The Human Body Part 24

"You don't love that house. We don't love that house, remember? Remember how it was to live there?"

"It was all a long time ago."

"That doesn't change anything, Alessandro. Not a thing. They didn't even come to my wedding. They didn't give a d.a.m.n."

"You've never asked me what this place is like."

"What are you talking about?"

"You've never asked me what it's like. Here."

"I think I can imagine what Afghanistan is like."

"No, you can't. You can't imagine it. There's a huge mountain, without a single tree or a tuft of gra.s.s. Right now the summit is covered with snow and the boundary between the snow and the rock is sharp, like you wouldn't believe. And there are other mountains, much more distant. At sunset each of them takes on a different nuance-they seem like theater curtains."

"Alessandro, you're not well."

"It's a magnificent place." The scaly patches on his skin are throbbing in unison, they're about to burst. Perhaps there's new skin underneath, an intact epidermis. Or maybe there's only b.l.o.o.d.y, gory flesh. "And another thing, Marianna. On your wedding day, as we walked down the aisle, we weren't invincible. We just told ourselves we were. We told ourselves it was just fine that way, better even, that everyone would see that we were . . . free and independent. But it wasn't true. Only two crazy people believed it. Everyone else felt sorry for us."

Marianna is silent now, as the lieutenant experiences the sour taste of having gone too far, crossing a line he hadn't even dared consider before.

"Talk to you soon, Marianna," he says.

He has time to make out his sister's final, m.u.f.fled protest: "So you're on her side now?" A stab in the back. There's nothing he can do about it. He hangs up.

No, he's not on Nini's side. He doesn't know whose side he's on anymore.

Part Three.

MEN.

The Innocent Life of Nutrias.

In the final days Ernesto would leave the house in the late afternoon to take the same invariable walk along the riverbank. He bundled up more than necessary, layering woolen sweaters and pullovers, as if to restore volume to a body that was losing it. He walked with his gaze turned upward, his expression skeptical, until he came to the bend where the waters widened into a stagnant cove. There he would sit on a lacquered metal bench not far from the river's edge. He would catch his breath, measuring his jugular heart rate with the help of a wrist.w.a.tch. When the levels returned to normal, he took a paper bag out of his pocket with some dry bread, which he crumbled slowly between his fingers, clearing his throat. Sometimes, instead of bread, he brought apple slices.

The nutrias he fed were filthy animals: a kind of large rat with a rheumy snout, long white whiskers, and glittering wet fur. They lived between the backwater and the muddy sh.o.r.e, piled on top of one another. "You see?" he said to me one day. "They're like children. Ready to step over each other for a little something to eat. They're so innocent. And needy. Shameful opportunists."

As the rodents crowded around the food, Ernesto spoke about Marianna, about when she was a little girl. He repeated the same secret word games I'd heard dozens of times, somewhat worn-out by now in the telling. He couldn't manage to reconcile them with the retaliation his daughter had inflicted on him; maybe he wasn't even able to recognize it as such. Retaliation for what? he would have asked. But he'd never been very inclined to question the matter. He preferred to settle for a collection of fantasies. As for the daughter who still existed somewhere, he didn't mention her. As the crow flies she must not have been too far away from the nutrias' pond, but she was certainly light-years away from his heart. In retrospect, the astounding transformation in the last days I spent with my father was precisely that: I had always believed he didn't have a heart. Only now was I able to see that it was hopelessly broken.

When his condition suddenly worsened, I took three weeks' leave and moved home. I was Nini and Ernesto's guest, a guest in the room where I'd grown up. Lying on the bed, I could see the door to Marianna's room, the same door I'd stared at countless times trying to guess what was happening on the other side, full of apprehension when she'd lock herself in with her friends on afternoons when our parents weren't home.

I had my own personal set of towels and a toothbrush in my toiletry kit. Each time, after using them, I put them back in my suitcase. I didn't feel like leaving something that belonged to me in the bathroom or anywhere else. Every surface of every piece of furniture was so imbued with the past that it would certainly have swallowed my item up instantly, transporting it to another temporal dimension, no longer reachable. At night, when I studied my face in the mirror, my gaze fell on the giraffe and elephant decals. Here's my toothpaste, here's my brush, I won't hurry, I won't rush. Working hard to keep teeth clean, front and back and in between. I recited their nursery rhymes silently to myself, feeling neither rancor nor nostalgia.

Nini's discreet, inflexible order still governed the apartment. A few weeks later, on the very day my father died, she would leave with a small suitcase, move in with her sister (widowed before her), and never return. Only then would I realize how slight her attachment had been to the house where we'd all lived together. If she'd ever really loved it, at some point she'd stopped, and none of us had noticed it. I might have picked up some signals, might have noticed, for example, that household ch.o.r.es tired her out more and more (she'd given in and hired a foreign woman who helped out every other day, violating three or four articles of her Fundamental Charter of Sobriety at once), but it had been some time since I paid attention to Nini's decline.

After Marianna's mutiny she'd begun failing, day after day, in mind and body. She still reacted to stimuli as you'd expect she would or, more precisely, as you'd expect an automaton resembling a small, sixty-year-old woman would do. When she smiled, rarely, her smile was vacant and reminded me that I, in any case, would never be sufficient motivation to rekindle joy in her. Not even Ernesto could anymore; Nini witnessed the rapid course of his illness as if it were the manifestation of a divine retribution that concerned them both. At one time she would have voiced that unspoken feeling with words like: "Well, we certainly deserved this!"

Mornings were taken up by Ernesto's hospital visits and by the vast, daunting bureaucracy that went with them. He had worked in the same hospital for thirty-one years, in a ward scarcely forty yards and two flights of stairs away from the urology department where he was now being treated. He'd been a step away from being appointed department head, yet he enjoyed few privileges. He waited his turn like any other patient, on the row of blue plastic chairs in the corridor, fidgety, talking nonstop. At that time he was obsessed with chemical solvents found in the pigments used to paint the walls of that hallway and others, with electromagnetic pollution, and with the abundance of phthaleins in the plastic packaging of the hospital meals, which, in fact, caused prostate cancer. He estimated having ingested more than eight thousand pounds of contaminated food. As if knowing it now made any difference.

From time to time a younger colleague recognized him and would stop to exchange a few words. Ernesto took advantage of it to corner the doctor and criticize the treatment he was being subjected to. He expounded on alternative therapies he'd come up with overnight, citing exotic and somewhat dubious sources from recent oncological literature. He could never trust a specialist as much as he did himself and his own insights, not even in an area that was not within his province. In those impromptu medical lessons, which often strayed into general didactics, he was still persuasive enough often to win me to his side. But clearly he had a hold over me by then and that's all there was to it. The man in the white coat would nod impatiently, only seemingly caught up. And if he were to pa.s.s by again in the course of the day, he wouldn't stop a second time.

"Life doesn't give back much," I said to him one morning, since I was sure a similar thought was haunting him. Ernesto shrugged. He didn't feel like answering. Age had chipped away at various aspects of his persona, but not his respect for reasoning, which always had to be logical, deductive. He wouldn't tolerate ranting about what reality was or wasn't, unless there was tangible evidence. Besides, he seemed to answer me with his silence: it's clear life doesn't give back what you deserve.

One night in February he had a respiratory attack. The ambulance came for him and took him to the hospital. He was admitted to intensive care, intubated, and put on a drip. They were considerate enough to give him a single room, with a window that afforded a view of snowy mountains that turned pink at dawn. When it was evident that he didn't have very long, Nini, fairly composed, told me: "Go call her. Please."

I left the building. I had forgotten to put on my heavy jacket and the cold surprised me. I walked over to a bare birch tree and laid my hand on its trunk; inside the sap flowed slowly and persistently. I thought about the silent struggle of plants and all of a sudden I was seized by anger. Is this the way it was to end, then? Two individuals declare war for the rest of their lives, consuming everything around them, and eventually death brings them together again in a hospital room, as if nothing had happened. What became of the threats, the long faces, the intransigence of everything I had gone through?

Marianna replied groggily: "It's six fifteen, Alessandro. What do you want?"

"They admitted Papa."

"Are you talking about Ernesto?"

"About Papa, yes."

I heard my sister rea.s.suring her husband-"Go back to sleep; it's nothing"-then the rustling of sheets, a few steps. She resumed speaking in a louder voice: "And what am I supposed to do about it?"

"He's dying. He might not have long. He has an effusion of blood in his-"

"I don't care what he has. Don't tell me. Did he ask you to phone me?"

"He's sedated. He can't talk."

"He talked enough when he was conscious."

"Marianna, this is no time for-"

"For what? Give me a break, Alessandro. The alarm clock goes off in an hour and I don't want to look like a total wreck when I get to work."

"Are you serious?"

"Does it seem to you that I'm joking? You know full well how hard it is for me to get back to sleep, so I guess at this point I'll just lie in bed with my eyes wide open until seven o'clock."

I kicked the tree trunk. A spiral of white outer bark broke away and fell to the ground. The inner bark beneath it was smooth and clean. I bent down to run my hand over it. The anger vanished as abruptly as it had come. It gave way to a great anguish, something like a last hope for salvation, which you'd forgotten about until a moment ago and which suddenly appears before you. Marianna had to join me, right away-it was essential. If she didn't jump into the first taxi as quickly as possible, if she didn't make it to Ernesto's room in time to see him still breathing, if tears didn't flow from her eyes, if she didn't hug Nini and hold her close, if none of this happened, then there would be no redemption for us. We'd survived an overdose of pain and might endure still more, but we wouldn't make it through the realization that there was no sense to all that travail.

"Please come," I begged her. "Our father is dying."

For a moment Marianna was silent. I listened intently for a sign of tears that would finally save us, all of us.

"For me, he doesn't exist."

Eight years earlier another phone call, equally grave though more submissive in tone, had marked the culmination of my sister's dark period and confirmed her conclusive severance from Nini and Ernesto's asphyxiating universe. Looking back on it now, it seems to me that the decisive chapters in the family life of us Egittos were all brought to a close in the same way: on the telephone. Only miles and miles of cables, buried deep in the ground, made it possible to confront subjects that, face-to-face, were too intense even to be mentioned.

After Marianna had racked up an impressive series of As and A-pluses on her report cards, which Nini kept in a folder in the top drawer of her dresser, after she'd garnered wide-ranging merit citations, Marianna's scholastic career had come to an abrupt standstill. Not that there hadn't been any warning signs. In high school Marianna had gone through months of languid, unwholesome indolence during which her average lagged, but each time she'd made up for those periods in which she'd slacked off with tremendous effort, regaining her preeminence. The decline was almost imperceptible. Still, if Ernesto had applied the same strictly quant.i.tative methods to her performance that he used to a.s.sess the rest of the world, if he had plotted a graph of her final exam results from first grade to the brink of graduation, he would immediately have noticed that they formed a descending curve.

For my part, I noticed that slight, continuing transformation by the way Marianna's freckles seemed less apparent each time summer rolled around. I had always thought that the pigmented spots on her cheeks were responsible for my sister's miraculous powers: after all, weren't they what differentiated her from the rest of us mediocre beings? But each spring they appeared less distinguishable. Since she'd gotten into the habit of getting a head start on her summer tan by resorting to tanning beds, afterward they were barely visible. By the time she reached her fourth year of university, nearly graduating with a degree in art history-a subject that didn't interest her much, but that complied with the creative bent that we liked to attribute to her-the freckles had disappeared entirely, like stars above a polluted city. And she herself simply stopped.

The exam wasn't even the most challenging, a paper on William Blake. On the first attempt she got a C and decided to retake the test. She made a brief fuss about it, but her despair and fierce railing against the teaching a.s.sistant who had questioned her obscure interpretation of the Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun seemed like a pose, aimed at masking a more serious, fundamental indifference. When she tried again, a month later, she was rejected by the professor herself. We sat at the table dumbfounded while she described the professor as an incompetent b.i.t.c.h, a frigid old hag who needed a good you know what; Nini clutched the silverware fretfully meanwhile, not daring to contest those views.

I was rooting for Marianna, as always, but it didn't help much. There was a third failure, then a fourth, in circ.u.mstances that were never very clear. The fifth time Marianna showed up for the exam without her blue book, sat down in front of the professor and her teaching a.s.sistant, and remained silent, staring at them until they grew impatient and dismissed her.

After the exam she came looking for me, wanting me to come home that night at all costs-yes, it was essential. The year before I had allowed the deadline for deferring the draft to pa.s.s, defying the family's general opposition and initiating the first of my unspoken getaways. I now resided in the barracks, but, in exchange for a favor to a superior, I was able to satisfy her.

At dinner, between sobs and hysterical tears, Marianna announced that she was dropping her studies. No one went to her; no one caressed her distraught, tearstained face. We watched her writhe like an animal caught in a trap. Her pain resonated in me with equal intensity, but I could do nothing to mitigate it. Nini expected me to say something. Ernesto went on eating, taking small bites. Finally, at the end of what he must have considered to be a childish display typical of his daughter, he said: "In the morning you're coming to the hospital. With me."

I didn't catch on at first, yet it was quite simple. For a professional like Ernesto Egitto, a respected physician who had always denied the existence of anything in man other than the workings of the body and the mental will that allows him to use it, there could be only one diagnosis: he had watched Marianna sitting at her desk for entire afternoons; therefore, if her determination wasn't at fault, it necessarily had to be something in her body. Hadn't his little girl always been tops in her cla.s.s? The most persevering, the only infallible one? Oh, but I have to go to school! she used to say to Musona. Something in her ability to function had to be jammed and he would find out what.

I have only indirect knowledge of what took place in the various hospital wards over the following months, reports that Ernesto delivered for my benefit on the infrequent occasions when I spent my leaves at home. He would reel off the tests he'd subjected Marianna to and summarize her medical record, which grew more and more sizable, as if he were gathering experimental data for a scientific publication or wanted to present me with real-life examples of what I was meanwhile studying in my college textbooks. Marianna did not partic.i.p.ate, did not comment; it was as if she were transparent, absent. Once in a while she would nod or smile briefly, without feeling.

To start with, Ernesto had an X-ray taken of her head. For several days we listened to him comment on the merits and limitations of my sister's cranial structure. The electrocardiogram revealed a slight extrasystole and Ernesto insisted on repeating the EKG under stress. Having ruled out skeletal and vascular abnormalities, he conjectured a malfunction of the lymphatic system and that avenue as well was pursued to the most improbable consequences, then proven to be fruitless. Based on blood and urine a.n.a.lyses he excluded a number of common ailments, although the high level of bilirubin led him to consider some serious pathology related to the liver. He accused Marianna of drinking too much alcohol, but it was such a ridiculous supposition-she hardly ever drank-that not even Nini, always very attentive to the developments of the testing, gave it any credence. So he settled for labeling my sister with Gilbert's syndrome, another possible concomitant cause of her recent collapse (that's what he called it now: her collapse).

Another deciliter of blood was drawn from Marianna's occluded veins, looking for evidence of rare diseases or autoimmune disorders. By the second month spent following Ernesto around from one outpatient department to another, Marianna looked anemic more than anything else, although her red blood cell count indicated the contrary. Her case was now in the public domain and we'd almost forgotten the symptom that had sparked the search: a university exam gone awry. By now we saw her as ill, in danger. She was simply too weak and tired to object. Or, as I figured out later on-and as I should have intuited by certain spirited glances she occasionally threw me-she wanted to see how far Ernesto would go to show the entire world how grave his insanity was, even at the cost of wrecking her own body.

It was after the gastroscopy report came back negative that Nini unexpectedly said, That's enough, they couldn't torture her any further. She'd known long before that there was nothing wrong with her daughter's const.i.tution, but found it too arduous to oppose her husband's intentions. Now, however, he had to stop. An argument broke out. On the rare occasions when Nini countered him, Ernesto routinely withdrew into unremitting silence. He spent hours and hours in the dark and Nini sometimes found him lying supine on the bath mat, his arms crossed over his chest like a dead pharaoh. One evening he didn't come home. That's when Nini ordered Marianna to do what some time later she would ask me to do. "Go call him. Apologize. Tell him to come home."

"Me, apologize to him?"

"Yes, you."

"Why should I?"

"That's how he is."

Nini said no more. In the Egitto family you had to know what was necessary without someone having to explain it to you. Marianna didn't have to be asked twice. As though considering for the first time the bizarre, predictable evolution of what she herself had triggered, but through a bulletproof gla.s.s, she walked resolutely to the phone, dialed Ernesto's number, and in a monotone said, "I apologize. Come home."

University, meanwhile, was a problem of the past, which no one dared bring up again, just like the senseless interlude of the medical tests: swallowed up forever by silence. Marianna barricaded herself in her room for the rest of the academic year. It was a kind of quarantine. When I saw her, I thought she seemed happier and more carefree than she'd been for a long time.

When summer came we left on a trip, she and I together with some friends. The final destination was the bleak coast of the Baltic Sea, but when we'd crossed the border between Austria and the Czech Republic, Marianna said she wanted to go back and asked to be taken to the nearest station, where she would take the first available train. "I don't feel comfortable, okay? I don't like these places-they make me feel anxious."

She forced the group to stop for a day in a small, nondescript village near Brno; in the end the others continued on, annoyed by the delay and by the fact that they would now have to crowd into the remaining cars. "I don't understand why you didn't go with them," Marianna protested, but it was clear she was grateful to me and, in a sense, considered it appropriate. I convinced her not to ruin the vacation entirely: we'd gone that far, we could at least visit Vienna. "Vienna won't make you feel anxious," I promised.

I have a confused, fragmented recollection of those last days together, the patchy memory you might have of a hurricane that catches you asleep. Marianna was intractable, seemed constantly on the verge of tears. She ate little, almost nothing. At restaurants or the small kiosks where we stopped for lunch, she stared at the food as if questioning it, until she pushed it aside, bored.

After a few days I gave up eating too. The feeling of hunger is the only unifying element of the otherwise disjointed episodes of that trip. I was hungry as Marianna, her expression fierce, viewed the tormented female bodies in Egon Schiele's watercolors and then declared, "Let's get out of here, right now. I hate this museum." I was hungry as we lay awake, lying on the double bed we shared with some embarra.s.sment, dredging up a series of old anecdotes that left us smiling or feeling really bad. I was faint from hunger, and nauseous, during our silent ride on the Ferris wheel, when Marianna turned to me, her eyes devoid of everything I knew of her, and said, "I'll never have anything to do with them, ever again." And I was hungry during the interminable trip back, under a rain that was incessant from start to finish. Without realizing it, we had resorted to the most fundamental form of purification that Ernesto had taught us: keeping the stomach empty for the greatest number of consecutive hours we were able to endure.

After our return Marianna became inscrutable to everyone. She carried out the strategy she had in mind with the meticulous style that I had always admired in her. She went back to the young man she'd been seeing halfheartedly until a few months earlier, a dull, adoring type whom Nini disapproved of with all the silent force of her demeanor; she moved in with him, and a year later married him. She rejected any invasive attempts by our parents and any mediation on my part. She was successful in the virtuoso endeavor of never saying another word to Nini and Ernesto, not even by mistake, not even to say, Leave me alone. She performed her descending scale once and for all, at a dizzying tempo and without a false note, down to the lowest notes on the keyboard.

That's how it had all ended up: Ernesto's invectives, the celebratory rituals, the love lavished and withdrawn, Nini's admonitions, the cautions, the fierce, unflagging study, the math Olympics where she finished second, the endearments, the music drills, the pounded chords that traveled down through the five floors of the building to the garage and from there sank underground, the syntactically perfect, glacial high school compositions-each element had played a part in winding Marianna up like a spring. A million turns of the key behind the back of the tin soldier she'd been. When fully wound, she'd started marching swiftly toward a finish line. It didn't much matter if that finish line coincided with the edge of the table: in our family, we all had a certain familiarity with going over the brink.

After the wedding we hardly ever talked about our parents anymore, or about our friends, about anything we had in common. When I went to see her, Marianna was always with her husband. I didn't understand how a vendetta could be carried out so coldly and kept up with the same dogged persistence. She had decided on everything long before. A little maneuver had triggered a disastrous course. There hadn't even been a real battle; everyone remained motionless in his trench, watching. On the other hand, I must have learned at least one lesson from the study of bones: the worst fractures are the kind that occur while standing still, when the body decides to go to pieces and does so in a fraction of a second, splintering into so many fragments that rea.s.sembling it afterward is unthinkable.

At Ernesto's funeral not many people asked me about Marianna. Some avoided asking out of a natural tendency to be wary, but over the years most had formed an idea of the situation that was bewildering and shocking enough to make them keep their mouths shut. Apparently rumors could even leak out of a house as well sealed up as that of the Egitto family.

A few days after the burial I turned to a psychiatrist colleague at the military hospital. I asked him for a prescription without allowing him to examine me first or explaining any of the reasons that had brought me there. I just said that I had never felt so weary in my entire life, and that an equally great agitation, combined with the incredible fatigue, kept me from sleeping. It was up to him-any substance capable of knocking me out for a while was fine; all I wanted was to rest, to disappear. "If you won't do it, I'll ask someone else. Or I'll sign it myself," I threatened.

The colleague reluctantly wrote out the prescription, urging me to see him again in a month. I did not go back. I found it more convenient to order a supply of the drug for the army, a sufficient number of boxes to get by for a long time. One pill a day, each to erase a single question to which over time I had found no answer: Why do wars break out? How does one become a soldier? What is a family?

Gra.s.s Keeps Growing

The soldiers' return home from the mission in Gulistan coincides with the arrival of spring. This is unfortunate for them: the season is too heartrending. The days never end and they convey a sense of insatiable frenzy, while the air laden with scents brings only painful memories to the surface. Marshal Rene is fighting it with everything he's got. He knows that with a little discipline you can survive any degree of pain; you just have to plan, you just have to keep busy.

He turned down his leave and the week after their return he was at his post in the barracks. His relatives in Senigallia were offended, but having to face their sympathetic faces was right at the top of his list of things to avoid. He wakes up at six thirty with his running clothes ready on the bedroom chair, at work he fills his days even if it means performing the same tasks twice, and at the end of his s.h.i.+ft he stays at the gym as long as he can. Monday evenings he plays squash with Pecone, on Thursdays he has his aikido cla.s.s, on Fridays he finds someone to go out with or else goes out alone. For the weekends, which are also the hardest time, he plans long motorcycle rides, or schedules time to clean out the garage, or any other unnecessary ch.o.r.e that comes to mind. Thanks to video games, he's also managed to fill the smaller, more insidious holes in his days. He follows the schedule with discipline and makes no significant variations, day after day, week after week. A man like him could go on like that forever.

A hardly pleasant activity that has occupied him, among others, consists of the round of visits to relatives of the deceased, which he's tackled systematically and which is about to conclude, today, in his meeting with Salvatore Camporesi's wife. The fact that he's kept her until last, that he's procrastinated for so long, is undoubtedly significant; it would merit reflection, but the marshal has no intention of examining the subject too closely.

They've been sitting together in the shade of the porch, in front of the Camporesi home, for almost two hours, while the child Gabriele plays quietly, crouched on the steps. From the outset Flavia has been determined not to do anything to make the conversation less difficult than it is. The fruit juice she offered him was warm and the bag of cookies she placed in front of him was an unfamiliar, worrisome brand that he didn't dare touch. It's clear that, at this moment, she's not prepared to pay much attention to formalities.

They've smoked more than they've talked, nonstop. After asking permission for the first few cigarettes, Flavia has gone on helping herself to the packet without asking. There are only three left and when they run out, the marshal imagines, it will be time to end the visit. Despite his discomfort, he's not looking forward to saying good-bye: Flavia Camporesi is the youngest and certainly the prettiest widow he's come across. The word itself, widow, seems to clash with her figure.

"Look-what a mess," she says suddenly, pointing to the garden, as if to distract his insistent gaze away from her.

Rene pretends to be surprised, although, walking the few feet between the outside gate and the house, he'd already noticed the neglected state of the yard. The gra.s.s comes halfway up their legs, green spikes have shot up here and there along with some wild poppies that look lethal, and the hedge that runs along the fence is overrun with wild, unruly new growth.

"I told him we shouldn't get a house like this. But for him it was like an obsession. His parents live in a place like this. Salvo always wanted to replicate his earlier life-he drove me out of my mind. By summer it will be a jungle here."

"There's no one to help you?"

Although they'd made an appointment, Flavia hasn't bothered to put on makeup and her curly hair, tied back with a rubber band, could maybe use a was.h.i.+ng. None of this is enough to detract from her face.

"For a while his father came. He took care of it. But after the accident he always wanted to talk about Salvo. He kept me in the kitchen for hours-it was exhausting. I told him to let it go." She pauses. "I'm sure he mostly wanted to check up on me. He has no right."

"I could help you myself. Cut the lawn, I mean." He says it impulsively and is immediately afraid he's made a mistake, like stepping into quicksand.

Flavia looks into his eyes for a split second, with a mixture of tenderness and pity. The cigarette burns down between her fingers. "Never mind, Rene. Thanks just the same."

"I'll gladly do it."

"You'd do it because you feel sorry."