A Winter's Night (34 page)

The other workers tried to leave the lighter jobs for Armando, like bagging up the chaff and carrying it into the shed; the sacks were big but at least they were not very heavy.

When it came time for lunch and the men found a spot under the shade of some big tree to settle down with something to eat, you could see that even among the day laborers and farmhands there were those who were better off and those who were worse off. Some had a pot of pasta with meat sauce and
parmigiano
, along with a nice chunk of cheese and some fresh bread, while others had to make do with bread and onions, or even just an apple. Armando was among the latter.

He didn't have the courage to ask for help from his brothers, because he might have been poor but he had his pride. On the other hand, he simply didn't have the strength to keep up a demanding and thus well-paid job. In the end, it was his fellow workers who took pity on Armando, and would often share whatever they had with him.

But his biggest problem wasn't in the fields or the courtyards of the farms where he went seeking work, it wasn't even in earning enough to survive. His real problem was at home, and it was his wife. As time passed, because of their increasingly difficult living conditions, she became prone to depression. Whole days would go by without a word from her, her eyes staring off at nothing. But then suddenly she would shriek and wail and become very agitated and neither her husband's attempts to calm her nor the pleading and crying of her little ones, frightened by her behavior, had any effect.

Yet Armando's love for her never wavered. She was beautiful. She had beautiful eyes and a beautiful body and nothing else mattered to him. His mother had warned him all those years ago, but it didn't make any difference, because when you're in love, you don't listen to anyone, and fate simply has to take its own course. Unfortunately Lucia was getting worse, and the neighbors, upset by the constant yelling, crying and crashing of objects against the walls, convinced her husband to call the doctor.

The town doctor was not an easy man to love. He was sharp, sometimes even brutal; he never spared his patients the raw truth because he thought that telling them the facts was his duty. Husbands were uneasy around him, for he looked at women with the greedy expression of someone who has seen death in the face an infinite number of times and has become accustomed to the thought that, when faced with dying there are only two things you can do: pray or fuck.

He didn't know any prayers, or if he did he'd forgotten them at the front, amid the butchered bodies of twenty-year-olds that he had to cut, amputate, patch up as best he could while they were screaming under his instruments without anesthesia.

The doctor's verdict was terse: “Your wife is crazy. She needs to be taken to the lunatic asylum.”

“I would never do that!” replied Armando, finding almost miraculously the courage to say no to a man who knew so much more than he did. He did not want to separate from his wife; he couldn't even think of living without her. But one day when Lucia seemed to have truly lost her mind—she had run out into the street shrieking and nearly ended up under a horse's hooves—he called the doctor again.

“I've already told you what must be done and you didn't want to listen to me. You can see for yourself that you can't leave her alone. Come by this evening at five and I'll write up a request for admitting her to the psychiatric hospital of Reggio Emilia.”

The words “psychiatric hospital” sounded much better than “lunatic asylum,” or so it seemed to Armando, and helped him to resign himself to the idea. He went to the doctor's house at the appointed time. The door was opened by his wife, an attractive young woman, who accompanied him right to her husband's study.

The doctor was seated at a desk and all around him were bookcases which had feet in the shape of lions' paws, full of books. One of them was open on the table and Armando could see the illustration that represented some surgical procedure. At the sides of the fireplace were two suits of Arabic armor: shields, crossed lances, conical helmets with nosepieces and scimitars, all beautifully decorated with fine wavy markings. Armando would have liked to ask the doctor if he had read them all, all those books, but he didn't want to sound stupid. Doctor Munari asked him for some general information about his wife and started filling out a form as Armando stood there at the opposite side of the desk with his hat in hand.

“Sit down,” said the doctor without raising his eyes from the sheet of paper. “You're a Bruni, aren't you?”

“Yes sir. My name's Bruni.”

“Are you a relative of Raffaele's?”

“Yes, he's my brother, but we call him Floti.”

“I know him. We met during the war at my field hospital. He's a good man. I almost ran him over, the other night: he jumped out on the street in front of me, right after the curve.”

Armando didn't seem interested in his story. “What difference is there between a psy . . . psych . . . “

“Psychiatric hospital,” prompted the doctor.

“Right, between that and the insane asylum.”

“They're the same thing.”

“Oh no then, absolutely not. I thought that . . . ”

“What did you think?”

“That it was a hospital.”

“Listen to me. Your wife cannot be cured. Somehow, her brain has broken down. I'll bet it runs in her family, do you know anything about that?”

Armando lowered his head because he had always known. Even though he'd never wanted to admit it to anyone, not even himself. The doctor closed the book on the table and continued speaking.

“There's no remedy for what she has; she can only get worse. Nonetheless, there may be times, interludes, we could call them, when your wife will seem better, almost normal, but you mustn't let that get your hopes up. She's going through a very negative period right now and she needs to be hospitalized.”

Armando shook his head, like a mule that refuses to follow his master. “I don't want her to. If there's no remedy, why should I take her to any kind of hospital?”

“So that she doesn't get into worse trouble. Look, Bruni, if something happens, you'll be responsible.”

“I understand that,” replied Armando. “But I won't sign your papers. Goodbye.” He got to his feet and went out.

“Where are you going? Stop, dammit!” the doctor shouted after him, but Armando was already out in the courtyard.

It had been a difficult, curt encounter in which neither one of them had tried to understand the other. The outcome was that Armando kept his wife at home for many months after that, but there were more dark days than bright ones. Lucia was pregnant again, with their second child, and she'd taken it very badly; she had become irritable and moody. At times she was calm and her gestures had a softness about then, her eyes a gentle look. But then she became sullen and bad-tempered and would fly into fits of rage. She had the baby in the middle of January after a wretched Christmas lacking in all the atmosphere that Armando had been accustomed to at home. The only thing that wasn't missing was food, thanks to the generosity of his mother and some of his brothers, who hadn't even wanted to be thanked.

It was Clerice who sent a midwife when Lucia's labor pains started, and a little girl was born before evening. Everything seemed to go well at first. The baby was hale and hearty, and the mother, who during delivery had screamed loud enough for the whole town to hear, was now resting peacefully, exhausted.

But things worsened as the days went by. The baby cried constantly; there was no respite, by day or by night. Maybe the mother didn't have enough milk, suggested the midwife when she was consulted. Everyone knew that if a woman ate little and poorly, her milk would dry up; the baby was crying because she couldn't get her fill.

Then one evening, as Armando was just returning from work, he found Lucia at the open window, about to throw the bawling baby out. He stopped her just in time. He said nothing, he didn't scold her. He tried instead to calm her down, and in the meantime, he cradled the baby in his arms and rocked her, singing a lullaby in a mountain dialect that he'd learned once when he'd taken a job gathering chestnuts. The baby magically became quiet and Armando held her out to his wife, saying, look at what a pretty little thing she is, she looks just like you. And he called the doctor.

“Convinced now?” asked the doctor as soon as he took stock of the situation. “Do you realize that she might try that again at any moment? So what are you going to do? Stay at home and watch her all day long? And who's going to go out and earn a crust of bread?”

Armando burst into tears and surrendered. His wife was taken to the mental hospital in Reggio and remained there all that year. Every now and then he'd go to visit her if someone happened to be going out that way, or even by train or by bus, those few times when he managed to scrape together the money. He would have happily gone by bicycle, but he'd never learned how. He was always distressed at the conditions there. The doctors did take care of her but there were so many patients and so few nurses, and they were always harsh and hurried.

She was assigned to a female ward and the nurses, who were huge women with a Herculean swagger, monitored Armando's visits with arms crossed and then accompanied Lucia back to the room she shared with two or three other poor wretches. He would say to her: “Don't let this awful place get you down; as soon as you're home again, you'll feel better. It's only hurting you to stay here. The girls miss you and they really want to see you,” he lied. “Do you miss them?”

Lucia looked back with big watery eyes and a confused expression that might have meant anything. Armando went to speak to the doctor, but didn't understand much because he talked too complicatedly. But he didn't give up; before taking his leave he asked a clear question, for which he wanted a clear answer: “When can you send her back home?”

“I can't say. One month, two. We'll see.”

“But how will I know?”

“Your town doctor will receive a letter from hospital management specifying a date and all the rest, and you'll come here to pick up your wife and sign that you agree to assume full responsibility for her actions.”

The letter arrived three months later, not because the patient had been cured, the town doctor told him, but because there wasn't enough room in the psychiatric hospital for everyone; they had to take turns. Every so often, they let out someone they considered not to be dangerous and took in someone else who was in worse condition. In any case, returning to a more or less normal life, seeing familiar faces, the house she had come to call home, and the town itself, all seemed to do Lucia some good.

But Doctor Munari wasn't tender this time around either. “You wanted her home because you couldn't do without . . . ”

“So what, even if it is true?” replied Armando resentfully. “She's my wife, isn't she? And I love her.”

“You go ahead and do as you like, I've already told you what I think. If you do want one piece of advice, don't get her pregnant again, you already have enough on your hands.”

Wasted breath. In a few months' time, Lucia was expecting again and had become depressed and moody, with sudden fits of temper, quarreling and weeping. A tragedy, said the neighbors. But Armando laid all of his frustrations squarely on Munari's shoulders. The doctor was the cause of all this, not his wife's disease. What right did he ever have to get mixed up in Armando's personal life? He was a bastard. He was vulgar and heartless. And a hypocrite! As if he didn't like the ladies himself! He, who had a wife who could be his daughter, and where had he found her anyway? There was plenty of gossip in town about that, people were whispering on her account. So the good doctor should take care of his own backyard!

At home, however, he never ran out of patience. He was always affectionate and understanding with his daughters and his wife. Whenever he could he'd bring some little gift home: a cherry stolen from a tree, a couple of the early peaches that Fonso brought him. How he loved to see the joy that lit up his daughters' eyes!

Sometimes Fonso would go to give the doctor a hand with his grounds, because he and Maria lived very close to the house, an Art Nouveau style villa with a raised ground floor and a white cement banister on the outside stairs. In back there was a plot of land with rennet-apple, pear, plum and peach trees that had to be pruned, and a vineyard to be treated with verdigris. Fonso would usually stop by after he'd finished working for the day, to see if the doctor needed any chores done or just to say hello on his way back home.

“How's it going, sir?”

“Badly, Fonso, my arthritis is torturing me. I can't even move when it really kicks in. I've had to sell my horse because I can't ride him anymore. The only thing I can do when I have an attack is go to bed, fill up on aspirin, sweat it out and hope it'll pass.”

“Is that why you always wear boots, if I may ask?”

“Yes, that's why, Fonso. They help a bit. You know, Mario Gabella was here the other day . . . do you know who he is?”

“Who doesn't? He won an entire estate one night playing tresette, and before dawn he lost another two.”

“Ahh, he's a real wastrel, that one,” commented the doctor. “Anyway, he suffers from arthritis as I do and he comes here to break my balls about it every day, practically. You know what I told him? I said, ‘Listen, Gabella, you got arthritis going duck hunting from a blind, I got it operating on soldiers during the war, standing in water up to my knees in the trenches. You know what I say? You keep yours and I'll keep mine.'”

‘That's why people aren't fond of him,' thought Fonso, ‘he's too blunt and cantankerous.'

“What do people say about me?” asked the doctor as if he had read Fonso's mind.

“It depends,” replied Fonso. “Many of them, most, that is, are ignorant and resentful and they look more at the form than the substance. I say the substance is that a doctor has to know what he's doing. He has to recognize an illness and cure it as well as possible. That's all that matters. Everyone has their own personality.”