Free Like Family by Paolo Giordano Page A

few seconds, whereupon the shivering ceased instantly. How long had it been since a mantouched her so gently? The doctors always protected themselves with gloves, and they were almost all young and glacial, but the acupuncturist with the unseeing eyes . . . he had a delicate touch and a lovely voice, mellow and deep.
    He’d explained to her how the whorls of the auricle contain the form of an upside-down fetus, a fetus waiting to see the light, and how by opportunely stimulating the nerve centers of that miniature individual it is possible to heal the body in its entirety. Mrs. A. listened intently, eating up his words and picturing the diminutive copy of the tumor inside her ear; she imagined it pierced by the needle. At the same instant, by magic, the one in her chest dissolved as well.
    â€œWill it hurt?” she asked.
    â€œNot at all. The needles are very fine.”
    â€œToo bad.”
    She wanted the monster in her to die painfully, for it to experience what she’d been going through, at least for a moment. The ambivalence that she exhibited toward the cancer at that stage was curious: on some occasions she spoke of it as a trampled part ofherself, on others as an alien life trapped inside her body, to be eradicated, period.
    â€œNow close your eyes,” the blind doctor had said, “and think of something pleasurable.”
    Something pleasurable. And so, for the first time in a long while, as she lay on yet another bed in yet another doctor’s office, motionless so that the needles sticking out of her body like a porcupine’s wouldn’t bend or move or penetrate more deeply, Mrs. A. recalled the day in late October when Renato had married her, the maple trees with their bloodred leaves like wounds on the valley’s slopes. She’d worn a dress that a seamstress had sewn, identical to that of Paola Ruffo of Calabria, but to make it more personal she had ordered a coronet of white rosebuds from a milliner on Via XX Settembre. Everything must still be in the armoire, the dress and the coronet’s frame, along with her wedding trousseau, which she had quickly stored away and then never dared take out again. She was stung by sharp regret thinking about the sheets and tablecloths, so costly and never used due to excessive regard.
    Then, through some train of association, maybe because he was in the habit of opening all the closetdoors in the house to see what was inside, Mrs. A.’s attention shifted to Emanuele. She recalled the morning when he decided to let go of the chair leg, take three uncertain steps toward her and finally cling to her stockings. It had been Mrs. A. who’d witnessed that miracle. Nora and I were slightly affronted, in part because she had not stopped crowing about it. “He started to walk with me,” she would proclaim proudly, and then she’d start to describe the scene all over again. Emanuele heard her repeat it so many times that he ended up mistaking that story for a memory. “Yes, I’m sure. I let go of the chair and toddled over to her. I clung to her stockings.” Since Babette passed away, we’ve given up contradicting him.
    _____
    There was something that Mrs. A. often said about our son: “Just try to measure him up against ten other boys his age. Compared to him they all seem like monkeys.” To some extent she was not mistaken. From the time he was born, Emanuele’s body had been well proportioned and harmonious, his features flawless, the difference between him and his peers alreadyvisible when he was in the ward, surrounded by the other plastic cradles. In the hospital room, Nora and Mrs. A. exclaimed over the perfect shape of his head, so small and round—the C-section had favored that—and his skin, clear and smooth from the beginning, none of the redness that made other newborns look blotchy.
    A few weeks later, I, too, who considered myself immune to the wonder, had fallen under