Requiem by Antonio Tabucchi Read Free Book Online Page A

nurses in the famous
     professor’s clinic have other things to do, if you ring the bell no one comes and they
     leave you there choking like a dog, so I have to be there at your bedside and work the
     disgusting machine that extracts the blood from your throat, and a month later, the day before
     you’re due to leave hospital, the doctors introduce a small tube through your nose down
     into your stomach so that they can feed you and they say: Everything’s fine now, the
     patient can go home, but everything isn’t fine, I go out for a coffee and when I come
     back to your room I find you dying, your face is all swollen and purple, you can’t
     breathe, you’ve got palpitations. What’s wrong with my father?, I ask the doctor
     on duty, a crafty so-and-so. Your father’s having a heart attack, he says. Then I want a
     cardiologist, I say, because I don’t believe you. The cardiologist arrives, gives you an
     electrocardiogram and says: The patient has nothing wrong with his heart but there is
     something wrong with his lungs, he needs an X-ray. And then I pick you up from the bed in my
     arms, because the nurses at the famous professor’s clinic have other things to do, and I
     call an ambulance and we go in the ambulance to the X-ray clinic, on my responsibility,
     because the sly doctor on duty says that you can only leave if I take full responsibility, so
     I do and the radiologist, after the X-ray, says: A tube has perforated your father’s
     oesophagus, pierced the mediastinum and entered the lung, now you need a specialist in
     pulmonary diseases with a scalpel, if not, your father will die. You see, Dad, when those
     eminent doctors introduced the tube into your stomach, they perforated first your oesophagus
     and then your lung, I took you away because I had no faith in them or in their competence; the
     specialist, whom I called at once, made an incision in your back with a scalpel, the air was
     expelled and the lung deflated, they put you in intensive care, that place where all the
     patients lie there naked connected up by tubes on all sides, and after two weeks you
     recovered, I should say that during all the time you were there, the famous doctor who had
     first operated on you never once came to see you, the bastard. And then?, asked my Father as a
     Young Man, what happened to me then? Well, Dad, I said, then I found a really good surgeon, a
     friend of mine who works in a big hospital, he performed the anastomosis on you, I mean the
     reconstruction of your perforated oesophagus, and after that you lived for another three
     years, three nice, peaceful years, eating normally, but then your illness reappeared, this
     time the disease had spread, and you died. How?, asked my Father as a Young Man, I want to
     know how, if it was a painful death or if it was peaceful, how was it?, I want to know. You
     just burned out like a candle, Dad, I said, one day you lay down and you said: I’m tired
     and I’m not hungry, and you never got up or ate anything again, apart from the soup that
     Mum used to make for you, I’d come and visit you every day, and you went on like that
     for a month, you were little more than a skeleton by then but you weren’t in any pain,
     and when you died, you waved to me before going into the dark.
    My Father as a Young Man smiled and smoothed back his hair. But there’s another story
     you should tell me, he said, you haven’t finished yet. There’s nothing else, I
     said. Don’t be obtuse, he said, I want to know if you were a good son, how you behaved
     towards the doctor who operated on me. Look, Dad, I said, I don’t know if I did the
     right thing, maybe I should have done things differently, I should have just punched the guy,
     that would have been a braver solution, but I didn’t, that’s why I’m left
     with this feeling of guilt, instead of smashing his face in, I wrote a story about the
     conversation I’d had with him and he brought a case against me,