The Crossroads (37 page)

‘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 torch examined his pupils. One was dilated, the other contracted.

Ten to one a brain haemorrhage.

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 turning 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 which 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 in spate, 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 grey, 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 habitués of the Café Rouge et Noir thronged round 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 kilometres 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 centre of the grey sky.

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

His curious physical conformation had earned him many nicknames: flamingo, grissino, goofy, vulture (undoubtedly the most apposite 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 haemorrhage. 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 Totò 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 rental shop to hire 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 haemorrhage 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 trousers for some small change. In the pocket of his white coat his mobile started vibrating.

Marilena
.

He took it out and looked at the display.

No, it was from inside the hospital.

‘Yes? Hallo? 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 ringing 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 recognised the dingy wallpaper of his bedroom. He was pretty sure he had fallen asleep beside the crib, 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 moustache, 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 towards 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 recognise 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 drinks 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 recognised 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 seemed that 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 drinks 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 mobile 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. It was unobtainable. He tried Quattro Formaggi. His phone, too, was switched off.

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 haemorrhage, 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 monopolised 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 specialisation 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
afterwards
you had to speak to the patient's family.

He was nearly sixty now and had three grown-up children (Francesco, the youngest, had decided to study medicine) but he still hadn't developed the doctor's proverbial bluntness in telling the plain truth, yet neither was he very good at sugaring the pill. When he tried to do so he would start stammering and get confused, which only made things worse.

After a career of over thirty years nothing had changed. Every time he had to break some bad news to a patient's family he felt his heart sink in the very same way. But that morning he faced an even more thankless task. Explaining to a thirteen-year-old boy, who was alone in the world, that his father was in a coma.

He peered into the deserted waiting room.

The boy was sitting half-asleep on a plastic chair. His head resting against the drinks machine. His eyes fixed on the floor.

No! No, I can't do it
…
Brolli turned round and walked quickly back towards the lift.
Cammarano can tell him. Cammarano is
young and decisive
.

But he stopped and looked out of the window. Hundreds of starlings were forming a black funnel which lengthened out against the white clouds.

He steeled himself and entered the waiting room.

Beppe Trecca woke up screaming ‘The vow!' He gasped for breath as if someone had been holding his head under water. With feverish, bloodshot eyes he looked around in bewilderment. It took him a few seconds to understand that he was at home in bed.

He saw the face of an African staring in at him through the rear window of the Puma, brandishing a packet of spongy white socks.

What a nightmare that was!

The social worker lifted his head off the pillow. Daylight filtered between the slats of the shutters. He was soaked in sweat and he felt the goose-feather duvet weighing down on him as if he was buried under a ton of earth. In his mouth he still had the revolting taste of the melon vodka. He reached out and switched on the bedside lamp. He screwed up his eyes and they seemed to burn.

I've got a temperature
.

He sat up. The room started spinning. Caught in a whirlpool, they all circled past him – Foppe the IKEA chest of drawers, the Mivar portable television, the poster of a tropical beach, the little bookcase crammed with paperback classics and the
Library of
Knowledge
, the table, a packet of spongy white socks, the silver frame enclosing the photograph of his mother, the …

A packet of socks?

Trecca gave an acidic burp and sat gazing at them, his body stiff under the duvet. He saw the whole night again as if in a film. The camper, Ida, the sex, the banana, Rod Stewart, him in the rain beside the corpse of the dead African and …

Beppe Trecca slapped his boiling forehead.

…
The vow!

Please, God … I swear to you that if you save his life I'll give
up everything … I'll give up the only beautiful thing in my
life … If you save him I promise I'll give up Ida. I'll never see
her again. I swear
.

He had asked God, and God had given.

The African had returned from the realms of the dead thanks to his prayer. Beppe Trecca, that night, had witnessed a miracle.