The potatoes are very good with lard, the oil in the salad was not rancid. The oil from the grocer on the corner is of much better quality than the oil from the grocer opposite, and it is even better than the oil from the grocer at the foot of the hill. I do not mean, however, that the grocer's oil is bad. In any case, the oil of the grocer at the corner is still the best.

The symptoms are varied and not always easy to detect; even the sick person may not present any obvious symptoms, despite being able to transmit the disease.
The onset of infection can sometimes be signalled by: discolouration of the skin, such as jaundice (yellowish discolouration of the skin and mucous membrane, due to increased bilirubin in the blood above 3mg/100ml); fatigue; fever; itching and possible small wounds due to scratching; nausea and vomiting; pain projected to the right hypochondrium (site of liver projection) and possibly to the right shoulder; pale stools; marsala-coloured urine. Elevated transaminases and bilirubin are always present.
The infection can evolve into four different outcomes, depending on the patient's immune condition:
1. Acute course with complete recovery and acquisition of immunity from infection (89% of cases);
2. fulminant hepatitis with 90% mortality: may require liver transplantation (1% of cases);
3. chronic infection, i.e. persistence of the virus in the body with liver damage (5-10% of cases); in this case the disease has a chronic course and may impair liver function within 10-30 years with the onset of cirrhosis or primary hepatocellular carcinoma (usually after cirrhosis is already present);
4. inactive carrier state (5% of cases): the virus persists in the liver but does not cause liver damage; it can remain in this state all its life, without causing damage even in the long term. It is also not very contagious to others.

Mrs Parker knows a Romanian grocer called Popesco Rosenfeld, who has just arrived from Constantinople. He is a great yoghurt specialist. He is a graduate of the yoghurt-makers' school in Adrianople.

The greenhouse is saturated with steam, the air unbreathable. The carnivorous orchid needs to be watered: I approach it with the watering can, a beetle climbs along the leaf, the plant opens its jagged purple jaws rimmed with tiny white teeth and closes them tightly. As I water it, its tentacles stretch out as far as the eye can see, twisting around my arm, the flower opens its mouth wide and bites my right side. I try with all my energy to open my vegetable jaws, but my gestures are slowed down by a mysterious force: in the effort to free myself I slam my temple against a beam. I feel a terrible twinge, I pull with all my strength, my eyes wide open panting.
There is half-light, the shutters are closed. I breathe a deadly mugginess, the pain in my side and head has not gone away. She holds my hand. 
I close my eyes and return to the greenhouse.

We are doing badly.  In all fields it's the same story.  Trade, agriculture, just like fire, this year... it doesn't work. 
No grain, no fire. 
Not even floods. 

Mum, sit down. We need to talk.
Michael, excuse me, I have to go out shopping and it's already late. I'll drop by Bianco and Marzano, I hope they can recommend a product to revitalise the wood, and in the meantime I'll get some colours to paint the ceramic: I bought a beautiful vase and I want to make a lampshade out of it. 
Yes, I know you are very good at painting ceramics. I'll drive you, we have plenty of time. Sit down for a moment, please. 
Just ten minutes, eh. I really must choose my own furniture cleaning products from now on: yesterday Teresa ruined the mahogany sideboard by cleaning it with a glass sprayer. What idiocy: an ammonia-based product on wood! That woman is sometimes out of her mind; lately, she seems dazed.
I think she is worried about Emmanuel. 
Your brother scared me to death, you know? Thank goodness he's better now.
Yeah. That's exactly what I wanted to talk to you about. Dad has his own work problems, and I'd rather leave him alone.
What situation?
Have you seen the test results? Hepatitis B.
I saw. But the doctor found him better: he has a strong fibre and with the right treatment he will heal perfectly. He is already healing.
Fortunately. The point, however, is another: where did he get it and how?
Who knows. He may even have got it from the dentist.
But there is sugar. 
Yeah, whatever. But can't you see he's confused, out of his mind? 
Michael, my goodness, he has a fever of thirty-nine! It's normal to be confused. You were confused too when you had scarlet fever.
Apart from the fact that I was eight, and not eighteen, he is confused even when he is well: at school he is four subjects down again.
School doesn't matter now: the important thing is that he is well.
Of course the important thing is that he is well: the point is that he is not well.
I don't understand what you are getting at.
Mum, think about it: you're giving him a lot of money. In fact, excuse me for saying so, too much for a boy his age. Don't you wonder what happens to them?
He is dating Kerschbaumer's daughter, I don't want to make him look bad.
Because they bring it from abroad. 
For fires it would be more difficult. Too many taxes.
So what? Does he spend money to make a good impression on her? Or what?
Why, what would you find strange if he wanted to give her presents?
Emmanuel is not one for expensive gifts, you know that better than I do.
You don't expect her to pay for the restaurant.
At their age you don't go to restaurants, if ever to the pub.
You can tell you don't know her: she is older than him and certainly not the pub type.
Right, how stupid was I not to think of that? He must have caught viral hepatitis at the Cambio or the Black Cat.
The fact that it is not probable does not mean that it could not have happened.
There is something ambiguous about that girl: I wouldn't be surprised if she frequents strange circles.
Don't be absurd, Michael.
Absurd me? 
You are talking about one of the most prominent families in Turin.
Oh, sure, that's a guarantee.
Your father and hers are old friends: do you think Dad might be friends with a disreputable character?
OK mum, let's end it here: I have understood your point of view perfectly. From now on I'll take the situation into my own hands: I'll keep an eye on him and if he keeps screwing up I'll have him admitted to Maurizio's father's private clinic. 
What bullshit?
Never mind, never mind. I'll take care of it. I already agreed with Maurizio, I'll have him do a complete check-up.
You just can't think positive, can you, Michael? I'm glad you're worried about your brother, you've always been a good guy and I love you for that, but you don't have to worry: he's already on the mend, within a week he'll be on his feet.
All right, come on. Put your coat on, it's cold. I'll drive you to the shop.

He is a good doctor. One can trust him. He never orders remedies without first trying them out on himself. Before having Parker operate, he wanted to have liver surgery himself, even though he was not sick at all.
How then is it explained that the doctor got away with it, while Parker died? 

The twinge in my stomach was the prelude to a rather serious illness, doctor. I was bedridden for almost two weeks, tormented by a hepatitis that the doctors, unable to understand its origin, ended up attributing to the HBV virus; which was true, but, as Thucydides put it, it was not the very real cause. 
Violent stomach cramps, intestinal colic, vomiting, intermittent fever, confused nightmares in infrared colours exhausted my limbs and my brain for days; I listened in silence to the suffering immersed in an icy sweat, without being able to explain to anyone that it was neither alone nor primarily the illness that tormented me.
You cannot know, until you have experienced it, how easy it is to fall and how difficult it is to rise again. I know it is trivial, but for those who experience it, it is always the first time: you don't need to know it from books, otherwise you would only have to read Dante to already know everything. Well, it doesn't work like that: in spiritual growth everyone always starts from scratch, it is not possible to climb on the shoulders of giants and go further as happens in mathematics or science. A child prodigy can afford to start from Einstein and go beyond him, but no one can ever afford to start from Socrates, Jesus or Buddha and go further: they will always remain a point of arrival, an impossible goal to reach. This is why catechism is useless: it puts it on a mechanical level, as if following rules was enough to be a man.
That long interlude of stillness allowed me to reflect on many things, for instance on the fact that scientific progress, without moral progress, produces monsters. Technological progress has made us regress, mentally and morally, to a level similar to that of childhood: none of the adults I know, myself included, are really adults; as I have already said somewhere, we are all children playing at being adults, destined to collapse under the weight of the first serious difficulties. People like that cannot be counted on, they will inevitably betray you, not so much out of malice as out of an inability to understand the consequences of their behaviour. Unlike Judas, such people do not even feel remorse. Such individuals are incapable of protecting anyone: I shudder to think how much harm these fake adults can do to children, even though they are convinced they love them. Antonia is the clearest proof of this, but my mother is no joke either. It seems to me that Hesiod speaks of such a phenomenon, children who grow old without ever becoming adults and are therefore exterminated by the gods.
It will come to the point, Doctor, where an individual with the moral maturity of a child will playfully unleash his latest genius invention, a lethal weapon capable of exterminating mankind. I suppose you know Dr. Strangelove, one of the most brilliant films I saw with Antonia during the period when we were bingeing on apple pie while lying in bed in front of the TV. I am almost certain that Antonia didn't understand its meaning: she laughed, I remember, amused by Sellers' magnificent performance and those apparent paradoxes, without realising that the film was about our reality. I was not laughing at all.
However, there is something wrong, we should tell the planner. Falling down is too easy and getting back up too difficult: the disproportion is frightening, the sense of impotence tremendous; the risk is that of not making it, of succumbing before having understood. Pàthei màthos, one can only grow through suffering, but the lesson only makes sense if it can be learnt; in this I must agree with Sophocles: if the excess of suffering eliminates you from the game, then it is not a lesson, it is a demented joke. Realising the irreparability of the evil done, if this evil is enormous, can shatter a man's psyche, can force him to commit suicide. Perhaps that is why life sends you signals from time to time: to warn you that you are passing the point of no return. I was probably experiencing one of those signals: so I was very careful to catch it.
With each new crisis I associated a memory with the pain, as in Simonides' mnemonics, mentally creating the stages of a kind of via crucis, until at a certain point the nausea of those memories became so unbearable that I was forced to remove every image of my recent past from my memory. My soul had become a virgin again: tabula rasa. 
On the other hand, my body was as if dead: I no longer felt any desire, I no longer had the normal physical reactions of an adolescent. But is not desiring anything the antechamber of wisdom? 
Yeah. And death too.
I still couldn't get out of bed, but I almost felt good. Every time my mother came into the room I tried to play the fool: I didn't want to worry her, and above all I had to avoid Michael's check-up at all costs (the day my brother learns to mind his own fucking business will always be too late).
And here we come to the point, doctor. 
During my illness Antonia had come to visit me every day. Every time I opened my eyes I saw her sitting on my bed, intent on passing her hand over my forehead, whispering tender encouragements whose only sound I perceived was muffled and distant, as if coming from the next room. They were lulling me and making my suffering pleasant.
Gradually, as I regained lucidity, my exhausted mind put the puzzle together. The illness had endowed me with a unique clairvoyance: I could see beyond appearances, I could see the deeper meaning beneath the fragile screen of words, I could see the unspoken truth. 
I had kicked her in the face, but she had always stood by me. She had made inexcusable mistakes, she had understood nothing of the evil she had done to me, but she had acted on instinct, and her instinct was love for me. In order not to lose me, she had turned into a devoted mother, pushed me down from the nest with loving pecks, suffering terribly but always remaining by my side, in good times and bad. Clinging to a branch over the abyss, unable to save herself without me, Antonia loved me.
At the precise moment when my mind formulated this thought, the nervous tension that was stiffening my limbs suddenly slackened: the quiet feeling of a castaway lying at the bottom of his boat after the storm that ripped out his sails and tossed him about for days took hold of me. Exhausted but calm, cradled by the waves, his gaze turned to the sky.
There was, however, one doubt that still haunted me. I struggled to get up, turned on the stereo, and Kurt's voice, accompanied by his guitar, sang Do-Re-Mi for me without it brutally squeezing my stomach at the thought of who had given it to me. Tears began to stream down my face, but they were liberating tears, of joy and emotion, like those of someone who finds an old friend. At that moment I realised that I was cured of my most serious illness: Michelle.
I still believed in miracles: there had to be a way to break down the invisible diaphragm that separated me from Antonia. But what? She was now resigned to losing me.
One morning when I woke up, floating in a zone of lucid unconsciousness, I felt the blood rush to my brain and suddenly I realised: there was only one way to reach her, and it was through her motherhood. It was a very difficult game, but I had to play it all the way. Not right away though: I had to wait until I was better, I needed all my strength and also a certain amount of good humour, so that I could put my acting talent back into play. In my relations with Antonia, especially in the early days, there had always been something naively histrionic and provocative, similar to the jumps, bites and somersaults with which a kitten performs in front of its mother cat, trying to provoke her inevitable reaction: a tender and violent embrace that serves to keep the little imbecile still. 
That was exactly what I desperately needed.

A conscientious doctor should die together with the sick person, if they cannot heal together. The captain of a ship perishes with the ship, in the waves. He does not survive. 
You cannot compare a sick person to a ship. 
And why not? Even the ship has its diseases. On the other hand, your doctor is as healthy as a fish; all the more reason, then, to perish with the sick man as the doctor with his ship.
Ah! I hadn't thought of that...

I had ended up in a poorly acted Ionesco drama and worse directed by an incompetent director: all the actors were dogs, including me, there was nothing worth seeing, nothing to keep me from going to the cashier to get my ticket money back. That was not my life, that was not me. My whirling around in the void had brought me back to the starting point, from which I had never really moved. 
I wanted her, I had never stopped wanting her: Antonia was the only real thing in my life.