When my temperature hit one hundred and five, Mom decided she should do something. Since it was four in the morning and all the farmacias were closed, she had to get the manager to call the local police station to ascertain the name of the farmacia in the area that had a twenty-four-hour emergency phone number to call for special nighttime service.

Two hours later Mom reappeared triumphant from her late night taxi ride. Sensible Italy had no silly rules about needing a doctor to prescribe medicine, so she was able to come to my room loaded with antibiotics, lotion, bandages, and aspirin.

By noon the next day, when my fever was at a stunning one hundred and six degrees, Mom decided that perhaps a doctor should be summoned despite her deep suspicion of the quality of the Roman Catholic Italian medical establishment.

Mistrust of Roman Catholic backward medicine notwithstanding, the pensione owner’s family physician was duly summoned. He appeared unexpectedly next to my bedside. I tried to fly away. Somewhere between one hundred and four and one hundred and six degrees, I had been borne by my fever into quite another and not altogether unpleasant state of consciousness.

Hovering near the ceiling I was enjoying my newfound ability to fly, the only problem being a matter of motion control, hampered as I was by the fact that any sudden movement of my head would result in my losing my grip on the operation and doing slow loops and weightless somersaults against the powdery whitewashed ceiling of my bedroom.

Like an errant helium balloon I could not come down. This disappointed me. If I had been able to hover a little lower, I could have navigated out of the window and then, hugging the hills, could have realized a lifelong dream to skim over the contours of the land. It was all I could do to remember to move my head v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y.

With one dramatic flick of the wrist, my doctor-magician swept the sweat-drenched sheet off the other me, the one still on the bed. A detective of illness, he ran a cool manicured finger from the glands of my swollen scrotum (was I finally flowering like my sisters? My testicles were now man-sized enough), to the swollen glands behind my ears, then back, retracing his steps to my leg, past the knee and down to my red foot, and finally to my pus-gorged, sausage-sized toe.

“Ha! I ‘av find the evil sick in you, boy! Madonna! I weel safe you, boy! Fear nussing, Mrs. Mama! I am ‘ere! He ‘as the infezione!”

Extracting an ancient glass syringe, a huge thick needle, and a long steel plunger, the doctor lovingly assembled his arsenal. Squaring his shoulders to the task at hand, he injected the first thick milky dose of penicillin directly into the hollow between my little toe and the next one. When my screaming subsided, he reloaded and did the honor to my rump.