Born Twice (Vintage International) (11 page)

Today I saw the go-cart in the storage area in the basement, and it had an altogether different effect on me. I was walking across the dusty room in the dark, paying attention to the uneven cement floor, when I saw it in a corner, illuminated by a diagonal shaft of light that came from a slit in the ceiling. It was covered in a veil of spiderwebs. It looked rusty, dirty, and useless. It looked like a fossilized skeleton. I was scared to touch it, as if it were the ruin of a dream.

Is a Child More Important than an Airplane?

“Don’t you ever make mistakes when you write?” the doctor asks me, part in jest and part complicitly.

“Yes,” I say, “but it’s not the same thing.”

“I see,” he says, looking sarcastically at the audience gathered in the assembly room of the Center. “It’s never the same thing. Mistakes are what other people do.”

He’s in a difficult situation, and he’s doing everything he can to make it worse for himself. I understand men like that. They are both incited and excited by the hostility they arouse in others and their own natural antipathy. They paint the most narrow-minded picture of themselves and then unfortunately live up to it. But they’re not the worst.

This pediatrician is visiting the Center because he accepted an invitation to hear out those parents who wanted to voice their complaints about the medical assistance they received before, during, and after their children’s births. That takes courage.

These stories are hard; they’re recriminations that have been exacerbated by time, by those long periods that despair reserves for reflection. Joy is volatile; its only concern is not to dissolve. But the kind of pain that cannot place blame on destiny, the kind that has carelessness and the cynicism of man to blame, is relentless.

“We’re not here to prosecute anyone,” the doctor, Director of the Center, begins by saying. “We’re here tonight to discuss to what extent the medical profession is responsible for handicaps—even if, statistically speaking, the situation tonight is somewhat unfair, as our public is made up entirely of those who have not been favored by chance.”

She laughs quickly. It sounds like a gasp. It echoes emptily in the silent room. Typical. She wants to express solidarity with the parents and yet defend the medical ranks, for whom she spares no sarcasm.

“I’m ready to be lynched,” says the guest pediatrician, with a smile that no one returns.

And so we hear stories about diagnoses that were carelessly made in the heat of the moment in the belief that they would be hidden behind an alibi of ethics. Instead, they smothered any such ethics: “It would be better for your son if you considered an institute.” We hear stories about diagnoses pronounced with irresponsible optimism, in hopes of distracting attention from the present torment: “Don’t worry, time will heal everything.” We hear accounts of pediatricians with no concept of infantile neurology; we hear accounts of clinicians who know nothing about rehabilitative therapy.

“It’s not just that the doctors are poorly prepared,” Signor Colnaghi says, in his deep voice. “Basically, they’re incompetent.”

“What’s the difference?” the pediatrician asks, with exaggerated amazement.

“The difference is that if a doctor knows his limits he’ll turn to a specialist,” Signor Colnaghi says, looking for consent toward the Director. “But if he doesn’t, he’ll attempt to form his own diagnosis. Do you have any idea what the consequences are?”

The Director joins in. “Children come to us when they’re four and five years old. By then we’ve lost precious time. A specialist would have known what to do.”

The pediatrician listens with professional impassivity.

“What do you think, Professor Frigerio?” she asks, looking over at me. “Do you think it’s a cultural issue?”

“I suppose I would have to say so, yes,” I reply. I feel like a student who’s been called on to validate what the professor has just said. It’s an embarrassing script, especially for the guest. We’re always called on to recite a part that’s not our own. “I think that culture is an indicator of what we do not know.”

Without wanting to, I have become a little Socrates. (It happens when we speak in public.) I look desperately for a way out:

“A doctor has to be prudent; he can’t afford to make a mistake. It’s better to ask for another person’s help. It’s all right not to know something. A doctor can’t put a person’s life at risk.”

“And so we’re back to what we were talking about before,” says the pediatrician, folding his arms across his chest. “Don’t you ever make mistakes?”

“But I have a different kind of job!” I say heatedly. “If I put a comma in the wrong place, only one out of ten people will notice and nothing will come of it. But if you make a mistake with a child, he’ll end up with brain damage. I’m not a doctor. I’m not even an airplane pilot.”

“An airplane pilot?” the pediatrician asks caustically.

“An airplane pilot can’t be distracted, especially when he’s landing, or neither he nor his passengers will survive.”

“So you’re comparing a child to an airplane.”

“No, I’m comparing the doctor to the pilot,” I say. My heart rate has gone up, my veins are pulsing. Evidently, for him, a child is less important than an airplane. “What made you want to be a doctor? The man who helps a child to be born is flying an airplane.”

The doctor looks down; he has perceived my emotions. He understands that it is not the right moment to contradict me. This is how many problems get resolved.

I try to control myself. “A child is more important than an airplane.”

“I agree,” he says patiently, but with a look of sincere puzzlement on his face.

Balancing Lessons

Halfway down the hall I suddenly let go. He doesn’t fall. He wavers unsteadily, his rubber-soled shoes seemingly stuck to the rug. He reaches out for the wall with his right hand to catch himself but drops to his knees anyway. He then quickly looks up at me as I lift my gaze from my wristwatch.

“Twelve seconds!” I say. “Well done, Paolo. Now let’s try again.”

When I help him to his feet he lets his whole body go, as if drained. It looks horrible, but he does it to save his strength. I understand this only later. There are so many things we come to understand only later. The weak, on the other hand, lucid in the vast wealth of their resources, understand right away.

He’s standing up again. I let go for a second but he falls backward. His eyes glaze over as if he has been hit by something. I manage to grab his arm. His inert weight makes him do a half twirl before slamming into the wall and sliding to the ground like a marionette. He’s slow at using his arms to block his fall. He’s slow at acquiring through reflection those movements that the so-called reflexes provide without thinking. He lost all bodily knowledge and has to relearn it consciously. Millions of years condensed into a decade: he has to simulate naturalness, imitate swiftness, and fake alacrity. This is his second birth—and it’s into a world in which even we are becoming disabled.

“Would you please stop making the child fall?” Franca calls out from down the hall.

Parents’ Meeting

One of the parents—a smug chubby woman, a math teacher by profession—poses a problem to the group. She gestures delicately with her hands. You can tell she likes to hear herself speak; that’s why she says she wants to hear what we have to say. It works every time.

I have decided to simplify her polished language, which overflows with syntactical affectations and refined parenthetical clauses, illuminated by a noun—
idiolect
—thrown in with weighty nonchalance. To simplify (and declare as much) is one of the despotic and comforting privileges of the omniscient narrator, a figure who has been despised both in the past as well as by me (they actually know so very little).

The problem is this: her thirteen-year-old son, who has an attention deficit disorder, as the person next to me callously but succinctly explains, can’t keep up with her when she tutors him in math, and she grows impatient with him.

“What do you do?” the doctor asks. I can see she’s growing impatient, too.

“I slap him, but then I feel worse than he does.”

How typically egocentric, I think to myself, to take pride in guilt as well as in merit.

“It’s not enough to feel bad,” the doctor scolds her. “You just can’t do that!”

“I know,” she says contritely. “That’s why I wanted your opinion. I don’t know why I do it.”

I’ve always been afraid of math teachers, even when they indulged me, even when they went back over things I never would have understood on my own and explained them from the beginning, calmly and clearly. Actually, it was at those times above all that I felt I was being suffocated by panic because my sense of guilt would increase. Their knowledge was like a form of highly disciplined and extremely logical terrorism.

“Interrupt your lesson,” the doctor suggests calmly. “Go and get something to drink. Distract yourself. You just cannot do that to your child!”

“I know,” she replies, simulating uncontrollable anxiety. “But what I’d really like to know”—she’s knitting her fingers together—“is why I react like that. Where does it come from? Intuitively, I think I know, but I’d like confirmation.”

Another thing: They always know the answer. They only want an audience to hear them out.

“It’s love-hate, don’t you think?” she says, almost begging. “That’s what we feel for our children. We love them too much.”

Like many mothers who don’t really feel it, she fakes an epic sense of maternity. The words of an American pedagogue come to mind: “If you want to do more for your children, do less.”

The embarrassed parents listen in silence. At times, the blackmail of language prevents us from showing the repugnance it triggers in us.

The doctor looks to me for assistance. “Professor Frigerio, what do you think about this? You’re a teacher too; surely you’ve tutored your son—”

“No, actually I rarely tutor him,” I reply, “because it has the same effect on me.”

“Do you slap your son too?” the doctor asks sarcastically.

“No, but there are worse offenses. A degrading look hurts. Intolerance is just as bad.”

The math teacher sticks out her chest; she’s pleased to have found someone whom she sees as an ally. “And it happens with our own children, the ones we love most. It doesn’t happen with other students, the ones who pay to be tutored.”

“That’s the whole point,” I say gravely.

“What is?”

“To begin with, the lesson you’re giving your son is atypical. You’re not getting paid for it.”

The math teacher looks at me in amazement.

“That’s the first frustrating thing about it,” I say, “and it can’t be ignored.”

“What a cynic you are!” the math teacher exclaims.

“I’m not the problem,” I say. “The problem is the lesson. A free lesson has to be gratifying in other ways. But because the student in this case just doesn’t understand, the lesson fosters new frustrations.”

I am pleased with the level of calm I am maintaining.

“Then, added to these frustrations,” I go on to say, “is an even greater delusion: that the student is our child.”

“The love-hate relationship I was talking about before,” the teacher suggests.

“No,” I reply, looking down. “I wouldn’t call it that. I would call it hate. You, in that precise moment, hate your son. That’s all. It’s pure hate.”

“What on earth are you saying?”

She has turned imploringly toward the doctor, but the doctor does not volunteer a word.

“You don’t have to explain,” I say. “You’re hurting him. You’ll love him later. In that particular moment, though, you hate him.”

She looks back toward the doctor.

“What do you think? Is it true that I feel this way?”

“Why ask me?” she says. “They’re your feelings.”

Sea Rescue

I’m sitting with the doctor in her glass-walled office. The appointments are over for the day, the lights have been turned off in the therapy room, the physiotherapists are getting dressed to go home, and she’s smoking a briar pipe that’s as long and narrow as her face. I’m telling her what happened last August in Fano.

A friend of mine from Ancona comes to visit. Our two families decide to go to the beach. It’s like a scene out of a nineteenth-century novel. A strong wind is blowing along the coast. Ominous dark waves crash against the stone jetties that enclose the small bay. There’s no one in the water; the red flag flaps wildly over the deserted beach. Driven by an infantile desire for extreme challenges and an inclination toward displays of bravado, feeling like a true swimmer compared to my delicate friend Carlo, and pursued by Franca’s familiar cutting remarks, I head out with him toward the mouth of the bay, where the waves break in a deafening crash. Suddenly we’re being pulled out to sea. I can discern the rolling hills of the coastline; they emerge and then disappear under an avalanche of water that pulls me down in turbulent cascades. I keep afloat by using my arms and desperately treading water. Let yourself be carried to shore by the current, I remember thinking; it’s crazy to swim against it. I recall the losing struggle of trying to fight the undertow, my mouth filling with water, thinking that I’ll try again farther down the coast. The shore flashes into sight in a whitish stormy light; the coastline is getting farther away.