Like Family by Paolo Giordano Read Free Book Online Page A

to tell it like it is. What she can’t stand is having everyone in town ask her how she is. Whocares?She’s lost thirteen pounds in a little over a month, she is visibly emaciated, so she’s not too surprised that everyone asks about her health. To avoid it she goes out as seldom as possible and now prefers to do her shopping at the market in Almese, a few miles farther away; in any case, it’s on her way back from the hospital.
    The doctors have advised against raw vegetables, preserves packed in oil and sausages—everything with a potential bacterial content that might threaten her weakened immune system, a kind of pregnant-woman’s diet that she has not experienced in better circumstances. And just like a pregnant woman, in the brief periods when she is unaffected by the treatment and its aftereffects, she indulges in sporadic yearnings for particular foods, which she perhaps ironically calls “my cravings.”
    One day she gets into the car and drives for miles and miles, only because she’s recalled the bread baked in a wood-burning oven in Giaveno. She’s spent a lifetime denying herself such whims in the name of exemplary conduct, out of respect for . . . respect for what? She’d had a yen for that bread many timesbefore but had never ventured to go and get it because it seemed inconvenient to face that winding road just to satisfy an impulse. Now she clings to her desires, she invokes them, because each one corresponds to a burst of vitality that for a few minutes distracts her from the overwhelming thought of the illness.
    Parmigiano cheese is the first to vanish from her refrigerator, followed by cheeses in general, then red and white meats. The nausea isn’t to blame for the meat, she explains; it’s that she can no longer taste or smell it, and chewing a piece of meat without tasting it is like having something dead in your mouth, aware the whole time that it’s dead: in the end it’s impossible to swallow it.
    â€œLast night I felt like peas and eggs. I cooked them and ate them eagerly. Then I started coughing and threw it all up. That’s it, no more eggs and peas either.”
    Mrs. A., who never turned her nose up at even the most dubious traditional dishes—roasted frogs’ legs, boiled snails, pigeon or tripe, fried brains and entrails—is now unable to consume an innocent plate of eggs and peas. “Water, too, can you believe it? Eventhat nauseates me.” Starting in December, and for the entire year of life left to her, she will drink only carbonated beverages—Coke, aranciata and chinotto—and will eat mainly sweets, like an immoderate, incorrigible little girl.
    I decide to go and see her. Informed of her absurd diet, I bring her a tray of small Baci di Dama cookies (observing their success, I show up with an identical tray at every future visit, until the end, until she refuses those, too). One sunny Sunday morning, I set out with Emanuele, who, to honor his defector-nanny has brought along an intensely colorful, almost psychedelic drawing, in which winged nymphs with pink, purple and blue hair float in a monster-infested sky.
    â€œWhat are these?” I ask him.
    â€œDelicate fairies.”
    â€œAnd those?”
    â€œPokémon.”
    â€œOh.”
    Too bad he then decides to wrap the drawing: he balls it up like a candy and loads it with Scotch tape. What he hands to Mrs. A. is a gob of crumpled, stickypaper. She sets it aside, puzzled. She no longer has time to pursue Emanuele’s creative excursions; she has her body to look after now, all those medicines to take and their side effects to be weighed against their benefits. I have the distinct feeling that the drawing will end up in the trash as soon as we leave.
    Emanuele can’t understand the self-centeredness the illness has forced on her. He can’t conceive of Mrs. A. as a different person from the woman who took care of him, him