TORINO

TORINO

 

by Albino Mattioli

 

The heavy iron door shut behind me. I felt the key turning and the deadbolts sliding into the sockets in my chest. My wrist hurt. Under the bandage the tight stitches were stretching my skin. I walked slowly through the narrow corridor, the rooms were all on the left with no doors. The yellowish walls were bare and dirty, stained mattresses were folded on the vacant beds. All windows had bars. I saw a desolate patient seating by the barred window. The sergeant in charge of the psychiatric ward, looked really off, he wore a white coat and had an Indian cap from Manali on his head. He pointed towards the narrow and gloomy corridor with glittering eyes and told me, with a slight grin "you can take any bed you want" as he hastened back to his post near the entrance to finish his cigarette.

Still drowsy from the medication they had given me in Alessandria, I dragged myself around, peered in the empty rooms without fully making a sense of where I was. Weakened by the loss of blood, I ended up crushing on one of those stinky mattresses, oblivious of the smell and my surroundings. I looked outside through the bars. It was a damp morning. I thought about my mother’s ingenuous joy at the train station a week earlier, happy to see me off to the military service. Here I was at the psychiatric ward waiting for my dismissal, a slit wrist and under medication.

The sergeant in Savona at the military camp infirmary had told me he would bring flowers to my grave rather than sending me home. I couldn’t eat. Then few days later, seeing my emaciated condition, he relented and had me transferred to the Alessandria Military Hospital for treatment. When the ambulance dropped me off in the morning, it was assembly time and all the patients, mainly young boys from the South who were also there hoping to be sent home for convalescence, had all gathered in the main hall on the first floor. The Alessandria Military Hospital was managed like a prison and even though gloomy and decadent, the architecture preserved its aesthetic value and charm. Originally a church, the Chiesa di San Francesco with adjacent convent, it was built during the late 1200 AD and later transformed into a hospital. At the assembly the colonel strongly repeated with a resonant voice “...from Alessandria everybody gets cured and is sent back to the battalion!”. Those words made my heart shrink. The idea to return back to Savona to be assigned later to some remote area on the north and waist one year of my life in such depressing environment made me more sick. The following days I aimlessly wandered around the vaulted pavilions and ancient chambers. Everybody looked desperate and lost. All the eyes I saw were downcast, void, depressed. Some of the boys were crying. I finally had a break down, I couldn’t take it anymore, it all became unbearable. One night I couldn’t sleep, I looked at the high concave ceiling for hours, then as the first morning light appeared everybody started to get up, pale as a shroud, I went to ask for a razor. Someone kindly handed me a plastic disposable one. I entered the crowded bathrooms, everybody was going in and out. The noise of water running and the undistinguished voices bounced loudly against the vault above. I felt the dampness in my joints, there was a mixed smell of urine and disinfectant. I went in one of the toilettes, tore the razor and extracted the tiny blade. I held my breath, closed my eyes, raised my right hand and let it drop sliding the thin blade through my left wrist. I just walked out of the bathrooms in the crowded hall standing with my arms down, a stream of blood dripping on to the floor. Many petrified eyes were staring at me, I heard a lot of commotion, then officials arrived, as I collapsed on the floor, they took me to the infirmary were, in front of the shocked and upset eyes of the colonel, I was given few stitches and afterward sent urgently to Torino were I was now interned.

The loud sound of the deadbolts echoed in the room again. As the iron door opened and closed I heard there was someone else at the entrance. The voice of the officer calling my name resounded in the corridor. I got up and from the threshold I could see him talking to a doctor. The doctor looked at me and shouted “Why is he here? He should be in the general medicine ward!”. He was holding my medical report. He got on the phone, then he hanged up and gestured me to follow him. The heavy iron door unlocked again and opened with a screech. I followed the doctor through the gardens, we passed the church, I was finally breathing some fresh air. The hospital was a vast complex. The main driveway was lined with trees, a big park stood amid the rows of long buildings connected one another by glass galleries. When we entered, our steps resounded as we went up the staircases, through the long vacant corridors and the luminous galleries from where the outside world, veiled by the glass, appeared vague, blurred and devoid of life. The pavilion I was assigned to, was on the second floor of the General Medicine Ward, spacious with tall ceilings and arched windows. There were quiet nuns dressed in white, moving slowly around the beds while attending to the patients.

The doctor called for the head nun and after wishing me good luck he left me in her care. My bed had clean sheets and was neat. For dinner they brought a plate of steamed spinaches, fresh mozzarella and bread. There were four kids next to me, also waiting to be sent home, with whom I instantly became friend. They were from all different parts of Italy. Two of them, every night, after the unsuspecting nuns retired to their rooms, would disappear behind the thick curtains, crawl down from the window, jump over the wall and vanish in the dark. They would come back later on with pizza, beer, cigarettes and magazines.

One week passed and due to the gravity of my case, I was the first one to be dismissed and to be sent home. When I broke the news to the group, there were cheers of joy and unrestrained happiness as if all of us were leaving together. They all hugged me and congratulated me, some of us even shed few tears; we all exchanged addresses and promised to keep in touch, although it never happened.

The hospital sent me home with one month of recovery leave, then I would have to go to a local military hospital near Rome, with medical certification in hand from a local psychiatric center, to regularly assess my conditions. I was free and I could finally taste again Rome's bright days.