The lady was now moaning slightly and rocking and had folded her hands across her middle in a childish (and curiously reassuring) gesture like a small girl who had eaten too many green apples. But Mario got us back to the hotel in record time and here everyone showed anxiety and concern for the patient as we helped her out of the bus and up the steps into the hotel. The infant was there, all eyes, but playing no part. It was one huge gape — if a microscope can be said to be a gape. Our faces would have made an interesting study in concern — selfish concern, for we did not know whether this attack of illness might not prejudice the tour. Also, as almost nobody in the group liked the Microscopes there was a good deal of hypocrisy mixed into our concern and perhaps clearly decipherable in our expressions. There was general movement to get the lady up to her room where she could be undressed, but perhaps this is what she feared for she refused to move off the sofa in the lounge and elected to treat with the doctor there, upright and in full public view. It was not satisfactory from a medical point of view but as she was French and extremely obstinate there was little to be done about it. Here she waited then, gulping and closing her lidless eyes like a sick lizard, and here we hovered around the outskirts with well-meaning solicitude, waiting for the doc who would certainly be called El Dottore and would flourish one of those continental-type thermometers which are large and impressive and have to be operated in an embarrassing posture.
He was some time coming, but come he did at last and it was clear that he had dressed for the event for he wore an elaborate outfit topped off by a sort of white silk stock. The material of his dark suit was of obvious weight and quality — it made one perspire just to look at it; but the whole ensemble was beautifully tailored, while his small feet were encased in elastic-sided boots. He was youngish, a man in his forties, with a large dark head, furry as a mole, and skin the color of plum cake. He had a singular sort of expression; a sort of holy expression which one suddenly realized came from the fact that he was scared stiff in case someone asked him a question in a foreign language. His cufflinks gleamed, so did his teeth. He carried pigskin gloves. But he was scared. He looked in fact as if he had just emerged after partaking of the Eucharist with Frank Sinatra. He sat down uncomfortably facing his patient and put a bag containing his instruments on the floor. Roberto now intervened with a spirited outline of the case and everybody’s hands began to move in rhythm with their inner rhetoric — Roberto staggering, falling, holding his stomach.
The lady was looking less alarmed and seemed rather pleased to have merited such a lot of attention. El Dottore listened with a dark and disabused air, nodding from time to time as if he knew only too well what made people fall about and hold their stomachs. From time to time he allowed one hand off the leash, so to speak, and allowed it to describe a few eloquent gestures to illustrate his discourse — he had a rich and agreeable voice as well. The hand evolved in the air in a quite autonomous sort of way and if one had not been able to understand what its owner said one might have imagined it to be picking a grape or milking a goat or waving goodbye to a dying patient. It was expressive and strangely encouraging, for he did have a definite presence. He produced a stethoscope and after waving it about as he was talking made a sudden dart for his patient’s wrist. This she did not mind. He planted it on her pulse and listened gravely and for a long time to her cardiac performance. He nodded slightly. They had now got on to trying to explain to him what her illness was and how she had come to catch it. He did not understand. So everyone, led by Roberto and the woman’s husband, began to make as if to swallow air like the French do. The doctor swallowed with concern as he watched them; he did not seem to have heard of this disease — are Italians immune to it because they talk too much: the air can’t get in? At any rate he did not get it. He raised a carefully manicured finger and scratched his temple as he thought. Then he bowed once more to his pulse, hearkening with great concentration. Ah! After a long and pregnant pause the truth dawned. He put away his little stethoscope with a snap and locked his bag. Sitting well back and with an aggressive tilt to his chin he came up with a remedy which certainly matched the singularity of the disease. “In my opinion the spleen must come out at once,” he said. The translation was handed about to the party in several tongues. The spleen! So that was it!
The only person who refused to register surprise whatever happened — nothing could surprise him, it seemed — was the male Microscope. The spleen, pouf, of course he had heard all about it before. She had always been splenetic — if that is the mot juste—and had had numberless attacks which always wore off after she had been treated in the ordinary way for wind in the rigging. One gathered that there was some immense mauve suppository manufactured in Geneva which would meet the case. Nor were we wrong for the doctor produced a gorgeous fountain pen and wrote out a prescription with untrembling hand which he handed over to Roberto who glanced at it and offered to send someone out to the chemist at once. And the spleen? One could hardly launch her into an operation of that order while we were on the move. She would have to go into hospital. Roberto’s perplexities were grievous to behold. Would her damned spleen hold up until he could get shot of her, could push her over the border? That is what he wanted to know. The doctor shook his head, smiled persuasively, and said that it was up to God. Strangely enough the woman’s husband took the whole matter with a philosophic optimism which seemed rather noble. Or perhaps he had been through these storms often enough to know that they subsided as quickly as they arose? But nobody thought of invoking Santa Lucia — had we been in Greece it would have been the first, the most urgent thing to do, for were we not in her domain? It was just a small indication of the degree to which we, so-called “evolved” Europeans, had become demagnetized to the sense of pagan realities. Spleen!