“Suddenly there’s a crash, and thousands of people exclaim. There are a few revolver shots, water pours in, submerges everyone, stifles voices, makes tables float and carpets swell; the lights go out, the ship sinks rapidly and you’re beneath a veil, beneath a charmeuse of blue water with the rhythm of ragtime still in your ears making a delightful funeral march. I think I could die almost without resisting; while the others struggled frantically in the water I should still be capable, if not of lighting a cigarette, certainly of calmly chewing a piece of gum. But alas, my dear Nocera, as I suffer from seasickness that kind of death is not for me. So I shall have to think of something else but, believe me, it would be splendid to be buried at sea, without the humiliation of being put in a coffin and buried in the filthy muck that’s called humus. As you, Nocera, will be responsible for the disposal of my body, I want you to have me cremated.”
“How stupid.”
“Yes, I know. Jean Moréas said he wanted to be cremated just because it was idiotic.”
“So far as I’m concerned,” Nocera said, “I don’t care whether they dump me in a swamp or bury me in Westminster Abbey.”
“But I like the idea of fooling the eight kinds of underground insect that are already counting on feasting on my dead body,” Tito replied. “To be eaten after death is revolting, but to be eaten while still alive is not. Think of that noble creature the oyster, which is eaten alive. So you, Nocera, will be responsible for my cremation; it’s an interesting thing to see. Haven’t you ever seen it? The body seems still alive, it rises, twists and turns, kneels, contracts its arms, assumes comically obscene attitudes.”
“It isn’t true.”
“You’ll see for yourself when I’m cremated, and you’ll admit that I’m right. But let us keep to the point. Recommend me a good way of dying.”
“Throw yourself from the fifth story.”
“There’s a risk of landing on someone else’s balcony.”
“Throw yourself under a train.”
“I’ve already tried that, and I don’t like it. Besides, nowadays trains are always late.”
Pietro Nocera lost patience. “I don’t know what to advise you,” he said. “If you’re as choosy as that, you don’t ask for advice and you don’t kill yourself. You go on living.”
So Tito started thinking things over by himself, and after long reflection came to the following conclusion: If I take a strong poison or fire five rounds into my head with a revolver, I’m only too sure of dying. Instead I want some thing that leaves me a possible way out or, to put it more precisely, a form of violence against myself that will allow destiny (if it exists) to save me if it doesn’t want me to die. If I swallow some corrosive sublimate tablets I shall die for certain, and destiny won’t be able to interfere, and if I throw myself from the top of a bell-tower I’ll smash my skull on the pavement, and destiny, fate, the Almighty won’t stop me in mid-air. I want to let chance save me if it wants to.
He said these things to himself on the way to the hospital.
He read some notices, went through a door, asked a porter for directions, smelled an odor of cleanliness and carbolic acid, walked up a few steps and down a corridor.
The woman doctor he was looking for came towards him with masculine-looking hands and wearing a white coat that preserved her feminine gracefulness.
They had been to university together, had worked at anatomy together, and had followed the same route from one clinic to another. For a short time Tito had been slightly in love with her, and at another time she had been in love with him, but only mildly, more in play than in real emotion. But there had never been a favorable occasion for revealing their feelings. When Tito left the university he promised to see her again. He sent her a picture postcard of the Eiffel Tower, and she replied with one of the Palazzo Carignano (the work of Juvara) and the question: “What are you up to nowadays?” to which he did not reply.
“Yes, Arnaudi, our lives might have taken a different course,” she said to him. “I remember one winter morning when we went together to the skin and venereal diseases department. You had said some very nice things to me, with a rather touching shyness. It was cold; the trees in the avenue were bare and the ramifications of the branches were like the bronchi in anatomical textbooks. You went into a tobacconist’s, and I waited outside. I decided that when you came out I’d tell you that I liked you. But you came out swearing at the state, or the tobacco, or the tobacconist, and the conversation went off at a tangent. The skin and venereal diseases department was close; we went in, and the subject never arose again.”
“I should have been happier,” Tito sadly confessed. “Our whole life can depend on our jumping into one tram instead of another, on going into a tobacconist’s, on leaving home a minute earlier or a minute later.”
Tito added that those who had had to change their job or the subject of their studies unconsciously regretted the books or the tools of the trade they had given up. It was like one’s first love; one never forgot it, because it seemed the only one worthwhile. He spoke as if his whole life had been embittered by regret for the microscope, the test tubes, the auscultations, the analyses, and the reactions; and he asked whether he might have a look at the laboratories, the operating theaters, the wards.
“I’ll be delighted to show you round,” she said. “Shall we begin with the wards?”
They left the laboratory and walked through a big ward with big frosted glass windows. There were several silent nuns and a smell of cooking and disinfectant. They passed between two long rows of white beds, all exactly alike but distinguished from one another by labels, and they stopped at the most typical cases and also at the strangest. How many different illnesses there were in all those identical beds; how many different destinies in those uniform and symmetrical wards. The young woman doctor took Tito to this bed and that, lingering over the most interesting cases and telling him about the latest methods of diagnosis and treatment.
In the surgical department, which smelt of iodoform, a sister was consoling a frantic patient. “Remember that you already have one leg in paradise,” she was saying, “and that you’ll soon be going to join it.”
They went into another ward.
More beds and more passages between them. Silent nuns, white coats, high windows with frosted glass.
The body of a colonel, with his medals and sword, lay on a low pallet. His cap was on the pillow beside his head.
“A hat on a bed is unlucky,” Tito said with a smile.
“What misfortune could happen to him now that he’s dead?”
“That of resuscitation.”
They went into the amphitheater. Tito had sat on those semicircular benches not so many years before.
“This is where we always sat,” the young woman said. “Do you remember? I sat here and you sat on my right.”
They went up to the next floor, walked through some more wards, tried different equipment, and went back to the laboratory.
In a glass case there were some big glass jars full of yellow alcohol, each of which contained a human fetus. There were fetuses of three, four, five, six, seven and eight months, some with the umbilical cord wound round them like a curl, others with an ironical smile, and others again with a derisive expression. But all their faces were cheerful, and there was a mocking quality in the attitude of their hands, as if they were cocking a snook at the life that had not succeeded in laying hold of them.