They’ve found me out! he thinks to himself. They realize that my heart functions on alternating current, higgledy-piggledy, and that I’ve had at least three heart attacks!
Then another doctor, also in a white smock, enters the room. He looks at the strip, at Montalbano, and at this colleague.
“Let’s do it over,” he says.
Maybe they can’t believe their eyes, can’t understand how a man with an electrocardiogram like that is still in a hospital bed and not on a marble slab in the morgue. They look at the new strip, their heads now very close together.
“Let’s do a telecardiogram,” is the verdict.The doctors seem per-plexed.
Montalbano wishes he could tell them that, if this is the way it is, they shouldn’t even bother extracting the bullet.They should let him die in peace. But, dammit, he forgot to make a will. The house in Marinella, for example, should definitely go to Livia, so that some fourth cousin doesn’t show up and claim it.
o o o
Right, because the house in Marinella has been his for a few years now. He never thought he’d be able to buy it. It cost too much for the salary he earned, which barely let him set anything aside. Then one day his father’s former partner had written to him saying he was ready to liquidate his father’s share of the vineyard, which amounted to a considerable sum.
So not only had he had the money to buy the house, but there was a fair amount left over to put away. For his old age. And that was why he needed to draw up a will, since, without wanting to, he’d become a man with property. Once again, however, after he got out of the hospital he couldn’t bring himself to go see the notary. But if he ever did get around to seeing him, the house would go to Livia, that much was certain. As for François, the son who wasn’t his son but could have been, he knew exactly what to leave him. Enough money to buy himself a nice car. He could already see the indignant expression on Livia’s face. What? And spoil him like that?
Yes, ma’am. A son who wasn’t a son but could (should?) have been one should be spoiled much more than a son who’s really a son. Twisted logic, yes, but still logical. And what about Catarella? Surely he had to put Catarella in his will. So what would he leave him? Certainly not any books. He tried to recall an old song of the Alpine regiment called “The Cap-tain’s Testament” or something similar, but couldn’t remember it. The watch! That was it. He would leave Catarella his father’s watch, which his business partner had sent to him.
That way he could feel like part of the family. The watch was the answer.
o o o
He can’t read the clock on the wall in the cardiology unit because there is a kind of greyish veil over his eyes.The two doctors are very attentively watching some sort of TV screen, occasionally moving a computer mouse.
One of them, the doctor who’s supposed to perform the operation, is named Strazzera, Amedeo Strazzera. This time the machine spits out not a strip of paper but a series of photographs or something similar.The two doctors study and study them, then finally sigh as though worn out after a long walk. Strazzera approaches while his colleague goes and sits down in a chair—white, of course. The doctor looks sternly at the inspector and bends forward. Montalbano is expecting him to say: “You must stop pretending you’re alive! Shame on you!” How does the poem go?
“The poor man, not knowing how much he’d bled, kept oni> fighting when in fact he was dead.”
But the doctor says nothing and begins to sound his chest with the stethoscope. As if he hasn’t already done this at least twenty times. Finally he straightens back up, looks over at his colleague, and asks: “What do we do?”
“I would let Di Bartolo have a look at him,” says the other.
Di Bartolo! A legend. Montalbano had met him a while back. By now he must be over seventy. A skinny old man with a little white beard that made him look like a goat, he could no longer conform to human society or the rules of common courtesy. Once, after examining, in a manner of speaking, a man known to be a ruthless loan shark, he told the patient he couldn’t tell him anything because he was unable to locate his heart. Another time, in a café, he said to a man he’d never seen before, who was sipping a coffee, “Do you know you’re about to have a heart attack?” And lo and behold, he had a heart attack right then and there, maybe because a luminary such as Di Bartolo had just told him it was coming.
But why do these two want to call in Di Bartolo if there is nothing more to be done? Maybe they want to show the old master what a phenomenon this Montalbano is, the way he inexplicably goes on living with a heart that looks like Dresden after the Allied bombing.
While waiting, they decide to take him back to his room. As they’re opening the door to push the stretcher through, he hears Livia’s voice call out desperately: “Salvo! Salvo!”
He doesn’t feel like answering. Poor thing! She’d come down to Vigàta to spend a few days with him and got this nice surprise instead.
o o o
“What a nice surprise!” Livia had said to him the day before, when, upon his return from a check-up at Montelusa Hospital, he’d appeared in the doorway with a large bouquet of roses in his hands. And she’d burst into tears.
“Come on, don’t start!” he’d said, barely holding back himself.
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Well, you never have before!”
“And when have you ever given me a bouquet of roses before?”
He lays his hand on her hip, but gently, so as not to wake her.
o o o
He’d forgotten—or else hadn’t noticed during his earlier meetings with him—that Dr. Di Bartolo not only looked but also sounded like a goat.
“Good day, everybody,” he bleats upon entering, followed by ten or so doctors, all dressed without fail in white smocks and crowding into the room.
“Good day,” replies everybody—that is, Montalbano, since he’s the only body in the room when the doctor appears.
Di Bartolo approaches the bed and looks at him with interest.
“I’m glad to see that, despite my colleagues’ efforts, you can still understand and know what you want.”
He makes a gesture and Strazzera appears beside him and hands him the test results. Di Bartolo barely glances at the first sheet and then tosses it onto the bed, does the same with the second, ditto the third and the fourth. In a matter of seconds, Montalbano’s head and torso disappear under the paper. In the end he hears the doctor’s voice but can’t see him because the photos of the telecardiogram are over his eyes.
“Mind telling me why you called me here?” The bleat sounds rather irritated. Apparently the goat is getting ornery.