That evening I lay white-gowned in the infirmary, with a temperature of a hundred and four. The day nurse, Maria, older and more matronly than Luisa, her hands ruddy and thick and her uniform smelling of starch, roused me from sleep to feed me a bowl of chicken soup. The soup seemed to curb my fever, because some time after I’d eaten it I felt suddenly clear, clear enough to look around the room and realize where I was, and to see the one bed in the corner whose barred sides had been raised and whose occupant had been enclosed in a large plastic cube, two small grey tanks breathing coiled tubes into its canopied air. Maria had gone—she was not in her chair by the entrance, or behind the reception desk; and seeing that I was alone I climbed out of my bed and went to the one in the corner, wedging my face in between two bars to get up close to the cube. The baby was staring up at its plastic ceiling, waving its wrinkled limbs as if reaching for something above her. I tried to get its attention, tapped on the plastic, made small gurgling noises, and finally it turned towards me, spittle dribbling down its ruddy cheek. I made a face to make it laugh, but its small grey eyes—they were not yet the vivid blue they would become—seemed to stare right through me.
Maria had not returned yet. I saw now that the clothes I had worn to the funeral were hanging on a rack near the doorway; I went over and pulled my pants on over my gown, then slipped through the reception room into the hall. A couple was coming in from the sun deck but they paid no attention to me, and I passed outside without resistance, through the same door that had cracked my bones the night of the storm. On the sun deck all the canvas chairs had been set out again in their orderly rows, as if nothing had happened; but it was supper hour, and the area was almost deserted. I skirted around the chairs until I came to the stern. At the other end of the ship the sun was only just setting; but beyond the stern the sky was already a deep blue, and it was hard to tell where the sky ended and the sea began.
My fever had begun to creep up on me again, my head starting to spin and my knees growing weak. The words of a song were floating into my head, surfacing like sunken relics from a place that was no longer visible on the horizon, that had been swallowed into the sea:
Vorrei far ritornare un’ ora sola
Il tempo bello della contentezza
Quando che noi giocando a vola vola
Di baci i’ ti coprivo e di carezze.
I realized with a start that I’d been singing out loud, a small mumble that died now as I became aware of it. I glanced behind me to see if anyone had heard. My mother’s grey-eyed German friend had just come onto the sun deck with a young woman; but they eased themselves into deck chairs without noticing me, laughing and talking in a language I couldn’t understand.
In my pant pocket, where I’d put it that morning before the funeral, was my lucky one lira, and I pulled it out now to look at it. The coin was shiny and slick from handling; but the imprint had not worn away, as it did sometimes on older five and ten lire—the lines were still visible on the eagle’s wings, and the mark where Luciano had said a bullet had hit. But when I flipped the coin over to look at the bust on the other side, it slipped through my fingers—easily almost, without resistance, as if I had not tried to stop it, or had not believed it could fall; though now that it was falling my limbs seemed to have grown too thick and slow to stop it. For a long instant it tumbled down, winking darkly at me in the dying light as if to send me some final secret message, some magic consolation, if only I could make it out; but at last it fell with a hollow clang to the deck, where it rolled for a moment in a wide slow arc before tilting fatally toward the rails, and tumbling out to sea.