Salvatore Scibona - The End

Many years ago, under her direction, Nico had pasted the walls with pale blue silk paper that gave the procedure room, which necessarily had no windows, a lighter affect. She used electric fans to keep it dry in the summer. The cushions on the table were thick and comfortable.

They gave the girl a pair of sterilized rayon hose and underpants from which the crotch was cut away, and arrayed their tools on the linen of the instrument table with their backs turned to her while she undressed.

Mrs. Marini fit the girl’s feet into the stirrups and firmly patted at her arm. She did not ask the girl any more questions about herself, having done all her preliminary questioning two nights before. The girl must not have occasion to tell any more inconsequential lies. Lying was the enemy of the physical relaxation that was central to her method. She was convinced that the majority of the injuries inflicted by otherwise competent physicians were caused by their (male) insensibility to the extreme effect that extreme emotions could have on a girl’s body. Mrs. Marini herself was a vicious judge of everyone, but she had trained herself to hold her judgment in abeyance and even to feel motherly, though the client might in fact be a despicable little harlot.

Whereas the doctors were ashamed, Mrs. Marini was proud, of her skills, manual and emotional; and the feelings of the practitioner never failed to be directly communicated — yes, through the hand — to the subject. Empathy was only another shiny tool, like the speculum, for opening up and evacuating.

The girl’s makeup was fresh and too carefully painted: She had darkened the rings under her eyes in an effort to age herself and had covered her legs with pancake and drawn a line of eyebrow pencil from her heels to the backs of her knees to imitate the seam of a nylon stocking. All this the surgical hose had wrecked by smearing.

Federica scrubbed and scrubbed her hands while Mrs. Marini hung a sanitized pillowcase over each of the girl’s legs.

“Now, if you feel your feet falling to sleep, dear,” Mrs. Marini said, “then you let me know.”

“Do I push?” the girl asked. Her name, she said, was Sophie.

“You must not push,” Federica commanded, turning from the sink.

“You don’t have to do anything at all, dear,” Mrs. Marini said. “Let yourself be limp. You are in a bathtub. The water is just the temperature that you like.”

“May I scratch my knee?” she simpered.

“Which one, child?” Federica asked, shaking the water from her hands.

The girl pointed, and then she let out a shriek of laughter; she snorted and spat through her tight lips. It was the laugh of abject silliness that an older child sometimes makes when she plays with a younger one; after which, when Mother shows her contempt, the child wonders why when she used to be smaller and used to laugh in the same way, Mother had smiled and used nice words. The laugh wasn’t uncommon in here right at this juncture, when the legs were exposed but nothing had been done to cause the client pain. The idea was to show the girl the fawning mother’s face, although it might embarrass one to pretend.

Federica reached under the cloth and scratched and patted down the leg of the girl, breathing deeply, slowly, and audibly, as Mrs. Marini had trained her to do.

The girl wore an inexpressive half smirk, and Mrs. Marini indicated with her eyes that Federica should stall until the smirk abated.

Finally, Federica sat down on a stool between the stirrups. “How do you feel?” she asked. “Do we get you something to drink?”

“Thank you, no,” said the girl.

Mrs. Marini continued to slowly rub the papery skin of the side of her hand on the girl’s hairless arm. “Now you’re going to feel a pinch, and you might want to bear down, but I want you to think of the pinch as a fist you can open up if you please,” she said, demonstrating in the air with her knotty hand.

Federica stooped, peering, and inserted a dilating rod with a stab, like a teacher indicating a pupil with her chalk.

The girl hissed.

“If you want to curse, dear, why, that’s fine. Nobody will hear you.”

“Thank you, no,” said the girl with composure.

“Or count, or say a rhyme.”

“No. Thank you.”

“Or cry, if you like,” said Federica, repeating the stab with a thicker rod.

“No,” she said, from the back of her throat.

“That’s very good,” Federica said. “What a good, good girl you are.”

Years ago, Mrs. Marini had worn a nurse’s costume. It fit her poorly, so she had adjusted it. Nico said it made her look like an iceberg. To be addressed as Nurse when she had for many years allowed her clients to call her Madam Doctor was the cost of a modest advance in her method and a significant new source of referred clients. It was also a penance for a septic case she might have prevented if she had spoken more carefully.

The girl had ratted her out to a tokologist at the Lutheran hospital, who had then tracked her down at Nico’s store. Nico attended the register while they talked in the workshop. The doctor knew all about her practice, as did his colleagues, but he had never had occasion to clean up a mess of hers before, which, ironically, had led him to seek this meeting.

“I was struck dumb when she told me you were responsible,” he said. “But while I was performing the therapeutic, I recovered a foreign object. That was when I concluded she was lying to me. I suppose she was too proud to say she had tried it herself and failed.”

“What did she look like?”

The doctor gave a precise depiction, which she recognized immediately.

“She thought my fee too high,” Mrs. Marini said.

“And you turned her out?”

“Of course not. I asked her what she could afford. And that was my error, that word, afford. I engaged her shame, and she walked off. What was the object?”

“A pencil tip.”

She made a little smile.

“It appears your record is better than mine, which I find difficult to believe, but there it is. You couldn’t possibly duplicate the sterility of a professional office, for example.”

“All of you were so surprised about germs.” In the air, she drew a broad circle around the doctor’s head to include the whole of the medical profession. “One does not need a theory of invisible animals to know it is repugnant to eat with a dirty fork.”

He proposed an exchange. He was interested in what she knew. She would “assist” him in his surgery with the cases for which he was able to get hospital approval. Most often a father or husband had purchased a determination that the woman’s life was threatened. Mrs. Marini learned a little about a topical anesthetic treatment and a slower, less painful means of cervical dilation.

When they parted ways, he gave her an assembly of elegant steel tools.

“I already own all these,” she said.

“Anyway, they’re spares. Curette derives from the Latin for ‘to take care of.’”

“I know, ” she said, exasperated, and shook his hand.

Aletter arrived in October. Enzo read it through in a glance. Then he read it over more slowly, while an invisible figure behind him wrapped its thick arm around his throat, crushing his windpipe, so that he felt the swell of blood in the eyes and the expulsive twisting of the stomach muscles and the strange jubilation of a man who is being strangled.

It was late on a Sunday night after he and the boy had come home from a weekend of fourteen-hour days harvesting the grapes on his mother-in-law’s farm, which once again the bank was threatening to take from her. Before he found the letter, he had sent the boy to bed, but he himself couldn’t sleep and had lain down on the cruddy floor of the kitchen, screwing one leg over the other so that the vertebrae snapped, and smoking in the dark while the moon came in.