Zeno's Conscience, Page 7

  “Poor thing!” she said, “to die like that! With that beautiful, full head of hair.” She stroked him. It was true. My father’s head was crowned by thick, white curls, whereas I, at thirty, was already balding.

  I didn’t remember that there were doctors in this world and that it was commonly supposed that they were sometimes agents of recovery. I had already seen death in that face distraught with pain, and I no longer had any hope. Maria was the first to mention the doctor, then she went out to wake our gardener and send him into the city.

  I remained alone, supporting my father, for about ten minutes, which to me seemed an eternity. I remember how, as my hands touched that tormented body, I tried to impart to them all the tenderness that filled my heart. He couldn’t hear words. What could I do to make him know how much I loved him?

  When the gardener came, I went to my room to write a note; it was hard for me to put together those few words meant to give the doctor an idea of the situation so that he could bring some medicines with him at once. I saw constantly before me the certain, imminent death of my father and I asked myself: “What will I do now in this world?”

  The long hours of waiting followed. I have a fairly precise recollection of those hours. After the first it was no longer necessary for me to support my father, who lay on his bed unconscious, unmoving. His groaning had stopped, but his insensibility was total. His respiration was hurried, and, almost unconsciously, I imitated it. I couldn’t breathe for long at that pace, and I granted myself occasional pauses, hoping to induce the sick man also to repose. But he rushed ahead tirelessly. We tried in vain to give him a spoonful of tea. His unconsciousness lessened when he was obliged to defend himself against any intervention from us. Determined, he would clench his teeth. Even in his unconscious state, he was accompanied by that indomitable stubbornness of his. Long before dawn his breathing changed rhythm. It came in phases that began with slow respiration that could have seemed that of a healthy man, but this was followed by other, more rapid breaths ending in a long, frightening pause, which seemed to Maria and to me the announcement of death. But the first phase would resume, almost always the same, a musical line of infinite sadness, lacking any color. That respiration wasn’t always the same, but it was always noisy and became virtually a part of that room. After that hour it remained always there, for a long, long time!

  I spent a few hours sprawled on a sofa, while Maria was still seated by the bed. On that sofa I wept my most searing tears. Weeping obscures our guilt and allows us to accuse fate, without contradiction. I wept because I was losing the father for whom I had always lived. No matter that I had given him scant company. Hadn’t my efforts to become a better man been aimed at affording him some satisfaction? The success I yearned for was to be my boast to him, who had always doubted me, but primarily it would be his consolation. And now, on the contrary, he could no longer wait for me and was going off, convinced of my incurable weakness. My tears were very bitter.

  In writing, or rather, in setting down on paper these painful memories, I discover that the image that obsessed me at my first attempt to see into my past, that locomotive dragging a series of cars up a slope, had come to me initially on that sofa, as I listened to my father’s breathing. That is how locomotives sound, as they pull enormous loads: they emit regular puffs that then accelerate, ending in a menacing pause as the listener fears he will see engine and train go hurtling downhill. Seriously! My first effort to remember had carried me back to that night, to the most important hours of my life.

  Dr. Coprosich arrived at the villa some time before dawn, accompanied by an orderly carrying a medicine case. He had been obliged to come on foot because, in the violent hurricane, he hadn’t found a cab.

  I received him weeping, and he treated me with great kindness, also encouraging me to hope. Still, I should say at once: after that meeting, there are few men in this world who can arouse in me the keen dislike Dr. Coprosich inspires. He is still alive today, decrepit and surrounded by the respect of the entire city. When I glimpse him, so frail and hesitant, walking through the streets seeking a bit of exercise and air, even now my aversion is renewed.

  At that time the doctor can’t have been much over forty. He had devoted considerable study to forensic medicine, and though he was well known to be a good Italian, the Royal and Imperial authorities assigned the most important investigations to him. He was a thin, nervous man, his insignificant face crowned by a baldness that simulated a very high forehead. Another weakness of his gave him importance: as he raised his eyeglasses (and he always did this when he wanted to ponder something), his blinded eyes stared beyond or above his interlocutor, and they had the curious look of the colorless eyes of a statue, menacing or perhaps ironic. The eyes were then unpleasant. If he had something to say, even a single word, he would replace the glasses on his nose, and then his eyes would become once more those of a commonplace solid citizen, who carefully ponders the things of which he speaks.

  He sat in the vestibule to rest for a few moments. He asked me to tell him exactly what had happened from the first alarm until his arrival. He removed his glasses, and his strange eyes gazed at the wall behind me.

  I tried to be precise, and this was not easy, considering the state I was in. I remembered also that Dr. Coprosich could not tolerate people ignorant of medicine who used medical terminology, as if they knew something about the subject. And when I came to talk about what had seemed to me “cerebral respiration,” he put on his glasses before saying to me: “Go slow with the definitions. We’ll see later what it is.” I had spoken also of my father’s odd behavior, his anxiety to see me, then his haste to go to bed. I didn’t report my father’s strange talk: perhaps I was afraid of being forced to repeat some of the replies I had made to my father. But I did say that Papà had not managed to express himself with precision, and that he seemed to be thinking intensely about something going on in his head that he couldn’t put into words. The doctor, his glasses squarely on his nose, exclaimed triumphantly: “I know what was going on in his head!”

  So did I, but I didn’t say so for fear of angering Dr. Coprosich: it was the hemorrhage.

  We went to the sick man’s bed. With the orderly’s help, the doctor turned the poor inert body this way and that for a time that seemed to me interminable. He listened and examined. He tried to elicit the patient’s help, but in vain.

  “That’s enough!” the doctor said at a certain point. He came over to me, his eyeglasses in his hand, as he looked at the floor and, with a sigh, said to me: “You must be brave. The situation is very serious.”

  We went to my room, where he washed his face.

  He was thus without eyeglasses, and when he raised his face to dry it, his damp head seemed the curious head of an amulet made by unskilled hands. He remembered having seen us some months previously, and he expressed his surprise that we hadn’t come back to him. Indeed, he thought then that we had left him for another doctor; on that occasion he had stated quite clearly that my father needed treatment. As he uttered these reproaches, without his glasses, he was impressive. He raised his voice and demanded explanations. His eyes sought them everywhere.

  Of course he was right, and I had earned the reproach. I must say here that I am sure these words are not the reason why I hate Dr. Coprosich. I apologized, telling him of my father’s aversion to doctors and medicines; I wept as I spoke, and the doctor, with generous kindliness, tried to calm me, saying that even if we had consulted him earlier, his skill might, at most, have been able to delay the catastrophe we were now witnessing, but not to prevent it.

  However, as he went on inquiring about the first signs of the illness, he found new cause to reproach me. He asked if my father had complained in recent months about the state of his health, his appetite, his sleeping habits. I could give him no precise answers, and could not even tell him if my father had eaten much or little at that table where we sat down together daily. The obviousness of my guilt crushed me, but the doctor didn�
€™t insist with his questions. He learned from me that Maria had always thought the old man was at death’s door, and that I had made fun of her for this.

  He was cleaning his ears, looking upward. “In a couple of hours he will probably regain consciousness, at least partially,” he said.

  “So there’s some hope?” I cried.

  “None whatsoever!” he replied curtly. “The leeches are never wrong in these cases. He will surely regain a bit of consciousness, and perhaps then lose his mind.”

  He shrugged and replaced the towel. That shrug indicated a real dismissal of his own work, and encouraged me to speak. I was filled with terror at the idea that my father might come out of his daze in order to witness his death, but if it hadn’t been for that shrug, I would never have had the courage to say as much.

  “Doctor!” I implored. “Doesn’t it seem a heartless thing, to make him regain consciousness?”

  I burst out crying. The desire to cry lurked always in my shaken nerves, but I succumbed to it helplessly, to display my tears and to make the doctor forgive the criticism I had dared express of his treatment.

  With great humanity he said to me, “Come now, calm yourself. The patient’s awareness will never be sufficiently acute to allow him to recognize his condition. He’s not a doctor. If we don’t tell him he’s dying, he won’t know. On the other hand, we may run into something worse. I mean, he could lose his mind. I’ve brought a straitjacket with me, however, and the orderly will remain here.”

  More frightened than ever, I begged him not to apply the leeches. Then, quite calmly, he told me that the orderly had surely already applied them, because he had given the man instructions before leaving my father’s room. I became angry. Could anything be more wicked than recalling a sick man to consciousness, without the least hope of saving him, only to plunge him into despair, or expose him to the risk of having to undergo—amid what suffering!—the straitjacket? With great violence, though still accompanying my words with those tears that craved compassion, I declared that it seemed to me an inconceivable cruelty not to allow a man to die in peace when he was definitively doomed.

  I hate that man because he then became angry with me. This is what I was never able to forgive him. He became so agitated that he forgot to put on his glasses, and yet he discovered the exact spot where my head was, to fix it with his baleful eyes. He said that it seemed to him that I wanted to sever even the thin thread of hope that still existed. This is exactly how he said it, harshly.

  We were on the verge of a fight. Weeping and shouting, I retorted that a few instants earlier he himself had rejected any hope of the sick man’s being saved. My house and those living in it were not to be used in experiments; there were other places in this world for that sort of thing!

  With great, ominously calm severity, he replied: “I explained to you the state of our knowledge at that instant. But who can say what may happen by tomorrow, or in half an hour’s time? By keeping your father alive, I have left the door open to all possibilities.”

  Then he put on his glasses, and with his fussy clerk’s mien, he added further, endless explanations about the importance that a doctor’s intervention could have in the economic destiny of a family. An extra half hour of respiration could decide the fate of an inheritance.

  I was weeping now also because I pitied myself for having to stand and listen to such things at such a moment. Exhausted, I stopped arguing. Anyway, the leeches had already been applied!

  The doctor is a power when he is at a sick man’s bedside, and toward Dr. Coprosich I exhibited all due respect. It must have been this respect that kept me from proposing that we seek a second opinion, a deference for which I reproached myself over many years. Now all remorse is dead, along with my other feelings of which I speak here as coldly as I would recount events that had befallen a stranger. In my heart, nothing of those days remains except my dislike for that doctor, who nevertheless stubbornly goes on living.

  Later we went once again to my father’s bed. We found him asleep, resting on his right side. They had placed a washcloth on his temple to cover the wounds made by the leeches. The doctor, eager to find out at once if the patient’s consciousness had increased, shouted into his ears. The patient didn’t react in any way.

  “So much the better!” I said with great courage, though still weeping.

  “The anticipated effect cannot fail!” the doctor replied. “Can’t you see that his respiration has already changed?”

  In fact, while gasping and labored, the respiration no longer followed those phases that had frightened me.

  The orderly said something to the doctor, who nodded. It involved trying the straitjacket on the patient. They extracted the device from the case and pulled my father up, forcing him to remain seated in the bed. Then he opened his eyes: they were dull, not yet adjusted to the light. I sobbed again, fearing they would immediately look around and see everything. On the contrary, when the sick man’s head was back on the pillow, those eyes closed, like the eyes of certain dolls.

  The doctor exulted.

  “It’s an entirely different thing!” he murmured.

  Yes: it was a different thing! For me, simply a serious threat. Fervently I kissed my father’s brow, and in my mind I made a wish: “Now sleep. Sleep until the eternal sleep arrives!”

  And this is how I wished for my father’s death, but the doctor didn’t divine it because he said to me, with good humor: “You, too, are pleased now, to see he has become himself again!”

  By the time the doctor left, dawn had broken. A grim dawn, tentative. The wind, still blowing in gusts, seemed to me less violent, although it continued to raise the frozen snow.

  I accompanied the doctor into the garden. I exaggerated these acts of politeness so that he wouldn’t perceive my rancor. My face conveyed only consideration and respect. I allowed myself a grimace of disgust, relieving my strain, only when I saw him go off along the path leading to the gate of the house. Small and black in the midst of the snow, he staggered and stopped at every gust, to resist it better. My grimace wasn’t enough for me, and I felt a need for other violent acts, after making that effort. For a few minutes I walked along the drive in the cold, bareheaded, angrily stamping my feet in the deep snow. I couldn’t say, however, if this puerile wrath was directed at the doctor or at myself. First of all at myself, at me, who had wanted my father dead and hadn’t dared say so. My silence converted that desire, inspired by the purest filial devotion, into a genuine crime that weighed on me horribly.

  The patient went on sleeping. He uttered only a few words, which I didn’t grasp, but in the calmest conversational tone, odd because he interrupted his breathing, still very fast, anything but calm. Was he approaching consciousness and desperation?

  Maria had now sat down at the bed beside the orderly. He inspired my confidence, and displeased me only through a certain exaggerated conscientiousness. He rejected Maria’s proposal to give the sick man a spoonful of broth, which she considered a good medicine. But the doctor had said nothing about broth, and the orderly wanted to wait for the doctor’s return before taking such an important step. He spoke more imperiously than the matter warranted. Poor Maria didn’t insist, nor did I. I made another grimace of disgust, however.

  They persuaded me to lie down. Since I would have to spend the night with the orderly, tending the patient, who would need me and Maria both, one of us could now rest on the sofa. I lay down and fell asleep at once, with complete, pleasant loss of consciousness and—I’m sure of this—not interrupted by the slightest glimmer of a dream.

  Last night, on the contrary, after spending part of yesterday collecting these memories, I had an extremely vivid dream that, with an enormous backward leap in time, carried me to those days. I saw myself again with the doctor in the same room where we had argued about leeches and straitjackets, a room that now looks completely different because it is the bedroom I share with my wife. I was telling Coprosich how to care for and cure my father, while
the doctor (not old and decrepit as he is now, but vigorous and keen as he was then) wrathfully, spectacles in hand, his eyes unfocused, was shouting that it wasn’t worth the trouble to do so many things. What he said exactly was this: “The leeches would recall him to life and to pain, and they mustn’t be applied!” I, on the contrary, was banging my fist on a medical volume and yelling: “Leeches! I want leeches! And the straitjacket, too!”

  Apparently my dream turned noisy, because my wife interrupted it, waking me. Distant shadows! I believe that to peer into them requires some optical aid, and this is what disorients you.

  My calm sleep is the last memory of that day. Then other long days followed in which one hour resembled the next. The weather had improved; they were saying that my father’s condition had also improved. He could move freely about the room and had begun his pursuit of air, from the bed to his easy chair. Through the closed windows, for some instants, he would look also at the snow-covered garden, dazzling in the sun. Every now and then, when I entered that room, I was ready to argue, to becloud that consciousness Coprosich was waiting for. But though my father showed signs of hearing and understanding better every day, that consciousness was still remote.

  Unfortunately I must confess that at my father’s deathbed I harbored in my soul a great resentment that strangely clung to my sorrow and distorted it. That resentment was addressed first of all toward Coprosich, and it was increased by my effort to conceal it from him. I felt some also toward myself, because I was unable to continue my argument with the doctor and tell him clearly that I didn’t give a damn for his learning and that I was wishing for my father’s death in order to spare him pain.

  Finally I felt resentful also toward the sick man. Anyone who has had the experience of spending days and weeks with a restless patient, and who is untrained to act as nurse and therefore remains a passive spectator of the treatment given by others, will understand me. Further, while I should have had a long rest to clarify my feelings, to control and perhaps appreciate my suffering for my father and for myself, instead I now had to struggle to make him swallow his medicine and to prevent him from leaving the room. Struggle always produces resentment.