Cocaine

13

As Tito had foreseen, after a few days’ separation he was overwhelmed by the memory of Cocaine. Every now and again he stopped in the street and, taking careful precautions to avoid being surprised, took the naked photograph of her from his pocket and looked at it.

“Are you back in Turin?” Nocera said to him.

“As you see.”

“And what are you going to do here?”

“I’m going to die.”

“Couldn’t you do it there?”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“You’re quite right, it’s too hot in Senegal. It’s less trouble to go on living.”

Nocera gave this jocular reply because he did not believe in Tito’s suicidal intentions. He had talked about them too much. A person who is determined on suicide keeps his mouth shut to avoid giving people a chance to prevent him. A person determined to take his own life does it without warning.

One day Tito had said: “I’ve tried everything in life: love, gambling, stimulants, narcotics, work, idleness, theft; I’ve met women of all races and men of every color. The only thing I haven’t encountered yet is death, and I want to try it.”

Pietro Nocera thought these words represented a love of rhetoric rather than an irrevocable decision.

“Don’t act the tragedian, Tito,” he replied. “Don’t talk about dying. Life is a pochade, a farce.”

“Yes, Nocera, I know, but I don’t enjoy it. I’m leaving before the end of the performance.”

“There’s literary affectation on your winding sheet,” Nocera said. “You won’t kill yourself. You talk about it too much, and even while doing so you’re looking for a hook to hold on to to show yourself how wrong you are. Your real object in talking to me like this is to get me to produce arguments that will enable you to say triumphantly: What you’re saying is quite right, you’ve convinced me, now I shan’t kill myself. But what I say to you, my dear Tito, is: You’re quite right, carry on and do it.”

“Bravo, Nocera. Encouragement was just what I wanted from you. The only thing I’m still doubtful about is how to do it. Gassing oneself is too slow. It’s not polite to keep death hanging about when it’s we who have invited him; he shouldn’t creep in through the tradesmen’s entrance, but come straight in through the front door. The ideal would be to die on the high seas. That’s the best way of dying. In a first class saloon, on a fantastic night, one of those mid-ocean parties vibrant with music, blue distances and rhythm. Surrounded by millionaire décolleté ladies, dressed only in ribbons and diamonds; beautiful, radiant women loaded with jewels and rejuvenated for the occasion. Men in tails engaged in intercontinental deals. Toasts, champagne, the orchestra playing ragtime, a dancer performing on a stage surrounded by palms and garlanded with lights. A cosmopolitan hum contributed to by Chinese, blacks, mulattos, merchants, bons viveurs, diplomatists, cocottes exchanging continents to increase their fees or recover their long-lost virginity. A crowd of people brought together on that ship by chance, by destiny, on different pretexts but for the same purpose, death.

“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.

The next room contained big glass cases, full of vertical tubes with cotton wool stoppers reminiscent of eighteenth-century powdered wigs.

“Are they bacteria cultures?”

“Yes,” his attractive companion replied. “Diphtheria, pneumonia, malaria, typhoid,” she continued, pointing to the various tubes, on each of which was a label. While she was telling him how bacteria were stained for examination under the microscope, a man with huge feet emerging from under his white coat went by.

“Doctor,” the young woman said, leaving Tito alone in front of the tubes containing the bacteria cultures, “they telephoned from the anatomy institute; they want a woman’s body, if possible a young one.”

“I haven’t anything at the moment,” the doctor replied after a moment’s thought, “but I hope something will be available at latest by this evening. A woman’s body did you say? Yes, I’ll get one. Tell the professor I hope to let him have it this evening.”

And he went into the next room.

Tito took advantage of the woman doctor’s momentary absence to help himself to one of the glass tubes and hide it in an inside pocket.

He stayed a little longer, listening distractedly and impatiently to what his guide told him, and as soon as he could he hurried home, lovingly stroking the tube of bacteria culture through the outside of his jacket. Typhoid, typhoid bacteria, he said to himself. I’ll drink the lot and I shall die. It’s the kind of death I want. If fate wants to save me, it will send me a doctor able to cure me.

He shook the viscous liquid, poured it into a glass, and drank it. It tasted sour, and brackish.

A bacteria culture doesn’t make at all a bad drink, he said to himself.

He washed it down with a liqueur glassful of chartreuse.

He took from his wallet the naked photograph of Cocaine, looked at it, and put it back.

He sat at his desk, took a blank sheet of paper and wrote: “I’m committing suicide because I’m tired of life. Every intelligent man when he reaches the age of twenty-eight should do the same.

“I want no priests at my funeral. But, since priests are not for the dead but for the living, if any priests attend I want a rabbi and a Waldensian pastor to be present also. I have a great deal of liking for priests of all religions, because either they are in good faith, in which case I consider them worthy of admiration, or they are in bad faith, in which case they are to be admired, as are all skillful mystifiers.

“I wish to be put in my coffin wearing green pajamas and with my hands in my pockets.

“I wish to be cremated.

“I wish my ashes to be put in my two multi-colored cinerary urns, one to be kept in my memory by Pietro Nocera, the other by my Maud Fabrège.

“I leave all my books and my clothes to Pietro Nocera. I leave my gilt monstrance to my friend the monk. I leave my few articles of jewelry to Maud Fabrège (Maddalena Panardi).

“I leave my money to the Society for the Protection of Animals.”

He added his signature and the date, put the document in an envelope so large that it needed a double dose of saliva, and wrote on it: My last Will and Testament, to be opened immediately after my death.

And to dispel melancholy he went out, carefully looking left and right to avoid being run over and killed by a tram.

He put one or two pinches of the white drug up his nose and went into a cinema. But he didn’t see anything.

When I told my mother I had a toothache she sent me to the dentist to have it out (he said to himself). When I had a boil, she squeezed it for me. When I told her I was suffering because of a girl she told me not to be silly. Soon after I was born my father sent for a priest. Since he sent for one priest rather than another I worshipped one God rather than another. When I changed my religion they called me a renegade because I no longer wanted to use the priest my father used. When I was a boy they taught me manners; but manners are nothing but lying, pretending not to know something that someone doesn’t want us to know, smiling at persons whom we should like to spit at, saying, “Thank you” when we should like to say, “Go to hell.” A few years later I rebelled against manners and made a display of the pleasures of sincerity, but later I realized that sincerity did me nothing but harm, so I reverted to lying. So I might just as well have followed the original teaching from the outset. First they told me that vox populi, public opinion, was right. In certain circumstances that closely concerned me I made enquiries for myself and discovered that public opinion was wrong. But since then I have gone into the matter more deeply and have been forced to admit that public opinion was right, after all. When everyone says that X is a thief and Y is a tart, you don’t believe it. For a year or two you swear that both are the soul of honor and purity, but when you’ve known them for three years you realize that there’s a great deal of dishonesty in him and a great deal of whorishness in her, so you might just as well have accepted vox populi at the outset. When I was twenty they told me to swear loyalty to the King, a person who acts in that capacity because his father and grandfather did the same before him. I took the oath because they forced me to, otherwise I wouldn’t have done it. Then they sent me to kill people I didn’t know who were dressed rather like I was. One day they said to me: “Look, there’s one of your enemies, fire at him,” and I fired, but missed. But he fired and wounded me. I don’t know why they said it was a glorious wound.

Meanwhile the cinema program continued. The various items were followed by intervals, and Tito stayed in his seat, letting his mind wander. He had used up all the cocaine in the box. An attendant came and told him he had seen the whole program three times and asked him to leave.

In the street his mind went on wandering in a very disconnected fashion. He told himself that he had now reached the age of twenty-eight, which is the tragic age for male lovers; you no longer have the vigor of a young lover and don’t yet have the money of an old one. If a woman loves you, he said to himself, she’s willing to make any sacrifice for you; when she has fallen out of love with you, she’s capable of anything to give vent to her malice, slandering and plotting and setting traps for you. He ridiculed ideals; behind the noblest aspirations lay the metallic clink of money. Old feelings that had disappeared revived in him. There was no such thing as love without jealousy; only women and pimps maintained the opposite. He considered original ways of committing suicide, such as plunging headlong from the gallery into the stalls at a theater. Women willing to give themselves to anyone refused the man who loved them on the day when they fell out of love with him. On the day they gave themselves to you they were making a great concession; but when you reproached them for giving themselves to another they insisted it was a trifle of no importance.

He went to cafés frequented by businessmen.

I’ve never understood how one can live by trade, that is, by selling for a hundred something that cost you ten (he said to himself). Whenever I’ve tried to sell anything, I sold for ten what cost me a hundred and fifty.

He decided that if he were born again he would be a vagrant or a beggar. Money was valuable only in so far as you could spend it. If you had to work, you had no time to spend what you earned. The thing to do was to be born rich or to rob. What did killing a man amount to? Five minutes was enough to plan, carry out, repent and forget the deed. Since it did not take more than thirty seconds, what did a painful deed (painful for the other party) amount to in comparison with the happiness of a lifetime?

Every now and then he remembered that he was close to death. The bacteria had begun their charitable work. He felt he was leaving life as tired and bored as if he were leaving a courtesan’s bed, and he congratulated himself on always having been bored; blessed are the bored, because they leave without complaint.

And since the leaven of his whole life had been women, his disconnected thoughts invariably returned to them. You wrack your brains about the psychological, physiological, pathological reasons why the woman you love deceives you, he said to himself. But more often than not a woman will give herself just because she has a beautiful pair of garters that she wants to have admired.

He recalled, but painlessly, some incidents from his love life. Cocaine, his distant Cocaine, gave him the exaltation of an hour; after possessing her he felt exultation, an enthusiasm for life, but an hour later dejection, taedium vitae, jealousy, fear of losing her, incurable depression set in. The woman and the drug produced the same toxic phenomena that were now leading to his death. If he had not met her, he would now be a doctor and would be looking into a microscope without seeing anything, or, perhaps, seeing everything. The blind eyes of a poet like Homer or Milton saw more than any arrogant precision instrument.

In his mind’s eye he formed a picture of Cocaine in old age; she had grown ugly, but was cleverly made up. My unhappiness, he said to himself, comes from a tube of scarlet for the lips, a blue pencil and a packet of face powder.

He vaguely regretted not having accepted the suggestion of his friend the monk. Asceticism, whether you had no desire, like a eunuch, or had it no longer, like St Francis of Assisi, was a sign of little vitality. I could be a mystic now (he said to himself). Mysticism was merely virility in a state of liquidation; sperm that had gone bad.

But why am I having these fantastic ideas? I must be a bit feverish, he said to himself, feeling his pulse on his way home. He found a thermometer in a drawer and put it under his armpit; his temperature was 102.

He put back the thermometer, took off one shoe, then the other, undressed, and got into bed.

He had all the symptoms of tonsillitis: fever, general debility… But how could it be tonsillitis? He had swallowed typhoid bacteria, so it must be an anomalous form of typhoid.

He recapitulated his death program. I want to leave fate the widest possible choice in the matter. I shall act like an ordinary patient, send for the doctor, tell him the symptoms, follow his advice (he said to himself). If fate wants me to live, I shall live and put no obstacles in its way. If it wants me to die, I shall do no more to stand in its way than any ordinary patient. I shall tell no one I made myself ill. If fate wants the doctor to find out, he’ll find out by himself.

He slept a feverish, agitated sleep for a few hours. When he woke up, Pietro Nocera, his landlady and Maud were by his bedside.

Maud had arrived from Senegal a few hours before and had sought him out immediately.

At the sight of her he felt a vague desire to live. He remembered that in typhoid cases bladders of ice are placed on the patient’s belly, so he asked for some, pending the arrival of the doctor.

“Shall I make him a zabaglione, Signor Nocera?” the landlady asked.

“Yes,” said Nocera.

“No,” said Tito, remembering that food is forbidden to typhoid patients. The régime consists of fasting and ice on the belly. Ice on the belly and fasting.

Maud, who had gone to answer the door, announced the doctor.

The celebrated Professor Libani, a very up-to-date young scientist with golden hair, golden spectacles and a great deal of goldsmith’s work on his hands and his belly, walked in.

He sat down, directed a clinical eye at the patient, felt his pulse, pulled the sheet down and the patient’s pajama jacket up, palpated, auscultated, observed, and sat down again to translate his scientific findings into ordinary speech.

When he opened his mouth the word that Tito expected to hear was “typhoid.” What the doctor actually said was: “You drink goat’s milk.”

“No, doctor.”

“Yes, you do. You drink goat’s milk.”

“Out of the question, doctor.”

“How do you know? You drink what the milkman gives you.”

“The milkman gives me nothing because I can’t stand that disgusting glandular excretion, milk. I drank it when I was a child up to the age of ten months, because that was all I was given. But as soon as the light of reason dawned —”

“Never mind,” the doctor gravely admitted. “You have…”

Again Tito expected to hear the ominous word “typhoid.”

“You have septicemia, that is, a blood infection.”

“Is it serious?” Maud asked, growing pale.

“No,” said the doctor. “The first thing to do is throw away that ice bladder; then you must have some high-pressure enemas to cleanse the bowels.”

“Enemas of what?” the landlady asked.

“Several pints of physiological serum, that is, salt and water. When the temperature has gone, or gone down, you can eat whatever you like.”

Tito opened his eyes wide. Good heavens, he said to himself, typhoid results in intestinal perforations, and to avoid irritating and enlarging them fasting is prescribed. But this doctor tells me to eat, and prescribes high-pressure enemas that will swell my intestine like a tire. But it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to interfere with the working of chance. Chance has put me in the hands of a doctor who has diagnosed the wrong illness and prescribed treatment which is the opposite of what perhaps might save me. I shall eat, have the enemas and burst.

All the same he made a suggestion. “Excuse me, doctor,” he said, “might it not be typhoid?”

“Absolutely out of the question,” the doctor replied. “The general symptoms of typhoid are absent; that is, the violent headache, the torpor, the diffuse pains in the bones. The spleen is hardly palpable, there’s no rash on the belly, and the pulse is too high in relation to the temperature. You know that in typhoid the pulse rate is inversely proportional to the temperature, but your temperature is 102 and your pulse 100. But if you want to be certain you’d better have a blood test. I’ll come back and do it later today.”

He rinsed his hands, gravely dried them, and obsequiously walked out of the room.

Nocera, Maud and the landlady talked to him quietly in the next room, and then they came back to the bedside to ask the patient which he wanted first, the meal or…

“I don’t mind which,” said Tito who, knowing the true nature of his illness, was very well aware that either would be fatal to him.

“So we’ll give you the enema first while this lady cooks you a beefsteak à la milanaise as big as that,” Nocera said.

“All right,” the patient said stoically.

And he lay face downwards, determinedly submissive, while five pints of water were noisily injected into his sensitive inside. The rubber tube hanging from the wall reminded him of the hookahs he had seen being smoked by rich blacks squatting on mats outside their huts at Dakar.

“Now turn over and sit up, because you’re going to eat,” said Nocera.

The condemned man turned over, sat up and took the steak, like Socrates taking the hemlock from the hands of the servant of the Eleven. When he had finished it he lay on his side, closed his eyes and imagined what was happening to it. Now it has gone through the esophagus, it’s making its way through the cardia and into the stomach, it’s welcomed by the gastric juices, it gets some rather rough treatment from peristalsis, it emerges from the pylorus, enters the duodenum and then the jejunum and turns over and over in the ileum. If mine is an iliac typhoid, heaven knows how many bacteria there are. Oh, here we are at the ascending colon. First of all, the caecum, the caecum with the vermiform appendix; take care at the level crossing, there’s a risk of appendicitis; but let’s go on; the transverse colon, and the descending colon. I noticed a theater called the Colon at Buenos Aires… But can my steak have got as far as that? On its journey it has met some distinguished characters with noble names that have changed its appearances, bile, trypsin, steapsin and amylopsin. Heaven knows what sort of reception they’ve given all those delightful bacteria that were floating about in that tube. By this time I ought to be dead. Why aren’t I dead?

“Calm yourself, calm yourself, darling,” Maud said to him, seeing how agitated he was.

His slight fever clouded his mind, just as cocaine had done the first time he took it at the hotel in the Place Vendôme, and he raved in the same way.

No, he said to himself, God isn’t a great humorist, He’s a small, wretched one. He has the mentality of a surveyor. To kill off multitudes He makes us wars and epidemics. He hasn’t even a sense of unfairness. The only odd thing I’ve ever caught Him at is allowing pockets to be picked in church while the victim is praying, but He has never had a really grandiose idea. In His position I’d eliminate the force of gravity. When you tried to throw away a cigarette end, it would stay in your hand. When you tried going downstairs, you’d have to go down on your knees, put your head down and pull yourself down by your hands, which would be a bigger effort than going upstairs. Or I’d increase the earth’s centrifugal force; instead of making it go round in twenty-four hours, I’d make it go round in one, hurling everything for vast distances and causing catastrophic disorder. Japanese pagodas would end up on the glaciers of Mont Blanc, Muslim minarets would be dipped like biscuits into the crater of Vesuvius, and the Pyramid of Cheops would end up in the Place de la Concorde. No, God is not an artist. For slaughtering people He uses killers so minute that you can’t even tell whether they are vegetable or animal. What a limited mentality the Almighty has, and how deficient He is in dignity.

“Calm down, calm down, my love,” Maud said to him again. “He’s feverish. Should we give him a morphine injection, doctor?”

“It’s not necessary,” the doctor replied. “We shall now give him the blood test. As a result,” the physician explained while he tied two cords round the patient’s arm to make his veins swell, “we shall know for certain that he’s not suffering from typhoid. I’m more than convinced of it already. There’s no swelling of the spleen, and there’s no rash.”

In spite of the fever Tito still understood something of what was said and had brief flashes of lucidity. When he heard the word rash he said: “There’s no rash, but there are the bacteria. Who knows how many thousands of millions I’ve swallowed.”

When the vein had swollen the doctor pricked it with a syringe, extracted some blood, put it into a sterile tube, and took it away.

The doctor came back next day (Tito had slept excellently) and announced that the result was negative. None of the various kinds of typhoid or paratyphoid A or paratyphoid B were present.

“So we can be satisfied on that point,” he said. “It’s not typhoid. To make still more certain we can, if we like, apply the urine test, Ehrlich’s so-called diazo reagent.”

“Let us do so, then.”

“Certainly. In the meantime go on eating and persist with the enemas.”

Tito still believed himself to be under the hallucinatory influence of cocaine. He knew that the treatment for the disease from which he was suffering was to leave the organism alone as much as possible but, though they tormented him with those jets of water and forced him to eat, he did not die. In fact he felt better. He was undergoing exactly the opposite of what was scientifically prescribed for typhoid, but his condition did not deteriorate.

“The diazo reagent has been negative too,” the doctor announced triumphantly on his fourth visit. “In any case, we excluded typhoid from the outset. And I note with pleasure that there has been a distinct improvement.”

“Yes,” said Maud. “He’s very agitated in the morning and the evening, but he’s calm in the afternoon.”

“It’s as if the bacteria took an afternoon rest,” Tito remarked.

“But he still has a temperature.”

“It’ll go down,” the doctor promised, as he put on his overcoat.

After he left, Nocera said to Maud: “I don’t see any improvement. To me he seems to be just the same as on the first day.”

“Shall we get another opinion?”

“That’s what I should do.”

Tito had no objection. He would have agreed if they had suggested sending for an electrician or giving him vitriol to drink.

Another doctor came. He was a typical physician of the old school. He remained standing by the bed with his arms crossed over his belly as if he were leaning on a windowsill. He felt the patient’s pulse, looked at his tongue, consulted his watch and a thermometer, and went through the usual exorcistic routine.

“Who’s your doctor?” he asked.

Nocera mentioned a name. The doctor made a grimace that betrayed what he thought.

“And what did he say?”

“A blood infection. Septicemia.”

“Rubbish,” said the doctor. “This gentleman has…”

The patient thought he saw the word “typhoid” forming on the doctor’s lips. But what he said was: “Mediterranean fever.”

“What did you say?”

“Malta fever.”

“Is it serious?”

“No. Serotherapy works wonders in these cases. What we need is Wright’s vaccine. We must act speedily. The first thing to do is to stop the previous treatment. I’ll go and get the vaccine and I’ll be back in an hour.”

This serious-minded doctor read the medical press and fell in love with the latest methods. A patient of his had died of Mediterranean fever six months before, and since then he had seen nothing but Mediterranean fever in all his patients.

“It’s perfectly simple,” he explained to Tito. “I shall inject several thousand million attenuated bacteria into your blood. Do you see this test tube? It contains three thousand million.”

The patient behaved like a martyr. He allowed himself to be injected without betraying the slightest feeling, either on his face or in the place where the needle went in. He simply said: “You’ve injected me with the bacteria of Malta fever, doctor, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Now, assuming for the sake of argument that I did not have that disease, that would have given it to me, wouldn’t it?”

“Of course.”

“So if your diagnosis is mistaken and I have typhoid, for instance, I should now have two diseases.”

“Certainly. But you haven’t got typhoid.”

“I know, I know,” the patient hastily added. It was just a hypothesis, an amusing hypothesis.”

So Tito now knew he had two diseases, typhoid and Malta fever. If I don’t die of the one I’ll die of the other, he said to himself.

His temperature, which had dropped, rose again, and he had bad pains all over his body.

“It’s nothing,” said the serious doctor. Those are the reactions invariably produced by Wright’s vaccine in these cases. It’s all perfectly normal and shows that my diagnosis was correct. It’s a very good omen.”

Maud and Nocera were not very satisfied with either of these doctors.

“As the first doctor was wrong, the second may be wrong too. The first one diagnosed a disease and made tests which satisfied him he was right. The second one diagnosed another disease and made tests which satisfied him that he was right too. I’d have a third opinion, and I’d call in the most famous doctor in the city.”

Before evening fell the famous, infallible medical luminary, that high priest of science, the greatest doctor in Turin appeared in Tito’s room.

He shook hands in a dignified manner with the other two doctors and said: “It’s typhoid. Even a dentist could see that.”

“Impossible,” exclaimed the first doctor.

“Have you tried Vidal’s test?”

“Yes.”

“How many times?”

“Once.”

“That’s not enough,” the luminary exclaimed. “Do it again.”

At last Tito was being treated by a doctor, obviously sent by destiny, who would cure him. Again he had blood extracted from a vein. This time the result was positive: one per cent.

“So it is typhoid?” he said.

“Yes,” all three doctors agreed.

And Tito said to himself: So far they haven’t cured me because they did not diagnose my disease. Now that they have recognized it they’ll prescribe the correct treatment, and I shall get better.

“You mustn’t have anything to eat,” the famous doctor said.

And Tito said to himself: I knew very well that if you have typhoid you mustn’t eat.

“And no more enemas.”

Tito was secretly delighted. He knew very well that the bowels must be left alone.

In fact the famous doctor turned to the other two and said: “If you give him an enema you’ll kill him. Even a midwife would know that.”

All the same Tito said to himself, they gave me twenty-four and I’m still alive. And they were just like the Niagara Falls.

“He must have cold baths to bring down his temperature. Do you understand?”

“Yes, doctor,” Maud, Nocera and the landlady replied.

“Afterwards he must be put back to bed immediately. We’ll come back tomorrow.”

And they left.

The patient felt he was coming back to life. It was not surprising that treatment for the wrong disease should be ineffective. But when the diagnosis was correct… And in this case there was no doubt that it was correct, for he was very well aware of having drunk a whole tube of bacteria culture on which the word “typhoid” was written.

But what baffled him was why those steaks and enemas had not killed him out of hand.

In the hands of these three doctors he felt as if he were being held by the feet by three acrobats hanging from the ceiling at a circus and being thrown from one to the other over long distances, turning giddy somersaults on the way, and his impression was that it was pure chance that they always caught him.

He was awakened from his meditation by Nocera and Maud, who gently ushered him into the cold bath.

“It’s awful,” Tito groaned, struggling and with his teeth chattering.

“Be patient, old man.”

“Be patient, my love.”

“Just another minute,” said the landlady with a watch in her hand.

“It’ll bring down your temperature,” Nocera said.

“It’ll make you better,” Maud said.

They quickly dried him and put him back to bed; he was as livid as a drowned man.

“You’ll soon get warm again, darling,” said Maud.

But instead of getting warm he felt colder in bed than in the bath, and he had a stabbing pain in the region of his right rib.

And he coughed.

Then he coughed again.

Then he spat blood.

The first doctor, who arrived soon after he was taken out of the bath, said that the stabbing pain in the ribs was merely an intercostal pain.

The famous doctor, the luminary of science, reassured everybody by saying: “It’s nothing. It’s a bone abscess characteristic of typhoid. Even an army medical officer would know that.”

But Tito knew that he had caught acute pneumonia in the bath.

When he started spitting blood the doctors silently withdrew, and Maud hurried out to fetch them back.

And Tito saw a priest in front of him, black and solemn, talking to him with a more than human voice.

“Who sent for you?” the patient said.

“No one,” the landlady lied.

“Priests can smell when someone’s dying,” Tito said in a little trickle of a voice. “They’re like the flies that lay their eggs in the nostrils of the dying. But, as he’s here, let him stay.”

The priest showed him a crucifix and made him say a prayer under his guidance.

“Listen, father,” Tito said. “There’s a box in that drawer with a photograph in it. Please bring it to me.”

The priest brought him the box, and Tito took from it the photograph of Cocaine in the nude.

“You’re going to tear it up, I hope,” the priest said, his eyes nearly popping out of his head.

“No,” Tito said with a laugh. “I want to look at it for the last time.”

“But in this last hour God is near your bed,” His minister said warningly.

“Good. Then He can look at it too.”

“And now you will confess,” said the priest, seizing the obscene photograph and putting it between the pages of his breviary.

“Confess? Is that laxative lemonade for the soul really necessary?”

“Don’t blaspheme, wretched man.”

“Go away, you fool.”

And he turned over on to his side, turning to the priest that part of his body into which three thousand million bacteria (Wright’s vaccine) had been injected.

The priest left. Halfway down he opened his breviary and blushed.

Nocera came in with an aunt of Tito’s, a horrible woman whom he rarely saw. In every family there’s at least one horrible aunt. There’s one in mine too.

She was glad that Tito was dying, but wept hot tears all the same.

“If you’re weeping it means I shall get better,” Tito said to her. “If I were going, you’d be laughing for joy.”

A man came in with three oxygen cylinders.

“Three? Why three?” the aunt who was one of those horrible aunts that they have in every family, including mine, wanted to know. “Why did you order three? Supposing he only uses two? Will the chemist take the other one back?”

“Yes, he will.”

“And will he give you the money back?”

“Listen, Nocera,” Tito exclaimed with his last remaining breath. “Get rid of this dreadful woman for me, otherwise I’ll get my own back on her. I’ll pay her the dirty trick of not dying.”

The high priest of medical science walked in.

“How are we, are we feeling better?” the illustrious doctor said, taking Tito’s pulse. “Are we feeling better?”

“Yes, we are, we’re going.”

And he died.

Nocera, Maud and the landlady went down on their knees round the bed, with their heads on the bedclothes, just as in the prints showing the death of Anita Garibaldi or Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour.

And that’s how one can get better after swallowing typhoid bacteria and being treated for septicemia and then for Malta fever. And that’s also how one can die of pneumonia after undergoing the classical treatment for typhoid.