One man’s hopeless fight against bureaucracy, sums up this story for me. The more I read this story, the more I realise this is painfully true to life. Less a story of fiction and more of a documentary.
Giuseppe Corte, suffering from an unidentified illness, books into a seven-storey nursing clinic for treatment. There he is placed on the seventh floor reserved for those patients with only the mildest of symptoms. This cheers him up especially as he learns that the lower floors are for those patients with more serious symptoms. After a while he finds he is moving down through the floors, towards his destiny on the first floor, not because of his illness, but for bureaucratic reasons.
“‘There’s only one inconvenience.’
‘What?’ asked Corte with a vague presentiment.
‘Inconvenient, as a form of expression,’ the doctor corrected himself. ‘I meant that the treatment unit is on the fourth floor, and I wouldn’t advise you to make the trek three times a day.’
‘So, then, nothing?’
‘Well, it would be better if you would be so kind as to go down to the fourth floor until the eczema has passed.’
‘Enough!’ screamed Giuseppe Corte. ‘I’ve already gone down enough! I would die. I’m not going to the fourth!’
‘As you wish,’ remarked the doctor, conciliatory so as not to irritate him.First published in I sette messaggeri (The Seven Messengers), Arnoldo Mondadori, 1942. First translated in Catastrophe and Other Stories, Calder, 1965
A Personal Anthology 