Page 23 of Daughter of Genoa (Escape to Tuscany)

Vittorio

Vittorio commits his first great act of disobedience that day.

He’s been sleeping badly. He’s never slept well, but these last nights have been torture.

He can’t ease the tightness in his chest by lying on his side any more.

Now he has to get out of bed and sit at his desk, where he leans forward with his head on his arms and tries to breathe – not too deeply, or it hurts – and the sweat rolls down his sides, down his back, between his legs until his nightshirt is drenched and his skin starts to itch.

The sweating’s new, too, and it isn’t good. None of it’s good.

What he ought to do is go to the infirmary, at last, and ask to be seen.

It’s a miracle someone hasn’t told him to go already.

Vittorio spends a lot of his time in the library, or else outside, taking advantage of the dispensation he’s been given.

But there are still the fixtures of Jesuit life: meals and Mass, spiritual direction, confession.

Recently, his coughing has disrupted all of them.

It’s getting harder and harder to hide just how ill he’s feeling – both from other people and from himself.

Yes, he ought to go to the infirmary. But first, he ought to go and speak to don Francesco.

He’s bound to have noticed that the supposed ‘cold’ of a few weeks ago hasn’t improved but has only lingered, worsened.

He’s bound to be wondering whether Vittorio can manage even the restricted duties he’s been given.

Wouldn’t it be better to talk to him first, before he’s forced to raise the question?

Don Francesco has been good to him. Doesn’t he deserve the truth?

By the time Vittorio has struggled up the hill to the Tipografia Guichard, he’s almost resolved to do it: to go to don Francesco, admit everything, and accept that what happens next will be out of his control.

That he might very well be stripped of his duties, returned to the authority of his superior, confined to the infirmary or even sent away to a hospital somewhere.

That he won’t be able to do his work, or be useful to anyone any more.

But when he leaves a short while later, exhausted and shaken – from the bombing, the sleepless night, Marta’s distress, all of it – Bernardo is waiting for him downstairs in the empty shop.

‘Look, Father, I don’t like to interfere.’ He looks as uncomfortable as Vittorio feels. ‘But have you seen a doctor about that cough of yours? Seems like something you ought to get looked at.’

Vittorio’s heart sinks. He’s grown used to worried questions and honey in his tea; those he can dismiss, but this is something else. If Bernardo has been moved to speak up, he must look very sick indeed. ‘It’s in hand,’ he says. ‘The Society of Jesus provides all the care I need.’

Bernardo shakes his head. ‘Forgive me, but that clearly isn’t true.

I understand that you have to live in a certain way – and that’s your choice, I’m sure, but there’s a limit.

I know a doctor,’ he forges on before Vittorio can protest. ‘An elder of our church. He helps anyone who needs it, no matter who they are. He wouldn’t ask you for money and he wouldn’t tell anyone.

I can phone him up now and ask him to see you. ’

Vittorio must say no. But the devil is whispering in his ear.

If he did go to see this Waldensian doctor, then he’d know what exactly it is that’s causing him these problems. He’d have a sense of what might happen next.

He’d have time to take action, if need be; to disclose everything to don Francesco and give him a chance to find someone else, someone stronger and more capable.

He’d have time to say goodbye to her .

‘I’m phoning him up,’ Bernardo says. ‘I’m sorry, Father, but I won’t wait for you to make up your mind.

’ He lifts the receiver and recites a number to the operator.

Vittorio just watches him, willing himself to do the right thing and protest. ‘Good morning, doctor. I have someone who needs to see you. It’s urgent…

A bad cough. Very bad, yes… No,’ he says, and rubs the back of his neck.

‘No, as it happens, he’s a priest. But he’s a good man, I can vouch for that…

All right, then, I’ll tell him. Thank you. ’

‘I really mustn’t—’ Vittorio begins, but Bernardo cuts him off.

‘You can go now. He’s not receiving patients, so you won’t be disturbed.

His surgery’s at via Assarotti 39B, practically on piazza Manin.

The doctor’s name is Rostan. He won’t call you Father, I’m afraid.

We do it out of respect, Silvia and I, because you’re our friend, but he won’t. He’ll insist on calling you Brother.’

‘I understand,’ Vittorio says. He’s touched, almost painfully touched by all this.

‘Shall I walk you there?’ Bernardo asks.

‘No, no. I can make my own way. But thank you,’ he says, and means it. ‘Thank you for your care.’

Bernardo pulls at his moustache. ‘It’s nothing. You’d better get on – he’ll be waiting.’

Vittorio thanks him again and goes out. He knows that Bernardo is watching him, and so he turns left, exactly as if he were planning to go directly to the doctor’s office.

He’ll follow the road until it joins via Assarotti, and then he’ll turn left again and go down the hill to the Gesù; and he’ll do what he should have done long ago.

But when he reaches via Assarotti, he hesitates.

Would it be so very bad to go after all – to find out what’s wrong, and have it over with?

Does he really need to reject Bernardo’s gesture of friendship and leave the doctor waiting for him in vain?

Perhaps it’s even better this way, the devil whispers.

Perhaps he’ll find it easier to obey, to accept what’s coming to him, if he takes this chance to prepare himself.

His mind goes to Marta, as it too often does. He thinks about her clinging to his hand, weeping her heart out for another man: a man who can love her, a man who very well might. He’ll remember that forever. Can he bear for it to be his last memory of her?

He turns right, and begins to walk up the hill.

*

Dr Rostan answers the door himself. He’s a short, stocky man with abundant grey hair, and he sticks his hand out for Vittorio to shake. ‘Come in, come in. You are Brother…?’

‘Vittorio. Bernardo and Silvia’s friend.’

‘So I gathered. Well, brother Vittorio, you caught me at a good time. I just came in to catch up on some work.’ He shepherds Vittorio into his office and closes the door after him. ‘Now, what’s the problem? Bernardo said that you had a bad cough.’

‘Yes,’ Vittorio says, and he outlines his symptoms: the shortness of breath, the night-time sweats, the dry cough that comes and goes, the chest pain that nags more and more. ‘I can’t even lie down to sleep,’ he says, suddenly desperate. ‘I feel like I’m suffocating.’

‘I see. And how long has this been going on? Be honest.’ The doctor fixes him with a steely blue eye.

‘It’s only been like this for a few days. But I haven’t been feeling very well for a while.’

‘And when you say a while, you mean…’

‘Weeks. Months, I suppose,’ Vittorio admits.

‘But it hasn’t been all that bad. I could manage.

I’ve always had weak lungs – I seem to get any cold or flu going around, so I rather thought it was something like that.

And my work… my work is stressful, and I spend a lot of time walking.

I was away from Genoa for twenty years – I’m not used to hills any more. ’

‘Right.’ Dr Rostan looks sceptical, but he doesn’t push any further. ‘Well, if you’d strip off – down to the waist, if you would – I can have a look at you and we’ll see what’s going on.’

Vittorio can’t remember the last time he had to strip in front of anyone.

Since becoming a Jesuit, he doesn’t even look at his own body; he’s adept at dressing and undressing without touching any part of himself, as his discipline demands.

The discipline he’s traducing simply by having come here.

Dr Rostan is looking at him with wide eyes.

‘You’re very underweight. Dangerously so, I’d say. Haven’t you been eating?’

‘I haven’t wanted to eat much. And there was Lent, of course, and…’

‘Lent shouldn’t do this to anyone, much less a man of your age. But now we’re getting into theology, and I think we’d better stay out of that . Sit up on the table and breathe as normally as you can.’

Vittorio hoists himself up onto the table that stands behind him, and Dr Rostan begins examining his chest, methodically placing one hand in a particular spot and then tapping at it with the other.

A memory comes rushing back, so vivid that he might be there: his childhood bedroom, sitting up in bed with his blue-striped pyjama jacket open and kindly, bald Dr Parodi, the family doctor, tapping his small chest with large, warm hands.

He’d given Vittorio a big smile and said that he’d been ever so brave and it was all perfectly in order.

Then he’d ushered Vittorio’s mother out of the room, and a moment later he’d heard her start to cry, a sharp, keening cry that made him feel alone and scared.

Dr Rostan is listening with a stethoscope now. The feel of the cold metal on his skin is horribly familiar. Vittorio tries to breathe, to force down the fear that’s rising up within him. The doctor must notice, because he puts a steadying hand on Vittorio’s shoulder as he removes the stethoscope.

‘All right, Father. You can get dressed now.’

Father . It doesn’t feel like a term of respect; it feels like an act of indulgence, a sop to a patient in dire straits. ‘What is it?’ Vittorio asks, pulling his clothes back on with shaking hands. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘You have a pleural effusion: in other words, your chest cavity is full of fluid. It’s pressing on your lungs and that’s why you can’t breathe comfortably. You need to get a chest X-ray and have some of the fluid drawn and analysed. In fact,’ Dr Rostan adds, ‘you should do so urgently.’

‘Why? What’s causing it?’

‘There’s no sense in my frightening you with a list of potential diagnoses. Get the tests done, and if you want to talk over whatever you find out, then you can come back and see me.’

‘But I need to know,’ Vittorio says, frantic now. ‘I’m not asking for a precise diagnosis. I just need to know what kind of thing it might be – how serious it is. I need to know what’s going to happen to me. It’s important. Please, doctor.’

Dr Rostan considers him for a moment. ‘Fine,’ he says at last. ‘You are a friend of my good friends, and so if this is an extraordinary situation – which I can only assume it is, since you’ve come to me in the first place – then I can tell you something in general terms. But I think we’d better sit down. ’