“And what about the patients?”
“There are relatively few of them, so two floors are converted into one.”
“You mean you put the patients of the third and fourth floors together?”
“No, no,” the nurse corrected him, “of the third and second. The patients on this floor will have to go down.”
“Down to the second?” asked Giovanni Corte, suddenly pale as death. “You mean I’ll have to go down to the second?”
“Well, yes. What’s so odd about that? When we come back, in two weeks, you’ll come back here, in this same room. I can’t see anything so terrifying about it.”
But Giovanni Corte—as if forewarned by some strange instinct—was horribly afraid. However, since he could hardly prevent the staff from going on their vacations, and convinced that the new treatment with the stronger rays would do him good—the eczema had almost cleared up—he didn’t dare offer any formal opposition to this new move. But he did insist, despite the nurses’ banter, that the label on the door of his new room should read “Giovanni Corte, third floor, temporary.” Such a thing had never been done before in the whole history of the sanatorium, but the doctors didn’t object, fearing that the prohibition of even such a minor matter might cause a serious shock to a patient as highly strung as Giovanni Corte.
After all, it was simply a question of waiting for fourteen days, neither more nor less. Giovanni Corte began to count them with stubborn eagerness, lying motionless on his bed for hours on end, staring at the furniture, which wasn’t as pleasant and modern here as on the higher floors, but more cumbersome, gloomy and severe. Every now and again he would listen intently, thinking he heard sounds from the floor below, the floor of the dying, the “condemned”—vague sounds of death in action.
Naturally he found all this very dispiriting. His agitation seemed to nourish the disease, his temperature began to rise, the state of continued weakness began to affect him vitally. From the window—which was almost always open, since it was now midsummer—he could no longer see the roofs nor even the houses, but only the green wall of the surrounding trees.
A week later, one afternoon at about two o’clock, his room was suddenly invaded by the head nurse and three nurses, with a trolley. “All ready for the move, then?” asked the head nurse jovially.
“What move?” asked Giovanni Corte weakly. “What’s all this? The third floor staff haven’t come back after a week, have they?”
“Third floor?” repeated the head nurse uncomprehendingly. “My orders are to take you down to the first floor,” and he produced a printed form for removal to the first floor signed by none other than Professor Dati himself.
Giovanni Corte gave vent to his terror, his diabolical rage in long angry shrieks, which resounded throughout the whole floor. “Less noise, please,” begged the nurses, “there are some patients here who are not at all well.” But it would have taken more than that to calm him.
At last the second floor doctor appeared—a most attentive person. After being given the relevant information, he looked at the form and listened to Giovanni Corte’s side of the story. He then turned angrily to the head nurse and told him there had been a mistake, he himself had had no such orders, for some time now the place had been an impossible muddle, he himself knew nothing about what was going on . . . at last, when he had had his say with his inferior, he turned politely to his patient, highly apologetic.
“Unfortunately, however,” he added, “unfortunately Professor Dati left the hospital about an hour ago—he’ll be away for a couple of days. I’m most awfully sorry, but his orders can’t be overlooked. He would be the first to regret it, I assure you . . . an absurd mistake! I fail to understand how it could have happened!”
Giovanni Corte had begun to tremble piteously. He was now completely unable to control himself, overcome with fear like a small child. His slow, desperate sobbing echoed throughout the room.
It was as a result of this execrable mistake, then, that he was removed to his last resting place: he who basically, according to the most stringent medical opinion, was fit for the sixth, if not the seventh floor as far as his illness was concerned! The situation was so grotesque that from time to time Giovanni Corte felt inclined simply to roar with laughter.
Stretched out on his bed, while the afternoon warmth flowed calmly over the city, he would stare at the green of the trees through the window and feel that he had come to a completely unreal world, walled in with sterilized tiles, full of deathly arctic passages and soulless white figures. It even occurred to him that the trees he thought he saw through the window were not real; finally, when he noticed that the leaves never moved, he was certain of it.
Corte was so upset by this idea that he called the nurse and asked for his spectacles, which he didn’t use in bed, being shortsighted; only then was he a little reassured: the lenses proved that they were real leaves and that they were shaken, though very slightly, by the wind.
When the nurse had gone out, he spent half an hour in complete silence. Six floors, six solid barriers, even if only because of a bureaucratic mistake, weighed implacably upon Giovanni Corte. How many years (for obviously it was now a question of years) would it be before he could climb back to the top of that precipice?
But why was the room suddenly going so dark? It was still midafternoon. With a supreme effort, for he felt himself paralyzed by a strange lethargy, Giovanni Corte turned to look at his watch on the locker by his bed. Three thirty. He turned his head the other way and saw that
