The wood of the steps continued to creak, more and more, under the rising weight of the three. Ingravallo, once at the top, pushed the door, with a certain charitable prudence.
He went in, followed by Tina and by Di Pietrantonio, into a large room. A stink, there, of dirty clothing or of not very washable or seldom-washed people in illness, or sweating in the labor that the countryside, unremittingly, at every change of weather, demands: or rather, even more, of feces poorly put away near the illness, so needful of shelter. Two long tapers painted in the vivid colors, blues, reds, gold, of a coloristic tradition unbroken in the years, hung on the wall from two nails at either side of the bed: the dry olive twig: an oleograph, the blue Madonna with a golden crown, in a black wood frame. Some rush-bottomed chairs. A plaster cat with a ribbon around its neck, scarlet, on the commode amid bottles, bowls. Near the Illness was seated an old woman, her striped skirt halfway down her tibias, with a pair of cloth shoes, no laces (and, within, her feet) which she had rested on the crossbar of the chair, open like slippers. In the bed, broad, under worn and greenish blankets, covered in part by one good one (and warm, and light, gift of Liliana, Ingravallo deduced) an outstretched little body, like a skinny cat in a sack set on the ground: a bony and cachetic face rested on the pillow, motionless, of a yellow-brown like something in an Egyptian museum; were it not, on the other hand, for the glassy whiteness of the beard, which indicated its belonging, not to an Egyptian catalogue, but to an era of human history painfully close and, for Ingravallo, in those days, downright contemporary. Everything was silent. You couldn't understand whether the man was alive or dead: if it was a man or woman, who in proceeding among the consolations of offspring and of the hoe in a swarm of mosquitoes towards the golden wedding, had sprouted that beard: a virile beard, as was wont to say, even of feminine beards, the Founder of the five-year-old Empire. The two tapers, here and there, seemed to be waiting to be stuck into suitable candlesticks, lighted by a match held in a charitable hand. Intolerant of this new mess of the dying parent and yet cautious and pitying, the imagination of Doctor Ingravallo kicked, bucked, galloped, heard and saw: he was seeing and already dismissing the coffin without drapery, of poplar planks, flowered with periwinkles and primula, surrounded by the absolving mutters or the prompt insurgence of some phrase chanted, or perhaps nasalized for better or worse amid the murmurings of the women and the good odor of the incense, issuing (core cuidado) from the parsimonious sway of the censer: to signify the great fear suffered and the repentance of the deceased, and the imploration and hope, all around, of the living and the surviving, once that coffin was closed and nailed and well-hammered: and in short, a kind of convinced serenity in every heart (better to go like this than to suffer for another month or more), in watching the planks, the flowers. . target of the reiterated spatterings of the asperges: between a shuffling of soles and a creaking of iron on the cobbles, if there were cobbles. But the reality was as yet different from the dream: those images of an almost raving impatience regarded the future, however near that future might be. Don Ciccio restrained the galloping of his delirium, tugged at the reins of his pawing rage. The patient, so thin, seemed ripe for the last rites: Eternity, infallible physician, was already, bent over him. Lovingly, she gazed upon him (and gulped some saliva down) with the succoring and greedy gaze of a Red Cross woman or a nurse who was slightly necrophilic: concerned with wiping his forehead in a light caress with the more delaying hand: and with the other, expert one, maneuvering under the covers and even under the body, between the sacroiliac and the bedpan, had finally found the right spot to stick into him the little point, the ebonite straw, for the service of perpetual immunization.
Strange borborygms, under cover, contradicted the coma, and, more strangely, death: they gave the impression of a miraculous imminence: that the sheets and the blankets were on the point of bulging, swelling: of rising and floating in midair, on the paralyzed gravity of death. The old woman, Migliarini Veronica, was huddled in the chair, frozen in a commemoration of the ages that had, on the other hand, dissolved into non-memory: she had one of her hands in the other, resembling Cosimo pater patriae in the so-called portrait by Pontormo: dry, lizardy skin, on her face, and the wrinkled immobility of a fossil. There wasn't, in her lap, but she would have liked it, the earthenware brazier. She raised her eyes, gelatinous and glassy in their tan color, without interrogating any of those people who, to her, must have seemed shadows, neither the girl, nor the men. The spent quiet of her gaze was opposed to the event, like the mindless memory of the earth, from paleontological distances: alienating that face of a hundred-and-ninety-year-old Aztec woman from the acquisitions of the species, from the latest, quick-change artist's conquests of Italian eyeing.
A majolica pan, as if from a clinic of the first category, was set on the brick floor, and not even near the walclass="underline" and neither did it lack some undeciphered content, on the consistence, coloration, odor, viscosity and specific weight of which both the lynx eyes and the bloodhound scent of Ingravallo felt that it wasn't necessary to investigate and analyze: the nose, of course, could not exempt itself from its natural functioning, that is, from that activity, or to be more accurate, that papillary passivity which is proper to it, and which does not admit, helas, any interlude or inhibition or absence of any kind from its duty.
"Is this your father?" Don Ciccio asked Tina, looking at her, looking around, and then taking off his hat.
"Doctor, you see the state he's in. You wouldn't believe me: but now you've got to believe me, finally!" she exclaimed in a resentful tone, and with eyes which seemed to have wept, the beauty. "I've given up hope by now. It'd be better for him, and for me too, if he died. To suffer like that, and without any money or anything. His behind, if you'll pardon the word, is just one big sore, now: it's a mess, poor Papa!" She was trying, thought Ingravallo harshly, in her grief she was trying to turn her father to use, his direct decay. "And he even has a rubber bedpan," she sighed, "otherwise his bedsores would have been infected. This morning, at eight o'clock, he was in pain again, it hurt him bad, he said. He couldn't stay still ten minutes, you might say. Now he hasn't moved for three hours: he doesn't say a word: I have a feeling he's out of his suffering now, that he can't suffer any more": she dried her eyes, blew her little nose: "because he can't feel anything now, good or bad, poor Papa. . The priest can't get here before one, he sent word. Ah me, poor us!" she looked at Ingravallo, "if it hadn't been for the signora!" That remark sounded empty, distant. Liliana: it was a name. It seemed, to Don Ciccio, that the girl hesitated to evoke it.
"Of course," he said, wearily, "the bedpan!" and he remembered the unbosomings of Balducci, "I know, I know who gave it to you: and that jar, too," and he indicated it with his head, his chin, "and the blanket," he looked at the blanket on the bed, "you were given them by… by a person who promptly got paid back, for her goodness. Don't do good, if you don't want to receive evil, the proverb says. And that's how it is. Aren't you going to talk? Don't you remember?"