Wu Ming - 54

Do you want a cigarette?

Don’t grab other people’s snacks. Under any circumstances. At night you sleep and you don’t get up and you don’t go to the kitchen to make coffee, because it puts you in a terrible state. You mustn’t give cigarettes to Davide, no, under no circumstances must you ever do that again. Too much cold water hurts and if you drink it in such a hurry I’m never giving you any more. There are rules here, you know.

Fine, rules, nothing has happened. But now you’re getting me up to send the monsters away?

The nurse walked quickly, spurred on by the nervous tapping of the heels behind him.

After three-quarters of an hour talking to her husband’s locum, Angela was not even any calmer, let alone satisfied by the brief statement that she had had to sit through. ‘A sudden thing, we really weren’t expecting it, until just the other day everything was going swimmingly. ’

She would happily have talked to Marco, who had known Fefe for a long time and understood his reactions better than anyone else. But Marco was on honeymoon and wouldn’t be back for a week.

As they walked down the corridor, Angela tried in vain to calm herself down, by digging her nails into the leather of her handbag and inhaling great gulps of lysoform.

Ferruccio had been put in a different room, on the third floor, a room all to himself. Angela knew very well what that meant. Odoacre, on the phone from Rome, had reminded her, to avoid nasty surprises. ‘Just for today, they’ve assured me. To keep him from hurting himself, more than anything else. ’

It was Odoacre himself who had given her the news, and even the fact that they had warned her in advance hadn’t gone down well with her; it made her feel useless. Fine, he was the leading physician at the clinic, he followed Ferruccio’s therapy in person, he was the head of the family and all the rest, but who cares, a sister should have the right to know before anyone else, isn’t that right?

That was why, when her husband had promised to come home that very evening, leaving the conference and his illustrious colleagues, Angela had had an impulse of pride: ‘Just stay in Rome,’ she had insisted, ‘you don’t need to put yourself out, I’m thoroughly capable of looking after my brother on my own.’

Then she had changed her mind. She knew Odoacre, she knew how fond he was of his work, and Fefe wasn’t as serious as all that. If he came back, it was to be close to her. For her, not for Ferruccio.

‘Hello, Signora Montroni. Come through.’

The old servant wrung out the floor cloth, dropped it into the bucket and bowed slightly.

‘Hello, Sante,’ Angela replied distractedly.

‘I heard about your brother, I’m really sorry.’

‘Never mind, let’s hope it’s only temporary.’ Angela hated small talk, but Sante was always good with Fefe, always available and patient, and his interest was sincere.

‘Yes, let’s hope so, he’s seemed strange to me lately, and on Monday he didn’t even bring any cigarettes.’

‘Then he must have been in a sorry state!’ Angela tried to joke, but it didn’t work terribly well.

Just before the first door, the nurse turned towards her. ‘Signora —’ he said in a voice filled with compassion.

Angela nodded her head, an exaggerated, insistent nod, to spare herself what was to come: ‘It’s ok, thank you, I know the procedure.’ Then she hid her face in her hands, because ‘knowing the procedure’ gave her no comfort whatsoever.

The door opened. Ferruccio was lying on the bed, staring into the distance, his blanket tucked up around his neck. The three straps were barely visible: around his chest, his waist and his ankles. Angela tried not to think about them, to empty her mind of the bad memories and walk towards him with a smile.

‘Hi, Fefe, I’ve brought you some cream puffs.’

‘Yes, that’s fine. Can you open that window a bit to let the monsters out?’

‘What monsters, Fefe?’

‘Oh, forget it, his monsters are inside, you know? Better let them stay there.’

He always talked about himself in the third person when he wasn’t well, and parroted the phrases he had heard other people using about him. Angela sniffed the air and immediately worked out what was wrong.

‘Won’t you be cold with the window open?’

‘No, no!’ shouted Ferruccio as he concentrated all the strength in his body on shaking his head. ‘Don’t worry about the cold. Open it, open it.’

‘Fine,’ Angela conceded, and walked across the freshly cleaned room to the window.

‘Nothing has happened, has it?’ Ferruccio asked again, and without waiting for a reply, he went on talking: ‘No, no, not a bit, absolutely nothing! He’s just got himself a little worked up, it happens to him every now and again, but a nurse’s nose, now. What do you think? Since they stopped that medicine of his, he hasn’t been calm at all. Not at all.’

The bag of pastries still lay untouched on the chest of drawers.

‘Aren’t you eating your cream puff, Fefe? I brought it specially for you!’ Ferruccio turned to look at it, Angela called herself an absolute cretin and approached the bed to feed him.’

‘Slowly, now, ok? Don’t be in such a rush!’

‘What does Marco say to me if I eat too quickly? Well, Ferruccio, you know that’s not all right, you’ll swell up, and if you go on like that I’ll take it away from you.’

Despite the rule, Fefe devoured the cream puff in three mouthfuls.

Angela checked her watch. Almost midday. She gave herself another five minutes. Ferruccio mustn’t get too tired.

In the taxi she tried to hold back her tears. But she couldn’t stop the thoughts writhing around in her head like snakes. She tried again, a long, deep breath. Hugging Pierre would have done her good, or even just talking to him on the phone. Damn him for wanting to go to Yugoslavia to find his father, to see the world! It would have to be during that famous ‘fortnight without Odoacre’. A fortnight just for the two of them. Now, with Ferruccio’s relapse, Pierre could have been near them. But he would have started cursing his luck, his own powerlessness, his poverty, their hopeless affair. No, come to think about it, Pierre wouldn’t have been much help, except to spend a night giving vent to the sadness she felt inside.

She realised she thought of him as a little boy. He was fascinating, handsome, she still remembered the first time their eyes had met, at the dance hall. He had that barely perceptible smile of a screen idol, his hand in his trouser pocket, his brilliantined kiss-curl that flopped around as they twirled on the floor. The Filuzzi King. All of a sudden she found the whole thing ridiculous. Pointless.

The black hole in her thoughts became a chasm. She felt old, as though she had lived her life twice. She was Ferruccio’s mother by necessity. She was the mother of Pierre, also an orphan, in pursuit of adventures to show that he was a match for any mysterious father. Perhaps in a way she was even older than Odoacre, who had not known hunger and poverty, who had not brought up a mad brother, without a penny, without anything. That was why he had picked her up off the street, giving her a decent future. She immediately regretted thinking anything of the kind. Odoacre had left the conference, he was coming back to be close to her. He really loved her, she was the one who was betraying him. She felt bad, remorse gripped her by the stomach, a shiver ran through her. With her last breath, she begged the driver to stop. She opened the door and threw up on the pavement.

Chapter 49

Between Trieste and Dubrovnik, 28 April

By the time they had reached Jablanac, Cary was certain of it: Major Dyle was an idiot.