‘… I swear it, Doctor! That woman, I tell you, in that house, it’s more pity than life …’
‘… But it’ll just be a moment … a burst of anger …’: he was on the point of moving on: ‘… like the wind, when all the doors are banging, all at once … and then it goes, and it’s nothing … In the fury of living alone … shut up in his bedroom … letting his imagination wander … that’s what happens to a misanthrope …’
The cicadas, awake once more, streaked the leafy minutiae with noise beneath the abundant light, the whole of the summer sky rustled with the interminable stridulation, in the unison of a deafening moment of freedom. The doctor had an idea. His diagnosis was in the process of development: or, perhaps, with five daughters given to him by Doña Carlotta, it had already been developed for some time. ‘Vae soli! Woe to him who is alone!’
‘… Ah, Doctor! You know more than me, for sure … but sometimes, believe me, Señor Don Gonzalo has such a face, such a face! … It seems, to him, that his mother is there in the world just to hold up those diamonds, like a tree to hold up its cherries …’: the woman’s breath had become shorter, drier: the fat onion that was boiling away in her throat seemed, in the fury of cooking, to have lost its juice. From the enormous goitre, its rattle tired the sadness of her speech. ‘… and woe to her if she spends one peso here, or gives away one centavo there … or if she buys whitefish from Beppina … or if she gives a little something for the cemetery … He says he’s already given … that what he gives is quite enough … And he gives nothing at all! Let them have some old shoes, he shouts, to hell with these beggars! But he wants to keep the money all for himself, and nothing for the poor … nothing! … Let them rot, he says …’
‘… Come, come!’ protested the doctor once again, ‘what stories! …’
‘… As for me, she has to give me money on the quiet, or on days when he’s not there,’ continued the old woman regardless, ‘for woe betide if he sees! … He alone has the power to spend! … He alone has the right to eat! … and his mother has to run about at his every whim! a man who’s already forty-four … I ask you … and to bring him coffee … and go up and down stairs … because he wants it in bed in the morning, with the newspapers … And he wants this, and then he wants that: and to chase all assistance from the house … if someone washes, or irons … or if he’s a carpenter who comes to fix a door … Away, away … Away all of them!’
The rattle was subsiding: there were still a few short gurgles of catarrh: then, in a muffled low voice, she said: ‘… and now that young child comes to do his homework, what patience the Señora has!, you know, the colonel’s grandson … But the day he finds him in the house! that’s the day he’ll strangle him … The Señora tells the child beforehand, when to come, while he’s not there …’
‘… And you, how are you? …’, the doctor asked paternally.
‘Me?’ said the woman, surprised. ‘Oh! dear Madonna! can’t you see I’m still wandering the streets?’ She tried to move her head to accompany that husky groan, made of poverty and sadness: but her shaking, obstructed by the goitre, brought a reduced, almost imperceptible elongation. ‘… What do you expect, Doctor, so long as we’re here! … We must still give thanks to the Lord! …’
The glimmer of medical scrutiny brought an immediate recovery. Her eyes, filled with a long and sorry story, harpooned the red and swollen eyes of the doctor. ‘When he’s in a rage, when he’s lost control, he has no idea, not even he, what comes out of his mouth. He has no idea what he’s doing! Don’t go repeating this, but the Señora, while she was helping me dry the dishes, told me how this winter, down in Pastrufazio, he crushed a pocket watch beneath his feet, on purpose, as though it were a grape … and it was a family memento: and then, straight after, he took down a portrait of his poor papa that hung in the dining room … and he walked over it … trampled it …’ She crossed herself. She displayed a great respect for the dining room. She stressed the final syllables of each word, since ‘took down’ and ‘hung’ in Serruchón dialect sound like ‘destacagiò’ and ‘takasü’. And ‘trampled it’ becomes ‘pestalgiò’. ‘… And he smashed the glass into small pieces like that’ (she stretched her chin by a millimetre, her hands being occupied) ‘like crumbs, under the soles of his shoes … oh! he’s a beast! … and his father was one of those … you never knew him, but I can say, for I knew him well … a man the likes of which today, you can be sure, you won’t find even the slightest trace, not of men like that …’
‘… Today, today,’ retorted the doctor, shrugging his shoulders: ‘you women, what do you know about such things?’
‘Oh! Madonna! it’s just a way of speaking, Doctor … Life’s different today, I know that very well … and it’s no longer like it used to be, after we’d had the war … even the silkworms aren’t what they used to be … At forty centavos a kilo! I had to go and sell them … less than the cherries! Forty centavos! for a kilo of silkworms! … What’s forty centavos? Not even a hundred grams of croconsuelo, which goes for forty-five, and this morning fifty … for each morning it’s different …
‘But him! To stamp on a gold watch … what a heart! … devoted as he is: … to threaten to kill his own mother! Lucky that it had glass on it, on the portrait, that kept it safe.’
The doctor began whipping his calf, with the air of someone who hasn’t a minute to lose. ‘Ah! that war! …’ Battistina concluded, and the trace of a sigh was cut short by the goitre. ‘And yet sometimes, when the moon’s in the right place for him, then, perhaps, he can be generous, and even with the first person who comes along; as though he were drunk … oh! a brute! … then he can be all right. Depends on the moment, the mood. Enough, I’ll say goodbye.’
The two parted as eleven-thirty struck from the tower, immense metal over the chirruping of every tree; almost as if the tolling of the hour-counter had caught them in flagrante. After a further stretch of pebbles and stones and after another bend, the doctor arrived at the entrance: at the villa’s main gate, of dilapidated timber.
Through the half-rotten wooden bars of such a mild declaration of private possession, he saw, each time he came, at a glance, the splendour of summertime. The infinite rustling of the ground seemed consubstantial with the light; and there the bright green hill sloped down, and there, after the brief respite of the lakes, were other hills within the light, and more, more. The eye, bedazzled, sought to pursue some new, soft, sweet fable there, among distant scenes, in the fallacy of prospects of escape, skirting the sky blue of those flat reservoirs as if on a conquest of love. He saw the steam of the Southern Railways disappear with a black tail and white tuft, as it did each time, after the station at Ranchito, escaping towards the plain and the city. The city … the city … full of good prospects for every young girl, even the most foolish; where there were doctors of renown, with people, standing in the waiting room; specialists charging seventy-five, perhaps a hundred.
As for the gold watch, he reckoned he’d heard it before, from Peppa who did the laundry, or was he wrong?, that it was silver: or perhaps, no: that it was a bedside alarm clock: and it went off one day, all of a sudden, just at the very moment when Señor Gonzalo was reading, or writing, or perhaps he was furiously racking his brains over one of those difficult words of his, that no one understands, which he likes to use to embellish his difficult, cloying prose, that no one reads: and it, the alarm clock, had begun dancing round the table, so that it had done a whole circuit by itself and, what was worse, without the permission of its owner … It ended up in pieces, for sure: with certain toothed cogs, made of brass, found months later while sweeping up … like when you see some small insect, shy … with seven spots on its wing case … to pause over in the desolation of a sitting room … memory, emptiness … to forgive …
And anyway, either Peppa or Beppa, one of the two whichever it was, had told him the very same story about a pen that had ended up under one heel, a clean, sharp blow, and then straight under the other heel, cr
unch-crunch, a Waterman. Pressed in vain to flow, after several minutes of stubborn persistence, splat, on the page, it presented him with a fine puddle of blue ink: and so it too received its just deserts, there and then, under both heels. Things that happen to those who live alone, the doctor thought, without the manly worries of family responsibility, together with the highest, with the purest joys: … of the fireplace: for sure! He left out the adjective ‘domestic’, but he knew this was what he was alluding to … The family that Señor Gonzalo … it had never entered his mind to come to a decision … And in the meantime, off with the pictures on the wall, and down, straight down, trampled underfoot …
The Señora, they had told him, seventy-four!, her eyes veiled with sorrow, (for she had realized straightaway), had gone in … had bent a knee to the ground, trembling … had stooped down in desperation … That’s what the women had told him … they’d heard it from the woman from Pastrufazio … who’d rushed in behind her mistress …
She was determined to overcome her distress, as a duty. Having suppressed her anguish … out of duty to the ground, bent: with thinning white hair now dishevelled … almost as though out of her debility came her ultimate devotion … whereas, already, as appearances faded, tired inner words came to mind … like tenebrous caresses.
Deprived of all help, she marshalled her ultimate tiredness to the devotion of one last service: she wanted to save that picture. She had bent down: had taken: with trembling, skeletal hands, whose blue veins carried a feeble pulse over her bones, which was a memory, perhaps … In her it was memory: just memory … In time they were images and forgotten truth: and she had been daughter, wife and mother …
In this way she had gathered the splinters in her hands … they were sharp … sickle-shaped … they could have harmed someone. She had picked up the portrait, the frame miraculously intact, with all its gilt edging, so delicate … The woman from Pastrufazio had also come to help her. They had cleared the mess, in the room, as though medicating an illness. A glory of splinters of plates haloed that man who was fabled for his baseness and idleness, mean and gluttonous, capable only, in his better moments, of ill-treating his hunched mother: of offending the memory of dead men. According to some, the watch was neither of gold nor silver, but of nickel-silver.
The doctor climbed towards the small iron gate, a little further on and a little further up: painted green: the normal point of entry into the silence and into the light of the villa, from the northern side, where the building appears lower, with one floor less, due to a difference of ground level. The idea of going in from the back, without any formality of ringing or ceremony of gate-opening, gave visitors a certain quiet confidence, a feeling of ease, like being at their own home: and that everything then would turn out right, and in the best of ways: as at home. The Pirobutirro household had substituted the ‘Beware of the Dog!’ sign for a blind faith in the honest intent of passers-by, who were rare, given the stony track!: and had substituted the dog for a smile of civil cordiality. Their custom of practical love and kindness, which is, perhaps, a result of moral foresight, came from the fixed idea of moral equality among bipeds: even though bipeds, when they wore those clogs, could sound like quadrupeds. Indeed, the affability of Señora Pirobutirro and her late husband, Señor Francisco, was proverbial. The collectors of contributions for the new bells for the church tower, in 1903, were overwhelmed by their kindness, as soon as they read the figure that Señor Francisco had put down with his own hand on the sheet of signatures, and which both spouses had endorsed, with the most touching generosity: and with absolute fluency. Since the family were all well practised with the pen.
The pop of a cork, a toast, a dry Nevado wine from the previous year, and lip-smacking and appreciation, once the cork had flown, had rounded off the ceremony with a few tears. ‘Do, dedi, datum, dare,’ the doctor muttered, almost on his patient’s behalf: ‘Dono, donavi, donatum, donare. Obfero, obtuli, oblatum, obferre.’ Just another drop … stop, stop … Señor Francisco … but this won’t do any harm.
He entered, went down the two steps. When he heard the squeak of the gate, the peon, who was crouching among the onions in flower, looked up, gave a glance at the visit, which he was expecting: touched his cap with two fingers, without standing up, confirmed in this way from a distance to the arriving figure that his mistress had gone to the Cemetery, with flowers: which he himself had picked for her: and accompanied by Peppa. This he expressed with various clashing ‘ö’ and ‘ü’ sounds of tenebrous diction while the white spheres of the onion flowers occupied a limited stretch of that enclosure, planted with vegetables and vines: it was hard to know which had the upper hand. ‘Very well,’ said the doctor.
The son, meanwhile, came to meet him on the small plum-tree walk, along the perimeter wall. He was tall, rather bent, with broad chest, full belly, the facial complexion of a Celt: but his skin sagged slightly and he looked tired, even though it was a splendid morning. Dressed only just decently, wearing dark black kidskin shoes with high insteps, black laces: and yet unlikely, in the countryside, to draw the respect of tennis players, or the admiration of women players. He was extremely courteous. His body was not adorned with any pullover, or other garment of note. A slightly jutting jaw, almost a childish desire that was then transformed into the snout of a melancholy beast, tended to give his speech that unpleasant tone of puzzlement and hesitation, though not always: and it seemed to explain a certain detachment from living beings. A detachment, the doctor thought, that was perhaps more suffered than desired. Sometimes, a certain facial expression seemed quite infantile, and the question doomed to all manner of rebuffs. You might have thought, on seeing him, that people have their own interests and concerns, which keep them busy, every minute: they don’t have time to talk to kids.
His words were exact and poor, like his clothing: and anything but impertinent. On observing him, one would have supposed he had no thought about himself, and even less of playing any role: e.g. that of the ex-serviceman. For the doctor, whom he had not seen for some time, his words were cordial but brief: and he demonstrated his respect. With innate politeness he passed off the four millimetres of salt-coloured beard that covered the doctor’s chin as being the stubble that it was: and he seemed to consider it more than natural, shortly after, that he should allow that bristle to prickle his back, his chest, his upper body, his abdomen.
His d’Eltino, or del Tino, ancestors, on the male side, had no bearing on his demeanour, except as distant causes, of poor effect; causes that everyone had forgotten for quite some time: in the same way that his surname had vanished from the old tombstones in the cemetery outside the walls. And the walls pulled down. Likewise, in city streets, people sometimes ask the reason why a stone post is unexpectedly there: and it is a relic, among surviving walls, of lost provenance. Perhaps that politeness, so human and pointless, and rather sad, was a manner not of today, that came from far away.
III
When questioned by the doctor, he listed his recent ailments, the usual ones. The doctor nodded and said he wished to examine him. They went upstairs to the bedrooms, he first, and into a large room with yellowish, whitewashed walls, two windows ‒ one of them bright, looking out over the robinias and the cicadas ‒ and two beds. The mountains to the north. The ceiling nearly black, with beams and crossbeams: painted with linseed oil in a smoky tint, as once was the Spanish custom.
The son took off his jacket, lay down on the farther bed, his own: a pure white blanket, like the other bed: solid walnut, so solid that the woodworm could be heard, gnawing away laboriously, in a short, hard turn, like a corkscrew, after moments of exertion. On that monastic whiteness the long body and prominent stomach gave the appearance of a chief engineer decently deceased, if it were not for the complexion of the face, and also the gaze and the breathing, prevailing over the heavy immobility of the head; which sank a little into the white, bulging pillow, all swirls. The clean coolness gave an immediate dignity to the forehead, hair, nose: res
embling a mask to be consigned to the cast museums of posterity. Instead it was the face of the only living male Pirobutirro, who was gazing at the beams of the ceiling. Horizontal on white.
The two polished, jet-black, pointed shoes looked like black, upturned jalapeño peppers. Moving his long, white hands in his buttonholes and braces, the dead man prepared himself for auscultation. On the wall in front, between the windows, the coruscating gaze of General Pastrufacio, in daguerreotype, from a walnut frame. He presided, half length, in shadow, wearing his poncho, and on his left shoulder two corners of a large South American neckerchief: and on his head that familiar, cylindrical, doge-like cap; edged all round with gold thread, in a design with tendrils, rare acorns, clematis. The hero’s blond hair, lightened many years before in the fixing bath, dropped harmoniously on to his shoulders and there turned gently into a most noble curl, which seemed the work of Andrea Mantegna or Giovanbellino: like an Este or Montefeltro pageboy come to the pampas, and to the years of the flag and musket. Now well past fifty, all over his cheeks and beneath his lips was a masculine abundance of hair, of rude and ancient vigour: hardened to the vastness of war and more than any portrait could hold in its frame.
The examination was ‘conscientious’. The doctor palpated the patient thoroughly, with both hands, as if to squeeze out his bowels: he looked like a fierce washerwoman with her laundry beside a stream; then, releasing his belly, he listened more or less everywhere, hopping about here and there, with his head, or rather his ear, prickling and tickling him with his beard. Then he put the stethoscope to the heart and to the upper part of the body: both back and front. He alternated auscultation with percussion with his finger, and finger on finger, on bronchial tract and lungs and, once again, the abdomen. He said: ‘Turn over’: and again: ‘Turn back’. Listening to him from behind while he was sitting on the bed and bent right forward, with the swelling and the folds of his stomach in the midst of his thighs, swollen out, and between his knees and face, his shirt turned up over his head as though by a gust of wind, or laid out face down, half askew, underpants and trousers awry ‒ the doctor then seemed to be communicating his instructions by telephone. Over and again he made him say ‘Thirty-three,’ ‘Thirty-three’; and ‘Thirty-three’ again. And the engineer repeated the number in good grace, with his face between his knees.
The Experience of Pain Page 6
