Doctor in distress

It is winter 1936. Every weekday morning a group of young people travel by train from Ferrara, their home city, to Bologna where they are studying at the university. Theirs is a six-carriage stopping train, often infuriatingly late because of delays on the line, thus contradicting the famous Fascist boast about improvement of Italian railways. But these youths enjoy their ride, its camaraderie and little rituals.

Only one carriage is not third class, and here, they notice, an eminent member of their own community is sitting: Dr Athos Fadigati. To this ENT specialist’s clinic most of them have, during childhood, been taken. Fadigati is an unmistakable yet paradoxically elusive figure, overweight, fastidiously dressed, with his homburg, yellow gloves and gold-rimmed spectacles which make him conspicuous for all his preference for privacy. And over the years he has acquired a reputation not only for exceptional medical competence. ‘Well, I’ve heard it said that he’s….’ And, as is the way with gossip, corroborations have followed (mostly correct ones).

These Bologna-bound students are aware of stories that he is ‘that way’, and when he elects to leave his superior carriage for theirs, their knowledge subtly permeates the new relationship he is now bestowing on them. In late middle age the doctor is taking a course at Bologna university, but even when he behaves like a student, and treats the group to snacks at a wayside station, they don’t really know how to deal with him. Our narrator thinks he has ‘the air of an old man silently warming his hands in front of a big fire’.

But one of these young Ferraresi, Deliliers, a coarse, conceited Apollo, ambitious to be a boxing champion, is not so generous, suspecting the doctor of finding erotic pleasure in his proximity to them all.