Читать книгу The Water-Breather - Ben Faccini - Страница 8

I’m eight years old. It’s the spring of 1978. Since Pado developed his theory on how diseases spread from air conditioning, and became president of the European Board of Histopathologists, our kilometre dial has clocked into thousands and started its cycle over and over again. Our journeys, along motorways, across seas and over mountains, have to keep up with the progress of sickness from people’s lungs and air conditioners. Travelling is a race against time. Every moment we pause, or complain, is a moment wasted, an opportunity for disease to take hold. Our car must carry on, always. That’s the way it is. Places to get to. Lives to save. Scientists to convince.

Duccio is entrusted with the maps. He keeps these in the pocket behind our father with the stacks of papers and hotel listings for each country. Some maps you have to fold out more than others. Spain and France stretch far across my lap. We always get lost in Brussels because the guidebook for Belgium has a tear where the Flemish and French street names merge in shredded strands. Giulio has the pamphlets for the conferences stashed behind Ama’s seat: ‘Legionella pneumophila and the use of erythromycin’. ‘Epidemiology and the evaluation of environmental carcinogenic risks’. Giulio also has a book of jokes with two hundred reasons why the chicken wants to cross the road. Ama keeps a paperback called What To Do On Long Journeys. It has been fingered and thrown across the car so many times that it is tattered and scuffed like a grimy shirt collar. Duccio can tell you the make of any car from any country. Giulio and Pado can list most of the capital cities of the world. I can tell when the petrol sign is going to turn red.

In England, we stay with our grandmother, Ama’s mother. She was born in London, but her parents were Dutch and Slovenian and brought her up speaking French in England. That probably explains why she married a Frenchman, our grandfather, Grand Maurice. He drowned two summers ago while fishing for crayfish in a lake in France and our grandmother hasn’t been the same since. Grand Maurice thought he was so lucky to have met her that he called her ‘ma chance’. We still call her Machance even if Pado tells us she hasn’t brought us much good fortune lately. I’m Machance’s favourite and no one really knows why. Maybe it’s because I was Grand Maurice’s favourite too. Ama shrugs and goes quiet about it. Giulio thinks it’s because I’ve got Grand Maurice’s brown-green eyes and, now that he’s dead, I’m the only one carrying them around.

When in Italy, we stay in small family hotels in Milan and Rome or with Pado’s parents in Umbria. In Germany, we have a bed-and-breakfast near the motorway which has sticky muesli and cartoons for children on the TV. In Madrid, the owner of our hotel is so chatty that he keeps us waiting for our room keys to tell us stories we’ve heard a hundred times. Over the reception desk there are posters from Pado’s scientific conferences coloured with microscopic close-ups of viruses and then a torn, withered photo of the owner’s wife carrying dried sausages from Cantabria, the sun setting on her skirt. Ama can’t sleep in the Madrid hotel because of the neon street signs outside our room so we wrap her clothes across the windows and whisper in the night. Before going to bed, Ama sniffs the sheets, one by one, to check they are clean. If she finds a hair, a scab, a toenail or even a trace of scent, she calls the reception in a small voice and we watch as astonished maids remake the beds with Ama following behind, smoothing the spreading white surfaces with her drowsy hands. When we try to help her, she gently pushes us to one side, ‘Just let me do it, please.’

Pado always states, ‘There’s no point telling me things I know. Tell me something new’, so when he pops his head into our hotel room to say ‘Goodnight’, you know you have to hurry to come up with new facts fast:

‘If you weigh all the insects in the world, they are heavier than all the animals put together!

‘Every single snowflake is unique!’

‘Not bad, Jean-Pio, I’ll have to think about those.’

Giulio invents a new chicken joke. It still has to cross the road, but it makes Pado laugh all the same. When Pado leaves, Giulio asks me where I get my facts from. I don’t really know. I suppose I just pick them up, here and there, glancing through newspapers in hotel lobbies, listening to Pado’s colleagues, staring out of the car window. Giulio and I have a deal: if I get up before him, I have to wake him gently, ask him what he is dreaming about and suggest a good ending. He then goes back to sleep and tells me what happened later. Duccio stands in front of the mirror ruffling his shiny black hair. He hates the way Ama combs it neatly to the side, every night, before he goes to bed. If it weren’t for our parents, he’d never wash his hair or change his clothes. Then no one would smile in the street or beam thirsty grins at him again. When Ama overhears our night-time whispering, she hisses a rustling ‘Ssssh, be quiet!’ and, in between her words, you can hear the pumping exhausts that choke her day, the sound of car doors slamming and the creasing of maps hiding roads that always carry on over the page.

Our hotels are usually within sight of the conference centres and we park the car in between hundreds of others. The rooms are teeming with fellow scientists and the foyers thick with greetings: ‘Meet my wife and children’, ‘I read your book’, ‘Will you be presenting your recent statistics?’

Ama jots down notes for Pado. Her memory sweeps backwards and forwards like the windscreen wipers on the car. She collects papers, remembers dates, faces and addresses. ‘Isn’t that xsthe pathologist from Stuttgart?’ she nudges Pado, writing down a name called up from the depths of her sleepless mind.

Ama is Pado’s translator too. She translates his speeches and articles, rolls out the languages he needs. She says the important thing is never to have an accent. That’s why no one ever knows where she comes from, not even her. Pado doesn’t care about accents, and whatever language he speaks, it sounds like Italian. If we have the room next to our parents, we can hear Ama correcting Pado, stopping and insisting on an intonation. Pado listens to her, running the cold bathroom tap over his toes, swollen from accelerating, foot down against the floor, all day long.

‘Please Gaspare, just try once more, for me,’ Ama pleads.

Then the rosary of Pado’s pronunciations starts up again and coils through the wall that divides us, an echoing rhythm to sleep to.

When we don’t even have time to stop in a hotel, we rush into roadside bars and hurry the waiters with ‘no time to waste’ sandwiches. Then we race back to the car and drive into the night, humped over our knees and our mother wide-eyed in the darkness. Pado uses the time to rehearse his speeches: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, members of the scientific community …’ He presents his findings on smoking and the different aspects of lung congestion to the cold windscreen with Ama’s lost face painted into the glass.