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none, I’d say. Often I have the feeling that those of us educated in the field of rigid consistency, fenced in by scientific rigor, struggle more than others. Maybe Mrs. A. was right to place her trust in the divine to some degree, just as she relied on the radio’s morning horoscope. Maybe Nora is right to wear her rosary around her neck so casually.
    In a few months, Emanuele’s Catholicism vanished. During Mrs. A.’s funeral, I watched him: he couldn’t even keep up with the Our Father—he didn’t knowthe words—and he struggled to latch onto scattered bits and pieces, scanning around. Jesus will likely remain just one of many stories that have been told to him.
    _____
    We learned of Mrs. A.’s worsening condition through a phone call. It’s Nora who calls her one evening. In all those years, Babette has never once dialed the number of our home; I suspect she always paid a fixed rate on her phone bill and not a penny more. Nora has a hard time understanding what she says, since Mrs. A. is constantly interrupted by her coughing. She first went to her general doctor, who prescribed a cortisone inhaler, but it didn’t do any good. So she wasted fifteen precious days. She went back, and this time he made an emergency referral to a pulmonologist, who first ordered an X-ray and then, when he’d seen that, a CT scan with a contrast medium.
    â€œA CT scan?” Nora asks, alarmed, drawing my attention as well.
    A CT scan, yes, but the report hasn’t yet arrived. With the X-ray, however, she’d reversed her route.After the pulmonologist, who pointed out a thickening on the right side—“it could be an infection, the start of bronchial pneumonia or bleeding, call it a shadow for the moment”—she went back to her general doctor, the only one who always speaks plainly to her and who did so on this occasion as well. The doctor held the plate up in front of him for a long time, studying it against the light from the window. Then he handed it back to her, rubbed his eyelids with the palms of his hands and said simply, “I wish you the best of luck.”
    With that, Mrs. A. bursts into uncontrollable tears. CT scan or no CT scan, she knows. As Nora, teary and wide-eyed, forms the letter
C
with her fingers, a capital
C
for “Cancer,” mouthing the other letters and then pointing to her chest, Mrs. A., in a paroxysm of coughing and sobbing, rants about a bird that came to find her, a bird that, at the end of the summer, had brought her the seemingly fatal pronouncement.

La locandiera

    T he diagnosis is quickly made. No surprise for Mrs. A., nor for us at that point, though there is a certain amount of bewilderment. Among all cancers, lung cancer is by far the most easily attributable to lifestyle, to pernicious habits, to negligent behavior. Mrs. A. never smoked a cigarette in her life, not even as a young girl when she helped out her father in the tobacco shop; if an impatient customer lit one while still inside the store, she would open the back door to get rid of the stink. There is no significant incidence of malignancies in her family—a great-aunt with throat cancer, a second cousin with apancreatic tumor—and her personal medical history is limited to an osteoarthritic condition and the usual childhood diseases. She followed a healthy diet; whenever she could, she ate vegetables from her own garden, she breathed clean air and never failed to stick to her regimen, ever. And still.
    I convey what I am able to understand of the pathology report to a doctor friend after Mrs. A. reads it to me, mangling all the medical terms (something she will continue to do until the end, her intelligence mocked by the impenetrable scientific jargon, although in the final months she will speak with the assurance of one who feels she has mastered the complexity of internal medicine, having come to know it intimately). I manage to make out