The Crossroads

  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.

  184

  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.

  185

  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.

  186

  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 c
ould 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.

  187

  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.

  He picked up the bible that he kept on his bedside table and quickly leafed through it. And he read, struggling to focus on the words:

  … So they took away the stone. Then Jesus raised his eyes and said, ‘Father, thank you for listening to me. I know that you always listen to me, but I said this for the good of the people around me, so that they will believe that you sent me.’ And having said this, he called out in a loud voice: ‘Lazarus, come forth!’ And the dead man came forth, with his feet and hands wrapped in bandages and his face covered in a shroud. Jesus said to them: ‘Untie him and let him go.’

  It’s identical!

  But at what a cost!

  I’ll give up Ida.

  That was what he had said. So …

  So I’ll never see her again. I made a vow.

  His head fell back heavily and he seemed to be sucked back down into the black hole.

  He had given away his heart in exchange for a life.

  I’ll give up the only beautiful thing in my life …

  With a grimace of terror on his face he clutched the sheet, as panic smashed into him like a wave hitting a sandcastle.

  188

  From the doorway of the waiting room a tall, thin doctor was looking at him.

  Who does he remind me of?

  Cristiano Zena had to think for a few seconds, then it came to him. He was a dead ringer for Bernard, the vulture in Popeye.

  After clearing his throat, the doctor spoke: ‘Are you Cristiano, the son of Rino Zena?’

  He nodded.

  The professor sat down, all bent over, on a plastic seat facing him.

  His legs were even longer than Quattro Formaggi’s, and Cristiano noticed that he was wearing odd socks. Both were blue, but one was smooth, the other ribbed.

  He felt an instinctive surge of affection for this man, which he immediately repressed.

  ‘I’m Enrico Brolli, the surgeon who operated on your father, and …’ He tailed off and started reading a folder which he held in his hand, scratching the back of his head.

  Cristiano stood up. ‘He’s dead. Why don’t you tell me straight out?’

  The doctor looked at him with his small head cocked on one side, as dogs sometimes do. ‘Who told you he’s dead?’

  ‘I won’t start crying. Just tell me, so I can go.’

  Brolli jumped to his feet and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘Come with me. Let’s go and see him.’

  189

  Quattro Formaggi, under the shower, raised his arms, then lowered them again and looked at his hands.

  Those hands had picked up a rock and smashed a girl’s head in.

  The boiling hot water of the shower turned to ice-cold rain and he felt on his fingertips the rough surface of the stone and the spongy texture of the moss and he felt again the vibration on contact with the forehead of that …

  His head whirled, he fell against the tiles and let himself slip down them like a damp cloth.

  190

  Rino Zena was lying on a bed, with a turban of white gauze wrapped round his head. A lamp over the headboard formed a luminous oval and his serene face seemed to hover above the pillow like that of a ghost. The rest of his body was hidden under a light-green sheet. All around was an amphitheatre of monitors and electronic gadgets which emitted lights and beeps.

  Cristiano Zena and Enrico Brolli were standing a couple of metres from the bed.

  ‘Is he asleep?’

  The doctor shook his head: ‘No. He’s in a coma.’

  ‘But he’s snoring!’

  Brolli couldn’t help smiling. ‘Sometimes people in comas snore.’

  ‘He’s in a coma?’ Cristiano turned for a second to look at him, as if he hadn’t understood.

  ‘Go closer, if you like.’

  He saw him take two steps forward, hesitantly, as if the bed contained an anaesthetised lion, and then grasp the headboard. ‘When will he wake up?’

  ‘I don’t know. But it usually takes a couple of weeks at least.’

  They stood in
silence.

  It seemed as if the boy hadn’t heard. He stood stiffly, clutching the headboard as if he was afraid of falling. Brolli didn’t know how to explain the situation to him. He moved closer to him. ‘Your father had an aneurysm. He’d probably had it since birth.’

  ‘What’s an aneu …?’ asked Cristiano without turning.

  ‘An aneurysm is a small swelling of the artery. A sort of little bag full of blood which isn’t elastic like the other blood vessels, and in time it can burst. Your father’s burst last night and the blood got into the sub … let’s say it got in between the brain and the skull, and penetrated the brain itself.’

  ‘What happens then?’

  ‘The blood compresses the brain and creates a chemical imbalance …’

  ‘And what did you do to him?’

  ‘We removed the blood and closed the artery.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘He’s in a coma.’

  ‘In a coma …’ Cristiano repeated.

  Brolli was about to stretch out his hand and put it on his shoulder. But he checked himself. This boy didn’t seem to want comfort. His eyes were dry and he was exhausted. ‘Your father can’t wake up. He looks as if he’s sleeping, but he’s not. Fortunately he can breathe on his own and he doesn’t need to be helped by a machine. That bottle hanging upside down,’ he pointed to the drip by the bed, ‘serves to feed him; later we’ll put a tube into him to take the food straight to his stomach. His brain has suffered very serious damage and now is devoting all its resources to repairing itself. All its other functions, such as eating, drinking and speaking, have been suspended. For the moment …’

  ‘But did the vein burst because he did something strange?’ Cristiano’s voice sounded shrill.

  The doctor raised an eyebrow. ‘What do you mean, strange?’

  ‘I don’t know …’ The boy fell silent, but then added: ‘I found him like that …’