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ONE MORNING IN MARCH, AFTER A NIGHT’S TRAIN journey, Giovanni Corte arrived in the town where the famous nursing home was. He was a little feverish, but he was still determined to walk from the station to the hospital, carrying his small bag.

Although his was an extremely slight case, in the very earliest stages, Giovanni Corte had been advised to go to the well-known sanatorium, which existed solely for the care of the particular illness from which he was suffering. This meant that the doctors were particularly competent and the equipment particularly pertinent and efficient.

Catching sight of it from a distance—he recognized it from having seen photos in some brochure—Giovanni Corte was most favorably impressed. The building was white, seven stories high; its mass was broken up by a series of recesses which gave it a vague resemblance to a hotel. It was surrounded by tall trees.

After a brief visit from the doctor, prior to a more thorough one later on, Giovanni Corte was taken to a cheerful room on the seventh and top floor. The furniture was light and elegant, as was the wallpaper, there were wooden armchairs and brightly colored cushions. The view was over one of the loveliest parts of the town. Everything was peaceful, welcoming and reassuring.

Giovanni Corte went to bed immediately, turned on the reading lamp at his bedside and began to read a book he had brought with him. After a few moments a nurse came in to see whether he needed anything.

He didn’t, but was delighted to chat with the young woman and ask her questions about the nursing home. That was how he came to know its one extremely odd characteristic: the patients were housed on each floor according to the gravity of their state. The seventh, or top, floor was for extremely mild cases. The sixth was still for mild cases, but ones needing a certain amount of attention. On the fifth floor there were quite serious cases and so on, floor by floor. The second floor was for the very seriously ill. On the first floor were the hopeless cases.

This extraordinary system, apart from facilitating the general services considerably, meant that a patient only mildly affected would not be troubled by a dying co-sufferer next door and ensured a uniformity of atmosphere on each floor. Treatment, of course, would thus vary from floor to floor.

This meant that the patients were divided into seven successive castes. Each floor was a world apart, with its own particular rules and traditions. And as each floor was in the charge of a different doctor, slight but definite differences in the methods of treatment had grown up, although initially the director had given the institution a single basic bent.

As soon as the nurse had left the room Giovanni Corte, no longer feeling feverish, went to the window and looked out, not because he wanted to see the view of the town (although he was not familiar with it) but in the hopes of catching a glimpse, through the windows, of the patients on the lower floors. The structure of the building, with its large recesses, made this possible. Giovanni Corte concentrated particularly on the first-floor windows, which looked a very long way away, and which he could see only obliquely. But he could see nothing interesting. Most of the windows were completely hidden by gray venetian blinds.

But Corte did see someone, a man, standing at a window right next to his own. The two looked at each other with a growing feeling of sympathy but did not know how to break the silence. At last Giovanni Corte plucked up courage and said, “Have you just arrived too?”

“Oh, no,” said his neighbor, “I’ve been here two months.” He was silent for a few moments and then, apparently not sure how to continue the conversation, added, “I was watching my brother down there.”

“Your brother?”

“Yes. We both came here at the same time, oddly enough, but he got worse—he’s on the fourth now.”

“Fourth what?”

“Fourth floor,” explained the man, pronouncing the two words with such pity and horror that Giovanni Corte was vaguely alarmed.

“But in that case”—Corte proceeded with his questioning with the lightheartedness one might adopt when speaking of tragic matters which don’t concern one—“if things are already so serious on the fourth floor, whom do they put on the first?”

“Oh, the dying. There’s nothing for the doctors to do down there. Only the priests. And of course . . .”

“But there aren’t many people down there,” interrupted Giovanni Corte as if seeking confirmation, “almost all the blinds are down.”

“There aren’t many now, but there were this morning,” replied the other with a slight smile. “The rooms with the blinds down are those where someone has died recently. As you can see, on the other floors the shutters are all open. Will you excuse me,” he continued, moving slowly back in, “it seems to be getting rather cold. I’m going back to bed. May I wish you all the best . . .”

The man vanished from the windowsill and shut the window firmly; a light was lit inside the room. Giovanni Corte remained standing at the window, his eyes fixed on the lowered blinds of the first floor. He stared at them with morbid intensity, trying to visualize the ghastly secrets of that terrible first floor where patients were taken to die; he felt relieved that he was so far away. Meanwhile, the shadows of evening crept over the city. One by one the thousand windows of the sanatorium lit up, from the distance it looked like a great house lit up for a ball. Only on the first floor, at the foot of the precipice, did dozens of windows remain blank and empty.

Giovanni Corte was considerably reassured by the doctor’s visit. A natural pessimist, he was already secretly prepared for an unfavorable verdict and wouldn’t have been surprised if the doctor had sent him down to the next floor.

His temperature however showed no signs of going down, even though his condition was otherwise satisfactory. But the doctor was pleasant and encouraging. Certainly he was affected—the doctor said—but only very slightly; in two or three weeks he would probably be cured. “So I’m to stay on the seventh floor?” inquired Giovanni Corte anxiously at this point.

“Well, of course!” replied the doctor, clapping a friendly hand on his shoulder. “Where did you think you were going? Down to the fourth perhaps?” He spoke jokingly, as though it were the most absurd thought in the world.

“I’m glad about that,” said Giovanni Corte. “You know how it is, when one’s ill one always imagines the worst.” In fact he stayed in the room which he had originally been given. On the rare afternoons when he was allowed up he made the acquaintance of some of his fellow patients. He followed the treatment scrupulously, concentrated his whole attention on making a rapid recovery, yet his condition seemed to remain unchanged.

About ten days later, the head nurse of the seventh floor came to see Giovanni Corte. He wanted to ask an entirely personal favor: the following day a woman with two children was coming to the hospital; there were two free rooms right next to his, but a third was needed; would Signor Corte mind very much moving into another, equally comfortable room?

Naturally, Giovanni Corte made no objection; he didn’t mind what room he was in; indeed, he might have a new and prettier nurse.

“Thank you so much,” said the head nurse with a slight bow; “though, mark you, such a courteous act doesn’t surprise me coming from a person such as yourself. We’ll start moving your things in about an hour, if you don’t mind. By the way, it’s one floor down,” he added in a quieter tone, as though it were a negligible detail. “Unfortunately there are no free rooms on this floor. Of course it’s a purely temporary arrangement,” he hastened to add, seeing that Corte had sat up suddenly and was about to protest, “a purely temporary arrangement. You’ll be coming up again as soon as there’s a free room, which should be in two or three days.”

“I must confess,” said Giovanni Corte, smiling, to show that he had no childish fears, “I must confess that this particular sort of change of room doesn’t appeal to me in the least.”

“But it has no medical basis; I quite understand what you mean, but in this case it’s simply to do a favor for this woman who doesn’t want to be separated from her children. Now, please,” he added, laughing openly, “please don’t get it into your head that there are other reasons!”

“Very well,” said Giovanni Corte, “but it seems to me to bode ill.”

So Giovanni Corte went down to the sixth floor, and though he was convinced that this move did not correspond to any worsening in his own condition, he felt unhappy at the thought that there was now a definite barrier between himself and the everyday world of healthy people. The seventh floor was an embarkation point, with a certain degree of contact with society; it could be regarded as a sort of annex to the ordinary world. But the sixth was already part of the real hospital; the attitudes of the doctors, nurses, of the patients themselves were just slightly different. It was admitted openly that the patients on that floor were really sick, even if not seriously so. From his initial conversation with his neighbors, staff and doctors, Giovanni Corte gathered that here the seventh floor was regarded as a joke, reserved for amateurs, all affectation and caprice; it was only on the sixth floor that things began in earnest.

One thing Giovanni Corte did realize, however, was that he would certainly have some difficulty in getting back up to the floor where, medically speaking, he really belonged; to get back to the seventh floor he would have to set the whole complex organism of the place in motion, even for such a small move; it was quite plain that, were he not to insist, no one would ever have thought of putting him back on the top floor, with the “almost well.”

So Giovanni Corte decided not to forfeit anything that was his by right and not to yield to the temptations of habit. He was much concerned to impress upon his companions that he was with them only for a few days, that it was he who had agreed to go down a floor simply to oblige a lady, that he’d be going up again as soon as there was a free room. The others listened without interest and nodded, unconvinced.

Giovanni Corte’s convictions, however, were confirmed by the judgment of the new doctor. He agreed that Giovanni Corte could most certainly be on the seventh floor; the form the disease had taken was ab-so-lute-ly negligible—he stressed each syllable so as to emphasize the importance of his diagnosis—but after all it might well be that Giovanni Corte would be better taken care of on the sixth floor.

“I don’t want all that nonsense all over again,” Giovanni Corte interrupted firmly at this point, “you say I should be on the seventh floor, and that’s where I want to be.”

“No one denies that,” retorted the doctor. “I was advising you not as a doc-tor, but as a real friend. As I say, you’re very slightly affected, it wouldn’t even be an exaggeration to say that you’re not ill at all, but in my opinion what makes your case different from other similarly mild ones is its greater extension: the intensity of the disease is minimal, but it is fairly widespread; the destructive process of the cells”—it was the first time Giovanni Corte had heard the sinister expression—“the destructive process of the cells is absolutely in the initial stage, it may not even have begun yet, but it is tending, I say tending, to affect large expanses of the organism. This is the only reason, in my opinion, why you might be better off down here on the sixth floor, where the methods of treatment are more highly specialized and more intensive.”

One day he was informed that the Director of the nursing home, after lengthy consultation with his colleagues, had decided to make a change in the subdivision of the patients. Each person’s grade—so to speak—was to be lowered by half a point. From now on the patients on each floor were to be divided into two categories according to the seriousness of their condition (indeed the respective doctors had already made this subdivision, though exclusively for their own personal use) and the lower of these two halves was to be officially moved one floor down. For example, half the patients on the sixth floor, those who were slightly more seriously affected, were to go down to the fifth; the less slightly affected of the seventh floor would go down to the sixth. Giovanni Corte was pleased to hear this, because his return to the seventh floor would certainly be much easier amid this highly complicated series of removals.

However, when he mentioned this hope to the nurse he was bitterly disappointed. He learned that he was indeed to be moved, not up to the seventh but down to the floor below. For reasons that the nurse was unable to explain, he had been classed among the more “serious” patients on the sixth floor and so had to go down to the fifth.

Once he had recovered from his initial surprise, Giovanni Corte completely lost his temper; he shouted that they were cheating him, that he refused to hear of moving downward, that he would go back home, that rights were rights and that the hospital administration could not afford to ignore the doctors’ diagnosis so brazenly.

He was still shouting when the doctor arrived to explain matters more fully. He advised Corte to calm down unless he wanted his temperature to rise and explained that there had been a misunderstanding, at least in a sense. He agreed once again that Giovanni Corte would have been equally suitably placed on the seventh floor, but added that he had a slightly different, though entirely personal, view of the case. Basically, in a certain sense, his condition could be considered as needing treatment on the sixth floor, because the symptoms were so widespread. But he himself failed to understand why Corte had been listed among the more serious cases of the sixth floor. In all probability the secretary, who had phoned him that very morning to ask about Giovanni Corte’s exact medical position, had made a mistake in copying out his report. Or more likely still the administrative staff had purposely depreciated his own judgment, since he was considered an expert doctor but overoptimistic. Finally, the doctor advised Corte not to worry, to accept the move without protest; what counted was the disease, not the floor on which the patient was placed.

As far as the treatment was concerned, added the doctor, Giovanni Corte would certainly not have cause for complaint: the doctor on the floor below was undoubtedly far more experienced; it was almost part of the system that the doctors became more experienced, at least in the eyes of the administration, the further down you went. The rooms were equally comfortable and elegant. The view was equally good; it was only from the third floor that it was cut off by the surrounding trees.

It was evening, and Giovanni Corte’s temperature had risen accordingly; he listened to this meticulous ratiocination with an increasing feeling of exhaustion. Finally he realized that he had neither the strength nor the desire to resist this unfair removal any further. Unprotesting, he allowed himself to be taken one floor down.

Giovanni Corte’s one meager consolation on the fifth floor was the knowledge that, in the opinion of doctors, nurses and patients alike, he was the least seriously ill of anyone on the whole floor. In short, he could consider himself much the most fortunate person in that section. On the other hand, he was haunted by the thought that there were now two serious barriers between himself and the world of ordinary people.

As spring progressed the weather became milder, but Giovanni Corte no longer liked to stand at the window as he used to do; although it was stupid to feel afraid, he felt a strange movement of terror at the sight of the first-floor windows, always mostly closed and now so much nearer.

His own state seemed unchanged; though after three days on the fifth floor a patch of eczema appeared on his right leg and showed no signs of clearing up during the following days. The doctor assured him that this was something absolutely independent of the main disease; it could have happened to the healthiest person in the world. Intensive treatment with gamma rays would clear it up in a few days.

“And can’t one have that here?” asked Giovanni Corte.

“Certainly,” replied the doctor, delighted; “we have everything here. There’s only one slight inconvenience . . .”

“What?” asked Giovanni Corte with vague foreboding.

“Inconvenience in a manner of speaking,” the doctor corrected himself. “The fourth floor is the only one with the relevant apparatus and I wouldn’t advise you to go up and down three times a day.”

“So it’s out of the question?”

“It would really be better if you would be good enough to go down to the fourth floor until the eczema has cleared up.”

“That’s enough,” shrieked Giovanni Corte, exasperated. “I’ve had enough of going down! I’d rather die than go down to the fourth floor!”

“As you wish,” said the doctor soothingly, so as not to annoy him, “but as the doctor responsible, I must point out that I forbid you to go up and down three times a day.”

The unfortunate thing was that the eczema, rather than clearing up, began to spread gradually. Giovanni Corte couldn’t rest, he tossed and turned in bed. His anger held out for three days but finally he gave in. Of his own accord, he asked the doctor to arrange for the ray treatment to be carried out, and to move to the floor below.

Here Corte noticed, with private delight, that he really was an exception. The other patients on the floor were certainly much more seriously affected and unable to move from their beds at all. He, on the other hand, could afford the luxury of walking from his bedroom to the room where the rays were, amid the compliments and amazement of the nurses themselves.

He made a point of stressing the extremely special nature of his position to the new doctor. A patient who, basically, should have been on the seventh floor was in fact on the fourth. As soon as his eczema was better, he would be going up again. This time there could be absolutely no excuse. He who could still legitimately have been on the seventh floor!

“On the seventh?” exclaimed the doctor who had just finished examining him, with a smile. “You sick people do exaggerate so! I’d be the first to agree that you should be pleased with your condition; from what I see from your medical chart, it hasn’t changed much for the worse. But—forgive my rather brutal honesty—there’s quite a difference between that and the seventh floor. You’re one of the least worrying cases, I quite agree, but you’re definitely ill.”

“Well, then,” said Giovanni Corte, scarlet in the face, “what floor would you personally put me on?”

“Well, really, it’s not easy to say, I’ve only examined you briefly, for any final judgment I’d have to observe you for at least a week.”

“All right,” insisted Corte, “but you must have some idea.”

To calm him, the doctor pretended to concentrate on the matter for a moment and then, nodding to himself, said slowly, “Oh, dear! Look, to please you, I think after all one might say the sixth. Yes,” he added as if to persuade himself of the rightness of what he was saying, “the sixth would probably be all right.”

The doctor thought that this would please his patient. But an expression of terror spread over Giovanni Corte’s face: he realized that the doctors of the upper floors had deceived him; here was this new doctor, plainly more expert and honest, who in his heart of hearts—it was quite obvious—would place him not on the seventh but on the sixth floor, possibly even the lower fifth! The unexpected disappointment prostrated Corte. That evening his temperature rose appreciably.

His stay on the fourth floor was the most peaceful period he had had since coming to the hospital. The doctor was a delightful person, attentive and pleasant; he often stayed for whole hours to talk about all kinds of things. Giovanni Corte too was delighted to have an opportunity to talk, and drew the conversation around to his normal past life as a lawyer and man of the world. He tried to convince himself that he still belonged to the society of healthy men, that he was still connected with the world of business, that he was really still interested in matters of public import. He tried, but unsuccessfully. The conversation invariably came around, in the end, to the subject of his illness.

The desire for any sign of improvement had become an obsession. Unfortunately, the gamma rays had succeeded in preventing the spread of the eczema but they had not cured it altogether. Giovanni Corte talked about this at length with the doctor every day and tried to appear philosophical, even ironic about it, without ever succeeding.

“Tell me, doctor,” he said one day, “how is the destructive process of the cells coming along?”

“What a frightful expression,” said the doctor reprovingly, “wherever did you come across that? That’s not at all right, particularly for a patient. I never want to hear anything like that again.”

“All right,” objected Corte, “but you still haven’t answered.”

“I’ll answer right away,” replied the doctor pleasantly. “The destructive process of your cells, to use your own horrible expression, is, in your very minor case, absolutely negligible. But obstinate, I must say.”

“Obstinate, you mean chronic?”

“Now, don’t credit me with things I haven’t said. I only said obstinate. Anyhow that’s how it is in minor cases. Even the mildest infections often need long and intensive treatment.”

“But tell me, doctor, when can I expect to see some improvement?”

“When? It’s difficult to say in these cases. . . . But listen,” he added after pausing for thought, “I can see that you’re positively obsessed with the idea of recovery . . . if I weren’t afraid of angering you, do you know what I’d suggest?”

“Please do say . . .”

“Well, I’ll put the situation very clearly. If I had this disease even slightly and were to come to this sanatorium, which is probably the best there is, I would arrange of my own accord, and from the first day—I repeat from the first day—to go down to one of the lower floors. In fact I’d even go to the . . .”

“To the first?” suggested Corte with a forced smile.

“Oh, dear, no!” replied the doctor with a deprecating smile, “oh, dear, no! But to the third or even the second. On the lower floors the treatment is far better, you know, the equipment is more complete, more powerful, the staff are more expert. And then you know who is the real soul of this hospital?”

“Isn’t it Professor Dati?”

“Exactly. It was he who invented the treatment carried out here, he really planned the whole place. Well, Dati, the mastermind, operates, so to speak, between the first and second floors. His driving force radiates from there. But I assure you that it never goes beyond the third floor: further up than that the details of his orders are glossed over, interpreted more slackly; the heart of the hospital is on the lowest floors, and that’s where you must be to have the best treatment.”

“So in short,” said Giovanni Corte, his voice shaking, “so you would advise me . . .”

“And there’s something else,” continued the doctor unperturbed, “and that is that in your case there’s also the eczema to be considered. I agree that it’s quite unimportant, but it is rather irritating, and in the long run it might lower your morale; and you know how important peace of mind is for your recovery. The rays have been only half successful. Now, why? It might have been pure chance, but it might also have been that they weren’t sufficiently intense. Well, on the third floor the apparatus is far more powerful. The chances of curing your eczema would be much greater. And the point is that once the cure is under way, the hardest part is over. Once you really feel better, there’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t come up here again, or indeed higher still, according to your ‘deserts,’ to the fifth, the sixth, possibly even the seventh . . .”

“But do you think this will hasten my recovery?”

“I’ve not the slightest doubt it will. I’ve already said what I’d do if I were in your place.”

The doctor talked like this to Giovanni Corte every day. And at last, tired of the inconveniences of the eczema, despite his instinctive reluctance to go down a floor, he decided to take the doctor’s advice and move to the floor below.

He noticed immediately that the third floor was possessed of a special gaiety affecting both doctors and nurses, even though the cases treated on that floor were very serious. He noticed too that this gaiety increased daily; consumed with curiosity, as soon as he got to know the nurse, he asked why on earth they were all so cheerful.

“Oh, didn’t you know?” she replied, “in three days’ time we’re all going on vacation.”

“On vacation?”

“That’s right. The whole floor closes for two weeks and the staff go off and enjoy themselves. Each floor takes it in turn to have a vacation.”

“And what about the patients?”

“There are relatively few of them, so two floors are converted into one.”

“You mean you put the patients of the third and fourth floors together?”

“No, no,” the nurse corrected him, “of the third and second. The patients on this floor will have to go down.”

“Down to the second?” asked Giovanni Corte, suddenly pale as death. “You mean I’ll have to go down to the second?”

“Well, yes. What’s so odd about that? When we come back, in two weeks, you’ll come back here, in this same room. I can’t see anything so terrifying about it.”

But Giovanni Corte—as if forewarned by some strange instinct—was horribly afraid. However, since he could hardly prevent the staff from going on their vacations, and convinced that the new treatment with the stronger rays would do him good—the eczema had almost cleared up—he didn’t dare offer any formal opposition to this new move. But he did insist, despite the nurses’ banter, that the label on the door of his new room should read “Giovanni Corte, third floor, temporary.” Such a thing had never been done before in the whole history of the sanatorium, but the doctors didn’t object, fearing that the prohibition of even such a minor matter might cause a serious shock to a patient as highly strung as Giovanni Corte.

After all, it was simply a question of waiting for fourteen days, neither more nor less. Giovanni Corte began to count them with stubborn eagerness, lying motionless on his bed for hours on end, staring at the furniture, which wasn’t as pleasant and modern here as on the higher floors, but more cumbersome, gloomy and severe. Every now and again he would listen intently, thinking he heard sounds from the floor below, the floor of the dying, the “condemned”—vague sounds of death in action.

Naturally he found all this very dispiriting. His agitation seemed to nourish the disease, his temperature began to rise, the state of continued weakness began to affect him vitally. From the window—which was almost always open, since it was now midsummer—he could no longer see the roofs nor even the houses, but only the green wall of the surrounding trees.

A week later, one afternoon at about two o’clock, his room was suddenly invaded by the head nurse and three nurses, with a trolley. “All ready for the move, then?” asked the head nurse jovially.

“What move?” asked Giovanni Corte weakly. “What’s all this? The third floor staff haven’t come back after a week, have they?”

“Third floor?” repeated the head nurse uncomprehendingly. “My orders are to take you down to the first floor,” and he produced a printed form for removal to the first floor signed by none other than Professor Dati himself.

Giovanni Corte gave vent to his terror, his diabolical rage in long angry shrieks, which resounded throughout the whole floor. “Less noise, please,” begged the nurses, “there are some patients here who are not at all well.” But it would have taken more than that to calm him.

At last the second floor doctor appeared—a most attentive person. After being given the relevant information, he looked at the form and listened to Giovanni Corte’s side of the story. He then turned angrily to the head nurse and told him there had been a mistake, he himself had had no such orders, for some time now the place had been an impossible muddle, he himself knew nothing about what was going on . . . at last, when he had had his say with his inferior, he turned politely to his patient, highly apologetic.

“Unfortunately, however,” he added, “unfortunately Professor Dati left the hospital about an hour ago—he’ll be away for a couple of days. I’m most awfully sorry, but his orders can’t be overlooked. He would be the first to regret it, I assure you . . . an absurd mistake! I fail to understand how it could have happened!”

Giovanni Corte had begun to tremble piteously. He was now completely unable to control himself, overcome with fear like a small child. His slow, desperate sobbing echoed throughout the room.

It was as a result of this execrable mistake, then, that he was removed to his last resting place: he who basically, according to the most stringent medical opinion, was fit for the sixth, if not the seventh floor as far as his illness was concerned! The situation was so grotesque that from time to time Giovanni Corte felt inclined simply to roar with laughter.

Stretched out on his bed, while the afternoon warmth flowed calmly over the city, he would stare at the green of the trees through the window and feel that he had come to a completely unreal world, walled in with sterilized tiles, full of deathly arctic passages and soulless white figures. It even occurred to him that the trees he thought he saw through the window were not real; finally, when he noticed that the leaves never moved, he was certain of it.

Corte was so upset by this idea that he called the nurse and asked for his spectacles, which he didn’t use in bed, being shortsighted; only then was he a little reassured: the lenses proved that they were real leaves and that they were shaken, though very slightly, by the wind.

When the nurse had gone out, he spent half an hour in complete silence. Six floors, six solid barriers, even if only because of a bureaucratic mistake, weighed implacably upon Giovanni Corte. How many years (for obviously it was now a question of years) would it be before he could climb back to the top of that precipice?

But why was the room suddenly going so dark? It was still midafternoon. With a supreme effort, for he felt himself paralyzed by a strange lethargy, Giovanni Corte turned to look at his watch on the locker by his bed. Three thirty. He turned his head the other way and saw that the venetian blinds, in obedience to some mysterious command, were dropping slowly, shutting out the light.