Richard Cantwell’s failing heart

Richard Cantwell’s failing heart turns a private medical vulnerability into the force that steadily narrows his remaining time. First managed with drugs and guarded language, it intrudes into work, intimacy, and movement through Venice; in the final drive, repeated attacks make his approaching death unmistakable to him, though he continues to act with characteristic control.

Medical Background and Early Management

Cantwell is fifty, a Colonel of Infantry in the United States Army, and has been reduced from general officer rank. Before coming to Venice for a duck shoot, he takes enough mannitol hexanitrate to pass a physical examination, though he does not know precisely what the drug will do. The surgeon is skeptical, repeats the readings, and warns that the drug is contraindicated in the presence of increased intraocular and intracranial pressure. Cantwell answers that he does not know what the surgeon is talking about. The episode establishes a pattern: his body is subject to medical scrutiny, but he approaches the examination as an obstacle to get through rather than an occasion to understand his condition.

A later conversation about health places a small cardiac condition alongside ulcers. Cantwell reacts that he had been told only about the ulcers. The exchange makes the heart problem part of the intimate knowledge shared between him and Renata, rather than an entirely private matter, but it does not make it less difficult for him to acknowledge. His health is described in minimizing terms even as the narrative gives the heart an increasingly active role in his life.

Symptoms, Medication, and the Limits of Control

The illness repeatedly interrupts Cantwell’s purposeful movement. After a telephone call, he suddenly feels unwell and experiences the sensation of being caught in an iron cage, compared to an iron lung or an iron maiden. Grey-faced, he leans on the concierge’s desk at the Gritti Palace Hotel and asks Domenico for water. When the water arrives, he takes four tablets of the kind ordinarily taken two at a time, then rests lightly. The episode makes medication and rest immediate necessities, but his manner remains controlled: he rests without illusion, alert even in physical distress.

At another point, after firing twice toward a boatman who is too far away to hear him, Cantwell recognizes that anger is bad for him. With no water available, he takes two pills with Gordon’s gin from his flask, while also recognizing that gin is bad for him. He privately reduces his permissible life to rest and very light exercise, then wonders whether the activity he is undertaking qualifies as light exercise. The dry self-address shows how sharply his choices have contracted: even a day’s shooting must be measured against the body’s limits. Yet he continues the shoot, and his attention turns from his symptoms to the flight of a drake and the absent Renata he imagines beside him in the blind.

Love, Work, and the Knowledge of Death

Cantwell’s condition enters his relationship with Renata through the future they discuss. She wishes he were not in the military business and were not going to die; he agrees, adding that he is getting out of the business. Renata answers sleepily that they will then go to Rome and get clothes. The exchange holds a practical, shared plan beside the blunt recognition of mortality. Leaving the business offers a change of life, but it does not remove the prospect of death that Renata names.

Their conversation about soldiering gives the same tension another form. Cantwell wishes Renata had a soldier’s straight, true brain and her beauty and memory; she says she would want to be a soldier if she could fight under him. He tells her never to fight under him, describing himself as cagey but unlucky. His response does not present military competence as protection from bodily fate. The heart’s vulnerability remains alongside the skills and authority through which he has defined himself.

Final Attacks and Ending

Near the end, Cantwell leaves the Gritti after taking tablets that secure him temporarily through pain and anger. He calculates that it will take twelve and a half minutes to reach the place where Renata will probably arrive late, and walks carefully at the speed he should walk. The exactness of the estimate and the careful crossing of the familiar bridges give his movement a measured quality; the body sets the pace even as he continues toward the woman he loves.

On the drive with Ronald Jackson, the attacks return. Cantwell says, “Three strikes is out, and they gave me four,” then recalls the reported last words of General Thomas J. Jackson: “No, no, let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” The quotation makes death present through another soldier’s remembered words, while Cantwell’s own blows arrive as physical fact. When the third attack grips him, he knows he cannot live. He asks Ronald Jackson to pull over, switch to parking lights, and find the way to Trieste; then he says he will get into the large back seat of the car. It is the last thing he ever says. He makes the seat and closes the door carefully. Afterward, Ronald Jackson reads Cantwell’s written instruction that the wrapped painting and two shotguns in the car be returned to the Gritti Palace Hotel for their rightful owner. The heart has ended Cantwell’s journey, but his final actions preserve his composure and leave practical arrangements behind.