“Ultimately, it’s up to the principal to interpret things on a case-by-case basis. I’m not sure that the administration will let me limit the size of the class.”
It’s getting hard for me to breathe.
“It’s happened before and I didn’t give up!” he adds, with malign triumph in his voice.
“Now listen carefully to me,” I say, moving my chair closer to the desk. I’m trying to speak slowly but I realize I’m panting. “A handicapped student has the right to a smaller class size. I’ve done the research.”
“Obviously not enough,” he insists.
“If you don’t limit the number of students so that it’s acceptable to Signorina Bauer,” I say, pointing my finger at him, my voice getting stronger, “just wait and see what will happen!”
I glare at him, seething with enmity.
“What are you trying to say?”
“Your school will be on the front pages of all the newspapers for not respecting the new laws. It’ll be a scandal!”
In order to save an unreal situation and salvage what I can, I said “school,” not him. He notices and is grateful for it, I can tell.
“Newspapers?” he asks. “You have clout with the newspapers?”
“My father-in-law! He’d do that for my son—and more!”
The mere thought of my father-in-law makes his face light up.
“Now don’t get so worked up,” he says slowly, looking at me. “I was just making you aware of a possible problem. We’re here to help each other, right?”
“Right,” I say. There’s nothing more I can say.
“You see, your father-in-law can make things happen. I’m sure of it. In this case as in publishing. That’s why I chose to speak to you about my poems.”
I have no strength left.
“You know, it really is vital to think about how one faces things. Suddenly, what was impossible is now possible. It’s that way for my poems too, you’ll see,” he concludes.
I listen to him, drained, my legs weak with the prolonged tension. I can’t put my child’s future on the line for threats like these. In Italy one is never entirely sure of the law. There’s always the risk that one will be overpowered by some higher authority.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I mumble, getting to my feet. The meeting is over. “But I can’t promise anything. It doesn’t depend on me.”
“No,” he replies, “it really does depend on you.”
He stands up too, fiercely and vigorously, extending his stiff leg in my direction. He comes around to my side of the desk. Leaning heavily on his cane and lifting his bad leg slightly off the floor, he rests his hand on my shoulder.
“It’s important that we get along; it doesn’t take much.”
I put his manuscript into my satchel.
“Keep me posted,” he says. Then, in dialect, he says, “One hand washes the other, isn’t that so? What do you say to that?”
“Goodbye,” I say. We’re at the door. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Me too!” he exclaims, with laughing eyes. “And you know what I think? I think we’re going to make it!”
I shake his hand. An uncomfortable solidarity has formed between us that pleases him.
“Do you want me to call the elevator for you?”
“No, I’ll walk down.”
“Lucky you!” he says. “I always have to take the elevator.”
“Right,” I say with a nod. “And if my son has to come upstairs, he’ll have to take it too.”
“We’ll take it together!” he calls out, as I start down the stairs.
Pleasure Island
We take our seats on the folding chairs that have been arranged in a semicircle around the exercise mat on which she sits, cross-legged. She’s wearing a black sweat suit that covers her long angular body. She glances at her Day-Glo wristwatch and smiles sarcastically as a woman with heavy makeup languidly enters the room in a cloud of perfume.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” she says.
Without adjusting her pace, the latecomer makes her way over to the folding chairs and slowly takes a seat in the second row. Her son’s case is not serious; he has trouble walking, and physiotherapy alone will probably take care of it. She tends to observe us with careful and detached curiosity, like a first-class traveler visiting the third-class deck. She never neglects to mention the minor nature of her son’s condition. When we’re discussing the most difficult cases she opens her eyes wide in a kind of theatrical solidarity, but you can tell that hearing other people’s stories simply offers her yet another form of reassurance. She’s not the only parent to react like that, just the most obvious and perhaps the stupidest. None of us are immune to it. We’re always glad to comfort those who are worse off and, in so doing, comfort ourselves. A classification of handicaps has become a silent object of competition between us. If we compete like this among ourselves, I suppose we shouldn’t really be surprised at how others react.
“All right. Is everyone listening?” the doctor says, rising up to a crouching position, one hand on the mat in front of her.
“You’ll have to talk about yourselves. That’s right, about yourselves,” she said solemnly at the first parents’ meeting at the Center. And then she pointed at us, making us instantly feel guilty.
We have to get to the root of the problem. We need to talk about things sincerely, to use that infamous word; that’s how she defined it. Her instructions are accompanied by shrill laughter, the kind she feels helps lessen the tension. How we experience the handicap, how the handicap has changed us, who we are now. Our experiences will be compared and gathered into a dossier by the Center. Eventually the material may even form the basis of a book.
“Are you pleased?” she asks.
A dark silence follows that finally unites us. We stare straight ahead, trying to avoid her gaze as she looks around the room in careful scrutiny. We’ve regressed back to schoolchildren; none of us dares look at the teacher while she decides which one of us to call on.
“We won’t talk about what goes on here at the Center; it will be our Pleasure Island. I want you to talk about what goes on outside.”
“Enough of this ‘Pleasure Island’!” a heavy man says gruffly, his neck puffing out like a toad’s, his eyes dilating, his cheeks turning purple. “Let’s begin by doing away with the name!”
“Why, don’t you like it, Signor Colnaghi?” the doctor asks calmly, rocking back on her heels and sticking out her chest proudly. “What don’t you like about it?”
“The name: Pleasure Island,” he replies. “What on earth does it have to do with us?”
“I agree,” I hear myself saying. Why am I doing this? I’m not sure, but now I have to keep going. Signor Colnaghi turns toward me, overwhelmed with gratitude. “It’s the wrong formula.”
She looks at me with a shared sense of irony. “So you’re against me now too, Signor Frigerio?” Then, after a pause she adds, “Of course we don’t have to use that name. What do you think, Signora?” She turns to a diminutive lady sitting in the front row who keeps her hands folded over her knees in a gradually intensifying grip. I’ve noticed her before; she’s one of those very shy people who, when called on to speak in public, would just love to disappear. The kind of person who dreams of saying memorable things and fears saying the ridiculous.
“It sounds fine to me,” she replies weakly.
The doctor jumps to her feet. We know how proud she is of doing this. Her existence is based on passionately serving those who are devoid of such agility. She teases us with it. She’s a good woman, we’re reluctantly forced to admit.
She laughs brightly, the way she does at the best of times. “Signor Colnaghi and Signor Frigerio don’t like Pleasure Island. What about the rest of you?”
The others hesitate; they shift uncomfortably on their chairs, torn between adulation and truth, tradition and secession.
“I get it. You don’t like it either. So we’ll do away with it. No mo
re Pleasure Island from now on. But what about the Center. Are you pleased with the Center?”
Yes! The Center, yes, a liberated chorus of voices exclaims, but hidden in their voices lies a combination of sincerity and untruthfulness, conviction and perplexity. Just as in school, there’s the same divided unanimity.
“We couldn’t ask for better treatment,” Signor Colnaghi says, dabbing at his forehead with a handkerchief, both proud and fearful of his unexpected triumph, “but Pleasure Island was a bit euphoric.”
“Yes, Signor Colnaghi, I know. It’s been discussed,” she says patiently, lowering her gaze.
He wants to say more, as often happens when someone has already concluded. “We live it differently.”
“I know.” She nods. Then she looks up. “That’s right. How do you live the experience of the Center?”
She’s picked up where she left off. How do we live the experience of the Center?
We grow serious: focused, intense, almost troubled. The vacation on Pleasure Island is over.
Favors
The same person who’ll refuse to do a favor for you if you ask in the evening might have been willing to do it had you asked earlier in the day. It all depends on someone’s mood. There’s no way of knowing for sure. These are the hypothetical certainties that are sources of joy when we are tempestuous and of distress when we are not.
That’s why I can’t risk making a mistake with my father-in-law. What’s the best time to ask him a favor?
“What kind of favor?” Franca asks.
“Publishing.”
“Never,” she says.
“Good,” I reply, encouraged by our matrimonial exchange.
“Who’s it for?”
“The guy with the limp.”
With some distress I realize I have brutally used the principal’s disability against him. It doesn’t usually happen to people who are either directly or indirectly affected by a handicap. If someone uses the abusive epithets “spastic” or “mongoloid,” you can be sure that no one in their family is either of those. Misfortunes have varying kinds of effects on us, linguistic ones being the most immediate. We become sensitive to the vocabulary associated with the problem. We could even say, by way of inference, that writers are perennially sensitive to the misfortunes of language, even if they’re never affected by them. Nor do they expect to be, in order to reflect on the variations in meaning. This helps explain why the language of the handicapped has become a victim of neuroses. People wonder why “blind” has become vision-impaired and “deaf ” is hearing-impaired. One plausible explanation could be that “blind” irreparably defines a person, while “vision-impaired” circumscribes the absence of a function.
The antithesis of this is furnished by the example of the limping principal. The most circumspect definition for him, according to the current language of the handicapped, would be to say he has problems walking, in the same way the mother of a child who stutters would say her child has problems speaking. Another way of defining the principal, one that is elegantly cloaked in the formal language of culture, would be to say that he is claudicate. But “claudicate principal” reveals an all-too-obvious irony.
The limping principal is a bitter, obstinate, and hostile man. His presence suggests both an authoritarian figure weakened by a physical defect and a devil—as in the novels of Lesage— perched high above the roofs of Madrid, the same image I was trying to suggest earlier. This confirms two things: that debility is a treacherous card to be played at just the right moment and that solidarity is not the most common attribute among those suffering from handicaps.
Perhaps the best moment to ask the favor is when he comes back from his car ride with Paolo. He’s always nervous before leaving, as if he were preparing for a sortie against the enemy. He straps Paolo so tightly into his seat that the boy sits up stiffly; not even his head lolls forward. He still hasn’t gotten used to Paolo’s anomalies. His face lights up when someone doesn’t immediately notice Paolo’s “problems,” as if this reassures him of a future normality. “He’ll never be normal,” I once told him in exasperation. We can put up with our own mistakes but not when we see them replicated in others. “That’s what you think!” he had replied, adding, “Nature performs miracles!”
He never assisted in Paolo’s physical therapy. Franca managed to involve friends, relatives, neighbors, and peers in turning his head and stretching his limbs, but she never dared ask her father. Or, rather, she limited herself to asking him once, recalling a Sicilian proverb that says when a friend doesn’t hear you the first time, it means he doesn’t want there to be a second time.
Perhaps it seemed unnatural to him that a child should be as frail as an elderly person. It must have seemed like physiological subversion, even though I explained to him that, in fact, physiology anticipates such a subversion. If it didn’t, Paolo would never have been able to put alternate circuits into function, as the neurologists had predicted he would.
“Why do you think Paolo survived?” I asked him once.
“Because he’s strong!” he answered, with a humble jolt of pride.
“No, because he’s weak,” I said. “He gains strength from his flexibility.”
“Enough of your talk!” he’d replied. “I just don’t follow you.”
Paolo offered him the most extreme opportunity to reexamine his beliefs, but that was the last thing he wanted to do. Dominated by hierarchical ideas on nature and society, he was forced to contend with his grandson’s condition, which posed insoluble problems to his understanding of the meaning of life. Contrary to what one would generally believe, diversity makes us feel diverse and we do not easily forgive that. My father-in-law died believing his grandson was diverse in appearance only. That was his most tenacious hope; the fear of being proved otherwise rendered him fanatical. Jung wrote that fanaticism is an overcompensated doubt, but my father-in-law never even managed to begin compensating for his.
He once told me that as a young man he and his friends would wait in the cinema for homosexual men to give themselves away so they could ambush them and teach them a lesson or two. It struck me that he had used the word lesson. It certainly had taught a lot to the person being attacked but nothing at all to the aggressor. Fifty years later, the lesson continues to elude him.
I wait for him to return from his outing with Paolo.
The green car enters the courtyard of the building with its lights on. It’s only late afternoon, but he turns on his lights at the same time the municipality turns on the streetlights. It’s one of the many rituals he celebrates with maniacal observation and of which he is especially proud, as if it were some kind of merit. Another one he’s proud of is his perfect attendance at a club to which he belongs. “I’ve never been absent,” he once told me proudly. “Never!” He reminded me of an admiral who, after saving his crew and passengers, had fearlessly gone down with his ship, the only difference being that my father-in-law lived to tell the story.
He opens his door slowly and walks around the rear of the car to open Paolo’s door. In the meantime I’ve gotten Paolo’s go-cart out of the garage and wheeled it over. He unfastens Paolo’s seat belt, picks him up, and lowers him into the go-cart with graceful ease. I know that this maneuver, done with delicate precision, fills him with the silent joy of an artisan in front of work well done.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you a favor,” I begin, as Paolo pedals off in zigzags across the courtyard.
“Tell me,” he replies.
“I know it runs counter to your moral and ethical code.”
“Get to the point,” he says.
“The principal of the school that Paolo will attend is disabled.”
“Him too!” He throws his hands up in the air.
“Yes, and he’d like to publish a book of his poems with an imprint of your caliber.”
He’s sensitive to this wrong word, but it puts him in a good mood, alluding to a power he doesn’t have.
“How do I fit in
?” he asks.
I know he wants to hear the favor that is being asked of him in clear and precise terms. It’s a practice I used to associate with men of a certain age, until I understood that these men of a certain age have accumulated a certain amount of experience over the years and they’re not wrong to expect it. They’re tired of doing favors for people who make it seem as though they themselves are actually doing the favor.
“He’d like you to talk to an important editor about his work. He thinks you can do anything.”
“It’s not true, but I can do it this time,” he says. “I did quite an important favor for one recently. Give me the manuscript.”
He nods slyly and says no more.
I am dumbfounded.
“I suppose you want to read it first before giving it to him,” I add, already responding to this situation for which I was unprepared.
“Why on earth would I do that? Give it to me now, and I’ll talk to him about it later this week. Did you like it?”
“Yes,” I say, taken aback. “It’s not bad.”
“Only ‘not bad’?” he says, smiling. “I was hoping for better.”
“Actually, for me, not bad means pretty good.”
“What’s ‘pretty good’?” he rebuts. “Give it to me and say no more!” He points to the car. “Would you mind backing it out while I go and say goodbye to Paolo?”
“Not at all,” I reply, opening the door and climbing in.
Everything feels easy, light, simple. I look up. In the square of sky between the buildings, I can see the first stars.
I back up quickly. My father-in-law shrinks at the far end of the courtyard. For some reason, I have always imagined him in breeches. But he’s never worn them.
Miss Bauer
Her name is Elisa Bauer. She’s from Bolzano and she’s thirty-two years old. She has never had a disabled child in her class and seems, when we meet her, visibly concerned about the prospect of having one. She wanted to meet us; we live about three hundred yards away from the school.
Born Twice (Vintage International) Page 6