As she heard that the medical students would be returning to the hospital in the morning, Raffaella Òsimo begged the head nurse to usher her into the primary care room, where the semiotics classes were being held.

The head nurse gave her a dirty look.

– Do you want the students to see you?

– Yes, please; take me.

– But do you know you look like a lizard?

– I know. I don’t care! Take me.

– Would you look at that. And what do you imagine they’ll do to you in there?

– Like to Nannina, – replied Òsimo. – No?

Nannina, her next-door neighbour, who had left the hospital the day before, had shown her, as soon as she got back to the ward after the lesson in the room at the back, her body all marked out like a map; her lungs, heart, liver, spleen, with dermographic pencils.

 – And you want to go there? – she concluded. – For me, you need me. But mind you don’t take the mark off for many days, not even with soap.

Òsimo shrugged her shoulders and said, smiling:

– You take me, and don’t you care.

Some colour had returned to her face; but she was still so thin; all eyes and all hair. Her eyes, however, black and beautiful, shone sharply again. And in that little bed, her little girl’s body, tiny, did not even seem, between the folds of the blankets.

 

To that head nurse, as to all nuns, she was an old acquaintance, Raffaella Òsimo.

She had already been there twice before, at the hospital. The first time, for… – eh, blessed girls! they let themselves be fooled, and then, who gets hurt? a poor innocent little creature, who ends up in the foundling home.

Òsimo,, to tell the truth, had also bitterly served her time, her foulness; two months or so after giving birth, she had returned to the hospital more than here, with three tablets of sublimate in her system. Now she had been suffering from anaemia for a month. By dint of iron injections she had already recovered, and in a few days she would be out of hospital.

They loved her in that ward and felt charity and suffering for her because of the shy and smiling grace of her goodness even though she was so disconsolate. But even the despair in her did not manifest itself with gloom or tears.

She had said, smiling the first time, that there was nothing left for her now but to die. Victim as she was, however, of a fate common to too many girls, she had aroused neither particular pity nor fear for that dark threat. It is known that all seduced and betrayed girls threaten suicide: one should not give oneself to believe such things.

Raffaella Òsimo, however, had said it and had done it.

In vain, then, the good nuns had tried to comfort her with faith; she had done so, as she was doing now; she listened attentively, smiled, said yes; but it was clear that the knot that clutched her heart would not loosen or be loosened by those exhortations. She recognised that she had deceived herself, that the real deception had come from her inexperience, from her passionate and credulous nature, rather than from the young man to whom she had abandoned herself and who could never have been hers.

But resign herself, no, she could not.

That if for others her story was nothing special, it was no less painful for her. She had suffered so much! First the heartbreak of having her father murdered, treacherously; then, the irreparable fall of all her aspirations.

She was a poor seamstress now, betrayed like so many others, abandoned like so many others; but one day… Yes, the others, it is true, said the same: – But one day… – and they lied; because to the wretched, to the defeated, the need to lie arises spontaneously from the oppressed breast.

But she did not lie.

She was still a young girl and would certainly have obtained her teacher’s licence if her father, who had supported her in her studies with such love, had not died so suddenly, down there in Calabria, murdered, not out of direct hatred, but during the political elections, at the hands of an unknown assassin, paid no doubt by the opposing faction of Baron Barni, whose zealous and faithful secretary he was.

Having been elected at the parliament, Barni, knowing that she was also a motherless and lonely woman, had taken her into his home in order to perform an act of charity in front of the electorate.

So she had come to Rome, in an uncertain state: they treated her as if she were family, but in the meantime she was the governess of the baron’s youngest children and also a bit of a lady-in-waiting to the baroness: without pay, of course.

She worked: the Baron took credit for the charity.

But what did he care, then? She worked with all her heart, to win the paternal benevolence of her host, with a secret hope: that her loving care, that is to say, her services without compensation, after her father’s sacrifice, would win the baron’s opposition to his eldest son, Riccardo, when he, as he had already promised her, declared his love for her. Oh, he was very sure Riccardo would condescend willingly; but he was only nineteen, he was still a high school student; he did not feel the courage to make that declaration to his parents: better to wait a few years.

Now, waiting… But there, could it be? In the same house, always close, amid so many flatteries, after so many promises, with so many oaths…

Passion had blinded her.

When, in the end, the foul could no longer be hidden, she was thrown out! Yes, banished indeed, she could say, without any mercy, without any regard even for her state.

After the birth, however, she had not wanted to return to Calabria; the baron, then in a rage, had threatened to take away the cheque; and he had indeed taken it away, after the attempted suicide. Riccardo had left for Florence; she, saved by a miracle, had started working as a young seamstress to support herself and her aunt. A year had passed; Riccardo had returned to Rome; but she had not even tried to see him again. Having failed in her violent purpose, she had taken it into her head to let herself die little by little. One fine day, the aunt lost her patience and returned to Calabria. A month earlier, during a fainting spell at the house of the dressmaker where she worked, she had been taken to the hospital and had stayed there to treat her anaemia.

The other day, meanwhile, from her cot, Raffaella Òsimo had seen the medical students who were taking a course in semiotics passing through the ward, and among these students she had seen Riccardo again, after about two years, with a young girl beside him, who must have been a student herself, blond, beautiful, foreign-looking: and from the way he looked at her… – ah, Raffaella could not deceive herself! – it was clear that he was in love with her. And how she smiled at him, hanging almost in his eyes….

She had followed them with her gaze to the end of the aisle; then she had stood with her eyes averted, raised on one elbow. Nannina, her bedside neighbour, had laughed.

– What did you see?

– Nothing…

And she too had smiled, as she slumped back on the bed, her heart beating as if it wanted to leap from her breast. Then the head of the room had come to invite Nannina to get dressed, because the professor wanted her there for the students’ lesson.

– And what should they do to me? – Nannina asked.

 – They’ll eat you! What do you want them to do to you? – she answered. – It’s your turn; it will be the others’ turn. You will leave tomorrow, anyway.

Raffaella had trembled at first at the thought that it might be her turn. Ah, so fallen, so derelict, how could she reappear before him there? For certain faults, when beauty is gone, neither pity nor sympathy.

Surely Richard’s companions, seeing her so wretched, would have laughed at him:

– How! What, with that little lizard?

It would not have been revenge. Nor did she, after all, want revenge.

But when, after half an hour or so, Nannina had returned to her little bed and explained what they had done to her there, and had shown her body all marked up, Raffaella had suddenly changed her mind; and now she was trembling with impatience, waiting for the students to arrive.

 

They arrived, eventually, around ten o’clock. There was Riccardo and, like the other day, next to the foreign student. They looked at each other and smiled.

– Shall I get dressed? – Raffaella asked the headmistress, jumping up to sit on the bed as soon as they entered the room at the end of the aisle.

– Ih what a rush! Down,’ the headmistress ordered her, ‘wait before the professor gives the order.

But Raffaella, as if she had told her:

– Get dressed! – she began to dress surreptitiously.

She was already good and ready under the covers when the headmistress came to call her.

Pale as death, convulsing all over her miserable little body, smiling, her eyes sparkling and her hair falling from all sides, she entered the room.

Riccardo Barni was talking to the young student and did not notice her at first, who – lost among so many young people – was looking for him with her eyes and did not hear the head physician, a free lecturer in semiotics, saying to her:

– Here, here, you g lady dau!

At the professor’s voice, Barni turned around and saw Raffaella staring at him, her face now flushed.

– In short! – shouted the professor. – Here!

Raffaella heard all the students laughing and became more and more bewildered; she saw that Riccardo was retreating to the end of the room, towards the window; she looked around, smiled nervously and asked:

– What shall I do?

– Here, here, lie down here! – ordered the professor, who was standing at the head of a small table, on which some kind of padding was spread out.

– Here I am, yes, sir! – Raffaella hastened to obey, but as she struggled to get up and sit on the table, she smiled again and said: – I can’t reach it…

A student helped her up. As she sat down, she looked at the professor, who was a handsome man, tall, clean-shaven, with gold spectacles, and said to him, pointing to the foreign student:

‘If you would let me draw it for you…’.

New burst of laughter from the students. The professor also smiled:

– Why? Are you ashamed?

– No, sir. But I would be happier.

And he turned to look towards the window at the back, where Riccardo had crouched, his back turned to the room.

The blonde student instinctively followed that look. She had already noticed Barni’s sudden upset. Now she realised that he had retreated there, and she too became very upset.

But the professor called her:

– Up, then, to you, Miss Orlitz. Let us please the patient.

Raffaella lay down on the small table and looked at the student, who was lifting her veil on her forehead. Ah, how beautiful she was, white and delicate, with blue eyes, sweet sweet. There she freed herself from her cape, took the dermographic pencil the professor handed her and bent over her to uncover her breasts with unsure hands.

Raffaella Òsimo closed her eyes in shame at her wretched breast, exposed to the gaze of so many young people around the table. She felt a cold hand rest on her heart.

– It beats too much… – said the young lady immediately, with a distinctly exotic accent, withdrawing her hand.

– How long have you been at the hospital? – asked the professor.

Raffaella replied, without opening her eyes, but with her eyelids fluttering nervously:

‘Thirty-two days. I’m almost healed.

– See if there is an anaemic murmur,’ the professor resumed, handing the student the stethoscope.

Raffaella felt the coldness of the instrument on her breast; then the young lady’s voice said:

– Breath, no… Palpitation, too much.

– Come on, do the percussion,’ the professor then ordered.

At the first strikes, Raffaella bent her head to one side, clenched her teeth and tried to open her eyes; she immediately closed them again, making a violent effort on herself to contain herself. From time to time, as the student suspended her percussion a little to mark a short line under her middle finger with a pencil dipped in a glass of water held by a student nearby, she painfully blew out the breath she had been holding through her nares.

How long did that torment last? And he was always there, by the window… Why didn’t the professor call him back? Why didn’t he invite him to see her heart, which his blonde companion was gradually tracing on that squalid breast, so reduced for him?

There, at last the percussion was over. Now the student was joining all the little lines to complete the drawing. Raffaella was tempted to look at her heart, drawn there; but, suddenly, she could no longer bear it; she burst into sobs.

The professor, annoyed, sent her back to the ward, ordering the ward sister to bring in another, less hysterical and less stupid patient.

Would he have looked for her with his eyes, at least, crossing the ward? But no, no: what did she care anymore? He would not even raise his head to be seen. He no longer had to see her. It was enough for her to let him know how she had been reduced to him.

With trembling hands, she picked up the fold of the sheet and pulled it over her face, as if she were dead.

For three days Raffaella Òsimo watched with careful care that the mark of the heart was not erased from her breast.

On leaving the hospital, in front of a small mirror in her poor little room, she confided a stiletto pointed at the wall, there, in the middle of the mark that her unsuspecting rival had drawn on her.

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