80
PARTISAN REVIEW
and
ill
and unable to pay his medical expenses. Fortunately, he
never knew that this was precisely what had happened.)
"But I have to worry."
"All right.
If
you could give me the manuscript of
Severina
to be
typed and sent to the publishers, it might help."
"But it's ready. I'm just revising it. You know I can never stop
revising. If you insist on taking it now, all right, but I'd rather keep it
for another couple of weeks. I've often told you that my ideal would
be to write and rewrite the same book all my life, as Manzoni did."
"Can't I help you somehow? You used to say I could, when I
telephoned from Rome."
"Perhaps then, not now. Leave it to me. By the way," he said,
lowering his voice, "when are they going to operate on me? After all,
I do have to go home some day ."
"I don't know," I said. "Why don't you ask the doctor? He has
always forbidden me to interfere. You trust him, don't you?"
"Yes, of course, otherwise I'd have gone back long ago. Here
everything is very pleasant, but that's not the point. Basically I feel
cured already, but that operation ... They explained it to me, they
convinced me it was necessary, what are they waiting for?"
I knew that any hope expected of the operation had vanished
on April 27 with the first sign of brain damage, the result of a
medical error made the previous October. I thought the doctor had
told him this : he never deceived his patients . I certainly had no
authority to explain .
"At home you'll find the housework tiring, now that Phoenician
Marie is gone," he said . (This was what he used to call our devoted
old Sardinian maidservant, who had died four days before we set out
for Geneva in March 1978.) "But since I'll be well again, I'll help
you."
"I've heard those promises before. But don't think about the
housework now, just try to get well."
"It's strange: I've always been wary of the surgeon's knife and
I'm grateful for having been spared it so far, in spite of all that has
happened to me. But now I have no fears. I just want to be cured."
"I've been through it several times, as you know. There's
nothing to it, really. You don't feel anything, and later, when you
come out of the anesthetic, you know you're never again going to
suffer all those pains and upsets that were disrupting your life, and
then while you're convalescing everyone makes a fuss of you."
