(excerpt)
Rosaria had been living alone for years. She had lost her husband relatively young after long illness and her little sister, Paolo’s wife. While she was still young, life had fashioned her into an experienced caregiver for the sick. She spent her early mornings, mid-mornings, and afternoons in the hospital. When I happened to find her at home in her black dress, I always knew that she had either just come from the hospital or was just about to leave for it. When Paolo was in the hospital dying, she began to stoop and walk with a shuffle. In the early mornings, you could see her plodding towards the tram stop, taking slow steps, all hunched over, as if she were going to work, dutiful, disciplined. In the evenings, she would arrive even wearier, ring the bell, and then recount in a voice enthusiastic and loud what had happened with the catheters, who had died that day in the corridor or in the neighboring room or on the neighboring bed. Cause many people died in the corridor, often young people. And she told me I shouldn’t smoke. That’s what’s taking Paolo from us, the red Marlboros, and that young woman, the one who lost her thirty-year-old fiancé, she cried today. (…)
On the tram to the hospital, I wrapped myself in a black curtain, and by the time I got off, I was exuding sorrow and compassion, silence and stern serenity, so that when I made it to Paolo’s room, the dying man’s room, which Rosaria had basically moved into, I could be solemn and compassionate in the silence, the exaltedness, the sadness. I went to the reception desk and asked, shaken, where I would find Paolo’s room, the man suffering from throat cancer, and then I went, walking with a dignified gait, up to the corridor on the second floor and quietly opened the door to the room. I was ready to embrace Rosaria and cry, to share everyone’s grief.
When I opened the door, I thought I had gotten the wrong room. Yes, I saw Paolo’s son, with his red hair, and I recognized the timber and treble of Rosaria’s loud chatter and my boyfriend’s laughter, and I saw old Paolo’s catheterized, emaciated body and his swollen face, but still, this was not a room in which a dying man was being mourned. Rosaria, who was standing beside the machine beeping above Paolo’s head, was talking about how you have to put pine nuts in spinach lasagna. Francesca, a relative from Sicily, was the first person who noticed me. She leapt up and welcomed me with loud, cheerful kisses, and someone else passed me a glass of almond milk. The room was full of relatives and friends, and they greeted me cheerfully, as if we had bumped into one another at a birthday party. How am I? So good to see me again! My boyfriend was glad that I had made it, and then, when Paolo suddenly coughed and lifted his head, everyone except the people standing closest to the bed sat back down. Francesca went over to his bedside, bent down, and took his outstretched, emaciated hand, which was feebly grabbing at the empty air. She held the dying man’s elbow firm in her grasp and, with her other hand, she pressed his fingers to her elbow. She leaned over, her face close to his ear, caressed his head, and whispered, “I’m here Paolo, I’m here.” She stood next to Paolo while the pain of the spasm wracked his body. She held his arm and whispered into his ear, and she only let go of it, slowly, gently, when the pain had released him. Francesca then arranged the pillow and kissed Paolo’s gray, lifeless face and said that the idea of putting pine nuts in lasagna is just utterly ridiculous.She didn’t like pine nuts. They give her the runs! And Rosaria puts pine nuts in everything, but lasagna is really taking it too far, to which Rosaria said that you could murder someone with the lasagna Francesca made, and as she said this, in order to indicate that Rosaria’s lasagna is as hard as a rock, she tapped her forehead with her fingers, at which the whole bunch of them burst out laughing, Francesca included. Sometimes one of the relatives would leave the pleasant semi-darkness of the room, where everything smelled of coffee and oranges, and someone would arrive and replace them. The recipes changed, the subjects of conversation changed, only Paolo and his suffering remained unchanged, and when his body again was wracked with spasms, Francesca was relieved by another in-law or a sibling or a cousin or my boyfriend. Someone was always on hand to help the dying man, to talk to him gently, to caress his face, to reassure him that they were there, they were all there, no need to fear, and they squeezed his hand and sat down at his bedside and continued chatting about goings-on at work, about cars, about the kids, or about recipes, while sitting on a chair in the corner, I thought about the hospital rooms I hadn’t seen, about my dead, whom I hadn’t known, whose illnesses and deaths had been distant, sad, and sorrowful, illnesses and deaths in which there had been neither life nor school nor kids nor lasagna recipes nor me, just silence, loneliness, and death, unknown, empty, and terrifying death.
Translated by Thomas Cooper