La giusta distanza dal male

“You are a young doctor in the emergency room of a large city. You deal with everyone’s pain, day and night, exhausting yourself in gruelling shifts, sacrificing everything outside of work. You endure as best you can, but the suffering of others is about to overwhelm you. It is at this point in your life that you encounter evil incarnate. He is sitting on the bonnet of a car, at night, in the dark hospital car park. He has two dark wings on his back. He is waiting for you. A courageous novel, capable of conveying the very human intensity of the emergency room and, at the same time, the loneliness of those who work there, the fears of those who should never have any, the silent fragility of those who care for us” (Tiziano Scarpa). It is night-time, and a young doctor is finishing yet another shift in the emergency room. Her work has become a black hole into which everything else disappears – her boyfriend, her friends, her passions, her life outside of work. By constantly defending herself from the pain of others, from the anger, frustration and impatience of the diverse humanity that crowds those rooms, she is beginning to feel nothing at all. Her early idealism becomes a vague memory, her enthusiasm fading shift after shift. She thinks about all this as she walks briskly across the empty hospital car park, but at a certain point she freezes: on the bonnet of a car is a disturbing figure with two long membranous wings, waiting for her. At first, Lucifer seems like just a hallucination caused by fatigue, but then his presence becomes constant. As the human relationships around her disappear, as the outside world seems increasingly dull and the emergency room fills up with red codes, treatments, hospitalisations and urgent procedures, he is the only one who remains, who befriends her. Who fills the void left by the others. But his presence is far from disinterested, bringing with it disturbing questions: What value do you place on your soul? How can we save ourselves from the suffering of others? Is there a right distance from evil? – and who, at a certain point, proposes a pact to her. This exciting novel is a meditation on pain: that of those who experience it in their own flesh and that of those who treat it. The portraits of those who populate the emergency room are vivid, very human, and sometimes disturbing. Bodies are enigmas, frightening abysses, wonders of false alarms and hidden dangers. There are those who discover within half an hour that they have a serious illness, those who exaggerate their symptoms to get a few days off work, and those who cannot accept the agony of a loved one and attack healthcare professionals. Doctors and nurses do their best to deal with the constant waves of emergencies, but all that pain eventually eats away at you: even if you don’t want to, you have to numb yourself, or you will succumb. Giorgia Protti uses some of literature’s sharpest weapons (hyperrealism and fantasy) with surprising talent, and in doing so recounts the conditions of the suffering and the rescuers, their vulnerability and their fears, the collapse of public health and of those who work in it every day.