‘Seven Floors’ by Dino Buzzati, translated by Judith Landry

Sunlight barely penetrated the hotel’s lobby; a few scattered rays reached the floor in front of the reception desk, with the rest of the room lit by wall and table lamps. The bookshelves ran from floor to ceiling and were lined with paperbacks and pamphlets—some were mass-market copies, some were sturdily bound editions that may once have formed part of home libraries, each worn and well-thumbed, the pages yellowed and frayed.

My perusal of the lobby’s bookshelves was broken as quickly as it had started, by the shudder of the elevator doors. A hotel porter shuffled out, a suitcase in each hand and another under his arm, followed by a frail, older gentleman. The porter heaved the suitcases over to the corner of the room, rushed back to assist his guest (seating him at a table opposite me), then ran to fetch him a glass of water.

The older gentleman was shaking and sweating, while muttering and complaining about something under his breath. My Italian was rusty, but I enquired if everything was okay.

‘They are moving me to the second floor!’ the gentleman wailed. He was delirious; I calmed him and made him take some of the water the porter had brought over. Amid his agitated complaints, I managed to gather his name: Signor Giuseppe Corte.

The hotel porter leant over—small movements in his eyes gesturing towards the older gentleman—and spoke to me in a hushed tone: ‘Sir, I do apologise if any scene has been caused, but we have had to ask all of our guests from the third floor to move to the second floor—only temporarily, you see.’

Mr Corte, however, remained distressed. He was not a hotel guest as such, he told me—he had arrived in the city some weeks ago as a patient of the municipality’s sanatorium—a minor complaint, he assured me, that should have been treated in a matter of days. ‘But the sanatorium was at its capacity,’ he explained, ‘so a room—as well as daily visits from nurses and consultants—was arranged for me here.’

I told Mr Corte I sympathised with the inconvenience, but that I was sure that any other room in the hotel would be just as comfortable, and meet his expectations.

‘Giovanotto, it is not the inconvenience, it is the implication! These few weeks I have been moved from floor to floor, each time without my full consent, each time persuaded by the medical staff that it is only a bureaucratic mistake, or that it will only be temporary—that I should not worry! Each time I have followed the doctors’ advice, yet it is the policy of the sanatorium that…’

‘Signor Corte,’—a voice travelled from the reception desk. A short man with spectacles came towards us—he was accompanied by a woman carrying a black, leather holdall and a small plastic case with a handle. ‘What is all this fuss I hear? I’m sure the manager has assured you this is only an interim relocation.’ The man was evidently a physician—he helped Mr Corte to his feet and towards the elevator.

As the elevator doors closed, Mr Corte—accompanied by the physician and the woman who had just arrived—looked at me, then at the clock above the reception desk, defeat, delirium, and resignation in his eyes.

Published in La Lettura, 1 March 1937, and in English in Catastrophe and Other Stories, Calder and Boyars, 1965

‘Seven Floors’ by Dino Buzzati, translated by Judith Landry

Towards the end of 2020, the writer Ronald De Feo sent me this story by Dino Buzzati, “sometimes called the Italian Kafka.” In ‘Seven Floors’, Giovanni Corte arrives at a sanatorium that specialises in the illness from which he is suffering. His case is “extremely slight” so he is given “a cheerful room on the seventh and uppermost floor”, where “only the very mildest cases were treated”. The worse a patient’s condition, the lower the floor on which they are accommodated, with the first floor reserved for “those for whom all hope had been abandoned.” When Corte is moved down to the sixth floor, it is for purely logistical reasons, and so on. It’s a beautifully crafted story, simultaneously uneasy and funny, with a powerful sense of gravity.

Originally published in La Lettura, March 1937. Published in English in Catastrophe and Other Stories, Calder and Boyars, 1965

‘Seven Floors’ by Dino Buzzati

I think I’d read Buzzati before – I vaguely remember ‘The Falling Girl’ – but it didn’t ‘click’ just then. Probably I wasn’t listening carefully enough. Regardless, I heard the click this time. ‘Seven Floors’ is a Kafkaesque tale (but more deserving of that epithet; Buzzati has a style all his own) about Giuseppe Corte, a mildly feverish man admitted to the highest floor of a sanatorium where he is told his stay will be brief, the lower floors being reserved for the progressively worse.

Corte observes the ground floor with a gloomy fear. Certain circumstances prevail and he is required – only temporarily, he is assured – to be moved to the sixth floor, to the fifth, to the fourth…, the doctors soothing his anxieties each time. That the reader can see what will happen long before Corte does is partly what makes the story. He ends up, inevitably, consigned to a darkened ground floor room. There could be no other ending.

(As a side note, there is another story in this collection about an influenza virus contracted by people who are disloyal to the government, but perhaps that’s a bit too close to the bone for these times.)

From Catastrophe and Other Stories, Alma Press 2018