The Garden of Letters (20 page)

In Ethiopia, daily life was more brutal than Angelo had let on in his letters to Dalia. The camp he was stationed in was several hundred miles outside Addis Ababa, in the middle of the desert. The air was hot and the dust storms were brutal on the men’s eyes. Although he had only done a bit of surgery when he was in medical school, these skills were quickly and repeatedly put to use, as removing bullets and shrapnel kept him busy. Men were carried in on stretchers with their flesh shattered from the impact of bullets. He learned through trial and error how far to dig, or how much morphine they could spare. On the days when supply shipments were delayed, the men were strapped down and forced to chew on a strip of leather while he extracted the bullet.

He rarely left the camp, and spent most of his days in the surgical tent.

They were a motley group of men. As most of them were uneducated, they at first kept their distance from Angelo, thinking his advanced degree and medical training made him different from them. But over the weeks, the close quarters of their cots, the poor food, and their mutual longing for their wives and girlfriends helped forge a camaraderie among all the men. Nicknames were soon doled out. But out of respect, everyone always called him
Dottore
Angelo.

One day, two months into their encampment, there was a call for Angelo from one of the soldiers.

“Dottore! Dottore!”
Tancredi cried out for him. Angelo sped outside the tent to discover a tall, emaciated African carrying a boy in his arms.

The man could not have weighed more than a hundred pounds. He carried his son, equally famished, like a broken kite frame. The skin on the boy’s torso was as tight as stretched canvas. His white bandages were soaked brown with blood. The ebony of both father and son’s skin was camouflaged by a thick coating of body paint, and from underneath the stripes of pigment, the father’s eyes were dark and wet like river stone.

Both Tancredi and Angelo ran out to meet the man, who collapsed as the others reached him, the boy’s body sliding weightlessly to the ground.

“Help me lift him,” Angelo ordered Tancredi, and together they raised the boy onto the stretcher that two other men had quickly brought to the scene.

“We’ll need to turn him over,” Angelo instructed. They flipped him onto his back and the boy let out a small, muffled groan.

With deft hands Angelo placed one hand on the boy’s scapula, and with his other hand, traced his finger across the bullet wound. A grape-sized entryway into the flesh of his shoulder was now crusted with blood and pus.

“Infection has already set in,” Angelo said, more to himself than to Tancredi. He touched the boy’s forehead. He was burning with fever.

“Go get the translator to tell the father we need to operate immediately,” he instructed Tancredi. Angelo immediately followed the stretcher into the surgical tent, and within minutes he was preparing to operate on the boy. The instruments were sterilized by one of his assistants, and he had just begun to pull the morphine into the needle when Tancredi returned.

“Did you tell him?” Angelo asked. He did not bother to look up, his eyes instead firmly set on surveying the boy’s wound, which now looked like a dark-ringed bull’s-eye.

“I couldn’t.”

Tancredi looked pale.

“Why’s that?” Angelo was impatient and just about to inject the boy with anesthetic.

“Because . . .” Tancredi stood there for a second like he had a stone in his mouth. “Because,
Dottore
 . . . Because he was dead.”

Angelo continued staring at the boy’s shoulder and didn’t answer Tancredi.

A great gust of wind entered the tent and lifted Angelo’s surgical coat. He didn’t move from his position.

He simply took out his scalpel and cut into the boy.

The boy survived the operation, but when he recovered, he had no one to claim him. The sight of the dying father—who had survived long enough to reach their campsite with his wounded son in his arms—was hard to forget for the other soldiers. They didn’t have the heart to abandon the boy now that he was alone.

They learned his name was Nasai from the cook, Amara, who always made sure the boy was well fed. When other Ethiopians occasionally arrived, the men would always introduce the boy in a vain attempt to see if a distant relative could be found. But none came forward, and none were ever discovered. So Nasai remained with the Italians.

Grateful for the doctor who had saved him, Nasai dedicated himself to Angelo. He learned how to assist Angelo in the medical tent. He organized the instruments, folded the bandages, and helped clean up and disinfect after the surgeries. He always slept outside the tent, even though Angelo had offered him a cot. Some nights, Angelo would awaken and go outside the tarp only to discover the young boy, crouched like a protective lion, a small stick and flint blade in his hand.

Nasai learned to speak some broken Italian, to play cards with the men, and even to drink their coffee. But as many times as the men told him he could share a tent with them, he insisted he needed to sleep outside with the sound of the wind and the light of the stars.

The months passed, and Angelo and Nasai became more like father and son. Angelo taught him to read, and to eat with a fork and knife. To brush his teeth with baking soda, and to sing Italian songs.

He imagined his own child back at home, growing larger every week in Dalia’s womb. He continued to write her long letters and he tried to imagine how beautiful she must look, so ripe and full of life.

She wrote him letters on scented paper, sometimes tucking lemon blossoms into the envelopes so that even if it was only in scent, she could travel and be next to him.

At night, he would close his eyes and imagine his time in Africa as a distant memory, his world instead filled with Dalia and their many children scampering around the Portofino terrace. The surgeries in a dusty tent in the desert would be replaced by house calls to families he had known all his life. And at night, he would sleep deeply with his
limonina
curled by his side.

Dalia had tried not to think too much about the birth, but as the date drew nearer, her body seemed seized by a desire to prepare the nursery. Suddenly, nothing seemed clean enough, and the linen napkins for diapers all seemed like they needed to be refolded. As did the small dressing gowns her mother- and sisters-in-law had embroidered with her over the past several months.

She had been walking toward her mother-in-law’s house, which was close to her and Angelo’s, when she was suddenly struck with a terrible pain. She felt her entire torso besieged by a contraction.

Doubled over in agony, she somehow managed to get to the doorstep. Angelo’s mother quickly ushered her inside.

“You’re in labor,” she told her. “We need to call the midwife.” She placed one hand on Dalia’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, it’s frightening the first time, I know . . .” She wrapped a shawl around Dalia, who was shivering. “The first time is always the hardest. Next time, you won’t even blink.”

She helped Dalia to sit and did her best to keep her calm. “I feel terrible to have to leave you, if even for a moment. But I need to get one of the girls to fetch the midwife. Vanna’s house is closest. I’ll run to her and come straight back.”

Dalia whimpered that she understood.

“But don’t worry, the baby won’t come right away. It could take hours . . .”

Dalia let out another groan. The pain was excruciating. Moments after Angelo’s mother left, she felt another sharp pain, so intense, she cradled her belly in her arms and begged for it to stop.

Just as she wondered how all the women before her had handled such pain, the contraction abated. The moment of reprieve was short-lived, though, and she felt the familiar sensation of her baby swimming inside her. The small fist of the child, pushing outward slightly from the corner of her abdomen. All of a sudden she felt another contraction, but now when she looked down, a flood of wine-colored fluid was pouring out of her.

When Angelo’s mother returned, she found Dalia on the floor, white as a gull.

In a vain attempt to stop what she thought was bleeding, the old woman grabbed the first towels she could find, then lifted poor Dalia in her arms and tried to keep her warm.

Vanna, the sister closest to Angelo, arrived, ushering the midwife through the doorway. Each of them knew immediately that something had gone terribly wrong. The midwife, a wizened gray woman who had delivered hundreds of babies before, saw the pool of port-wine fluid beneath Dalia and felt her heart sink.

Vanna gasped upon seeing her sister-in-law laid out like a pale and suffering
pieta
over her mother’s lap.

“Oh my God!” she cried.

Marina turned to Vanna and snapped into action. “This is not good. Start boiling the water, Vanna. Then get me a stack of clean sheets. We have to try and deliver the baby now.”

With the water on the stove, the women draped a cloth on the long dining room table and lifted a semi-conscious Dalia on top, as this was the custom to prevent ruining the bed.

“Marina delivered all three of my babies. You’re in good hands,” Vanna whispered into Dalia’s ear, in an attempt to soothe her. But she knew that when her water broke it had been cloudy like sea water, certainly not like diluted blood. She went to the bathroom and found a washcloth, soaked it in some water, and retuned to the dining room and brought it to Dalia’s forehead.

Dalia looked like a frightened fawn. “Please, please tell me that the baby will be all right.” Her voice was desperate.

Marina took her brown, papery hands and cupped Dalia’s abdomen and went quiet. She looked at the young girl and saw her white pallor, her teeth clenched with pain. She did what she thought would bring the girl comfort without making a false promise; she took the girl’s hand and gripped it in her own.

The blood continued to seep from between Dalia’s legs, and Vanna tried to maintain a fresh supply of towels. Her two sisters had appeared, bringing every towel they had in their own pantries. Their mother was now wailing and calling out to God, Jesus, and the Madonna. To whoever might hear her supplication. Her fingers were wrapped over her rosary, her knuckles white from gripping the beads. From Dalia’s lips there was a faint murmuring, for she was too weak to cry out. The only word she uttered was Angelo’s name.

“When will this baby come?” Angelo’s mother beseeched Marina.

“It’s in God’s hands. All we can do is wait.”