Authors: Pitigrilli
“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.