The next few weeks I passed in a delirium. I had contracted pneumonia, and spent the rest of the voyage, and some time after it, in a high fever. It seemed I had fallen into the world of dreams, where no object or image had the meaning normally assigned to it, hid some secret about itself that I must discover; and all day and night my mind raced, working out complicated schemes and theories that might account for all the disparate facts, that might piece them together at last into a final magical solution. But just when the solution seemed near, an odd image would intrude: the face of Dr. Cosabene peering over me, distorted like an object in a curved mirror; a white room whose rough ceiling had become the surface of the moon; two spoons the size of young men leaning tiredly against a wall, rifles slung over their shoulders; a large orange balloon floating calmly by in the sky, and someone in a basket beneath waving goodbye, goodbye to a friend on the earth.
Later, in a hospital ward where a thousand wild voices babbled incoherently around me, I had two visitors. The first did not take me by surprise, really: I had seen him only once before, and then only fleetingly, but his eyes, blue flames, had burned themselves into my memory then, and I recognized him at once when he came to stand over my bed, his presence fitting into place like the final sum of one of la maestra’s arithmetic questions. But I was only just coming out of the delirium of my fever then; and afterwards I could not say for certain whether he had actually stood over me, or whether I had merely imagined him.
It was the second visitor, who came after the first, that I had not expected to see: a stranger who was my father, and after all not the black-haired ogre I had imagined but a tired-eyed man whose hair had begun to grey and whose burly shoulders and limbs seemed to fit him awkwardly, like the Sunday clothes the peasants in Valle del Sole wore to mass. He cried without shame when the nurse brought him to my bed; and every day afterwards, until my fever had finally broken, he came to sit beside me, though he never spoke a word, only peered at me through his watery eyes, his cap clutched in his hands like a talisman. When I was let out of the hospital we rode together on a coal-dust-filled train, my father holding the baby in his awkward arms while we rolled across a desolate landscape, bleak and snow-covered for as far as the eye could see.
But all these later events happened in a mist. Before the mist set in, though, I was granted a few final moments of clarity—time enough to witness my mother’s funeral, which took place the morning after her death, and which I was allowed to attend because no one, not even myself, had noticed that I was burning with fever. The funeral was held at the ship’s stern, where the sun deck normally was, though all the chairs had been cleared away now. The sun was just edging above a still sea, the air cold but the sky stubbornly clear; and despite the early hour a small crowd of passengers attended—the ones my mother had befriended, Mr. D’Amico, the grey-eyed German, the honeymoon couple, and several others who I did not recognize, and who stood a ways back as if they were afraid of being turned away. Antonio was there, and the captain, hats in hands, as well as a few of the other officers, the ship’s chaplain, Luisa, a sombre and sober Dr. Cosabene.
But only Luisa and Mr. D’Amico and the honeymoon couple cried through the service; the others retained a stony silence, stiff and awkward, as if the bright sun and clear sky made them feel unnatural in their mourning.
My mother’s body, enclosed in a canvas sack and covered with an Italian flag, lay on a small platform that rose up above the rails and pointed out to sea. After the chaplain had read from his missal Antonio gave the eulogy. But I wasn’t following—there had been a mistake, the kind of thing where dead people were not dead or where they could sometimes come back to life again, like that, the way the wheat around Valle del Sole, snow-covered in winter, could suddenly be green again in the spring. In a moment, I was sure, my mother’s head would pop out of her sack. ‘Vittorio,’ she’d say, eyes all squinty and lips pouting, ‘look at you, always so serious!’ And everyone would laugh.
But now Antonio, his voice hoarse with emotion, was ending his eulogy; and after a long moment of silence a young frail-eyed officer began to play a song on a bugle, while we stood with our heads bowed. When he had finished the chaplain made a sign of the cross, and on a nod from the captain Antonio’s hand slipped over a lever beneath the platform that held my mother, hesitated there a moment, then finally wrenched the lever back, hard. The platform tilted sharply towards the sea and the canvas sack slid out suddenly from under the flag; but before I could hear it strike the sea’s surface my knees buckled beneath me, and my mind went black.