The Mercury Column

A physician's consulting room in a hospital in Turin on a spring morning, on a walnut table by a shuttered window a slender mercury manometer thirty-two centimetres tall, a thin glass tube before a narrow grey tin plate tapering to a point, plain and unmarked, a silver thread of mercury halfway up, at its foot a round glass reservoir with two bent glass stubs on a black half-round cast-iron foot, orange-red rubber tubes running to a folded beige cloth cuff and to a black rubber bulb with a brass valve, a hand in a dark frock-coat sleeve turning the valve, an empty bentwood chair beside it, soft green-tinted light.