‘But it’s that they’re exactly the same,’ Mario almost shouted. Immediately he begged, ‘Mrs Workman, something must be done.’
‘That’s for sure,’ answered Mrs Workman. ‘Get into bed and sleep it off.’
XVIII
During the night he woke up several times bathed in sweat, the sheets twisted. One time he imagined he’d just dreamed the visit he’d made the previous evening to Berkowickz’s apartment; another time, as he smoked a cigarette of insomnia looking out the window of his study (outside the bulbs of the street lamps projected a weak light over the street), he wished vehemently for that whole week to have been a nightmare. At some point he managed to get to sleep, comforted by the hope that the next day everything would be different.
The next day he woke up with the certainty that nothing was going to be different. It was seven in the morning; filtering through the curtains, the skeletal light of dawn lit up the room. Although overwhelmed by the prospect (a Saturday without a single activity to occupy his time), he got up immediately, shaved and showered, and had just a cup of coffee for breakfast. He tried to banish from his mind the ominous proximity of Berkowickz’s apartment, on the other side of the landing. He tried to read, but couldn’t concentrate. Morbidly he leafed through the sheaf of photocopies that Berkowickz had given him the day before: it was an article entitled ‘The Syllable in Phonological Theory, with Special Reference to the Italian’, by Daniel Berkowickz. He left the sheaf of photocopies on the sofa and went to his study where he spent a while putting papers in order. By nine-thirty he didn’t know what to do with himself any more. If only I could at least go out for a run, he thought, lighting a cigarette. That was when he remembered that it had been almost a week since they bandaged his ankle. He remembered the doctor’s words: ‘Come back in a week.’ He called a taxi and, while he waited for it on the porch, he was happy to have found something to occupy the morning. He was also happy at the mere possibility of getting rid of the bandage, crutch and limp that had been humiliating him all week.
The taxi stopped on the expanse of pavement surrounded by grass where Mario had parked his car the previous week: the old second-hand Buick was still there; Mario felt a sort of tenderness towards it.
He went into the hospital. At the end of the corridor with very white walls he found a foyer with several rows of chairs, a few rugs and a counter behind which a crimson-faced nurse with fleshy hands was entrenched. Mario recognized her. Leaning his crutch and his elbows on the counter, he waited for the nurse to finish dealing with a telephone call. When she hung up the phone she turned to Mario and handed him a form.
‘I don’t know if you recognize me,’ said Mario, smiling, because he was sure the nurse recognized him and could perhaps save him the paperwork. ‘I was here last week and —’
‘Be so kind as to fill in the form,’ the nurse parried curtly. Then she added in a quieter voice, ‘That’d be great if I had to remember everyone who came through here.’
Mario filled in the form, handed it back to the nurse. She pointed him towards the row of chairs opposite the counter and asked him to wait. Mario sat down in a chair and set down in the one beside it a bag in which he’d taken the precaution of putting the shoe and sock that matched the ones he was wearing on his right foot. He leafed through old issues of Newsweek, Discovery and Travel and Leisure. On a couple of occasions he noticed distractedly that the nurse was leaning over the counter to look at him. He smiled, but the nurse vanished back into her cave. He heard her speaking on the phone, in a low voice, and once thought he heard the name Berkowickz. Almost in disgust, he thought: There’s no getting away from him. He again felt a ball of anguish in his throat; his hands sweated again. Then he thought that since he’d entered the hospital he hadn’t seen anyone except the crimson-faced nurse: no doctors, no patients, no other nurses. He shuddered. Absurdly, he thought of going home and taking the bandage off himself. An instant later he heard a nurse, at the other end of the foyer, calling him by his name and motioning him to follow her.
They went into a room that smelled of cleanliness, iodine and bandages. The nurse told him to lie down on the examining table that occupied the centre of the room; she removed the bandage from his ankle and examined it. Under the oblique light that illuminated them, Mario noticed the thick shadow that soiled the nurse’s upper lip; he realized she was the same one who had attended him the week before. He sat up a little, leaning on one elbow, and looked at her anxiously, as if searching for a sign of recognition in her eyes. The nurse smiled coldly. She said, ‘The doctor will see you straight away.’
After a moment the doctor came in: pale, Oriental, small, nervous. Mario was no longer surprised that it was the same doctor as the previous week. He lay back down on the table while he felt the pressure of investigating fingers on various parts of his foot. He tried to relax, not to think of anything. Bent over Mario’s ankle, the doctor squinted; his eyes thinned into slots.
‘Does it hurt?’ asked the doctor, gently squeezing his instep.
Mario sat up again: he noticed that the swelling around his ankle had completely disappeared. The yellow pallor and stains of dirt that darkened his skin revealed the recent presence of the bandage. The nurse watched them smilingly from a discreet distance.
‘Does it hurt?’ the doctor repeated.
‘No,’ Mario assured him. ‘It doesn’t hurt.’
‘Hmm,’ murmured the doctor.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘The ankle is fine,’ the doctor said, straightening up and looking at Mario: the two slots turned back into two green ovals. He smiled, walked over to the sink that was on the other side of the room and washed his hands.
‘Completely?’ asked Mario.
‘Completely,’ the doctor answered, turning around as he dried his hands on a towel.
Perhaps stupidly, Mario asked, ‘Could I go out for a run tomorrow?’
The doctor looked him in the eye again, this time maliciously. Then he looked down to his dirty, naked ankle against the white of the sheets.
‘You could,’ he ventured. ‘But it might be better to leave it till Monday.’
In a rush, wanting to get out of the hospital as soon as possible, Mario washed his foot before the nurse’s immutable smile, and put on his sock and shoe. He crossed the foyer accompanied by the nurse, walked down the corridor and reached the door. When he was about to leave, the woman stopped him by grabbing his arm. She looked up and down the corridor, stared at Mario in a strange way, and smiled.
‘I recognized you,’ she whispered. ‘I knew you’d be back.’
Before the nurse approached to kiss him, Mario thought: Now I’ll wake up.
XIX
Mario went out for a run at eight o’clock on Monday morning. He immediately noticed the street was suffused in a halo of mist: the houses opposite, the cars parked by the sidewalk and the globes of light from the street lamps seemed to shimmer with an unstable and hazy existence. Trying not to strain his ankle, he did a few arm and leg stretches on the tiny rectangle of lawn in front of the house and thought: Fall’s here already. Then he remembered something; he almost smiled. He went back inside and came out again a moment later, this time with his glasses on. The mist having dissolved, Mario began to run along the path of greyish flagstones between the road and the meticulous gardens, enclosed by flowerbeds and wooden fences aligned in front of the houses. At first he ran with care, almost fear, barely putting any weight on his left foot; then, as he noticed his ankle wasn’t suffering, he quickened his pace.