Born Twice (Vintage International) (19 page)

I finally stopped being scared by the encephalogram and by IQ tests. (Why not test for stupidity as a planetary epidemic?) I think we should measure all things less; there are too many risks for everyone involved. I would propose a greater sense of delicacy with the handicapped and more respect. They will return the favor.

Garbage

He spoke at a student rally. I found out about it from a colleague of mine who has a friend who teaches at Paolo’s school.

“How did it go?” I asked, trying to appear calm.

“Very well,” she said, also seeming calm. “He was very clear.”

“Do you know what he said?”

“I don’t know the details,” she said, “but the point was: Either we get treated like mature people or we’ll force them to treat us like children.”

I recognize the binary structure of his logic.

“I hear that you spoke at a rally,” I say at home that evening.

“Yes, that’s right,” he says.

“How did it go?”

“It went well.”

That’s his laconic and exhaustive formula for replies.

“Did you have trouble with your voice?”

“There was a microphone.”

“With all the difficulty you have speaking,” I say, looking at him straight in the eye to overcome my trepidation, “weren’t you scared?”

He looks at me. He seems glad I asked.

“You know, I thought about it,” he says slowly, in that complicit and expert way of his, “and I realized that there were two possibilities. Either they were going to treat me like garbage or let me talk.”

“And?”

“They let me talk.”

The Recital

It’s the end-of-the-year recital for the disabled children at Paolo’s church youth group.

“Do you think I can go?” I ask Franca in desperate nonchalance.

“Of course,” she says openly.

“What?” I ask her in disbelief.

“It’s the third year he’s done it, and you’ve never been once.” She’s trying to be neutral. “I suppose you could continue not going.”

“How did he feel about me not being there?”

“Terrible.”

“Did he say so?”

“No, you know how proud he is. He only asked if you were coming this year.”

“What did you say?” Why do I even ask? Never ask questions.

“I don’t know. I said, ‘You know how Papa is.’ ”

“How is Papa?” I ask her.

“Terrible,” she says, as if she were talking to Paolo.

I’m giving in. “What play are they doing?”

“Ulysses.”

“Whose, Joyce’s?”

“No, Homer’s.”

I gave in.

Here I am in the auditorium, unadorned except for the metal folding chairs that surround the stage. An intense light shines from behind the heavy black curtain that hangs on rings along a metal bar. Portable spotlights project intersecting colored lights onto the whitewashed ceiling.

“This place looks like a bomb shelter,” I say to Franca, who doesn’t share the memory, because of her age, or the joke, because of her beliefs. She looks at the roomful of bright faces. There’s a festive air. We’re part of a warm, welcoming crowd that breaks into applause now and then to encourage the actors in benevolent complicity. In fact, the show has already begun. We are living it in the orchestra, in this gathering of desperate, resigned, happy, serious parents. A boy with Down’s syndrome sticks his head out of the curtain, looks around the room, laughs, and retreats. Then a girl steps out but she runs off too. We hear clattering and shouting as they take their positions. Suddenly, recitals of my own infancy come flashing back; it wasn’t about speaking memorable lines onstage; it was about the orchestra, darkness punctuated with eyes and lights. For us, theater was the audience for whom we made faces that we thought were hysterical. The theater was never again like that. The line that divided the actors from the audience seemed open to us in both directions. Yet it could not be crossed. We were bewitched by its magic.

I try to hold back my emotions.

“Do you like it?” Franca asks.

“Yes, enormously.”

Here I open a parenthesis that has evil as its object.

We’re used to evil. Evil has the power of confirming our superiority or relieving our weakness. It’s so familiar that it makes good seem disconcerting, so we try to reduce it, mutating its signs and assimilating it into the negative models that are already familiar to us.

I’ve noticed this happening in the most common of reactions, including my own, toward voluntarism. The tendency is to interpret altruism as a stand-in for egoism, generosity as gratifying for the one who exercises it, solidarity in the name of self-interest, a sacrificing
I
being blackmailed by a tyrannical super-
I.
Nor can anything be learned from ethology, which has been ransacked in order to explain aggressiveness but never the other way around. Animals that sacrifice themselves for their young or for others—are they, too, victims of a super-
I
? No, that’s instinct, ethologists tell us. But we continue to deny this positive instinct in man and instead endow him with all sorts of others.

Evil—contrary to what is generally thought—is reassuring. We venerate it in monsters; it justifies vendettas; it mobilizes our defenses and hardens the heart. Good is inimitable. (How can it ever be compared to evil?) It leaps over the trenches and walls we construct against the enemy, it eludes the endless little tricks of intelligence, it derails shrewdness by flat-out ignoring it, it’s disarmed, and it’s simple. Evil excites us and piques our curiosity, it stimulates the investigative spirit, it’s hidden in the final room, the one where the infamous secret lies. Good opens doors; it doesn’t hide anything; it steps aside so as not to be noticed. Evil promises mystery; good is a luminous mystery, an unacceptable presence.

I am speaking with full cognizance, but I am in good— if limited—company. For many men, nothing is more edifying than destruction and nothing is more repugnant than edification. That the ideologies of our century have been responsible for generating massacres is not because they pointed out some remote paradise but because they first had to create an immediate inferno. Of course, it’s far more comforting—and more ethical—to turn the hierarchies on their heads. It’s an alibi you can say anything about except that it hasn’t been used.

Am I exaggerating? Maybe, but exaggerations, like caricatures, can offer us an image in which we can discern the original.

I had always imagined voluntarism—without knowing it, of course—as a point of intersection between a failed vocation and self-consolation. Until I met Paolo’s friends. The kids that go out with him for pizza or to the movies or to the used record stores, where he’ll buy popular songs from previous eras (who else to save our traditions if not the young?) are kind, gentle, and discreet. They don’t expect anything in exchange, no gifts or thank-you notes. Not only do they help, they do what people need even when they never get it: They sympathize.

Paolo is spending the vacation with us but he doesn’t consider it a vacation. I still don’t know exactly what he considers it, nor do I intend to inquire. I wonder what we are communicating to him when, after fifteen years of injunctions, we still say, “Walk straight!” Is it an order, a reminder, an exhortation? An alibi for us to continue hoping? Is it disillusion, a scolding, a form of punishment? I’ve often noticed something other than exasperation in his look—an atrocious boredom masked by patience. If he finally manages to have fun on vacation with his group of volunteers, where they accept him with brio, without wanting to change him, should we even wonder why? The hidden imperative of the educator, according to Droysen, can be reduced to these few unsaid words: “You must become the way I want you, because only in that way will I ever be able to have a relationship with you.” Is it any surprise that Paolo is happy when he is no longer being educated?

In classical times, pagans were disturbed to see fellow citizens help the poor, the sick, and the imprisoned. Today, when even laypeople practice charity (what does
lay
actually mean when the predominant religion is the religion of man?), people tend to profit from voluntarism rather than use it as a model.

By pretending not to see evil, we are reflected back in it. This is less true of goodness. For an author, however, evil is a saving grace and good is a curse. The praise of good troubled the great writers; it was the nightmare of their consciousness. In order to be excused for it, Manzoni took refuge in irony; Cervantes in madness; Dickens in stupidity; Dostoyevsky in idiocy; Melville in innocence. The only writer who never hesitated to raise a cathedral to good is Victor Hugo, but we can forgive him for anything.

To speak well of good is unforgivable. In fact, I can’t forgive myself. But I simply had to pay back the friends, relatives, and strangers for the inestimable help they’ve given.

Suddenly, the curtain opens. A boy pushes it back. It slides along the rod. He keeps pushing it back until he bumps into the pole that holds it up. Laughter—practically an ovation—rises from the audience of disabled children and their families. I don’t know whether the director—his name was on the poster— had meant for it to happen. It certainly couldn’t have started any better. And it only got worse.

To say that everything possible happened would only be a part of it. There was a gigantic Ulysses with hairy legs and a white skirt who looked like a Scot who had descended on Asia Minor in sandals. Calypso’s tears flowed as she sat on her egg of an island, wooden waves sliding by as if in a cartoon. Telemachus was the only person onstage who wasn’t disabled, but you wouldn’t have known it. He was a student of pharmaceutical science, Franca said. From his articulation and intonation we couldn’t tell if he was asking Athena a question or answering her. They chose to take advantage of Paolo’s cavernous voice to transform him into a laconic Polyphemus. I have to confess that his dialogue with Ulysses was very suggestive, a cross between the Levantine and the metaphysical, but maybe it was my emotions that betrayed me.

The best parts included the piece with Nausicaa, who sat by the edge of a river all dressed in white (the Down’s syndrome daughter of a lawyer with wild eyes seated in the front row), and the banquet of Proci, with the companions gorging themselves on glasses of orange soda and prosciutto sandwiches. I have never liked seeing actors eat onstage, both because I couldn’t join in and because they never really ate, just chomped away on microscopically small portions of food with hermetically sealed mouths. They never finished their food, they were always well-mannered, and they always sat up straight. That acting technique went unheeded in this play. Instead, I found myself envying the actors’ everyday voracity. And they enjoyed displaying it to us, laughing along with the public as they gulped down slices of cake or devoured pieces of chocolate. Only Penelope, dressed in her brown tunic (a symbol perhaps of her conjugal faithfulness), managed to conserve a distant austerity worthy of Ionesco.

A well-earned, enthusiastic, and appreciative ovation rewarded everyone at the end of the show, actors and audience alike. Unanimity, that daydream of children and infinite utopia of those who never grow up, became a melancholy Eden.

We wait for Paolo to come out from behind the curtain. Finally he appears, triumphant, at the top of the stairs. He descends the first few steps, sweaty and glowing, refusing any help with a wave of his hand. Then he slips on the last two steps, pitching forward. Luckily we are at the bottom, where parents like to be and their children don’t. He is saved by a final round of applause from the public, this time celebrating reality.

The Banquet

My father-in-law is eighty years old. He has taken good care of his body for his whole life, but now he’s growing disabled in the mind. “No, it’s not Alzheimer’s,” the famous gerontologist told us when we took him to get his opinion, pretending it was just a regular checkup. “Nor is it senile dementia,” he said.

“So what is it then?” Franca asked.

The gerontologist looked at her with a careful smile. “It’s old age, Signora.”

When the best gerontologists get old, they tend to let down their guard and use basic language instead of shielding themselves behind professional jargon. Eventually they profess not to be of any help at all. But Franca refused to give in.

“Fine, but why did it get worse all of a sudden?”

“Because it’s in the descendant phase of the parabola,” the gerontologist replied, tracing an arc with his finger over the desk and holding up a copy of
National Geographic
to intersect it at its lowest part.

“Yes, but why his brain?” Franca insisted. “
His
mother,” she said, pointing at me, “was completely lucid when she died, and she was older than my father.”

“It’s all written in our genes, Signora,” the clinician said solemnly. “Your father’s brain is aging at a faster rate than the other parts of his body. There’s nothing strange about it.”

Franca listened to him in dismay, almost in fear.

“You’ve done X rays and CAT scans,” she said. “What did you see? What’s happening to his brain?”

“Now don’t get upset, Signora,” the doctor replied. “This is a very common process. I’d have to say that his case doesn’t even classify as precocious.”