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The Two Uncles An Addendum to Mount Allegro Jerre Mangione Memoir (1975) The day I returned from Sicily, my father telephoned me to say that my Uncle Nino was dying and wanted to see me. My father had no great love for my uncle, but he urged me to come as soon as possible. I took the next plane to Rochester and went directly to the hospital. In the waiting room, I found Uncle Nino’s oldest crony, my Uncle Luigi, eighty-five years old and six feet tall. Usually, my uncle’s powerful body was as impressive as the side of a mountain, but now it was sagging. Lately there had been too many reminders that he was living on borrowed time—his sister, who had died a few months before at the age of ninety-two; a Jewish neighbor with whom he had swapped stories for almost fifty years, until a week before his funeral. And now Uncle Nino, one of his oldest friends, the only one who was his match at briscola, was on his deathbed. I had not set eyes on Uncle Luigi for almost a year but, when he embraced me, he had no words of greeting. His first words were those that had been gnawing at his soul ever since it became definitely known that his friend, Nino, could not live long. ‘‘I am packed and ready to leave,’’ he said. ‘‘Anytime my call comes. After all, it’s about time, isn’t it?’’ I argued with him: There was nothing seriously wrong with his health and all of his wits were intact. He was only suffering from discouragement. When he looked more discouraged, I asked him if he had ever watched a television program 177 178 the two uncles of that year called ‘‘Life Begins at Eighty,’’ whose panelists were all octogenarians. ‘‘If you spoke English well enough, you could easily be one of them,’’ I said. ‘‘A shame they don’t speak Italian well enough,’’ he grumbled slyly. ‘‘It sounds like a silly program. How could life possibly begin at eighty? Second childhood maybe, but not life. Bear this in mind, nephew. Those of us over eighty years old who are sound in body and mind represent only about two percent of the population. That is a very small percentage. And that is why my bag is packed and I’m ready to leave.’’ Now that he had articulated his worry he brightened perceptibly, and was reminded of a ‘‘true story’’ about an old man he knew who was planning to marry a girl of eighteen. His relatives were aghast. One of them pointed out that in five years’ time he would be eighty years old and the girl twenty-three. ‘‘Well, when that happens,’’ the old man said, ‘‘I’ll divorce her and marry another eighteenyear -old girl.’’ It was an old chestnut of a story, one I had heard him tell before, but he was still delighted with it and, at the punch line, roared with laughter. Listening to the lusty sound of it, I had no doubt he would live to be a hundred. Together we went up to see Uncle Nino. He was also roaring, but with the terrible anger of a man who is about to die against his will. I could hardly bear to look at him. He had always been small, but now he was down to seventy pounds and his wrists were so skinny you could see the bone structure. It was easier to look at his face, for in my memory it had always looked sunken, and always there had been the same high cheekbones, the same red and gray moustache bristling over thin, wry lips. Now there was a tube stuck up his nose and held to the sunken cheeks with adhesive tape. Another tube emerged from a hole in his stomach where he had been operated on. His voice could only be heard intermittently, suddenly going off and on like that of a broken radio. Yet his lips kept moving, and his eyes darted with a rage that was brownish yellow like the rest of his bile-ridden body. He paid no attention to Uncle Luigi, but he acknowledged my presence at once by speaking my name, and then quickly went into the theme of his anger: his pain was intolerable and no one was doing anything to help him, least of all the nurses and the doctors. ‘‘They want...

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