The Water-Breather. Ben Faccini
knee. He hesitates a moment, then edges away, abandoning Ama’s hand to itself.
We pass at least five public lavatories, but we’re not allowed to stop because Pado assures us his Italian university book on venereology is still a reference. He has it with him at all times.
‘Page forty-one,’ he says, pointing to his case.
Ama opens the book and scrunches up her face as she reads that ‘virulent germs and potential diseases are everywhere, particularly in places of scant hygiene such as public toilets’. Then she turns the pages quickly to avoid looking at the photographs too long.
‘How hideous!’ she winces. ‘Is that what happens in acute cases of gonorrhoea?’
Pado nods and, from over Ama’s shoulder, I can see pictures jumping out at me, like squashed animals on the road, stuck between people’s legs. Giulio says he doesn’t care about the photographs or any disease or anything, but he is going to burst if he doesn’t get to a loo soon.
Pado tells him to quieten down: ‘Men can hold on.’
Ama is sure that it is harder for women and then that’s it because Pado says: ‘How come everything is so much more difficult for women?’
‘That’s not what I meant at all,’ Ama protests.
‘Then why say it like that?’
It all comes down to the fact that Ama was brought up in England and it’s not a place to live because people don’t speak their mind and have to make little, snide comments instead. It’s not as if you can’t make little comments in Italy though.
In fact, we used to have a potty, but that ended when Giulio made it overflow. He was telling Duccio to move over, and not looking, and then it was too late. Streams of pee were flooding the car and Ama was screaming ‘Get out!’ in English, French and Italian all at once. The pee made a stain on the floor and layers of antiseptic wipes won’t make it go away. If the days are hot and the car is warm, a faint smell rises in your nose.
Ama likes to find her own quiet spot to pee. As the only woman in the car, she tells us she has a right to be alone. She points at trees and behind bushes, forces us down lanes. Pado always has a different spot in mind.
‘Here’s perfect! Perfetto.’
‘No Gaspare, not here, please.’
‘Why, it’ll do fine.’
‘No, not here.’
‘For goodness’ sake, who cares?’
‘I do!’
‘I’m going to stop here.’
‘No, go on a bit.’
‘Why?’
‘There’s someone coming.’
‘Where?’
‘There, from behind that house.’
‘I can’t see a house.’
‘There!’
‘That’s not a house.’
‘What the hell is it then?’
‘It’s a barn.’
‘No, it’s not.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Please drive on! Look, there is somebody coming.’
‘That’s a fucking cow.’
‘Don’t get angry with me. I can’t believe this.’
‘You can’t believe what?’
‘I simply want a pee, you idiot.’
‘Don’t call me a fucking idiot.’
‘I didn’t, I said idiot.’
‘Come on, out you get. We’re all waiting.’
‘Carry on further! I’m not going anywhere near that cow.’
‘What? Why the hell not? It’s behind a fence.’
‘I know. I just don’t like it. I’m sorry, I’m not doing anything in front of that cow! Forget it, just forget it.’
‘Right. I’m stopping here, behind this tree.’
We stop under a tree, down a lane. The air is cold, and stripped, desolate farmland stretches all about and around. Pado turns the engine off. Ama won’t budge. She refuses to look at Giulio who is tapping her shoulder from behind. Then Duccio and I tap her on the shoulder too, ‘Go on, Ama, please have a pee! It’s all right here.’
‘Will you all stop getting at me! I don’t want to go any more,’ Ama yells, shrugging us off her. We shrink backwards into our seats and Pado kicks the accelerator so hard that the cows in the meadows stretch over their fences to watch the mud on our tyres being sprayed up into the air.
Crossing the Channel is not only dicey because of the rough seas, there are also Pado’s glass jars of preserved lungs and the histological slides for his colleagues to take into account. You have to explain them carefully to customs so Pado prefers to slip them under his seat with all the wine he’s jammed into every gap of the car.
‘Don’t take that much wine Gaspare, it’s not reasonable. You know what they’re like at customs,’ Ama tries wearily.
‘Bloody customs. Ridiculous limits!’ Pado won’t give up.
We divide the wine into ‘good friends’ and ‘acquaintances’. The good friends get labelled bottles carefully laid out under cheese, garlic and pâtés to hide their number. The acquaintances get cheap wine shoved under the back seat, huddled up against the floating organs in their jars.
‘Please tell me they are from an animal!’ Ama begs when she sees them.
Pado merely mutters ‘Yes, yes’ to Ama.
She’s not convinced, and nor are we, because it’s like the time Mr Yunnan first arrived. Mr Yunnan came in a jumble of brown cardboard boxes with numbers on them. Box one goes on box two and so on and so forth, until you have a whole body, or rather a skeleton, as Mr Yunnan has been dead for some time, maybe four or five years, Pado reckons. It was Giulio and I who gave him his name. The first time he was assembled, we couldn’t believe it was so complicated. Clicking the neck onto the spine was the hardest. Luckily, Pado had had delicate hinges fitted so he could rotate the bones to face all his colleagues in the back rows. He says that’s how he describes the kind of deformation of the ribs that can happen with lung inflammation and something about osteoclastic pitting of the bones.
Ama was sure the skeleton was plastic. ‘Look how the finger bones are joined together! Isn’t it fantastic what they can do nowadays! The knees bend, and the feet!’
That was before she read the certificate, half in English, half in Chinese, which said that Professor Gaspare Messina has the right to carry human skeleton number 76455 for professional purposes.
‘There’s nothing to get het up about,’ Pado reassured Ama. ‘He’s dead. I got him through a special deal with the Chinese government, in Yunnan Province. It’s the cheapest and best place for skeletons because they’re generally in good nick when they arrive.’
Ama couldn’t look Mr Yunnan’s way. She was speechless. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I need this skeleton for my work. It’s fine.’
‘It’s fine to drive around with someone’s bones in our car is it? What next Gaspare? What bloody next?’ Ama gasped.
We looked at Mr Yunnan. This extra presence. This unassembled, severed set of bones that we had touched with our own bare hands. It was only when Pado explained that you could tell he was a young man and that he might well have been a prisoner, that I knew that the hinge at the base of his neck was fastened to the point