to's girlfriend came too. He drove to the hospital, a dizzying zig-zag down the steep hill on which the medieval city was built, the lights of the modern lower town coldly flashing. I had no idea where we were going. The emergency room was quiet and empty except for a woman with a little boy on her lap. She looked up grimly as if she’d been waiting but hadn’t dared ask for help. No hospital staff were in sight. Benches lined the smudged walls, and we sat Dan on one of them. His face had turned a pale grey. My feelings of panic had collected in a small ball at the top of my stomach, and I felt drained and weightless. I paced, listening at the doors that led to examining rooms. There were voices behind one door. No one came out. We could do nothing but sit and wait. I began to. notice Roberto and the girlfriend. They fidgeted and sighed, and I felt bad that we had dragged them here. Neither of them spoke any English. Dan held his hand in a towel and, reviving a bit, tried in a hoarse voice to tai k with Roberto who gallantly nodded and smiled. He seemed the pleasant kind of boy who would do whatever his mother asked, but was not about to call attention to himself by knocking on one of the doors and demanding a doctor. His friend, a girl of about nineteen, had dull blonde hair, a colorless face and funny teeth, which I kept noticing because her vague smile turned to startled giggles whenever I spoke. The smile seemed to be an attempt at helpfulness, and for some reason it really aggravated me. She was dressed in pink, with earrings and a matching bracelet of fat pink balls which she kept twisting and rearranging on her thin wrist. These two teenagers were our only allies. Her bracelet drove me crazy. Finally one of the doors cracked, and a doctor in wrinkled whites and a two-day beard shouldered his way through. I jumped. The doctor looked up and, saying nothing, led us through one of the doors. He gestured toward an examining table. He unwrapped the dish-towel around Dan’s hand. After looking a little while, he said in Italian, “It’s nothing. A few stitches, and it will be all right.” His tone implied we were idiots for getting excited. I didn’t care: the finger was still attached. He handed me the blood-soaked towels. Then looking more closely, he changed his mind. “No, you must remain in the hospital for a week.” We caught the words, “in ospedale” and “una setti- mana,” but not why. “Una settimana!” Dan cried. He was beginning to get loud, and I realized later that he must have been going into shock. Perhaps the doctor explained the situation to Roberto, but neither of them tried to make us understand what exactly was wrong with Dan’s finger or.what would happen next. A nurse walked us outdoors, through a vast courtyard and into another building. We rode up a freight elevator and walked along a darkened corridor that opened into a forlorn waiting room. After a while a pair of white doors opened and a tired-looking nurse summoned Dan inside. Our only hope of communicating in Italian was to do it together, so I marched toward the examining room too. The nurse closed the door sharply in my face. Roberto had disappeared. I sat down in one of the molded plastic chairs, in the dimness, with the girlfriend. After half an hour, a wedge of light crept across the floor as the door opened. This time I was invited in. Dan lay on his back on a sheet- draped table. I stood by his head and held his shoulders, wishing-someone would hold mine. A young nurse motioned me to a desk where she wearily rolled papers into a huge black typewriter. She asked me to spell Dan’s name, but it was German and incomprehensible to her. Because I hadn’t learned the Italian names for letters, she never got it right. I stumbled over his birth date. I could manSitting in the cool sunshine, I stared at the steam that curled from a cup of cappuccino and tried not to think about the men, the brokenness, the damage that had been suffered by all those hands, arms, faces, the fragility of the spirits that awaited repair. age the month and day, but from our five Berlitz lessons I only knew numbers up to twenty, and had no idea how to say “nineteen-fifty-one.” The atmosphere eased when a male nurse appeared, ambled over to where Dan lay, and said in a hearty voice, “Salve!” At the time I was sure it meant “Health!” or “Salvation!” and I took it quite literally, the way someone not used to “God bless you” after a sneeze might feel an actual blessing bestowed. Hehad-thick black hair and a smile that reached back to empty spaces where teeth were missing. He wore white clogs. Introducing himself as Giorgio, he shook Dan’s good hand with exclamations of “Danny, Danny, che disastro!” He waited with us, teasing, making us laugh. Then a second miracle occurred. Roberto returned with Kay Albani, the agent who had found us our apartment. Kay, a Canadian fluent in Italian, was the only person we knew in Bergamo besides Sra. Cerutti. How Roberto knew her or knew that she knew us was a mystery, but we were so relieved at her magical appearance that we didn’t ask. “Poverino!” she said to Dan- poor thing! —and immediately quizzed everyone in sight. She drew the doctor aside and argued with him. Finally she explained the diagnosis to us: the wound was very deep, a main tendon and several nerves had been severed, and two operations would be required. One was to be performed the next day to repair the torn skin, the other in three weeks to reconnect the nerves and tendon. Dan would stay the night in the hospital. She would meet me there the next morning and arrange for us to be allowed in to see him. Roberto and the girlfriend drove me home. As we walked through the enormous doorway into the black courtyard, the girlfriend stopped, felt along the wall, clicked a button, and suddenly lamps appeared in the passageway. “La luce,” she said in her soft voice. “La luce,” 1 repeated, amazed. We hadn’t known there was a night switch for the courtyard and had been creeping up the winding stairway, cupping hands around matches that always blew out, trapping us in the darkness. La luce. I thanked them both as many times as I could and walked up to the apartment. I went into the kitchen. The floor was covered with glass, and blood, and the spaghetti Dan had been making. I picked up the large pieces of glass with washcloths, mopped up the shards and the spaghetti. All night the building was noisy, something scratching at the kitchen window grate, creatures scurrying through the walls. I dreamed my parents came to visit, and as we climbed the stairs, I described our beautiful, crumbling apartment. Just at the top, the outside wall of the building, a bright ochre color, detached itself, fell in a slow arc, and crashed on the ground. We stood at the apa(rtment door on a ledge, the ruined stairway below. ospital Gates In the morning light the hospital towered like a fortress. A bronze gate controlled the entrance between two huge nineteenth-century buildings, and through it I could glimpse the courtyard of the night before. Roads with turnstiles and sentry cubicles led to twenty other buildings in the rest of the compound. Blue-shirted guards stood by the gate, arms across their chests, pointedly ignoring a group of women who waited with bags and baskets for the start of visiting hours. I was nervous about finding Kay. Feeling small and completely helpless, I paced in front of a newspaper stand across the street. I bought a paper without wanting to and after some time spotted Kay. She was striding back and forth in front of the gate, glancing about like an irritated hen. Plump and fifty, she had coppery blonde hair and wore a navy blue dress with assertive white polka dots. A Canadian married to a native of Bergamo (her husband was a taxi driver), she had carefully studied the town life. She knew useful people everywhere, at the butcher’s and the fruitseller’s, in the hospital. She had nurtured and pruned her connections for twenty years until like hardy trees they all bore fruit. While the women at the gate had to content themselves with cultivating /a pazienza, Kay could get things done. We marched up to the guards. She delivered a barrage of Italian—I caught “American husband” and “anxious wife”—and, emphasizing the name of her friend the hospital administrator, she eased me forward. Six buildings of dull yellow stucco formed a grand quadrangle, several blocks in area. Paths crisscrossed the lawn where women in chenille bathrobes walked slowly on the arms of nurses. Men in pajamas and slippers sat in the sun on stone benches, smoking and talking. They looked like rest cure patients at an out-of-fashion spa, people who did not expect to get well in a hurry. I was afraid that Dan had been moved in the night. There seemed to be no central information office. What if we couldn’t find him? I had memorized the important words, written on a slip of paper by the nurse: “Chirugia Plastica Sezione Maschile, Camera Quattro, Letto Sette.” Men’s Plastic Surgery, Room Four, Bed Seven. Dust coiled along the marble stairway as if the maintenance staff were years behind. A small trail of dried blood, little circles, tiny splashes, led from the second floor to the third. We found Dan asleep in a long green room. An older man with a tube protruding from his neck peered over his newspaper as we entered and greeted us politely. “Buon giorno, Signore.” Dan’s eyes were closed, one arm tucked beneath a very white sheet, the other in a fat bandage that rested on his chest. He looked extremely clean. They have taken good care of him, I thought. I could draw comfort from the whiteness of the sheets, the tightness of the blanket. Someone has known what to do for my husband, and it has been done. He opened his eyes. Kay and I pulled up chairs. He smiled and reached his hand from beneath the sheet to hold mine. Kay unknotted the handles of a bulky plastic grocery bag and pulled out a large bunch of green grapes, three ripe peaches, and a bottle of wine. “Later, when you feel better, try this Sassela,” she said. “It will restore your strength. I don’t like red myself, but it’s my husband’s favorite.” “You brought all this for me?” Dan exclaimed. “You need fresh things to recover. I heard the hospital cooks might be going on strike. How are they treating you?” “I can’t tell what they’re saying most of the time, but someone found a nurse who speaks a little English. Angelo. He says Italian doctors believe in rest. It may be hard to get out of here.” We talked until Dan grew sleepy. Kay departed in a flurry of admonitions and good wishes, and I sat by the bed listening to Dan’s steady breathing. From the corridor drifted the clattering of silverware as tables were prepared for lunch. Through the doorway I saw the other patients in Men’s Plastic Surgery emerging from their rooms. Each had a grotesque bandage. Later we would learn about their accidents. A ppwersaw jumped out of control—the stocky white- haired man swayed beneath the weight of an arm-length cast. A motorbike swerved in front of a car— the sallow-faced teenager stared from beneath bandages that bound his head and chin. A firecracker exploded too soon—the twelve-year- old sat very still, his jaw held rigid by a complicated intertwining of wires. Suddenly I had to leave. I wrote Dan a note and hurried down the stairs, across the courtyard, and out the hospital gates. I stopped at the first cafe I saw. Sitting in the cool sunshine, I stared at the steam that curled from a cup of cappuccino and tried not to think about the men, the brokenness, the damage that had been suffered by all those hands, arms, faces, the fragility of the spirits that awaited repair. I felt like crying. Dan seemed safe enough for the moment, and as the worry ebbed I realized how abanClinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1988 33
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