Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

Cecilia described the strangest, most convoluted cases, both dramatic and comical; in the ER, anything could happen. There was a lot of boredom, a lot of drug addicts and drunks; but also, on the one hand, the inexhaustible list of howlers and absurdities made up by patients and their families, and on the other, the act of challenging death, that, too, never-ending. My father asked questions; he liked to hear her laugh and talk, not just because of the passion apparent in her stories, but because they showed her competence. Each time, he was amazed by the accuracy of her diagnoses, and by how sound and sensible her treatments were. He thought that sooner or later, at least once in a lifetime, a doctor like him (diligent, caring, mediocre) was bound to meet a true natural talent. There was no envy, it was pure admiration. Maybe he was deluding himself about his role in Cecilia’s bravura, deluding himself about being the first to discover it. The only resource he could claim, experience, could be measured by age; it was less mysterious than talent, but more bitter, because to a great extent you earned it by making mistakes.

* * *

One day Cecilia arrived at the café and said she wasn’t hungry; she needed to talk and felt like walking, did my father want to keep her company? They went out and he asked her what had happened, because it was clear that something had happened, something had upset her. Cecilia said she had just laid out a patient. “I laid him out” meant “he died in my hands,” a common expression among doctors, though a bit brutal, and one which perhaps implied an admission of guilt, even if no one was to blame. Coming from someone else, my father wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but “I laid him out” sounded strange and moving coming from her. Not that he didn’t lay out patients, frequently, constantly, one after another: it seemed to be his specialty.

A suspected recidivous ulcer had arrived in the emergency room. But the patient had intense chest pain, was pale and sweaty, and had a reading of 180 in one arm and 80 in the other. So Cecilia had sent him to have a CT scan, because she was thinking about the aorta. The man, a very tall, thin, elderly fellow with a bewildered look, was left lying on the stretcher until they came to take him. They had exchanged a few words. He was in pain and he was thirsty. “I’m dying of thirst” he kept saying. He remembered a fountain where he used to go to get water as a child, in the countryside, and he remembered the water was so cold that when he filled the bottle the glass fogged up. Ten minutes later they called her from Radiology: he had died while they were scanning him. “But I just sent him to you,” she told the radiologist. She didn’t think he would go so fast.

She was afraid she’d never forget that image, his final memory, the bottle fogged up by the icy water. My father listened in silence. He was ashamed of having once told her that he couldn’t stand his patients’ relatives, that until people got sick they didn’t learn anything from life. He’d said his department was full of unstable or inattentive relatives who expected the doctors to work miracles or perform some kind of undetectable euthanasia before the holidays. He told her that the living didn’t want to see dead bodies anymore, that rather than cure people, hospitals served to cover up death. He was ashamed of having told her that the old people in his care were treated like broken appliances. He was ashamed to have spoken only about the most grotesque side of his work, as if the rest didn’t exist. He’d left out all that was noble, left out himself as a doctor; by leaving himself out of the picture, except as a victim of the relatives’ stupidity, he’d meant to leave out illness and death. Was this, too, something he’d done out of reserve? He sensed that with her he would learn to be less reserved.

* * *

One evening in early May my father came out of the locker room on the ground floor. In the corridor he passed an elderly woman, out of breath, barefoot, carrying her shoes, one shoe in each hand. Two nurses had stopped to look at her, but her eyes were focused straight ahead and she wasn’t paying attention to what was going on around her. The large windows that overlooked the inner courtyard were open; it had just stopped raining and the air was awash with that hospital smell, usually imperceptible, now intensified by the dampness: a mixture of disinfectant, scented ammonia, and kitchen odors. In the courtyard was a parking area scattered with saplings with reddish leaves, the cars parked regularly between the tree trunks as if this, instead of white lines, were the natural system of marking the spaces, as if this had been planned from the beginning.

It looked like one of Mattia’s sketches, but blurry, badly drawn. And in the drawing, vibrant and unexpected, was Cecilia. Standing beside a Scénic, rummaging in her bag for the key. How had she managed to get in? To park inside? A privilege granted only to a few and never to the younger doctors — the woman definitely had hidden resources. To get a better look at her, to see what she was up to, my father had to lean over and peer through the new foliage of a tree. He didn’t want to expose himself too much because he’d noticed some people who’d stopped to talk on the other side of the courtyard. He didn’t want them to see him spying on a colleague, but he couldn’t tear himself away from the window. The people in the distance were mere shadows at the edge of his field of vision, but cautiousness and fear made them loom larger. Cecilia meanwhile activated the remote door opener, but the smart key fell to the ground, landing in a puddle. Leaning over even farther, my father saw that the cause of Cecilia’s difficulty was the couple of packages she was juggling in addition to her handbag. To free herself from the packages she set them on the roof of the car, then picked up the key and dried it off with a tissue. At that point, as if inspired by a spirit and will of its own, the key dropped a second time, into the same puddle.

She didn’t pick it up right away. She leaned against the Scénic and stared at it. And my father stared at her staring at the key. The ground floor was about five feet above the level of the courtyard, and from where he stood he could see her quite well. He tried to read the expression on her face. He couldn’t make it out. There was a trace of sadness in her eyes, but also something that simply didn’t make sense: tenderness, affection. Toward the key that had fallen? Toward herself? She didn’t seem like the type of person to feel sorry for herself, nor someone who would take an incident like that as a sign of bad luck. He would have liked to see a face like that every morning when he opened his eyes (my father thought for the first time). No, that wasn’t right. Not a face like that— that face. Sudden, overwhelming desire: he wanted to leap down from the windowsill — swoop down like an angel in an ex-voto — and wheel around her, glide down to grasp her and snatch her away, save her from an impending danger. What had come over him? Were a pair of tender, somewhat mournful eyes all it took for him to start having visions? Of all the faces in his life, why that one ? As if the others had paled and dulled. Why such joy, such hope? It made no sense, any more than feeling sorry for an object made of plastic and metal that keeps falling.

Across the courtyard, meanwhile, the small group of people had gone their separate ways, and a man and child had emerged from the glass door of the building opposite. They walked slowly, approaching the parking lot. My father was afraid they might see him if they looked up, but he couldn’t make himself budge. Cecilia’s eyes, staring down at the key, were now desperate. It was strange that someone so competent and self-confident would get so disheartened over something so trivial. He thought of calling to her — to say hello, to shake her out of her reverie, to prevent strangers from catching her in that moment of despair. He, too, felt paralyzed by the fallen key. When he was a boy, soon after his father’s death or shortly before, coming out of his room in his pajamas one Sunday morning, he found himself in the doorway of the kitchen. His mother, sitting at the table with a cup of coffee in front of her, hadn’t heard him approach. She was staring blankly, her right hand gripping her left wrist. And he didn’t know whether to leave or stay, whether to go in and pretend he hadn’t noticed or hug her, comfort her, if she needed to be comforted. What had he decided to do, in the end? Impossible to remember. But he remembered the floor being cold underneath his bare feet.