Like Family

by Paolo Giordano

  I convey what I am able to understand of the pathology report to a doctor friend after Mrs. A. reads it to me, mangling all the medical terms (something she will continue to do until the end, her intelligence mocked by the impenetrable scientific jargon, although in the final months she will speak with the assurance of one who feels she has mastered the complexity of internal medicine, having come to know it intimately). I manage to make out “carcinoma” and “non-small-cell” and “stage four,” and that is enough for my friend to mutter grimly and say, “It will be quick. They are remarkably swift tumors.”

  In the flurry of phone calls that follow—we now call her every evening for updates—the words that recur most frequently are “I can’t understand it.” I’d like to tell her that there is precious little to understand, that it’s just the way it is. Her tumor can be classified as a statistic, maybe in the overlooked tail end of a Gaussian curve, though still within the natural order of things, but I keep this realism to myself, expressing it only to Nora, who, like Mrs. A., dazedly wonders why. As far as Nora is concerned, my rationality is only an embellished form of cynicism, one of the things that irritates her the most about me, a residue of my youthful callousness that she has not yet been able to correct. We don’t talk about it anymore.

  The plausible reason that everyone was looking for arrived soon enough, however, in the form of a newspaper clipping that Giulietta, a neighbor of Mrs. A., brings her one afternoon. A scientific study of dubious credibility has drawn attention to an anomalous percentage of tumors in Val di Susa. Possible causes include the telephone repeater whose noxious effect the residents of the valley have been clamoring about for years and the nuclear power plants along the Rhône.

  “Could be,” I comment on the phone, “yes, it could be,” yet I can’t help but note that expressions such as “anomalous” and “nuclear power plants” are perceived by Mrs. A. as reassuring or appalling depending on her need. There’s no reason to make an issue of it. The telephone repeater and the transborder power plants—if that’s what it takes, so be it, let’s blame them. It’s easier to point the finger at enriched uranium in France or electromagnetic radiation than accuse an equally invisible fate, a void, the merciless scourge of God.

  _____

  Soon there isn’t even time to wonder about the reasons. Mrs. A. is overwhelmed by a host of new routines, which starkly remind her of Renato’s years of dialysis, only now the body in the spotlight is hers, and she herself is caring for it. With the first cycle of chemotherapy coming up—the oncologist has planned for three of them, with twenty-day intervals, after reluctantly ruling out the idea of an operation—Mrs. A. would like to acquire a wig. She has no way of knowing when her hair will begin to fall out, clump after clump, and she wants to be prepared. By some perversity of fate, her hair is the only feature she really cares about: she walks lopsidedly, she hasn’t bought a new dress for at least twenty years (so that we can never go wrong by giving her a cardigan on every birthday), she doesn’t spend as much as a penny on cosmetics, and the pieces of jewelry she wears are the same ones her husband knew, but she pays special attention to her hair. Sometimes, to pamper her, Nora would make an appointment with her own hairdresser for Mrs. A. She pointed out to me several times how few women there are whose hair is naturally white like that of Mrs. A., a chalk white streaked with silvery strands. “I hope mine will be like that when I get old,” she says, and I suspect that behind that wish there’s a deeper longing to identify.

  “First I want to get it cut,” Mrs. A. announces over the phone, “short, like I wore it when I was a girl. At least I’ll get used to seeing myself bald.”

  Nora takes the idea for what it is, an impulse. “Don’t be silly. It suits you the way it is.”

  The hope left unspoken by Mrs. A. is that cutting her hair will strengthen the roots enough so that it won’t fall out anymore. Her way of thinking is cluttered with popular beliefs that always amused or enraged me, depending. She has no idea of the destructive power of the poison that will be introduced into her body, the force with which it will wipe out all forms of life and resistance, good or bad, without differentiating, like a hurricane. Nora finally manages to dissuade her. She takes the trouble to find the best store to shop for a wig. She consults a client for whom she decorated an apartment in Liguria, a woman who the year before sacrificed both breasts to a malignant cyst and of whom Nora now speaks with a certain admiration, as if that experience had promoted the lady to a higher level of consciousness. The woman refers us to a shop in the city center, and, judging from my preliminary phone call, she has not steered us wrong: the girl who answers the phone is much less embarrassed than I am to talk about wigs for a woman with cancer—in fact, she isn’t embarrassed at all, as if people called her all the time with the same pressing need.

  Mrs. A. comes to our house, and in the kitchen I measure the circumference of her head with the tape measure that was kept in the sewing box, once her exclusive domain. Then I take photos, front, back and profile. The wig will have to be styled just like that forever, a perpetual coiffure for hair that will never grow.

  I take her to the fitting myself, which makes me feel rather weird, almost how I’d feel if I had to accompany her to the gynecologist. Mrs. A. is jovial—cancer can be defeated—and she seems to be pleased that this part of the day is entirely given over to her, that someone has taken the trouble to drive her car and now even offers her a coffee. No one has devoted any time to her for as long as she can remember.

  Inside the shop they have us take a seat in a corridor from which you can keep an eye on what’s going on in the other rooms. Above us hangs a drop-crystal chandelier fitted with energy-saving bulbs. The ambience of the place falls somewhere between elegant and shabby, though more shabby, actually. Mrs. A. points out the pieces of furniture, naming the style for each one: Empire, Liberty, Baroque . . . “See how many things I could have taught a child?” She sighs. But the child never arrived.

  When Nora and I kissed for the first time, we were both wearing wigs: hers about a foot high, shaped like a pineapple, mine with curly gray ringlets. We both had white makeup on our faces. We were in acting class, rehearsing some scenes from La locandiera, none of which would be performed in front of an audience. We dressed in costumes to enhance the experience.

  Every evening the male students and doctoral candidates in the department of physics, myself included, left the austere building on Via Giuria and scattered throughout the city looking for places where there were girls who did not have the same mortifying sobriety in their dress, the same slipshod disregard for their bodies in general. We took courses in photography, Asian languages, cooking, tango and aerobics; we slipped into film-club discussions full of female modern-lit students or pretended to believe in the spiritual potential of kundalini yoga, all to open the door to sex. After several such ventures, I’d landed in the acting class, though I had no interest in theater. At the first session, Nora, who had been studying for over a year, led me through the breathing exercises. My wife-to-be violently shoved her hand into my abdomen, forcing me to emit an embarrassing, spontaneous sound, before she’d even told me her name.

  After class, late that evening, we walked back and forth along the riverfront, orbiting around the stop where a bus would eventually split us up and letting more than one of them go by. Most of the time, Nora spoke about her father and her mother, who at the time were in the hostile throes of separation. She was tormented by the thought of her parents the way one can only be at twenty-five, when you suddenly realize that while you prefer to be an adult who is not like them, you may not succeed at it.

  The night we were wearing the wigs, I made her laugh by imitating the Russian guy, Alexei, with whom I shared an office on the ground floor. For a month he’d been living in the room where we worked, to save on rent. He’d equipped it with an electric burner on which he heated the nasty contents of various canned food products, and at night he
laid a sleeping bag on top of our joined desks, evading the guards. He put everything away before I arrived, except when he didn’t hear the alarm go off. Unexpectedly, Nora kissed me. Since we were wearing wigs and I was imitating the broken English of a Russian, in a sense we were and weren’t ourselves, but maybe that’s always the way it is when you kiss someone new on the lips.

  I tell all this to Mrs. A. as we wait, to distract her more than anything else, but she must already know the story, or isn’t too interested, because when a young woman appears with a head-shaped wooden stand on which her new hair is resting, she leaps to her feet.

  The fake hair is remarkably similar in color and style to hers, but I’d be willing to bet that the texture is quite different. Mrs. A. sits down in front of a mirror and lets the girl place it on her head ceremoniously, like a crown. She stares raptly at her reflection, turning to one side and the other, and asks the young woman for a handheld mirror to check the back.

  “I look almost better with than without it,” she says, and I can’t decide if it’s to cheer herself up or if she really thinks that. With that synthetic hair, she is certainly different from before: different yet also the same.

  We are briefed on how to care for the wig: it can be combed and also washed with a mild shampoo, but not often; there’s no need to, the wig’s hair does not get dirty the way ours does (the young woman has the linguistic prudence to say “ours” instead of “real”). “And now you can choose a nightcap. It’s complimentary, and we have them in different colors. Mint green, do you like this one? What do you think? It goes well with your eyes, too. Here, wait, I’ll help you take it off.”

  Mrs. A. holds on to the wig with both hands. “No! I want to keep it on. If I can. So I can get used to it at least.”

  The young woman can’t keep a sad expression from crossing her face. “Oh. Of course you can. It’s yours now.”

  We leave the shop arm in arm. Mrs. A. is wearing her new hair, looking proud. “Let’s not say anything to Nora. Let’s see if she notices,” she suggests. I promise to go along—it sounds like fun. Meantime I text a message to my wife, explaining that Babette will be wearing the wig and that she should pretend not to notice.

  In the frenzy we forgot to take the wooden dummy. I go back to retrieve it a few days later, by myself. I tell the same girl, “Excuse me, but the lady lost her head.” She, however, does not smile; perhaps the joke is in bad taste.

  I leave the dummy in the car, on the passenger seat, until the next time I see Mrs. A. I even exchange a few words with it. One afternoon I offer a young colleague a ride home. As he gets into the car, he looks up, puzzled. “And just what are you doing with this?” he asks. Then, giving me no time to explain, he bows to kiss her lipless face.

  The Hall of Memorabilia

  Mrs. A. does not lose her hair during the first cycle of chemotherapy, nor during the second either. Instead she vomits continually, which is perhaps worse. She’s placed three basins in strategic locations—beside the couch, under the bed and in the bathroom—and is not reluctant to talk about how she uses them regularly. Reticence about bodily functions has never been part of her nature. She’s a woman who goes straight to the point: one of those people—as she would describe herself—who choose to tell it like it is. What she can’t stand is having everyone in town ask her how she is. Who cares? She’s lost thirteen pounds in a little over a month, she is visibly emaciated, so she’s not too surprised that everyone asks about her health. To avoid it she goes out as seldom as possible and now prefers to do her shopping at the market in Almese, a few miles farther away; in any case, it’s on her way back from the hospital.

  The doctors have advised against raw vegetables, preserves packed in oil and sausages—everything with a potential bacterial content that might threaten her weakened immune system, a kind of pregnant-woman’s diet that she has not experienced in better circumstances. And just like a pregnant woman, in the brief periods when she is unaffected by the treatment and its aftereffects, she indulges in sporadic yearnings for particular foods, which she perhaps ironically calls “my cravings.”

  One day she gets into the car and drives for miles and miles, only because she’s recalled the bread baked in a wood-burning oven in Giaveno. She’s spent a lifetime denying herself such whims in the name of exemplary conduct, out of respect for . . . respect for what? She’d had a yen for that bread many times before but had never ventured to go and get it because it seemed inconvenient to face that winding road just to satisfy an impulse. Now she clings to her desires, she invokes them, because each one corresponds to a burst of vitality that for a few minutes distracts her from the overwhelming thought of the illness.

  Parmigiano cheese is the first to vanish from her refrigerator, followed by cheeses in general, then red and white meats. The nausea isn’t to blame for the meat, she explains; it’s that she can no longer taste or smell it, and chewing a piece of meat without tasting it is like having something dead in your mouth, aware the whole time that it’s dead: in the end it’s impossible to swallow it.

  “Last night I felt like peas and eggs. I cooked them and ate them eagerly. Then I started coughing and threw it all up. That’s it, no more eggs and peas either.”

  Mrs. A., who never turned her nose up at even the most dubious traditional dishes—roasted frogs’ legs, boiled snails, pigeon or tripe, fried brains and entrails—is now unable to consume an innocent plate of eggs and peas. “Water, too, can you believe it? Even that nauseates me.” Starting in December, and for the entire year of life left to her, she will drink only carbonated beverages—Coke, aranciata and chinotto—and will eat mainly sweets, like an immoderate, incorrigible little girl.

  I decide to go and see her. Informed of her absurd diet, I bring her a tray of small Baci di Dama cookies (observing their success, I show up with an identical tray at every future visit, until the end, until she refuses those, too). One sunny Sunday morning, I set out with Emanuele, who, to honor his defector-nanny has brought along an intensely colorful, almost psychedelic drawing, in which winged nymphs with pink, purple and blue hair float in a monster-infested sky.

  “What are these?” I ask him.

  “Delicate fairies.”

  “And those?”

  “Pokémon.”

  “Oh.”

  Too bad he then decides to wrap the drawing: he balls it up like a candy and loads it with Scotch tape. What he hands to Mrs. A. is a gob of crumpled, sticky paper. She sets it aside, puzzled. She no longer has time to pursue Emanuele’s creative excursions; she has her body to look after now, all those medicines to take and their side effects to be weighed against their benefits. I have the distinct feeling that the drawing will end up in the trash as soon as we leave.

  Emanuele can’t understand the self-centeredness the illness has forced on her. He can’t conceive of Mrs. A. as a different person from the woman who took care of him, him and him alone, who followed him along his rambling fantasies wherever they were headed and spoiled him like a little prince. When he notices her unexpected remoteness, he becomes nervous and petulant. I can tell by the way his voice changes: he does that whenever he wants to be the center of attention. But Mrs. A. doesn’t have the strength or the desire to understand what’s going through the child’s head. I find myself between two raging flames burning with expectations and resentment: on the one hand a sick elderly woman, on the other a schoolboy, each eager to have all eyes on him for fear of disappearing.

  I send Emanuele out to play in the courtyard, even though it’s cold. He protests but in the end obeys. From the doorway he gives me one of his most withering looks.

  _____

  There was a room in Mrs. A.’s house where the radiators had been turned off for years, a room that looked not like either a living room or a study but rather a reliquary. Since in winter the temperature here was at least ten degrees lower than in the rest of the apartment, when you went in
, you had the feeling you were entering a catacomb. The windows were shuttered with colored-glass panes depicting women’s faces in profile—I don’t recall the name of the stained-glass artist, but Mrs. A. always mentioned him very reverently—so the light that filtered through was also hushed, sepulchral. Everything in that room spoke of Renato.

  A recessed wall had been fitted with shelves, and a different collection was displayed on each shelf. The mix of periods and styles suggested that the collector was an individual suffering from a peculiar incoherence or someone who was very open-minded: there were a dozen pre-Columbian statues, some bizarrely shaped paperweights that I had never seen anywhere else, painted ceramic sculptures of dubious taste, plus assorted silver and brass containers. In the center of the room, a low table with a false bottom displayed twenty or so pocketwatches, arranged equidistantly from one another on a green felt lining, the hands of each stopped at twelve noon. The aspiration of a secondhand dealer like Renato to become an art expert—a goal he came close to but never actually achieved—was evident from the heterogeneous nature of the collection. Whether Mrs. A. was aware of it is impossible to say, but she would not have dishonored her husband’s dubious talent for anything in the world. Of all the experiences in her life, assisting him in his business dealings was certainly the most unexpected and exciting; just the thought of it still filled her with pride.

  The most valuable objects were stacked behind a lacquered screen with Oriental motifs: about fifty canvases, all authenticated. I know for a fact that there were works by Aligi Sassu and Romano Gazzera, at least a couple from the school of Felice Casorati and some from the futurist period, though not by its most celebrated exponents. Mrs. A. also spoke to me about an oil by Giuseppe Migneco, Gli sposi (The Married Couple), which Renato had never wanted to sell, despite the insistence of a doctor who increased his offer each year. That painting, she said, made her think of her and Renato, and of me and Nora.