MISTLETOE IN MY HAIR-NET

Ian Thomson recalls a Christmas spent in the cranial traumatology clinic of one of Rome's more primitive hospitals

`I'M AFRAID you've had an emergency operation for a fractured skull.' A blurred but familiar face divided into three, then two and finally into focus as the English friend who shared my flat in Rome. I protested, 'But why me?' The image dis- solved and I was out again.

Some hours later I awoke outside what must have been, to judge by the sharp ammonia stench, a latrine. A sign at the end of the corridor announced: 'SAN GIO- VANNI, ROME: CRANIAL TRAUMATOLOGY CLINIC'. Five or six nuns swished past, each bearing what resembled a carafe of white wine. They were pursued by a man wearing a cotton-wool beard and a belted red tunic. 'Mind how you go with those pee- jugs!' he joshed. The sisters made a strange noise like startled poultry.

Shivering from the cold, I found I could not sit up; like a bedlamite, I had been strapped to a low iron trolley out in the corridor. Fairy lights on a small silver tree nearby fizzed and crackled from a faulty connection as I groaned for assistance. Father Christmas was chivvying another group of sisters. 'You can't just leave him there like that!' he seemed to be saying. There was a smell of canteen slops and carbolic soap.

Nuns were frequently to be seen at the Roman hospital of San Giovanni; it is affil- iated to the ugly basilica of the same name. Soon enough a couple of Catholic sisters came to untie me, hastily providing a bowl into which I emptied the previous night's supper. One of them, a big-thighed, strong-buttocked creature, yanked sharply at a piece of plastic tubing. A light bulb popped in my head and I blasphemed with the pain: 'Madonna!' I had no idea I had been rigged to a catheter.

`Calma, calmati!' soothed the nun as she plumped my pillow. 'It will be Christmas soon.' To which she added with surreal irrelevance: 'There's nothing to stop you going to Vigil Mass after surgery.'

Prior to surgery, the last my friend had seen of me was as a group of flustered doc- tors, white coats flapping, hurtled me out of casualty on a trolley, swing-doors bang- ing on our way to the operating theatre. `Stai ferrnar they shouted at the terrified girl. 'Stay right where you are!'

Five hours had elapsed between my col- lapse in the bedroom of our flat and being discovered there with the telephone dan- gling — in best Hitchcock tradition from its hook, fingerprints of blood on the walls and floor.

It was a close brush with mortality. The operation for an impacted fracture with resultant haematoma — a swelling com- posed of blood effused into the connective tissues of the brain — had lasted three hours. During most of this time my friend was kept in the dark about my chances of survival. After constant pleading, a nurse (or nun) agreed to telephone the operat- ing theatre. 'Coma oppure mono sicuro,' came the verdict. A coma, if not death. During this ordeal my friend was unkindly ordered to remove her shoes: her restless pacing up and down was disturbing other patients asleep in the corridors.

Surgery had left me with a hole in the back of my skull where the haematoma had been evacuated. It was the size of a healthy tangerine. My head had been swathed in bandages like a mummy's, and a hair-net pulled tightly over the dressing. The quaintly named Dottore Milza (Doc- tor Spleen), who performed the operation, cautioned me against the hole. 'You are fortunate not to be in a persistent vegeta- tive state,' he remarked in accurate medi- cal English. 'But you are missing some bone and therefore less thick-skulled than before.' `So what's to be done?'

`May I suggest a silver plate? We can glue it over your cavity. You'll be grateful for the protection.'

I didn't like the sound of this: how could one get through the metal detectors at an airport with a silver plate in one's head? But I trusted Dr Spleen. A stocky man of regimental bearing, he gave an impression of brisk efficiency. Clip-board tucked under his arm like a swagger-stick, he tapped the glass of his watch, saying, 'We'll see you after Christmas for therapy. Cheer up. We can always stick some mistletoe in your hair-net.'

I found it hard to believe that this could be Europe, let alone the capital of Italy, at a time of goodwill. Certainly it made no difference to the urinals of San Giovanni that we were about to celebrate the solemn Nativity of Our Lord: they remained as squalid as those aboard the second-class Naples-Palermo express. The food was usu- ally a stew of fish and rice swimming in oleo-margarine, or else half-boiled lumps of pork gristle, soft and tallowy. Patients would resignedly refer to is as 'grasso di rinoceronte', rhino-fat.

After three days I was moved from the corridor into a ward where the walls were decorated with old Kodachrome pho- tographs of Mount Vesuvius and Sophia Loren. The basilica of San Giovanni itself — or its blackened façade — was dimly vis- ible from a single frosted window. A grim place. At least the food improved as Christ- mas approached. On a good day one might find a few currants peeping from the cus- tard. We ate this pudding in respectful silence, as though a coffin were in the room. One evening, though, a patient yelled at a startled nun, 'What is it? What's this stuff?'

We all dropped our spoons. Professor Testardo was a newcomer and yet to learn the ropes. 'Next thing you'll be flavouring the rhino-fat with frankincense!' he contin- ued in mellifluous Italian, beaming strange- ly. A university professor, it was rumoured that Testardo was seeing double after falling downstairs and not quite right in his mind. He wore glasses, with a wad of cot- ton-wool stuffed behind one lens. It was no surprise when he bumbled into a model of the manger, toppling the shepherds out of Bethlehem. 'Watch where you're going, headcase!' Father Christmas scolded. 'We won't put the three kings in there if you're around.'

For some days now Professor Testardo had been practising his English on me. CI am so sick of speaking the language of Dante and Fellini.') He was fascinated by the words 'And a partridge in a pear tree', and would mumble them as he eased his legs out of bed in the morning. His routine at this hour was always the same: on with the slippers, off to the urinals (mindful now of the miniature crèche), then over to the window where he'd remove his glasses and cover up each — left hand, right hand — to assess the state of his double vision. "An- a partr-eee-dge in-a pear-a-tree". Is it so?'

`So I may also say, "Goody gumdrops"?' The chaotic organisation of San Giovan- ni at Christmas was not without its com- pensations. There were rarely any night-nurses on duty in the men's ward where I was recuperating, so visitors were allowed to sleep there and tend to their relatives through the early hours. After midnight my friend would metamorphose into Our Lady of the Bedpans, prevailed upon to run all sorts of errands from procuring pain-killers to raising the alarm whenever an incontinent lost a catheter. `Signorina, signorina!' the men beseeched. As far as I was concerned, the nuns in their coifs and black habits had been trained in the school of Torquemada (my right arm had gone blue from their injec- tions) and I needed their help like the hole in my head. Cries for attention often came from the patient they called Luigi 'Sure Thing', a huge and porcine man whose unhappy habit was to break wind after lights out. For such a visual phenomenon, Luigi had a small voice and (apart from those noctur- nal eructations) a quiet manner. It was not always so: they say he had been a safe-bur- glar in the Roman underworld. A rival had coshed him on the head — it must have been a really haymaker of a wallop — and Luigi drifted in and out of a coma now. A great scar like a railway track ran across his forehead, reddish against the waxy pati- na of his skin. Surgical polythene bags full of urine hung like udders below his bed. Every afternoon Sure Thing was visited by three black-clad female relatives from Sicily, the oldest of these bearing more than a soupcon of a moustache, They came with unusual Christmas presents --wedges of pungent cheese, loaves of unleavened bread, a type of Spanish pepper with such a devilish kick to it that it was known as a diavolesco. In a surrealist parody of the Adoration, they would prostrate them- selves before Dr Spleen and offer him a gorgonzola sandwich. It was as though they divined a shamanistic power in the sur- geon, the power of life or death over their beloved Luigi. But Sure Thing was not long for this world; resignation was in the colour of the clothes and sorrowful eyes of his visiting relatives: a colour like the dark- ness of earth and death.

The holy terror of San Giovanni was Mustah. Impossible to know what he was like before brain surgery, Mustah — a Tunisian in his late teens — was now quite demented. He would hurl things at the nurses (a pillow, a slipper, even an empty plate) or spend hours gazing at an image of the Christ Child that hung above his bed. On Christmas Eve, Mustah lobbed his pillow at a trolley-load of test-tubes, scat- tering shards of glass across the ward. `Mustah!' — a priest came to counsel the problematic patient — 'Do you know what hell is like? It is as hot as Tunis in July and everyone is made to recite a thousand Hail Marys.'

It failed to make an impression. All Mustah would say was, 'Ho paura di nes- suno,' I'm afraid of no one. Not that the nurses helped; they only encouraged Mus- tah in his antics, teaching him to wolf- whistle, which caused them piquant amusement.

Supper that Christmas Eve was little better than the usual rhino-fat. It consist- ed of paltry strips of turkey followed by a suety dish served under plastic fly-covers. `There is one well-known remedy for hunger.' Professor Testardo sucked on a tooth noisily. 'Know what it is? A damn good dinner. Asparagus risotto, baked oys- ters with parmesan cheese, poached sea bass in orange marinade. And any God's amount of partridges in pear trees.'

`What about brains?' This from Sure Thing.

`Only in Albania,' said Professor Testar- do.

Ho paura di nessuno.' Mustah gave an idiot grin.

At midnight I wiped the condensation from my bedside window with a pillow- slip. A china-blue half-moon hung in the sky above the basilica of San Giovanni where they were celebrating Vigil Mass. I could clearly see a group of hospital patients, dressed in pyjamas, running as far as they could towards the Egyptian obelisk in the middle of Piazza San Gio- vanni. I recognised Father Christmas among them. A delirium born in sleep, perhaps; but the hare-brained escapade cheered me greatly.

On Boxing Day I was visited for therapy by Dr Spleen and a group of trainee doc- tors. 'And how is our Englishman this win- try morning? In fighting trim, I hope.' The tests involved a lolly-stick pressed against the tongue, noting the response of pupil dilation, tapping the knee-caps with a rub- ber hammer. I also had to walk across the ward in a straight line and lift up both legs simultaneously — not easy when your head is supposed to remain on the pillow. Worse was when Dr Spleen decided to test my multiplication tables in Italian, some- thing which always caused me the greatest of difficulty even in English. With every incorrect answer (in fact there were no correct ones), the doctors cast one another nervous glances and then proceeded to the days of the week. Here I had no problem; my spoken Italian had become quite fluent — unaccountably so — since the day I received a blow to my head.

`Very impressive.' Dr Spleen raised an eyebrow. 'It's hardly the Berlitz method, but a cranial cavity can certainly work won- ders.' Then he unexpectedly snatched away the book I was reading, A Christmas Carol, to challenge me on the author's name.

Surely we can do better than this, I thought.

By the sixth day of Christmas boredom was beginning to take its toll. Professor Testardo had decided to moan a good deal CI have a headache that aspirin cannot cure'), while Mustah was reduced to angry silence after failing to set fire to the cattle shed with its figurines of Mary and Joseph, the ox and ass. I had no dressing-gown — only a raincoat; and no slippers — only a pair of sandals. The nurses sniggered at my sartorial elegance as I took a daily shuffle round the hospital with the help of my friend. At least I could walk now, albeit with a weird sense of balance. 'The fall and rise of a Rome patient!" Dr Spleen congrat- ulated me.

The walls of his office were hung with fabulous diagrams from a dissection hand- book. 'Gray's Anatomy!' exclaimed Dr Spleen. 'A far greater work of art than The Divine Comedy.' The delicate fibres of the optic nerve resembled the veins in a dead leaf, a diagonal dissection of the brain like a great pink cauliflower. And the names! Fissure of Sylvius, Orbiculus Ciliaris, the Limbic Lode. 'The mistakes made by us surgeons are innumerable, you know.' Dr Spleen hemmed and hawed a bit. 'Quite a few patients have died under me.' I decid- ed then to have the silver plate fitted in London.

On the twelfth day of Christmas, Epiphany, the three Magi were added to the beleaguered manger. 'What does my true love send to me now?' Professor Tes- tardo seemed sad at my departure. I had been informed by the head nurse that another haematoma casualty was on his way, and that it was now time for me to leave. Having said goodbye to my fellow inmates, a porter handed me a black refuse bag with my clothes — the trousers, he said, had been incinerated because they were blood-stained. Now bearded and unrecognisable, I hobbled out.

It was snowing in Rome, the first snow- fall in ten years. Soft flakes were falling over the Capitoline Hill and the Colosse- um, like down from a pillow fight. Despite the comical horrors of San Giovanni, I had enjoyed my convalescence there. The per- vasive goodwill among patients, the regal solitude of the sick-bed, all this had made my illness oddly pleasurable. And I wasn't sent a bill.

Ian Thomson's book Bonjour Blanc: A Journey Through Haiti is out in Penguin paperback.