Getting to know Cornali through school motivated me to reflect at length on the theme of contradiction. I came to the conclusion that, despite everything, contradictions don’t really exist. That is, they exist only on a mathematical-logical plane. It’s undeniably true that people say one thing and do another, yet they never see that as contradictory. Both good people and criminals alike resort to the principle of contradictions to justify their mistakes, but ultimately their behavior can be completely understood only if one casts aside that very principle. One must look at the agency that compels things to happen, at the ungraspable coherence behind things, at the unknowable totality. Then those actions no longer seem contradictory but necessary, and the whole principle of contradictions is absurd.
I’m not talking about a Cartesian form of reasoning here. Nor am I referring to the world of dreams, where travelers lose and find themselves again. Rather, what I’m alluding to is that mysterious and obscure nucleus known as the individual and what rouses him or her to speed.
The girl understood that Cornali, by defending the disabled in general and yet simultaneously attacking her, was not a victim of contradictions, but that he was bending them to his will. In order to obtain his desired result he used the basest and most efficient weapon: reason. Ultimately, he got what he wanted. She refused to answer him; she shut herself into a guilty, impenetrable state of mutism. He told me about it triumphantly. He saw it as the definitive confirmation of her immaturity. It’s odd that the concept of maturity is most frequently invoked by the immature. Here too, things only seem contradictory. In reality, by accusing others of being immature, such people actually defend themselves.
The girl gave up studying for Cornali’s class during the last month of school. She continued to attend his lectures, though, perhaps because he was one of the few teachers who could still manage to hold them. I don’t want to contradict myself—fatal verb—but Cornali did have a fine mind, blinded as much by intelligence as by idiocy. He fought hard so that disabled people could come to school at a time when they were simply being turned away. It was the first time, albeit surrounded by oppression and violence, that we radically faced the problem of integration. This fact should not be ignored or forgotten, especially now, when each occasion for passing judgment spurs new inequalities and discriminations.
When the girl’s name was called at the final faculty meeting of the year, Cornali didn’t say a word. The rest of us spoke up on her behalf, but he remained silent. The principal, who in his formal manner sought to conserve the final vestiges of authority, turned patiently toward him.
“Please be so kind as to give us your assessment,” he said.
“D,” Cornali replied.
The Photograph
“Don’t move!” I say.
He’s holding on to the pole of the beach umbrella, his arms are stiff, his feet are planted deep in the sand, his body bends at a hypotenuse angle. He’s starting to slip; his mouth contorts in pain. He falls backward onto the sand, the palms of his hands spread wide open.
“Let’s try it a different way.”
I turn him over onto his stomach so he’s lying in the same position as the eighty-year-old woman on the lounge chair next to us and proceed to cover his back with sand. Her skin is covered with wrinkles, partly from old age, partly because of the sun. She’s sure that the sun is the source of good health; she thinks the more it seeps into her thick hide, the closer she will be to immortality. She dies a year later, looking as shriveled as a furnace-dried centipede.
“Rest your chin in your hands,” I suggest.
He tries, but his elbows slip out sideways and his head droops down onto the sand.
I help him back into the pose but by the time I bring the camera up to my eye his head has already fallen forward again.
“You’ll never get him to stay like that,” Franca says, picking him up and wiping off the sand. “It would be hard for us too.”
Now there’s a phrase that comes up repeatedly among those who assist the handicapped: us used as a term of comparison, a symbol of a supreme normality, an unreachable—and all too common—finishing line.
“Why do you insist on photographing him like that?” she asks.
I’m not really sure. I was thinking about cherubs, the way they lean on their elbows at the corners of Renaissance paintings. Why do I have to search for such absurd and remote models?
I sit him down in the sand and dig a hole around him. He falls forward. His face gets dirty. He doesn’t cry because he knows I’m responsible for his troubles. Instead, he looks at me with a mixture of disapproval and benevolence. Sometimes he’s almost fatherly with me; it’s one of his qualities that touches me deeply.
I brush him off and sit him down with his legs crossed like a little Buddha.
“There—stay like that—don’t move!”
I sound just like my father, one of the few vacationers before the war to own a legendary Zeiss, when he used to take pictures of me on the hills above Lake Como.
The little Buddha wavers unsteadily for a moment before losing his balance and falling forward. I snap the picture just as he turns his frightened face toward mine. In the photograph he comes out looking serious and worried. Normal.
“That one!” Franca says, picking it out from the rest and slipping it under the glass frame that now hangs in the hallway.
The Brother
Families know how to defend themselves against their enemies. They foster a sense of danger in much the same way the city of ancient Rome, according to Sallust, fostered fear among its citizens in order to bolster internal strength. But then they discover the enemy at home. Paolo has an enemy. It’s his brother.
Alfredo is three years older than Paolo. He has an enemy too. Before Paolo’s birth he was the only child. He didn’t have to share his parents with a rival. He was king.
What gives him away? His laughter. Laughter reveals so much about us, so much more than tears. Many animals cry, but besides anthropoid apes, as far as I know, very few laugh. Then there are humans.
Alfredo laughs for reasons that are often unclear. If his brother tries to walk from one side of the hallway to the other, he’ll laugh from the doorway of his bedroom. When Paolo couldn’t cry, when he could only sob, making him gasp for air (it’s horrible when a person can’t cry), Alfredo would explode into convulsive laughter.
“Nervous laughter,” Franca would say, updating an expression that she probably learned in her youth. Once, nerves were the unconscious. “It’s his nerves,” they’d say about someone afflicted with neuroses. “A nervous breakdown,” they’d say when he fell prey to the inner enemy. And, “crazy,” they’d say when he lost it completely.
I began to be suspicious of Alfredo’s laughter.
He’d laugh when his brother would trip. “Idiotic laughter,” Franca would say, in a variation on the theme. But when I told her what I thought, she said that everyone laughs when a person trips.
“At the movies, maybe,” I replied.
“No, in real life. We’re all sadists.”
This conclusion, presented so compellingly and universally, managed to confuse me. But on another occasion, when Paolo tripped on the stairs and Alfredo laughed, I turned to her and asked, “Why aren’t you laughing?” She was disconcerted by my question but she replied by hiding behind the alibi that we usually reserve for children when they wound us—that they’re young.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I can understand not worrying about a minor incident: it’s all right to be indifferent. But why laugh? Is it nervous laughter? Is it idiotic laughter? No, it’s gleeful laughter. We laugh at the movies when the pompous fellow slips or when the tyrant is deposed or when the archenemy surrenders. The key is that the enemy has to fall.
Whenever Alfredo saw his brother the enemy in trouble, a fleeting, soulless smile would cross his face. Soon he was laughing more frequently. A sinister euphoria, a bitter allegria, gave him away. It happened with particular frequency wh
en Paolo was learning how to tie his shoes. According to a book we have on physical rehabilitation, learning to tie your shoes is one of the most important conquests on the road to independence. (I’m not sure if that’s reassuring or disturbing to know, but in any case it’s precious for our pride.) It wasn’t just his heavy-handedness that made it difficult; his body weight made him lose his balance and fall forward. Alfredo would watch him struggle, spellbound. Once Franca walked into the room and saw Alfredo laughing. “Why don’t you help him? He’s your brother,” she said. “Why should I? He has to learn on his own,” he had replied. People have infinite reasons for refusing to help, but the cleverest one is precisely because they want to help. “Help him!” Franca yelled, giving him a push and making him fall down next to his brother.
What amazed me most was not that this form of hate had been born but that it persisted. When I spoke to a psychiatrist friend about it, she smiled gently and knowingly, as if she had run into an old friend.
“It’s really quite common,” she said with a sigh. (It’s always reassuring to discover that our absurdities are normal. That’s how we cope with them.) “It’s pure jealousy of the younger sibling, who gets pampered by the parents and is always the center of attention.”
“Yes, but because of his problems.”
“That makes no difference,” she had replied. “Alfredo stopped being the sun and became a satellite. He’ll never be able to forgive his brother for that. That kind of wound never heals.”
I’ve never been able to understand why the wounds of the unconscious refuse to heal. All other wounds heal, but unconscious ones continue to bleed for as long as we live. Perhaps because they’re unconscious, because everybody knows about them except us. Alfredo wasn’t aware that he hated Paolo, at least on the surface. Once I described his brother’s condition to him in great detail, comparing it with his.
“So?” he asked.
“So you have to help him,” I said.
“Why? Don’t I already?”
“No,” I replied, “you do the exact opposite.” I’ll never forget how he cried, at first in a whimper and then with growing distress. The only way I could calm him down was by shaking him. “Think about it!” I had shouted in his face.
“That was the last thing you should have said,” my psychiatrist friend comforted me by saying. “Only love can attenuate the wounds. Now you have to love him even more than before.”
But I loved him less. That’s what worried me. You can make practically anything happen except feelings. And still, those who are closest to you will continue to tell you what you should do and how you should behave. They construct logical systems and create mathematical proofs and come up with undeniable conclusions: If you love then you should react in such and such a way. But I feel differently. Franca is barely surprised by me anymore, while the other one can only accuse me. How many times did I pretend to react the way they expected me to? And while I know that mine was a fiction, can we be sure their proofs were flawless? That the reactions I simulated were the only “right” ones? Life is so much more than a proof. Anyway, they were the wrong reactions for me. Perhaps maturity means respecting the injustice of one’s own reactions. Perhaps maturity means substituting the injustice of conventional thinking with unjust freedom. Even if this—I am beginning to realize—sounds like the introduction to a manual on criminal behavior.
Alfredo, who was not living up to my expectations, could have relied on the very same alibi. If he felt aversion toward his brother, was it really his fault? And wasn’t I also not living up to his expectations of understanding and solidarity? The rationales of the weak make sense to us only when they become our own.
Alfredo had been dethroned and could not be resigned to that. To top it off, he didn’t even like his brother. The frailty that should have made him feel more tenderly toward him—there’s that should again—actually drove a stake between them. The pathology distanced him. His discomfort changed to repulsion. I knew what he was going through because sometimes I felt the same way.
This made it feel foreign to me. We’re reluctant to accept those flaws that, magnified in others, we fear in ourselves. Because of the difference in scale and the accompanying sense of remorse, they become unacceptable. Alfredo would smirk when Paolo would try, and fail, to catch a ball. Then, when it happened a second time, he’d laugh. That’s the difference between us: I’d get exasperated while he’d be amused. (There’s never a lack of comparisons that favor us.) But Paolo, on the other hand, who stood between us, sometimes just couldn’t take it anymore and would start to cry; his hands would grip at the smooth floor as if it too might slip away from him.
One on One
The principal of the elementary school is disabled. He limps when he walks, dipping slightly with each step, his left leg extending out to the side. When he sits down, he plants his cane in front of him like a baseball bat and rests his chin on top of his hands.
Writing about him now, after so many years, I realize that I never knew—nor was I ever curious to know—the cause of his impediment. It could have been the war. Maybe he had polio. My general indifference, which is even more telling because of my personal case, teaches me something about the distance that exists between the disabled and us.
In any event, his impediment was eclipsed by his enormous vitality. He’d get up from his desk suddenly, violently, rotating his stiff leg outward. And when he came down the hall—tall, bearded, and gaunt, hunched over his cane with that lopsided gait of his—teachers and children alike would move aside to let him by. And if someone didn’t notice in time that he was advancing toward them, they’d leap out of the way to avoid an encounter. He was fully aware of the uneasy feelings he provoked in others. Indeed, he often chose to intensify them by waving his cane in the air to emphasize his words or to point someone out, in both cases managing to transform a simple gesture into a threat.
I knew he was feared within the school as a serious womanizer. All the female teachers had to defend themselves from his gruff rapacity. From the older women he expected the smallest display of sexual loyalty, a kind of temporary and immediate relief. Though somewhat more careful with the younger ones, he was no less insistent. Once, called before the Superintendent after being accused by one of his victims, he shamelessly managed to have the charges reversed in the name of corruption. I’d like to hope that today such a reversal wouldn’t be possible and he wouldn’t be able to get away with it. But back then the victim gave up trying, as she said, to nail him to his responsibilities. Nor was there any lack of women either, among the so-called “non-faculty staff ” who had had some kind of intimate relationship with him, an expression that in his case suggested something sordid and lecherous.
This bristly-faced, smooth-talking city satyr was constantly on the prowl for sexual favors, for pleasures stolen through intimidation and surprise, for brief liaisons with women who were at their wits’ end in silent despair. He reminded me of the pillager of a ruined city or a jackal after an earthquake. Or of one of those men who’d be shot on the spot—now there’s an unparalleled expression (we find a variation of it in “summary execution”). It’s a terminology that, under the guise of “equality,” always managed to satisfy my homicidal instincts.
It’s a shame we can punish only those who commit physical crimes and not those who are guilty of psychological ones. I detest men who “collect” sexual adventures; they use trickery and deception to obtain that which rapists obtain with force. Moreover, these psychological rapists are considered great seducers. What distinguishes the two, besides the apparent identity of their object (never a better word) of desire, is that they are never won over by their prey, they’re never taken with their victims’ loss of power. These men court women with the same dark determination with which misogynists avoid them. Essentially, both groups hate women, only in different ways and with different consequences. That the scorn they have for their victims is matched by their victims’ image of them validates them, pr
ovides them with the final stamp of approval. As such, the man finds the alibi to begin his hunt all over again.
The principal of the Martin Luther King Scuola Elementare might not have needed an alibi. He was only concerned about the penal repercussions. While psychological thieves are unquestionably of lower principles than apple thieves (the biblical fruit being the preferred one for such metaphors), no laws exist to stop them. Indeed, if their intentions are never transformed into action, a crime is never actually committed. This is the minuscule abyss that separates the penal from the moral code.
These prejudices were well established within me when I met with the principal in his office on the second floor of the recently completed school. Its structure—cube-shaped buildings connected by staircases, bridges, and open, airy corridors— and the outlying constellation of lawns and shrubs gave it a modern feeling of spaciousness and light, entirely different from the Lombrosian isolation of my own school.
His manner is both gruff and courteous. He wants to make me feel like a colleague. Given his seniority in age, he has the sad privilege of inviting me to address him with the informal tu. He observes me carefully. He has sunken cheeks and his eyes are bright with excitement. Pointing to his bad leg, which juts out from behind the desk, he refers to the unfair circumstances that unite us. There is a kind of caustic glee in this casual show of solidarity; it’s the bitterly private sense of humor of someone who enjoys imposing his handicap on others.
“Now let’s be clear,” he says promptly.
I’ve always disliked that phrase. It’s never the invitation to transparency that it seems to be. On the contrary, it always inaugurates an exchange of hostilities.
“You’re lucky to have found a principal like me.”
He looks up to see how I react to what he’s saying.
“If there’s anyone who knows what it means to be handicapped, it’s me.”
Born Twice (Vintage International) Page 4