Involuntary Witness Read Online Free

“While I’m here I’ll get something for myself as well. Have you some effervescent vitamin C?”
    She looked at me for a second, without a word. She knew the script. Then she gave me the vitamin C along with the rest. I paid and fled like a thief.
    When I got home I unwrapped the package, opened the boxes and read the enclosed leaflets. I found them
all interesting, but my attention was irresistibly drawn to the side-effects of the antidepressant. Trittico with a trazodone base.
    The patient began with simple dizzy spells, passing swiftly on to dryness of the mouth, blurred vision, constipation, urinary retention, tremors and alteration of the libido.
    It occurred to me that I had already seen to altering my libido on my own, then I went on reading. I thus discovered that a limited number of men who take trazodone develop a tendency to long, painful erections, what is known as priapism.
    This problem might even require an emergency surgical operation, which in turn might result in permanent sexual impairment.
    But the end was reassuring. The risk of fatal overdose of trazodone was, fortunately, lower than that resulting from the use of tricyclic antidepressants.
    Having finished reading, I fell to meditating.
    What do you do in the case of a prolonged and painful erection? Do you go to a hospital holding the thing in your hand? Do you put on very comfortable underpants? What do you say to the doctor? What does permanent sexual impairment amount to?
    And again, how much does one need for a fatal overdose of trazodone? Are two pills enough? Or does it require the whole packet?
    I found no answers to these questions, but the Trittico ended up down the bog, along with the rest of the medicines prescribed by my psychiatrist. My ex-psychiatrist.
    I conscientiously emptied all the packets and pulled the chain. Into the rubbish bin went the boxes, phials, ampoules and descriptive leaflets.
    That done, I poured myself an ample half-glass of
whisky – avoid alcoholic beverages – and put Chariots of Fire into the video machine. One of the few cassettes I had brought away with me.
    When the first pictures started coming, I lit up a Marlboro – avoid nicotine, especially in the evening – and for the first time in a very long while I almost felt in a good mood.

6
    When I was a boy I used to box.
    My grandfather took me along to a gym after seeing me come home with my face swollen from the beating it had taken. Administered by a fellow bigger – and nastier – than me.
    I was fourteen then, very skinny, with a nose red and shiny from acne. I was in the fourth form at grammar school, and was perfectly convinced that there was no such thing as happiness. For me, at any rate.
    The gym was in a damp basement. The instructor was a lean man approaching seventy, with arms still lean and muscular and a face like Buster Keaton’s. He was a friend of my grandfather.
    I have a precise recollection of the moment we entered it, at the foot of some narrow, ill-lit steps. There was not a voice to be heard, only the dull thud of fists hitting the punch bag, the rap of skipping ropes, the rhythm of the punch ball. There was a smell I can’t describe, but it is there in my nostrils now, as I write, and a thrill runs through me.
    That I was going in for boxing was long kept secret from my mother. She only learned it when, at the age of seventeen and a half, I won the welterweight silver medal in the regional junior championships.
    My grandfather, however, never got to see me on that pasteboard podium.
    Three months previously he had been walking through a pine wood with his Alsatian when at a
certain moment he stopped and calmly sat down on a bench.
    A lad who was nearby reported that, after stroking the dog, he had leaned his head on the back of the bench in an unusual fashion.
    The carabinieri had to shoot the dog before they could approach the body and identify him as Guido Guerrieri, former Professor of Medieval Philosophy.
    My