Once more I found myself holding a friend’s body and rocking back and forth in tears.
Later I heard that the responsible kid was found dead with a broken neck.
High school was a different world, a different culture for me. The kids who went to Concepción were from families living in houses out in the suburbs. They had never awakened and stared into the eyes of a rat crawling across their bed. They had never had to sleep in several layers of clothes, because the tenement heating system—right on schedule—failed in the coldest weather.
Still, kids are kids, no matter the social structure or setting, and there are always underdogs. One became my best friend in school, after I found myself unexpectedly taking on Salvatore’s role of tough guy against a school bully.
I told Sal about that incident once, thinking he’d be proud of me—and he was. But I also saw something else in his face: sadness and maybe a loss of innocence.
Then I didn’t see him for quite a while, not until the middle of my senior year at university. It was Good Friday, and I was home on spring break—we called it Easter break then—and I needed to get out of the apartment for awhile. Papa had become more withdrawn. He snapped at the slightest thing I said or did. His initial happiness at hearing of my acceptance to medical school soon became a sullenness that was uncharacteristic of the man.
I told Mama I was going for a walk—I didn't ask—and she nodded. She knew I was on the verge of manhood, and young males my age were alley cats on the prowl.
I headed down the stairs and took my usual tour of the tenements, even crossing into the forbidden territories of the other ethnics. No one stopped or confronted me. I was still Dottore Berto, the one who sewed and patched up anyone who was hurt.
I found myself coming up in front of the ristorante and social club, where the Sicilianos and their enforcers would sit, eat, and plan. I saw a familiar face.
“Hey, Berto! Come over, have something to eat.”
Sal sat at the front table with an obviously hair-dyed blonde hanging on his shoulder. He had bulked up even more, looking like some Michelin tire man in those pre-steroid days of muscle building.
I was never one to turn down free food.
“Grazi, Sal. You’re looking stronger than ever.”
He turned to the blonde.
“Polly, this is my best friend, Berto. You call him Dottore Berto—and only he can call me Sal—capice? He’s going to medical school soon.”
I didn’t know how he had found out. Apparently the entire neighborhood knew. He took out a twenty, an unbelievable amount in those days for a young guy to have. “Here, girl, order what you want. Berto and we’re gonna take a walk and talk.”
The girl batted her false eyelashes. I wasn’t sure what was real and what wasn’t on her.
He got up, put his arm on my shoulder, and steered me out the door. We walked slowly, and he told me how he had been recruited, how he had easily earned the title of enforcer. He wasn’t happy.
“Berto, there’s got to be something else I can do. I want to do something useful, like what you’re going to do.”
I looked at the powerfully built man and saw the shadow of the kid’s grin behind his sad wistfulness.
“Sal, with your ability, you could become a sports coach in a school.”
I laughed and said, “Nobody would act up in your gym classes.”
He laughed.
“Me, teach in a school? Maybe I should get a big wooden ruler, too!”
We both laughed some more, as we passed the house where the crazy lady lived. Then Sal let out an exclamation.
“Oh, shit, Berto! Look, it’s Patches. He don’t look too good.”
The cat was old now. He had lost a lot of weight. He was lying on his side, taking shallow breaths. He was dying.
We knelt down and Sal put his hand on the cat. It raised its head slightly, licked his hand, and then died.
Sal ripped off his outer shirt and wrapped the cat’s body in it. He stood there in his Stanley Kowalski undershirt in the still-cool April weather.
“Come on, Berto, we owe it to him.”
I followed him along a now-familiar path to the cemetery. We entered the open gate, and Sal knocked on the caretaker’s shed. The old man knew us. He stood aside as my friend grabbed a spade and handed it to me. He beckoned the caretaker to follow us. He did.
Our little procession, a Good Friday burial, ended under a tree near the border of the cemetery. No graves would be dug there. The caretaker looked at the bundle in Sal’s arms, held like a beloved baby, and took the shovel from me. He dug the hole deep, and Sal knelt down and placed the cat’s body at the bottom. Then the caretaker shoveled the dirt back in. I picked up a large stone lying near the fence and placed it on the fresh mound. Sal crossed himself and stood up.
We walked back to the ristorante in silence.
Sal sat down at the same table. The girl had eaten her fill and was letting him know that she didn’t appreciate being left alone for so long. I tried to warn her, tried to tell her to shut up. Suddenly my friend’s hand shot out and grabbed her neck. It took all my strength to pull that hand away from her.
Sal quieted down. The early spring sun was setting. I noticed that people were leaving, their unfinished plates of food still in place at their tables. The girl stared at Sal, hesitated, and then asked if she could go to the ladies’ room. He nodded.
A few minutes passed. The waiter walked over and told Sal that his boss wanted to see him outside. It didn’t sound or feel right.
Sal told the waiter to invite the man inside. He said they could share a glass of vino.
The waiter laughed nervously.
“Berto, you don’t say no to this guy.”
He got up, still not showing any signs of being cold in that scanty undershirt, and headed outside. The waiter headed to the back of the eatery.
I could feel what was coming in my bones. I headed for the door to call out a warning to Sal, when the double blast of a shotgun sent debris through the air. It covered the window, the door, and me.
My hand reached up and felt the warm stickiness of blood. It wasn’t mine.
I ran out, as the big car pulled away. Sammy Welch Jr. was laughing in the back window.
Sal was on the sidewalk, a massive hole in his chest, the right side of his head blown away, now matching the red birthmark on his left forehead.
I stood in the cemetery that last day. I really did not have an answer to Sister Grace Roberta’s question. In truth the answer needed no words.
I moved toward the little marker set in the ground.
SALVATORE GATTO
The Cat
I looked at the marker in the next plot.
SISTER GRACE ROBERTA
Bride of Christ
Annunciata Moro Gatto
Mother
The Gnomon
He was a giant.
Even back then he was balding, his remaining black hair turning silver-gray along the sides. His nose betrayed his Roman ancestry. He stared down at me above his gold, wire-rim glasses, his sparkling brown eyes observing every nuance. He smiled and turned away from the man sitting on the examining table in the clinic and knelt down to look at me, eye to eye.
“Berto, why are you here?”
He knew who I was—he had delivered me. Mama had been among the countless others who had sought care at his clinic.
How could I tell him? What does an eight-year-old know? What does an eight-year-old say to a god?
“Can I watch what you do?”
“Why?”
The words came of their own volition.
“I want to be like you.”
He smiled again and nodded then stood up to his full, six-foot height and nodded once more.
And so it began.
I became his shadow, at his side for the next fifteen years until his death.
Dr. Agnelli taught me how to wash my hands with the pungent-smelling, green soap that was ubiquitous in his exami
ning rooms. I followed him from bay to bay, his long white coat swirling from the speed with which he moved, an ice skater on the worn tile floors. The nurses who worked alongside him, mind readers of his every need, fetched bowls, strange metal instruments, and large glass syringes ending in the dreaded, stainless-steel needles used back then.
I was eight and he was, as I know now, forty-eight. Still I was hard pressed to keep up with him.
He ran what we now call a storefront clinic, and it dealt with all the afflictions that a tenement neighborhood of immigrants of mixed ethnicities experienced. For the most part it was filled with runny-nosed kids like me, women with “women’s problems,” and the never-ending trauma cases.
I laugh at how primitive it was relative to what I have since learned and practiced, just as my students would laugh, when I used to tell them how I functioned in my own early days as a doctor. But there was a dignity to Dr. Agnelli's practice that the lack of technology made even more precious.
How many doctors today actually touch their patients?
Corrado Agnelli did. He loved all of them and was not afraid to touch them—to deal with the sights and smells and fears exuded by the human organism when something goes amiss. I watched him listen patiently, as he examined a baby boy brought in by a desperate mother who could not lower his fever. His hands, ears, and eyes functioned together, as he observed the flushed skin, the scarlatiniform rash of strep or the oozing eyes and polka-dot spotting of measles. To him, priest of Aesclepius, the child was a sacred vessel of life, a chalice to be handled reverently.
If it was one of those rare, fortunate cases where a baby was well, and the best medicine he could offer was sympathetic reassurance. He would laugh, as the infant rewarded his efforts by showering him with urine or spitting up curdled milk on his hands.
The old, those lucky or unlucky enough to have reached an age of increasing infirmity—the downward spiral of the life cycle looming over them—presented their numerous complaints: shortness of breath, chest pains, rheumatism. Such conditions actually appeared far less frequently than today, because most of the tenement population met the Bone Man before these degenerative conditions had time to take hold. Malnutrition, physical and emotional abuse, even the stress of repeated childbirth, all served the whim of the dark angel.
What appealed most to my young boy's mind were the blood-and-guts trauma cases, the product of the ethnic clashes in the neighborhood. They unsettled and saddened the normally unflappable doctor the most.
“Berto, come here. Our young man, Lianto, see what he has brought upon himself?”
I looked at the teenage boy sitting there holding a forearm filleted by another teen’s homemade knife. The skin lay split open, thin layers of fat and underlying muscle exposed by the sharp edge of uncontrolled rage.
“Watch, Berto. Lianto, move your fingers.”
The boy’s limb became a puppet on a stick. As his fingers moved, I could see the bunching and relaxing of the brown-red muscles encapsulated in pearly sheaths, their long, yellow-white tendons the strings of a violin in motion.
“Ah, good. Berto, we’ve just tested Lianto’s nerves and tendons to see if any were cut. Since he can do those movements, they weren’t. Now let’s put this young man back together.”
He poured bowl after bowl of irrigating-cleansing solution into the wound. As he told me later, it was the most important step: Never close a dirty wound.
I saw him take a syringe from the tray held by his acolyte nurse. The young man’s eyes dilated at the sight of the needle, but Agnelli shushed him.
“Lianto, this will hurt a helluva lot less than the knife that sliced you. And once it’s in, you won’t feel any pain. Now take a big breath and hold it.”
Like magic he inserted the needle and removed it from under the edges of skin, each time leaving raised areas where he had deposited the pain-relieving anesthetic liquid. Finally the plunger reached the bottom of the glass barrel.
“Lianto, we’re going to let you sit a moment, while the medicine does its job. Then we’ll close you up.”
He motioned for me to follow, and we walked away from the cot where the boy lay.
“Learn from this, Berto. This should never have happened. Live your life, but never lose control.”
Would that I had heeded such advice.
We returned to the patient, and the dottore slipped on rubber gloves. The nurse, wraith-like, appeared once more with a covered tray. When she removed the cloth, I saw the magic tools: the needle holder, the forceps, the silk thread, and several sizes of curved needles.
Agnelli threaded a needle and grasped it with the holder then turned to me.
“It is important that we bring the skin edges together just right.”
Then he recited a mantra that has stayed with me for nearly seven decades: “Equal edges come together in prayer.”
Another old-man’s memory flashback: In Corrado Agnelli’s day, they packed silk suture thread inside glass capsules filled with sterile water. The filaments had to be carefully broken open and removed then threaded onto individual needles. By the middle of my own career, metal staples and skin glue that set almost instantly took the place of prepackaged needles and nylon or other synthetic thread combinations.
The march of progress!
My tenth birthday was memorable. Papa had surprised me with a brass belt buckle he had made from scraps at the foundry. He had brazed my name onto it. He attached it to my belt, and I could not stop touching it and looking at it. Even now I go to my dresser drawer and pull it out, the leather strap long rotted and gone. I rub my fingers over the raised letters: BERTO.
It is not unusual for that remnant of my youth to become wet with tears, as I remember what happened later on my birthday.
The brawls on Hamilton Street were worse than usual that year. My friends Angie and Tomas were, like me, typical ten year olds, and we could not resist going to watch the fights. That is where I received my true baptism—I experienced what it means to be responsible for another person’s life, when I used makeshift tools to stop the mortal bleeding of one of the brawlers.
It also taught me how fast news travels on the neighborhood jungle telegraph.
“Berto, you did a foolish thing!”
I had gone to the clinic after school. Dr. Agnelli had been busy delivering the baby of one of the neighborhood women. It was the one procedure he would not let me observe.
He walked out of the makeshift delivery room, the same one where my mother had given birth to me—where he had delivered me. His gown was covered in blood, amniotic fluid, and other stains I didn’t recognize. I could hear the cry of the newborn infant coming from behind the curtain, and I saw the anxious father, still dressed in his foundry work clothes, being admitted to see his wife and new daughter. I wondered if that was how my father had looked and behaved when I had entered the world.
My mother never failed to remind me that I would not have existed but for the skills and persistence of the dottore. He had guided her and Papa through the loss of four other pregnancies. And when I began to form within her, Mama immediately sought his counsel.
She would smile, and Papa would nod, as she quoted—word for word—Dr. Agnelli’s visit, where he confirmed her pregnancy then reassured her that this time she would deliver a healthy baby.
He tossed the soiled gown into a cloth bag, removed his gloves, and threw them into another container. Then he sat down. Deliveries were one of the few activities that truly exhausted him. When I asked him why, his remark seemed cryptic to my young mind.
“Deliveries bring the triple responsibility of mother, child, and father. Harm one and, like dominoes, they all collapse.”
Dear God, how I remember witnessing my first delivery death as a student, and how those words came back to haunt me.
He looked at me.
“Berto, why did you put that young man at risk?”
I shook my head, confused by his words. He was bleeding to death, and I had sew
ed up the wound and stopped the bleeding. What had I done wrong? Then I started to tremble and felt hard pressed to keep from crying.
Dr. Agnelli put his hand on mine.
“No, don’t cry, Berto. I guess I have mixed feelings about what you did. I’m proud of your initiative, your willingness to help. But there are many things you do not yet know about the human body. Maybe next time, God forbid that there be one, the safest thing you could do would be to put pressure on the wound to keep blood loss from killing your patient. Your friends could then run and get help.”
He knew there was a big unspoken “if” in his advice. The inhabitants of my neighborhood would sooner die than call the police or go to a hospital.
I remained quiet, and I think he knew I would not heed this particular advice. There were so many more fights, so many wounds. So from that time on he strove to teach me the hidden messages, the warning signs to watch for. In his own way he kept me from committing errors of omission that would kill just as quickly as a knife or bullet.
“Berto, come, wash and gown up.”
I was not quite fifteen. He no longer had to squat to look at me eye to eye, because I was almost as tall as he was. And I could easily follow him around. But this was the first time he had asked me to put on the sacerdotal gown, cap, and gloves.
“Berto, you are old enough to understand and appreciate the miracle of new life. Mrs. Recalde’s contractions are now at the point where she is ready to deliver. Do you want to assist?”
It took the loud and repeated warnings from the nurse to keep me from rushing through the essential hand-and-forearm scrub, the aroma of the green soap by then a familiar perfume to my nose. My nerves tingled, my heart rate uncountable, and I realized why he had been showing me his textbooks on obstetrics for the past two months.
That day I helped in the birth of my schoolmate Pepe’s little brother.
Berto's World_Stories Page 16
