Luigi Musolino
The trill of the alarm clock opened up a world of fever, nausea and pain.
Tullio Sandri crawled out of bed, his head pounding, his joints knotted by ropes of agony.
“For fuck’s sake…” he gasped, and his voice seemed to come from an indefinite spot in the ceiling, sounding like the gasp of an old man.
In the bathroom mirror was a face he barely recognised: pale green, damp, with black circles around the eyes that crept down to the cheekbones. A quick examination of his tongue, rimmed with a white patina, accentuated the feeling that he was about to vomit his guts out.
“Not today, come on…” A thousand things to do, people to meet, posts to be published. And in the evening he was attending the dinner of the Party of Change, the Anti-Vax/No-Big-Pharma movement, of which he had become president just over a month ago. He had been working on his speech for a week. He could not miss it.
He opened the cabinet of homeopathic products. Aconitum, Belladonna, Nux Vomica, Eupatorium Perfoliatum, Gelsemium, Apis. He opted for fifteen drops of Eupatorium, hoping they would dull the ache in his bones, the exhaustion that pinned him to the sink.
“And fuck Big Pharma,” he growled, shuffling back towards his bedroom. He hadn’t taken any conventional medicine in five years or more, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been sick.
By the time he reached the bed, with the room swirling around him as if he were on a rollercoaster ride, he was exhausted. He lay there for half an hour contemplating the Tibetan chandelier, the batik paintings, the framed poster of the Party of Change, as he waited for the Eupatorium to take effect. Then, without warning, he vomited a yellowish lump on the floor, an acidic flush rising in his throat like an eruption. He whimpered, thrashing around in the blankets, shivering. He felt like shit. Christ, he’d never felt so bad in his entire life. A giant, burning stove in place of a forehead.
He grabbed the phone from the bedside table and called Enrico Rizzi, friend, confidant, secretary of the anti-vaccine association.
“Hey, Tullio, ready for tonight?” Rizzi asked.
Tullio cleared his throat, and it was as if a nail had been driven into his Adam’s apple. A pang went through his chest.
“Enrico… look, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’m really shattered. I woke up a mess, I must have a fever of forty. Flu, I guess.”
“But can you make it tonight? You can’t miss the dinner, everyone is expecting your speech…”
“You know how much I care, but right now I feel terrible. I hope to recover, but I wanted to warn you…”
“Did you take anything?”
“Eupatorium.”
“Okay, but you also need to take something for the fever. Throw down ten drops of Belladonna, then pour a drop of cypress oil into a teaspoon of maple syrup and mix it all in a thyme herbal tea, boiling hot. And by tonight you’ll be as good as new!”
“Let’s hope so. I’ll keep you posted, Enri. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Oh, I’ll send you a crazy article later. A theory about the collapse of the Morandi bridge in Genoa. There’s a hypothesis that it was blown up with micro-charges. An attack organised by the government to distract people from more important matters.”
“I told you that something didn’t add up!” exclaimed Tullio, forgetting for a second the headache, the vomiting, the fever. “Yeah, send me the article, I’m curious. I’ll call you later, okay?”
“Get well. And remember, cypress oil!”
Tullio ended the call and stretched out his arm to place the phone on the bedside table. Under his right armpit he felt a presence, an abnormality; probing with two fingers he encountered a swelling, a pulsating bulge moving with every heartbeat. Lymph nodes. He discovered to his horror that they were all enlarged, the ones under his neck, in his groin. He didn’t have the strength to drag himself back to the bathroom to retrieve the cypress oil. He realised he was scared stiff. He picked up his mobile phone again, then scrolled through the address book until he found the number of his doctor.
Although the idea of consulting a servant of the pharmaceutical companies did not appeal to him at all, he called the number, for the first time in over three years.
“Yes. This is Tullio Sandri, doctor, I don’t know if you remember me? Yes. The one from the Party of Change. Um, listen… can you come by for a visit? I don’t think I can make it to your office. Flu, I’m afraid. Bad. I don’t feel well at all.”
* * *
Doctor Riboni arrived half an hour later, the buzz of the intercom announcing his presence. Tullio got out of bed on shaky legs, cleaned up the vomit as best he could, and went to open the door of the apartment building. The doctor entered the flat in a black suit, holding a huge leather bag. He greeted Tullio with a nod of his head, looking at him sternly. Tullio did not remember the doctor being so tall, cadaverous.
“You don’t look good, Mr. Sandri.”
“I feel awful.”
They moved into the room, and Tullio had the impression that the doctor was following him on stilts. Legs too skinny, too long.
“Strip to your underwear and lie down so I can examine you properly,” Riboni ordered. Tullio obeyed, the effort of taking off his clothes drawing groans from him, and then he collapsed onto the bed while the doctor fumbled in his bag.
He pulled out a stethoscope, and donned a pair of latex gloves. Tullio shivered at the contact of the icy metal on his hot chest. The doctor’s gloved fingers were just as cold. They probed under his armpits, in the crease between thigh and groin, behind his ears, on his neck.
“Open your mouth and say aaahhh. Now give me two coughs. There you go. Have you vomited? How long have you been feeling like this? Have you noticed these swellings in your armpit and groin area?”
Tullio obeyed the commands and answered the questions like a frightened child. When Riboni had finished his examination, he sat down on the edge of the bed, stripped off his gloves and placed his instruments in his bag. Then he stood, silently staring at his tapering hands, letting out a long, deep sigh. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and brought it in front of his face.
“Well, doctor?” urged Tullio. “What’s the verdict?”
Riboni shook his head, stood up. He really was too tall. “The news is not the best, Mr. Sandri.” He spoke through the handkerchief pressed to his lips.
“In what way?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s the plague.”
It was as if a shadow had suddenly slipped into the room, a creature of darkness that occupied the corners and engulfed the light. Tullio squinted, and with a tremendous effort he pulled himself into a sitting position, propping himself on his elbows.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Plague. Bubonic,” the doctor confirmed. “You have probably been bitten by an infected flea. It’s going to get worse and worse. Petechiae, boils, necrosis of the extremities, delirium. Of course, there are antibiotics, but I don’t think you’re okay with taking that stuff, are you? I’m sorry, Mr. Sandri, I really am. I am mortified.”
Tullio opened his mouth wide, stunned, unable to utter a sound. He stared at the doctor, who was studying him with eyes like whirlpools from over his handkerchief, and suddenly burst into sobbing laughter.
“Very funny, doctor, very funny!” he coughed. “For a moment I almost believed you! Nice joke, but the plague was eradicated centuries ago. This is not the Middle Ages!”
Riboni, however, did not laugh. He walked away from the bed on his stilted legs, dragging his mammoth bag with him, an expression of pity in his deep, black eyes. On the threshold of the room he paused, lowering his handkerchief.
“The plague has unfortunately never been eradicated. But don’t worry. We take care of everything. You just have to trust us. We are the only ones who know how to deal with the likes of you.”
The doctor stepped into the corridor. Tullio heard him talking on the phone to someone in a whisper. He tried to get up and found he could not. It felt as if his legs had been sawn off and his torso stuck in a furnace.
“Hey, doc, the joke’s only good when it’s short-lived! Hey! Get back here!” he shouted with his last remnants of strength.
Then he collapsed back onto his bed, energy spent.
* * *
It was the sound of bells that woke him up. They tinkled in a disjointed, eerie song. Down in the street.
It took him a few moments to focus on the room, his head wrapped in a bandage of burning migraine. He managed to rise a little, pushing with his aching feet on the mattress, and saw the trio lined up at his bedside.
He screamed, huddling against the headboard.
In the centre was Dr. Riboni. Tullio recognised him by his suit and lanky figure. His face was concealed by a bizarre papier-mâché mask, from which emanated a sickly, sweet smell of spices. On his head was a shapeless cylinder, grey with dust. Behind two round holes covered by small glass lenses, he glimpsed the doctor’s eyes.
“What do you want?” he breathed in a hoarse voice. “Who are they?”
The figures accompanying the doctor were the embodiment of decay. Hunched over, swathed in stinking rags, they peered at him from beneath hoods with porcine eyes embedded in faces chewed by disease, riven with scars and badly healed wounds, lips purple around rotten teeth. One of them was missing his left hand, his arm ending in a bony stump; the other had no nose, just a triangular gash of bright, wet red.
“Go away! Go away!” implored Tullio, and in response the doctor spread his arms wide in a gesture that set the two thugs in motion. They limped to the side of the bed and grabbed him under his armpits, wrenching sharp cries of pain from him. Unceremoniously they dragged him into the corridor, and then down the stairs as though he were nothing but a sack of potatoes.
“Help me! Someone help me!” Tullio called, but the apartment building was as silent as a mausoleum.
He wanted to rebel, to resist, but he was too weak. As the men dragged him into the street, he thought it must all be a nightmare, one of those horrible nightmares triggered by high fever.
* * *
Dishevelled clouds swung over the town of Pinerolo like a funeral shroud chewed by woodworms. A few metres from the door of the apartment block stood a cart drawn by a dissolute horse, its ribs so exposed as to resemble a birdcage. On the pavement Tullio tried to get his feet under him, to escape the grasp of his tormentors, but they pulled him to the cart, blowing breaths that stank of garlic and corruption into his face.
The doctor climbed onto the mangy steed, hoisting himself on his stick-insect legs.
Tullio turned and tried to bite the hooded man’s stump on his right, but was lifted with ease and thrown onto the cart. Just below his skin he could feel things moving and swelling. He looked desperately around in search of a familiar face, perhaps a neighbour, but there was no one. All he heard were the bells that seemed to jingle mockingly around him, a soundtrack to the madness he was experiencing.
He pissed himself, and the hunched, twisted figures sitting either side of him snickered as if it were the funniest thing in the world.
He tried in vain to stammer a prayer, but the words were swallowed up by the hoarse cry of a crow that darted high over the rooftops.
“To the Lazaretto!” shrieked a voice, exultant. “To the Lazaretto!”
The lopsided cart splashed forward on the cobblestones, and Tullio wondered if he would ever return home.
* * *
Alternating between wakefulness and oblivion, Tullio saw Pinerolo’s shops and squares, fountains and avenues, banks and ice cream parlours, lurch past as the cart jolted on. But he didn’t see another human being. The only life evident in the streets were pigeons, stray dogs and the vague, scampering shapes of vermin, slipping around corners, or congregating near manhole covers.
The cart left the city and moved on into the countryside. It rattled along a long mule track lined with tall poplars, zigzagged through cornfields, crossed desolate plains rotten with fog, where the only human forms were the scarecrows built by farmers in the spring, and finally reached a huge brick farmhouse that looked abandoned.
“Where are we?” Tullio mumbled. The only response his captors gave him was to unload him from the cart and throw him onto a stretcher made of rudimentary sticks and red-stained sheets. As they carried him inside the farmhouse, he noticed gigantic bonfires burning in the distance, releasing monstrous bulbs of black smoke, which stank of burning flesh.
Tullio coughed and vomited blood.
Then he fainted.
When he rose from the waters of the void into the waking world, he was in the Lazaretto.
* * *
He had been laid in a corner of the vast hall that formed the necrotic heart of the structure, on a cot filthy with bodily fluids and overrun with ticks. The corpse carriers and the doctor were gone.
All around, Hell.
Hundreds of sick people were suffering and suppurating in the Lazaretto, some on improvised beds, others lying on the beaten earth floor, their putrid sores in contact with the feculent ground.
Tullio looked down at his own body: galaxies of boils dotted his legs, torso and arms, and some of the tumescences had burst, releasing black blood and pus.
The smell was intolerable. The stench of excrement and stale sweat mingled with the mephitic miasma of decomposition. The cries and groans, which echoed around him, were joined by the sound of distant bells.
Why was he there? What was going on?
He told himself that a new epidemic had broken out, a modern plague, swift and devastating, and he was nothing more than one of the many victims of a catastrophe that would see an end to the human race.
He remained in his corner, struck by the similarity between the scene around him and the depiction of Hell by Hieronymus Bosch.
He saw old nuns in shabby dresses, priests and doctors shuffling to and fro, attending with apparently little interest or care to the lame and the crippled, the disfigured and the hideously afflicted. From time to time, in the mass of bodies piled up, and in the continuous procession that swirled through the structure, he saw figures that had little or nothing human about them, with too many limbs, or disproportionate heads, some of which were concealed within nightmarish masks of wood and bone. He attributed those visions to the disease that was gnawing at his brain.
When he could summon up the energy, he screamed.
Clutching at the robe of a passing monk, he begged the holy man to put him out of his misery, but the monk merely spat on him and walked away laughing.
After some hours, a one-eyed child, a fellow sufferer, approached him and granted him the benefit of a wet cloth on his forehead.
Night came, and with it the melancholy hooting of owls.
Morning came, and with it new sick people, new bodies to pile up in the belly of the Lazaretto.
And then night again.
And so the days passed, endless and intolerable, with no let-up in the constant flow of pain and suffering.
Tullio’s body suppurated, rotted and collapsed, but his consciousness remained alert, his mind clear.
One day he heard a doctor mutter: “We’re no longer keeping up with them. There are too many! Christ, help us…”
No one was paying attention to him anymore. They were trampling him, dumping other sick people on him. He wished he could die. But when he looked down at his arms and saw that his hands were little more than metacarpals covered in parchment-like strips of sinew, he knew that he never would.
Gradually he felt himself seeping into the ground, infecting it, changing from a solid to a liquid state. Knowing he was destined never to die, he only hoped that one day he would mutate from a liquid into a foul-smelling gas, whereupon he would rise into the air and finally be free.
Oh, he knew it would take a long time. A very long time. But Tullio Sandri clung to hope as he rotted and leaked and changed.
One day, he was sure, he would escape from the damp, decaying embrace of the Lazaretto, and somehow return home.
Finally home.