One of the worst things that can happen to you is to faint on the street when you go out to buy a newspaper with ten euros in your pocket but no wallet and no ID. It had been months since the last time I’d passed out, that afternoon at the pool. I was told later what happened. A passerby saw me drop like a sack of potatoes to the sidewalk. I banged up my arm and my head, which caused a nasty cut to the forehead and a badly scraped elbow. An ambulance rushed me to the emergency room, where a couple of hours later I came to, when my family had already tipped over into panic. Paola, after I’d been gone for two hours, started calling all the hospitals and had tracked me down there. The doctor told her that they’d given me a CAT scan and that the bang to my head hadn’t caused any cerebral trauma. Then the doctor had lowered his voice and told her that he had some very bad news
“I suspect your husband may have a widespread tumor in his lungs. Let me repeat, I suspect, I’m not an oncologist. I just thought it best to warn you.”
Paola’s nonchalant response astonished the doctor.
“Thanks, you did the right thing. Any breaks in the elbow?”
“No.”
When Paola acts out the dialogue for me, including the doctor’s high-pitched voice, I laugh until my belly aches and I immediately feel a stabbing pain in my liver and surrounding areas. The clinical progression is starting to become unpleasant. I can no longer laugh.
Nicolas Chamfort, a French author, used to say that “a day without laughter is a day wasted.”
How tragically true.
The doctors detain me overnight for observation. Paola stays with me until a nurse tosses her out in a fury. But before the draconian move, Paola and I stare at each other like two honeymooners. I can’t believe my luck; she, bemused, sympathetic, lovely, wants to give me what I need from her. Yet she can’t. I want to talk to her. But something stalls as if this is hers to work out, hers to decide. I can’t force her to forgive me. That decision, like mine about telling the children, has to come from her.
I stay there in my room alongside an old man with a leg in traction who heaves a painful-sounding breath every ten seconds, a little boy who bumped his head pretty badly jumping down off a wall, and a guy in his early twenties who received multiple fractures in a traffic accident. I’m in excellent company. In fact, I feel almost healthy alongside my roommates. Tomorrow, I’ll walk out of here on my own two legs and I’ll go jogging. I only manage to fall asleep very late, rocked to sleep by the old man’s moaning. I dream I’ve gone back in time, to the moment I first kissed Signora Moroni. Today I’m sure I’d be capable of resisting.