Later the fox returns and takes him to a dining hall where people in blue pajamas are seated at tables, staring into bowls. Some are dipping spoons into them, eating bread and pasta, talking to their soup. Like them, he eats.
He is sitting alone in a room with two chairs and a desk. Through the window he sees a church dome, and a bell is booming from it. Pigeons fly around it. He watches them for a while and does not break his gaze when the door opens behind him and someone enters. A woman seats herself opposite with the desk between them. She is peering at her clipboard through ugly reading-glasses—an owl. She is about forty years old, maybe a little more. Her hair is dyed jet black, her cheeks are rouged, and she has a thoughtful face, not pretty.
”Zdravo!“she says with a smile, though her eyes are worried about something. “Pozdrav!”
He sits straighter and pays attention, but does not answer.
“You are Croatian?” she asks in his native language.
He looks away.
“What is your name?”
He resumes watching the pigeons.
“I am Dr. Mazzuolo. Can you tell me your name?”
He does not answer, neither does he look at her, though he notes that she wears too much lipstick.
“I am Croatian”, she goes on in a friendly conversational tone. “I’m married to an Italian man, and I live here in Venezia. I was born in Croatia, but right after the war my parents and I got out. We fled across the sea in a little boat. I was younger then, engaged to be married, not to my present husband but to a boy who died. It seemed to me that the world ended when we left our home. Do you feel that your world has ended?”
He wishes she would stop speaking. He understands why she is doing it, why she wants to engage him in conversation. It is her job.
“I am your psychologist”, she explains. “I hope you do not mind that I am a woman. It is not so easy for a man to talk to a woman doctor, I understand this. But you are older than I am, so you could think of me as your niece—” She smiles. “—a niece who is also a doctor. I am not a physician; that would be a psychiatrist. But I studied at Bologna and did my graduate work in America. So, you see, I hope you will trust me in time, and then if you wish, when you feel you are ready, you can speak with me.”
He glances swiftly at her and then away.
She looks down at her clipboard and writes something on the paper.
“So, you do not feel you are ready to tell me your name. But can I at least reassure you that you needn’t hide information anymore. You are safe here in Italy, where there are no secret police or political prisons. You have been in prison, I know.”
He ceases watching the pigeons, drops his chin to his chest, and clasps his hands between his knees. If he had the energy he would put his face between his knees and shut everything out.
“The doctors have described the wounds upon your body. I have seen wounds like this before. Sometimes people from our homeland are able to get out across the border. They walk a long way or they come by boats. And among them are a few who escaped from prison. I think you are one of them. Are you one of them?”
Now his head is between his knees. He is a breathing diatom, diving for the darkness of the deep waters. The woman is silent for a time. Then she scrapes back her chair and walks over and stands beside him. She puts a hand lightly to the back of his head and keeps it there, gently stroking the bristles and the scars.
“I am Slavica”, she whispers. “Don’t be afraid.”
How long has he been here? There is a lot of rain. Is it spring or autumn? They have moved him to a part of the hospital where it is not necessary to lock the doors of patients’ rooms. The ward is locked, however, so escape is still impossible. He has not yet spoken to the woman. Slavica does all the talking. She has told him there will be no more electroshock treatments. He has had nine—it was like being executed nine times over. She does not like the shock treatments; she thinks they are barbaric, but she is not a physician and has no say in hospital policy. However, she did get them to stop his treatment because it seems the shocks made no difference. They certainly were not helping. Does he feel better now? Is his memory returning?
He likes to listen to her. She talks about her husband, who is a dentist, and her two children, a boy and a girl, and what they are doing. The older child, a boy, is obsessed with soccer. The little girl plays the flute—she’s gifted, says the mother, advanced beyond her years that child! Slavica is very proud of her. And of the boy too, he is so much like his father. They live in a good house on the mainland in the town of Mira. It means a bit of a drive to work each day, but they don’t like the dampness and the frequent floods in the city. The tourists can be bothersome too. In summer, the family likes to drive up to the Dolomites and hike in the mountains. In winter, not every year but as often as they can afford, they go to Innsbruck for skiing. Does he know where that is? It’s in Austria. Very lovely, though she prefers the Sud Tirol. Italy is unstable right now, she tells him, the Euro-Communists are always trying to get the better of the Christian Democrats.
He understands why she throws these fine filaments to him: she is hoping he will catch a thread and let her pull him in. Sometimes she is so naive in her approach that he feels an urge to help her along, to suggest a few topics that would be better bait. Of course, he does not.
Most days he just eats and naps and eats. And eats and eats and eats. And walks the hallways. He knows the other patients now, not by name, but by their faces and their conditions. He feels pangs of pity for the truly insane, those who remain in agony. Usually such people are under heavy sedation. It is impossible to engage them in any way. He has tried once or twice to find within himself that mysterious current he first felt in the cellar hospital of Sarajevo, when he looked into the souls of other sufferers and spoke to them with his eyes. Wordless messages from the swallows, consolation from a myth. But it seems that this too has been taken away.
Sometimes she makes him smile—not much, never in the beginning, a little as the months go by. Sometimes her eyes get wet. Her little boy has suffered a broken leg. A big boy kicked him hard during a game. An accident, but it does things to a mother’s heart.
Three or four times a week, an hour per session.
He is picking up a few Italian words from the fox. No, not the fox. He is known to everyone in the hospital as “Chicklet”. Slavica says that it’s because the man makes clicking noises, as if he is always chewing gum with his little square teeth, and Chicklet is the name of an American gum. This is interesting. You learn something new every day.
“What year were you born?” she asks abruptly one day, changing the subject from alpine flowers to more personal questions.
Without thinking, he murmurs, “Nineteen thirty-three.”
She leans across the desk and takes his hands in hers. He pulls away, disturbed not so much by her touch as by the fact that he has spoken without intending to.
“Your first words”, she breathes, wiping an unprofessional tear from her eye.
He looks away.
“What is your name?” she whispers, pressuring for more.
He does not acknowledge the question. She tricked him, caught him with her thread. Who is she, really, and why is she so concerned about him? What does she hope to learn, and why does she want to learn it?
“Yes, enough for one day”, she says with a sympathetic smile. “Though the year isn’t right because that would make you only in your late twenties.” Then the smile dies on her face, and she sits down again, looking closely at him. The months of plentiful food have been filling him out, and his hair is growing again. Perhaps he sits taller these days. The bruises are healed too. After a few moments, she jots something down on her clipboard, stands up, and in a muted tone bids him farewell until tomorrow.
He finds the neurotics most difficult. Psychotics elicit sympathy. Neurotics repel sympathy because they demand attention and in a language he cannot understand. They get very angry or very hurt if you do not pla
y their games. The games are all inside their minds, and the rules are difficult to figure out. He would not play them even if he knew what they were. Slavica informs him that he is neither psychotic nor neurotic. He has suffered severe trauma and is recovering. The hospital windows, she tells him in a factual tone, are made of a kind of glass that cannot be shattered. In the old days, patients sometimes ran down a hallway, threw themselves against the glass, and fell to the sidewalk below, or drowned in the “street”.
“But I know you would not do such a thing”, she adds, glancing surreptitiously at the jagged white lines across his wrists.
Another month goes by. It is hot these days, but breezes sometimes blow in off the Adriatic. The days are growing shorter, autumn is approaching. He watches the pigeons a lot and walks the hallways. His strength is returning little by little. He can shower without Chicklet standing guard. He spends more time in the recreation room playing checkers with the deranged, or making paper flowers under the art instructor’s eye. He spends a week putting together a thousand-piece picture puzzle of the world. The world is very large. The color for Yugoslavia is red. Italy is green. All oceans are blue.
Today they lend him a little safety razor (one from which the blade cannot be removed) and some shaving soap. He is scraping his face clean of bristles for the first time in—how long?—straining to remember, he realizes that the last time he shaved was —how long ago? how long ago?—it was just after Christmas—when—
Then he stares into the mirror and sees himself stripped to the waist, needing a haircut, whistling as he shaves with the Spanish straight-razor Antun gave him as a wedding gift, and behind him Ariadne is stepping out of the bath, smiling to herself, holding her large belly because the baby is now kicking and swimming around in the inland sea. He collapses onto the floor of the ward washroom, sobbing aloud. Drawn by the noise, Chicklet and another orderly come rushing in. They help him to his feet, take him back to his room, and call his psychologist. When she enters his cell, she finds him lying on his bed with arms crossed over his face, weeping silently now.
She sits down on the bedside chair. He is aware of her presence. No one comes in to give him a needle. No one restrains him or locks the door. Only Slavica is here. She asks no questions, offers no maternal pit-pats or chat. She merely sits and waits with him.
He drifts into a light sleep and awakes to find her still present. Now she will ask questions, he feels certain: Why is he crying? What has he remembered? What is his name? Instead, she looks back without tension or intent. She says nothing with her lips, though she is telling him, I am with you, I am here.
At last, he sits up and whispers, “My name is Josip.”
“Would you like to have a day out?” she asks, a month or two later.
“Yes”, he says.
“I will arrange it.”
They have talked their way around a few things, but not much so far, nothing that would open an inner abscess. Just a few facts. She knows now that he is without family, has been a political prisoner, and was once a professor at a university in Croatia. She says with a playful smile that she can determine his academic field (a pure conjecture, she admits, not a clinical diagnosis), because his temperament and character are those of a writer, and if this is true, she is certain he is a poet.
“Why do you think that?” he asks with a scowl that intrigues her.
“Your eyes. The way you watch things.”
He angrily gets to his feet and paces about the room.
“I am not a poet!”
“What, then?”
“A mathematician.”
“That is surprising”, she says, raising her eyebrows. “I could not have guessed.”
He wants her to go now, just let him be, enough is enough for one day. But she does not move a muscle. She just sits there and watches him stare out the window with his shoulders quaking, observing how his body grows still with the passage of minutes. He is looking at something out there above the city’s skyline.
“What is it, Josip?”
In a subdued voice he murmurs, “The wing’s curve . . .”
“What did you say?”
“The wing’s curve, the wind’s curve, the earth’s curve” “That is interesting. What does it symbolize?”
“I don’t know. They were my wife’s words.”
“You are married?”
“Her name was Ariadne.”
The outing takes place a few weeks later. Slavica has come to an agreement with her husband that one of her patients will visit all day Saturday, have supper with the family, and then they will drive back to Venezia and drop him at the asylum as if it were a hotel.
After breakfasting at the hospital, Slavica and Josip drive across the causeway from the city to the mainland. Josip has doubts about the wisdom of the excursion. He is a little afraid of himself. She reassures him that this is to be expected after all he has been through. Add to this the months he has been locked inside that stuffy old hospital—nearly a year—and it’s not surprising that he feels like a stranger in a strange land.
“I am a stranger in a strange land”, he replies glumly.
“Emilio will make you feel at home.”
“What does he think about a mental patient coming for a family visit?”
“He’s looking forward to meeting you. He likes Croatians.”
“Aren’t you afraid I will hurt your children?”
She turns her eyes from the road for a second or two, peers at him over the rim of her owlish spectacles, and laughs. A much more effective response than anything she might have said.
“This is good, Josip”, she says after a silence. “It’s very good that you are honest. When a person is real, he speaks truth. I know you are a man of truth.”
“Thank you. But I do not know what truth is.”
“You know what it is. It’s there.”
“How honest am I permitted to be?”
“As honest as you like. Say what you wish.”
“You wear too much lipstick.”
She bursts out laughing. “It’s true. Emilio tells me the same. He asks me, do you wear all that paint for me or for someone else? I wear it for you, my dear husband, I tell him, and I wear it for someone else. And do you know who that someone else is?”
“I would rather not know”, murmurs Josip uncomfortably.
She laughs again. “The someone else is the lady I see each morning in my mirror.”
Josip knows it is better to be tactful, but she has invited candidness.
“Do you not like how you look—how you look naturally?” he asks.
“I am not beautiful. I am not even pretty. Women want to be beautiful, even if it’s just a fantasy.”
“I thought you told me last week that fantasy leads to unreality.”
“Yes, that’s so. I prescribe the medicine, but I don’t take it myself.”
This makes Josip smile. “Any more questions?”
“Are you still my niece?”
“No, I am your auntie.”
Their home is a two-story brick villa—a very small one—near the Brenta, a river that runs through Padova to Venezia. The other houses on the street are real villas, their marble pillars and cornices reminding Josip of classical Rome. The Mazzuolos’ home has no pillars, though from the outside it appears to be spacious enough. An enormous television aerial caps the roof, and the grass in the front yard is mowed like a fine carpet. Flowering shrubs hug the building, and old cypresses and poplars of various shapes and sizes border the property, whispering in the morning breeze. The sun is shining through the branches from the direction of Croatia.
They find her husband behind the house. He is a short, pudgy man with a balding head, practicing golf shots on the back lawn. A few steps away, two children are reading books as they lie on a blanket beside a little fountain and a pool of natural stones, over which a statue of St. Anthony of Padova is preaching to fish. The girl drops her book and comes running to her mother, chattering ex
citedly about a bird’s nest in a tree—the peeping of baby chicks has begun this morning, but Papa will not let her climb up to touch them. She is five or six and possesses very pretty Slavic features.
“Chiara, Chiara, say hello to our guest.” The girl smiles and curtsies, and then runs off to the tree where she discovered the nest.
Slavica’s husband has a wide friendly face, and his black eyes sparkle as he shakes Josip’s hand.
“Benvenuto”, he says with a smile. The clasp is warm and strong. He has fine teeth, well displayed. He switches to awkward Croatian. “Slavica has told me a lot about you. We’re so glad you could visit us, Mr. . . . Mr. . . .”
“Lasta”, says Josip, with a bow of his head. “Please call me Josip.”
“Josip—and I am Emilio.”
The boy glances up from his book.
“Mamma,” he calls, “was Garibaldi a bad man or a good man?”
“A bad man”, she calls back.
“A good man”, grins the boy’s father. “Paolo, come and meet our guest. No—our guest will come and meet you.”
So, they all go over to the blanket and tower above the boy, who is about eight years old, with an unruly thatch of black hair and intelligent eyes. His leg is in a cast, and he can only roll over onto his side and stick up his arm for a handshake, then back to the book.
Josip glances into the pool. St. Anthony is preaching to real fish, gold and yellow and black, swimming around the stems of floating flowers.
They have a leisurely lunch on the patio, hours-long, Italian style, full of pleasant disconnected chat, mostly the important things the children want to talk about. No questions are asked of the visitor. Emilio is an excellent host, offering wine again and again, though Josip declines. He is happy with water. Afterward they take a long walk beside the Brenta, the father pushing his son in a homemade contraption of bicycle wheels and plywood—which they call “the limousine”.
Island of The World Page 45
