

‘My mother told me to call you,’ I said, my teeth chattering. ‘She said to say about the pains. She was throwing up and making noises even after she stopped. I was throwing up too but I wasn’t making any noises, anyway not the same ones.’

‘Noises? Look at you without any shoes. If you die from pneumonia you’ll have yourself to blame.’ He’d stood now and was moving towards a doorway opposite the one I’d come in through. ‘Everyone gets sick in a storm if they’re not used to it, nothing to worry about. I’ll give you some pills. Nowadays they have pills for everything—constipation, diarrhoea, malaria, hangovers. Pretty soon they won’t need doctors any more, only pharmacists.’

The door we went through led into a narrow hallway that ran the length of the upper deck, a high line of windows looking onto the sea—I remembered now having been down the hall once with Antonio, when he’d taken me with him on his rounds. But I did not see Antonio now among the crewmen and officers who were lurching in and out of doorways or hurrying down the hall in one direction or other, casting backward glances at me as they passed.

‘Where did you pick this one up,
dottore
? Don’t tell me he’s been outside in this weather—if the captain finds out he’ll have someone’s balls.’

‘There’s no problem,’ the doctor said casually. ‘Everything’s under control.’

The doctor led me down an indoor stairwell and we came out on the main deck not far from the infirmary. The door I’d opened to get outside was closed now, though the hall was still deserted.

‘How did you get outside?’ the doctor asked. His body swayed like a great bending sail as he walked, though he kept to the centre of the hall, ignoring the handrails along the wall. ‘I don’t know what got into your head to go out there. Why didn’t you go to the nurse? Luisa!’ The doctor flicked on the lights as he stepped into the infirmary’s reception room. He popped his head into the ward. ‘Luisa! What, are you sleeping? You’re on duty tonight, get up, and with half the ship probably trying to find you. How can anyone sleep in weather like this?’

The doctor pulled a key from his pocket and opened a door behind the reception desk. Through the doorway I caught sight of a bed-like table upholstered in black, a dark lamp stretching up from the table’s head like a blind eye.

When the doctor came out he was holding a small glass pill bottle.

‘Here,’ he said, handing it to me. ‘Tell her to take a couple of these every few hours. And change out of those clothes.’

‘But she wants you to come,’ I said, close to tears; I was beginning to despair of ever getting him down to the room. ‘She’s making noises. She said you should come. She said to say the pains are only a few minutes away.’

‘The pains?’ A roll caught the doctor by surprise and he stumbled backwards against the reception desk, its bolts groaning under his weight. ‘What pains?’ I shrugged helplessly.

‘She said to say about the pains.’

‘
Madonna
,’ the doctor said, paling, ‘she’s having her baby. Luisa! Luisa,
per l’amore di Cristo
get out of that bed! We’re having a baby!’

The doctor hurried back into the room behind the reception desk. I heard him rummaging through drawers, heard cupboards slamming shut, and a minute later he emerged again carrying a small black bag. A bleary-eyed Luisa—she was
little more than sixteen or seventeen, I saw now, a small slip of a girl with large black eyes and a tiny upturned nose—was standing in the doorway of the ward, her uniform creased and puckered and her bonnet askew.

‘A baby?’

‘Bring some ether,
Luí, sbrigati
. And a basin!’ The doctor and I were already rushing headlong down the hallway. A moment later I saw Luisa following behind us, a basin clutched to her chest with one hand and her other still reaching down to slip on a shoe as she stumbled out of the infirmary doorway.

My mother lay in the same position I’d left her in, knees up and hands clutched to the bedposts. Her breathing, though, seemed calmer than before.