“Good,” he said. “You will be able to play football again better than
ever.”
My knee did not bend and the leg dropped straight from the knee to the
ankle without a calf, and the machine was to bend the knee and make it
move as in riding a tricycle. But it did not bend yet, and instead the
machine lurched when it came to the bending part. The doctor said: “That
will all pass. You are a fortunate young man. You will play football
again like a champion.”
In the next machine was a major who had a little hand like a baby’s. He
winked at me when the doctor examined his hand, which was between two
leather straps that bounced up and down and flapped the stiff fingers,
and said: “And will I too play football, captain-doctor?” He had been a
very great fencer, and before the war the greatest fencer in Italy.
The doctor went to his office in a back room and brought a photograph
which showed a hand that had been withered almost as small as the
major’s, before it had taken a machine course, and after was a little
larger. The major held the photograph with his good hand and looked at
it very carefully. “A wound?” he asked.
“An industrial accident,” the doctor said.
“Very interesting, very interesting,” the major said, and handed it back
to the doctor.
“You have confidence?”
“No,” said the major.
There were three boys who came each day who were about the same age I
was. They were all three from Milan, and one of them was to be a lawyer,
and one was to be a painter, and one had intended to be a soldier, and
after we were finished with the machines, sometimes we walked back
together to the Café Cova, which was next door to the Scala. We walked
the short way through the communist quarter because we were four
together. The people hated us because we were officers, and from a
wine-shop some one would call out, “A basso gli ufficiali!” as we
passed. Another boy who walked with us sometimes and made us five wore a
black silk handkerchief across his face because he had no nose then and
his face was to be rebuilt. He had gone out to the front from the
military academy and been wounded within an hour after he had gone into
the front line for the first time. They rebuilt his face, but he came
from a very old family and they could never get the nose exactly right.
He went to South America and worked in a bank. But this was a long time
ago, and then we did not any of us know how it was going to be
afterward. We only knew then that there was always the war, but that we
were not going to it any more.
We all had the same medals, except the boy with the black silk bandage
across his face, and he had not been at the front long enough to get any
medals. The tall boy with a very pale face who was to be a lawyer had
been a lieutenant of Arditi and had three medals of the sort we each had
only one of. He had lived a very long time with death and was a little
detached. We were all a little detached, and there was nothing that held
us together except that we met every afternoon at the hospital.
Although, as we walked to the Cova through the tough part of town,
walking in the dark, with light and singing coming out of the
wine-shops, and sometimes having to walk into the street when the men
and women would crowd together on the sidewalk so that we would have had
to jostle them to get by, we felt held together by there being something
that had happened that they, the people who disliked us, did not
understand.
We ourselves all understood the Cova, where it was rich and warm and not
too brightly lighted, and noisy and smoky at certain hours, and there
were always girls at the tables and the illustrated papers on a rack on
the wall. The girls at the Cova were very patriotic, and I found that
the most patriotic people in Italy were the café girls—and I believe
they are still patriotic.
The boys at first were very polite about my medals and asked me what I
had done to get them. I showed them the papers, which were written in
very beautiful language and full of _fratellanza_ and _abnegazione_, but
which really said, with the adjectives removed, that I had been given
the medals because I was an American. After that their manner changed a
little toward me, although I was their friend against outsiders. I was a
friend, but I was never really one of them after they had read the
citations, because it had been different with them and they had done
very different things to get their medals. I had been wounded, it was
true; but we all knew that being wounded, after all, was really an
accident. I was never ashamed of the ribbons, though, and sometimes,
after the cocktail hour, I would imagine myself having done all the
things they had done to get their medals; but walking home at night
through the empty streets with the cold wind and all the shops closed,
trying to keep near the street lights, I knew that I would never have
done such things, and I was very much afraid to die, and often lay in
bed at night by myself, afraid to die and wondering how I would be when
I went back to the front again.
The three with the medals were like hunting-hawks; and I was not a hawk,
although I might seem a hawk to those who had never hunted; they, the
three, knew better and so we drifted apart. But I stayed good friends
with the boy who had been wounded his first day at the front, because he
would never know now how he would have turned out; so he could never be
accepted either, and I liked him because I thought perhaps he would not
have turned out to be a hawk either.
The major, who had been the great fencer, did not believe in bravery,
and spent much time while we sat in the machines correcting my grammar.
He had complimented me on how I spoke Italian, and we talked together
very easily. One day I had said that Italian seemed such an easy
language to me that I could not take a great interest in it; everything
was so easy to say. “Ah, yes,” the major said. “Why, then, do you not
take up the use of grammar?” So we took up the use of grammar, and soon
Italian was such a difficult language that I was afraid to talk to him
until I had the grammar straight in my mind.
The major came very regularly to the hospital. I do not think he ever
missed a day, although I am sure he did not believe in the machines.
There was a time when none of us believed in the machines, and one day
the major said it was all nonsense. The machines were new then and it
was we who were to prove them. It was an idiotic idea, he said, “a
theory, like another.” I had not learned my grammar, and he said I was a
stupid impossible disgrace, and he was a fool to have bothered with me.
He was a small man and he sat straight up in his chair with his right
hand thrust into the machine and looked straight ahead at the wall while
the straps thumped up and down with his fingers in them.
“What will you do when the war is over if it is over?” he asked me.
“Speak grammatically!”
“I will go to the States.”
“Are you married?”
“No, but I hope to be.”
“The more of a fool you are,” he said. He seemed very angry. “A man must
not marry.”
“Why, Signor Maggiore?”
“Don’t call me ‘Signor Maggiore.’”
“Why must not a man marry?”
“He cannot marry. He cannot marry,” he said angrily. “If he is to lose
everything, he should not place himself in a position to lose that. He
should not place himself in a position to lose. He should find things he
cannot lose.”
He spoke very angrily and bitterly, and looked straight ahead while he
talked.
“But why should he necessarily lose it?”
“He’ll lose it,” the major said. He was looking at the wall. Then he
looked down at the machine and jerked his little hand out from between
the straps and slapped it hard against his thigh. “He’ll lose it,” he
almost shouted. “Don’t argue with me!” Then he called to the attendant
who ran the machines. “Come and turn this damned thing off.”
He went back into the other room for the light treatment and the
massage. Then I heard him ask the doctor if he might use his telephone
and he shut the door. When he came back into the room, I was sitting in
another machine. He was wearing his cape and had his cap on, and he came
directly toward my machine and put his arm on my shoulder.
“I am so sorry,” he said, and patted me on the shoulder with his good
hand. “I would not be rude. My wife has just died. You must forgive me.”
“Oh—” I said, feeling sick for him. “I am _so_ sorry.”
He stood there biting his lower lip. “It is very difficult,” he said. “I
cannot resign myself.”
He looked straight past me and out through the window. Then he began to
cry. “I am utterly unable to resign myself,” he said and choked. And
then crying, his head up looking at nothing, carrying himself straight
and soldierly, with tears on both his cheeks and biting his lips, he
walked past the machines and out the door.
The doctor told me that the major’s wife, who was very young and whom he
had not married until he was definitely invalided out of the war, had
died of pneumonia. She had been sick only a few days. No one expected
her to die. The major did not come to the hospital for three days. Then
he came at the usual hour, wearing a black band on the sleeve of his
uniform. When he came back, there were large framed photographs around
the wall, of all sorts of wounds before and after they had been cured by
the machines. In front of the machine the major used were three
photographs of hands like his that were completely restored. I do not
know where the doctor got them. I always understood we were the first to
use the machines. The photographs did not make much difference to the
major because he only looked out of the window.