“I must confess,” said Giovanni Corte, smiling, to show that he had no childish fears, “I must confess that this particular sort of change of room doesn’t appeal to me in the least.”
“But it has no medical basis; I quite understand what you mean, but in this case it’s simply to do a favor for this woman who doesn’t want to be separated from her children. Now, please,” he added, laughing openly, “please don’t get it into your head that there are other reasons!”
“Very well,” said Giovanni Corte, “but it seems to me to bode ill.”
So Giovanni Corte went down to the sixth floor, and though he was convinced that this move did not correspond to any worsening in his own condition, he felt unhappy at the thought that there was now a definite barrier between himself and the everyday world of healthy people. The seventh floor was an embarkation point, with a certain degree of contact with society; it could be regarded as a sort of annex to the ordinary world. But the sixth was already part of the real hospital; the attitudes of the doctors, nurses, of the patients themselves were just slightly different. It was admitted openly that the patients on that floor were really sick, even if not seriously so. From his initial conversation with his neighbors, staff and doctors, Giovanni Corte gathered that here the seventh floor was regarded as a joke, reserved for amateurs, all affectation and caprice; it was only on the sixth floor that things began in earnest.
One thing Giovanni Corte did realize, however, was that he would certainly have some difficulty in getting back up to the floor where, medically speaking, he really belonged; to get back to the seventh floor he would have to set the whole complex organism of the place in motion, even for such a small move; it was quite plain that, were he not to insist, no one would ever have thought of putting him back on the top floor, with the “almost well.”
So Giovanni Corte decided not to forfeit anything that was his by right and not to yield to the temptations of habit. He was much concerned to impress upon his companions that he was with them only for a few days, that it was he who had agreed to go down a floor simply to oblige a lady, that he’d be going up again as soon as there was a free room. The others listened without interest and nodded, unconvinced.
Giovanni Corte’s convictions, however, were confirmed by the judgment of the new doctor. He agreed that Giovanni Corte could most certainly be on the seventh floor; the form the disease had taken was ab-so-lute-ly negligible—he stressed each syllable so as to emphasize the importance of his diagnosis—but after all it might well be that Giovanni Corte would be better taken care of on the sixth floor.
“I don’t want all that nonsense all over again,” Giovanni Corte interrupted firmly at this point, “you say I should be on the seventh floor, and that’s where I want to be.”
“No one denies that,” retorted the doctor. “I was advising you not as a doc-tor, but as a real friend. As I say, you’re very slightly affected, it wouldn’t even be an exaggeration to say that you’re not ill at all, but in my opinion what makes your case different from other similarly mild ones is its greater extension: the intensity of the disease is minimal, but it is fairly widespread; the destructive process of the cells”—it was the first time Giovanni Corte had heard the sinister expression—“the destructive process of the cells is absolutely in the initial stage, it may not even have begun yet, but it is tending, I say tending, to affect large expanses of the organism. This is the only reason, in my opinion, why you might be better off down here on the sixth floor, where the methods of treatment are more highly specialized and more intensive.”
One day he was informed that the Director of the nursing home, after lengthy consultation with his colleagues, had decided to make a change in the subdivision of the patients. Each person’s grade—so to speak—was to be lowered by half a point. From now on the patients on each floor were to be divided into two categories according to the seriousness of their condition (indeed the respective doctors had already made this subdivision, though exclusively for their own personal use) and the lower of these two halves was to be officially moved one floor down. For example, half the patients on the sixth floor, those who were slightly more seriously affected, were to go down to the fifth; the less slightly affected of the seventh floor would go down to the sixth. Giovanni Corte was pleased to hear this, because his return to the seventh floor would certainly be much easier amid this highly complicated series of removals.
However, when he mentioned this hope to the nurse he was bitterly disappointed. He learned that he was indeed to be moved, not up to the seventh but down to the floor below. For reasons that the nurse was unable to explain, he had been classed among the more “serious” patients on the sixth floor and so had to go down to the fifth.
Once he had recovered from his initial surprise, Giovanni Corte completely lost his temper; he shouted that they were cheating him, that he refused to hear of moving
