Read Online The Watcher and Other Stories by Italo Calvino - Free Book Online Page B

treatment.”
    They gathered up these things and went off. They were led up some stairs by a young man, one of the “bright” ones, tiny and squat, who, despite his ugly features, his shaved head, and the thick eyebrows which grew together, proved up to his task and full of concern; he almost seemed to have landed in there by mistake, because of his looks. “In this wing there are four.” They went in.
    It was a huge, long room, and they passed between two white rows of beds. Coming from the darkness of the stairs, they were dazzled, painfully, in perhaps what was only a sensation of defense, a kind of refusal to perceive in the white mounds of sheets and pillows the human-colored shapes that rose from them; or else it was a first translation, from hearing to sight, of a shrill, constant animal cry: geee... geee... geee... which rose from some part of the ward, answered at times from another point by a chuckling or barking animal sound: gaa! gaa! gaa! gaa!
    The shrill cry came from a tiny red face, all eyes, the mouth opened in motionless laughter: a boy, sitting in bed in a white shirt, or rather not sitting, but emerging, trunk and head, from the bed’s opening as a plant peeps up in a pot, like a plant’s stalk that ended (there was no sign of arms) in that fishlike head, and this boy-plant-fish (At what point can a human being be called human? Amerigo asked himself) moved up and down, bending forward at each “geee... gee...” And the “gaa! gaa!” that answered him came from another boy who seemed even more shapeless, though a head stuck out in his bed, greedy, flushed, a large mouth, and it must have had arms—or fins—which moved beneath the sheets where it seemed sheathed (to what degree can a creature be called a creature of whatever species?), and other voices echoed, making more sounds, excited perhaps by the appearance of people in the ward, and there was also a panting and moaning, like a shout ready to burst forth but promptly stifled. This came from an adult.
    In that wing, some were adults—it seemed—and some, boys and children, if one was to judge by the dimensions and by signs like the hair or the skin color, which count among people outside. One was a giant, with a huge infant’s head held erect by pillows: he lay immobile, his arms hidden behind his back, the chin on the chest which extended into an obese belly, the eyes looked at nothing, the gray hair hung over the huge forehead (an elderly creature, who had survived in that long fetus-growth?), frozen in a dazed sadness.
    The priest, the one with the beret, was already in the ward, waiting for them, he, too, with his list in hand. Seeing Amerigo, he glowered. But at that moment Amerigo was no longer thinking of the senseless reason for his being there; he felt the boundary line he was supposed to check was now another: not that of the “people’s will,” long since lost from sight, but the boundary of the human.
    The priest and the chairman had approached the Reverend Mother who was in charge of that wing, with the names of the four registered voters. The nun pointed them out. Other nuns came forward, carrying a screen, a little table, all the things necessary to the voting in there.
    One bed at the end of the ward was empty, neatly made; its occupant, perhaps already convalescing, was sitting on a chair beside the bed, dressed in flannel pajamas with a jacket over them, and sitting at the opposite side of the bed was an old man wearing a hat, certainly the patient’s father, who had come to visit him that Sunday. The son was young, simple-minded, of normal stature but somehow, it seemed, numbed in his movements. The father cracked some almonds for the son and passed them to him across the bed, and the son took them and slowly put them to his mouth. And the father watched him chew.
    The fish-boys burst out with their cries and every so often the Reverend Mother broke away