Читать книгу Innocence - Julian Barnes - Страница 19

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Hard work and opportunism are the secrets of biological success. Gramsci himself was fond of the proverb ‘Where one horse shits, a thousand swallows feed.’ But from the usual source of help, the family, Salvatore received very little. All that it really came down to was that during his years of medical training he was able to lodge at a reasonable rent over a greengrocer’s shop belonging to his great-aunt’s step-daughter’s niece.

As a medical student his call-up was deferred, and just before the Allies landed in Sicily he got himself transferred to Bologna. The following spring the great neurologist, Professor Landino, returned from a long exile, and Salvatore expected to be deeply influenced by him, but was disappointed. Honourable men are rare, but not necessarily interesting. Landino was not interesting. Neurology, however, made its appeal in the simplest possible way, for its own sake. As a junior he made notes on case after case of back injuries which had been caused two or perhaps three years earlier when the patients had come to grief in a truck or some military vehicle which had run over a mine or a pot-hole. The surgeons had removed the injured disc from the spine and fused the vertebrae above and below it to make as neat a job as possible. And now there was no inflammation, nothing to be read from X-rays or tests on the cerebrospinal fluid, and yet the patients complained of agonising pain. There were women, too, admitted to the hospital who were unable to move one arm or both, who couldn’t stoop down to lift their children, whose faces were distorted and fixed into a singer’s open-mouthed grimace. The pain was in their imagination, but as real, of course, as if it wasn’t. In fact, it was impossible in these circumstances to attach any meaning to ‘real’ or to ‘imagination’. There was no acceptable diagnosis to make. He was in the face of pain which left no trace, and healing without explanation. The specialists, however confident, knew no more, perhaps less, than a dog who lies down in the shade until it feels better. But whatever exists, can be known. Salvatore didn’t delude himself that he was capable of great discoveries. But he thought he might set himself to see why no discoveries had been made so far. ‘Gentlemen,’ Professor Landino began, with a smile which acknowledged the women students but implied that he was too old to learn new tricks, ‘not for nothing is neuralgia associated with artists, sensitives and degenerates.’ He paused on these last words, giving them equal weight. ‘We define neuralgia as pain whose origin is not clearly traceable.’