by T. C. Boyle
“Don R.,” I said, getting up from the desk and simultaneously fitting the stethoscope to my ears, “I can see that you’re suffering—but have no fear, you’ve come to the right man. Now, let’s have a look….”
Well, I examined him, and he was as complete and utter a physical wreck as any man under seventy who has ever set foot in my office. The chest pain, extending below the breastbone and down the left arm to the wrist and little finger, was symptomatic of angina, a sign of premature atherosclerosis; his liver and spleen were enlarged; he suffered from hypertension and ulcers; and if he didn’t yet have a full-blown case of emphysema, he was well on his way to developing it. At least, this was my preliminary diagnosis—we would know more when the test results came back from the lab.
Crocifissa returned to inform me that Signora Malatesta seemed to be having some sort of attack in the waiting room, and as the door swung shut behind her, I could see one of Santo’s bodyguards bent over the old woman, gently patting her on the back. “Momento,” I called out, and turned to Santo with my gravest expression. “You are a very unwell man, Don R.,” I told him, “and I can’t help but suspect that your style of living has been a contributing factor. You do smoke, do you not?”
A grunt. The blocky fingers patted down the breast pocket of his jacket and he produced an engraved cigarette case. He offered me a Lucky Strike with a gallant sweep of his arm and, when I refused, lit one up for himself. For a long moment he sat meditating over my question with a lungful of tobacco smoke. Finally, he shrugged his shoulders. “Two or three packs a day,” he rasped, and appended a little cough.
“And alcohol?”
“What is this, Doctor, the confessional?” he growled, fixing me with a pair of dangerous black eyes. But then he subsided, shrugging again. “A liter of Chianti or Valpolicella with my meals—at breakfast, lunch, evening snack and dinner—and maybe two or three fiaschi of brandy a day to keep my throat open.”
“Coffee?”
“A pot or two in the morning. And in the evening, when I can’t sleep. And that’s another problem, Doctor—these pills that Bernardi gave me for sleeping? Well, they have no effect on me, nothing, I might as well be swallowing little blue capsules of cat piss. I toss, I turn. My stomach is on fire. And this at four and five in the morning.”
“I see, yes,” I said, and I pulled at the little Vandyke I’ve worn for nearly forty years now to inspire confidence in my patients. “And do you—how shall I put it? Do you exercise regularly?”
Santo looked away. His swollen features seemed to close in on themselves and in that moment he was the pudgy boy again, ready to burst into tears at some real or imagined slight. When he spoke, his voice had sunk to a whisper. “You mean with the women then, eh?” And before I could answer he went on, his voice so reduced I could barely hear him: “I—I just don’t seem to feel the urge anymore. And not only when it comes to my wife, as you might expect after ten years of marriage, but with the young girls too.”
Somehow, we had steered ourselves into dangerous conversational waters, and I saw that these waters foamed with naked shoals and rocky reefs. “No, no,” I said, and I almost gasped out the words, “I meant physical exercise, jogging, bicycling, a regular twenty-minute walk, perhaps?”
“Ha!” he spat. “Exercise!” And he rose ponderously from the chair, his face as engorged and lopsided as a tomato left out to rot in the sun. “That’s all I do is exercise. My whole frigging life is exercise, morning to night and back to morning again. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t ball the girls in the brothel and my cigarettes taste like shit. And do you know why? Do you?”
Suddenly his voice had risen to a roar and the door popped open so that I could see the burnished faces of the two bodyguards as they clutched at their waistbands for the heavy pistols they wore there. “Bastiano!” he bellowed. “Bastiano Frigging C., that’s why. That’s my problem. Not the cigarettes, not the booze, not the heart or the liver or the guts, but that bony pussy-licking son of a bitch Bastiano!”
A week later, in the middle of a consultation with Signora Trombetta over her hot flashes and crying spells, the door to my office burst open and there, looking like death in a dishpan, stood Bastiano C. I hadn’t seen him in over a year, since I’d last treated him for intestinal worms, and, as with Santo R., I was stunned by his visible deterioration. Even as a boy he’d been thin, the sullen elder child of the village schoolmaster, all legs and arms, like a spider, but now it was as if the flesh had been painted on his bones. At five feet, nine inches tall, he must have weighed less than a hundred pounds. His two bodyguards, expressionless men nearly as emaciated as he, flanked him like slats in a fence. He gave a slight jerk of his neck, barely perceptible, and the widow Trombetta, though she was in her sixties and suffering from arthritis in every joint, scurried out the door as if she’d been set afire.
“Don C.,” I said, peering at him through the upper portion of my bifocals, “how good to see you. And how may I help you?”
He said nothing, merely stood there in the doorway looking as if a breeze would blow him away if it weren’t for the pistols, shivs and cartridges that anchored him to the floor. Another minute gesture, so conservative of energy, the merest flick of the neck, and the two henchmen melted away into the waiting room, the door closing softly behind them.
I cleared my throat. “And what seems to be the matter?” I asked in my most mellifluous, comforting tones, the tones I used on the recalcitrant child, the boy who doesn’t like the look of the needle or the girl who won’t stick out her tongue for the depressor.
Nothing.
The silence was unlike him. I’d always known him as a choleric personality, quick to speak his mind, exchange insults, fly into a rage—both in the early days of our acquaintance, when he was a spoiled boy living at home with his parents, and afterward, when he began to make his mark on the world, first as a campiere on the Buschetta estate and later as a man of respect. He wasn’t one to hold anything back.
I rearranged the things on my desk, took off my glasses and wiped them with my handkerchief. Bastiano C. was twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, somewhere in that range, and his medical history had been unremarkable as far as I could recall. Oh, there had been the usual doses of clap, the knife and gun wounds, but nothing that could begin to explain the physical shambles I now saw before me. I listened to the clock in the square toll the hour—it was 4:00 P.M. and hotter than even Dante could have imagined—and then I tried one last time. “So, Don C., you’re not feeling well. Would you like to tell me about it?”
The man’s face was sour, the gift of early handsomeness pressed from it like grappa from the dregs. He scratched his rear casually, then took a seat as if he were stuffed with feathers, and leaned forward. “Pepto-Bismol,” he said in the moist high-pitched tones that made it seem as if he were sucking his words like lozenges. “I live Pepto-Bismol. I breathe it, drink it by the quart, it runs through my veins. I even shit pink.”
“Ah, it’s your stomach, then,” I said, rising now, the stethoscope dangling from my neck, but he gestured for me to remain seated. He wasn’t yet ready to reveal himself, to become intimate with my diagnostic ways.
“I am telling you, Doctor,” he said, “I do not eat, drink, smoke; my taste is gone and my pleasure in things is as dead as the black cat we nailed over Miraglia Sciacca’s door. I take two bites of pasta with a little butter and grated Romano and it’s like they stabbed me in my guts.” He looked miserably at the floor and worked the bones of his left wrist till they clicked like dice thrown against a wall. “And do you know why?” he demanded finally.
I didn’t know, but I certainly had a suspicion.
“Santo R.,” he said, slowing down to inject some real venom into his voice. “The fat-ass bastard.”
That night, over a mutton chop and a bowl of bean soup, I consulted my housekeeper about the situation. Santuzza is an ignorant woman, crammed from her toes to her scalp with the superstitious claptrap th
at afflicts the Sicilian peasantry like a congenital defect (I once caught her rubbing fox fat on her misshapen feet and saying a Salve Regina backwards in a low moaning singsong voice), but she has an uncanny and all-encompassing knowledge of the spats, feuds and sex scandals not only of Partinico but of the entire Palermo province. The minute I leave for the office, the telephone receiver becomes glued to the side of her head—she cooks with it in place, sweeps, does the wash and changes the sheets, and all the while the pertinacious voice of the telephone buzzes in her ear. All day long it’s gossip, gossip, gossip.
“They had a falling-out,” Santuzza said, putting a loaf in front of me and refilling my glass from the carafe on the sideboard. “They were both asked to be a go-between in the dispute of Gaspare Pantaleo and Miraglia Sciacca.”
“Ah,” I murmured, breaking off a crust and wiping it thoughtfully round the rim of my plate, “I should have known.”
As Santuzza told it, the disaffection between Pantaleo and Sciacca, tenant farmers on the C. and R. estates, respectively, arose over a question of snails. It had been a dry year following hard on the heels of the driest year anyone could remember, and the snails hadn’t appeared in any numbers during the previous fall. But recently we’d had a freak rain, and Gaspare Pantaleo, a poor man who has to do everything in his power to make ends meet, went out to gather snails for a stew to feed his children. He knew a particular spot, high on the riverbank where there was a tumble of stones dumped to prevent erosion, and though it was on private property, the land belonged neither to the C. nor R. family holdings. Miraglia Sciacca discovered him there. Apparently Sciacca knew of this spot also, a good damp protected place where the snails clumped together in bunches in the cracks between the rocks, and he too had gone out to collect snails for a stew. His children—there were eight of them, and each with an identical cast in the right eye—were hungry too, always hungry. Like Pantaleo, he lived close to the bone, hunting snails, frogs, elvers and songbirds, gathering borage and wild asparagus and whatnot to stretch his larder. Well, they had words over the snails, one thing led to another, and when Miraglia Sciacca came to he was lying in the mud with maybe a thousand snails crushed into his groin.
Two days later he marched up to the Pantaleo household with an antiquated carbine and shot the first two dogs he saw. Gaspare Pantaleo’s brother Filippo retaliated by poisoning the Sciacca family’s pig, and then Rosario Bontalde, Miraglia Sciacca’s uncle by marriage, sent a fifteen-pound wheel of cheese to the Pantaleos as an apparent peace offering. But the cheese was hexed—remember, this is Santuzza talking—and within the week Girolama Pantaleo, Gaspare’s eldest daughter and one of the true and astonishing beauties of the province, lost all her hair. Personally, I suspected ringworm or perhaps a dietary deficiency, but I didn’t want to distract Santuzza, so I ate my soup and said nothing.
Things apparently came to a head when Gaspare Pantaleo stormed up the road to the Sciacca place to demand that the hex be lifted—the cheese they’d disposed of, but in such cases the hex, Santuzza assured me, lingers in all who’ve eaten of it. At the time, Miraglia Sciacca was out in the yard, not five paces from the public street, splitting olive wood so he could stack it against the fence for the coming winter. “You’re a fraud and a pederast,” Gaspare Pantaleo accused in a voice the neighbors could hear half a mile away, “and I demand that you take the hex off that cheese.”
Miraglia’s only response was a crude epithet.
“All right then, you son of a bitch, I’ll thrash it out of you,” Gaspare roared, and he set his hand down on the fence post to hoist himself over, and that was when Miraglia Sciacca, without so much as a hitch in his stroke, brought the ax down and took Gaspare Pantaleo’s right hand off at the wrist. That was bad enough, but it wasn’t the worst of it. What really inflamed the entire Pantaleo clan, what drove them to escalate matters by calling in Don Bastiano C. as mediator, was that the Sciaccas wouldn’t return the hand. As Santuzza had it from Rosa Giardini, an intimate of the Sciaccas, Miraglia kept the hand preserved in a jar on the mantelpiece, taking it down at the slightest excuse to show off to his guests and boast of his prowess.
Three weeks passed and the sun held steady in the sky, though by now we should have been well into the rains, and I heard nothing of the feuding parties. I saw Santo R. one evening as I was sitting in the cafe, but we didn’t speak—he was out in the street, along with his two elephantine bodyguards, bending painfully to inspect the underside of his car for explosives before lumbering into the driver’s seat, firing up the ignition and roaring away in a cyclone of leaves and whirling trash. It was ironic to think that snails had been the cause of all this misunderstanding and a further burden to the precarious health of the two men of respect, Don Santo R. and Don Bastiano C., because now you couldn’t find snails for love or money. Not a trattoria, cafe or street vendor offered them for sale, and the unseasonable sun burned like a cinder in the sky.
It was a festering hot day toward the end of November, no rain in sight and the sirocco tearing relentlessly at the withered branches of the trees, when Santo R. next showed up at my office. Business was slow—the season of croup and bronchitis, head colds and flu depended upon the rains as much as the snails did—and I was gazing out the window at a pair of buzzards spiraling over the slaughterhouse when he announced himself with a delicate little cough. “Don R.,” I said, rising to greet him with a smile, but the smile must have frozen on my face—I was shocked at the sight of him. If he’d looked bad a month ago, bloated and pale and on the verge of collapse, now he was so swollen I could think of nothing so much as a sausage ready to burst its skin on the grill.
“Doctor,” he rasped, and his face was like chalk beside the ruddy beef of the bodyguard who supported him, “I don’t feel so good.” Through the open door I could see Crocifissa making the sign of the cross. The second bodyguard was nowhere to be seen.
Alarmed, I hurried out from behind the desk and helped the remaining henchman settle Don R. in the chair. Don R.’s fingers were so puffed up as to be featureless, and I saw that he’d removed the laces of his shoes to ease the swelling of his feet—this was no mere obesity, but a sign that something was desperately wrong. Generalized edema, difficulty breathing, cardiac arrhythmia—the man was a walking time bomb. “Don R.,” I said, bending forward to listen to the fitful thump and wheeze of his heart, “you’ve been taking your medication, haven’t you?” I’d prescribed nitroglycerine for the angina, a diuretic and Aldomet for hypertension, and strictly warned him against salt, alcohol, tobacco and saturated fats.
Santo’s eyes were closed. He opened them with a grunt of command, made eye contact with the bodyguard and ordered him from the room. When the door had closed, he let out a deep, world-weary sigh. “A good man, Francesco,” he said. “He’s about all I have left. I had to send my wife and kids away till this blows over, and Guido, my other man, well”—he lifted his hand and let it drop like a guillotine—“no one lives forever.”
“Listen to me, Don R.,” I said, stern now, my patience at an end, “you haven’t been taking your medication, have you?”
No reaction. I might as well have been addressing a stump, a post in the ground.
“And the alcohol, the cigarettes, the pastries and all the rest?”
A shrug of the shoulders. “I’m tired, Doctor,” he said.
“Tired?” I was outraged. “I should think you’d be tired. Your system’s depleted. You’re a mess. You’re taking your life in your hands just to mount a flight of stairs. But you didn’t come here for lectures, and I’m not going to give you one—no, I’m going to lift up that telephone receiver on the desk and call the hospital. You’re checking in this afternoon.”
The eyes, which had fallen shut, blinked open again. “No, Doctor,” he rasped, and his words came in a slow steady procession, “you’re not going to touch that telephone. Do you know how long I’d last in a hospital? Were you born yesterday? Bastiano’d have me strung up like a side of beef befo
re the night was out.”
“But your blood pressure is through the roof, you, you—”
“Fuck blood pressure.”
There was a silence. The sirocco, so late for the season, rattled the panes of the window. The overhead fan creaked on its bearings. After a moment he spoke, and his voice was thick with emotion. “Doctor,” he began, “Doctor, you’ve known me all my life—I’m not thirty yet and I feel like I’m a hundred. Do you know what it takes to be a man of respect in this country, do you?” His voice broke. “All the beatings, the muggings, the threats and kidnappings, cutting off the heads of the dogs and horses, nailing the cats to the walls…I tell you, Doctor, I tell you: it takes a toll on a man.”
He was about to go on when a noise from the outer room froze him—it was nothing, barely audible above the wind, the least gurgle in the throat, but it was enough. With a swiftness that astonished me, he was up from the chair, the pistol clenched in his hand. I heard Crocifissa suddenly, a truncated cry, and then the door flew open and there stood Bastiano C., one hand clutching a gleaming silver snub-nosed revolver, the other pinned to his gut.
This was the longest moment of my life. It seemed to play out over the course of an hour, but in reality, the whole thing took no more than a minute or two. Behind Bastiano, I could make out the sad collapsed form of Santo’s bodyguard, stretched out like a sea lion on the beach, a wire garrote sunk into the fleshy folds of his throat. Beneath him, barely visible, lay the expiring sticklike shadow of Bastiano’s remaining bodyguard—Bastiano too, as it turned out, had lost one to the exigencies of war. Crocifissa, wide-eyed and with a fist clamped to her mouth, sat at her desk in shock.
