My mother, who spoke as if I had learned how to walk at the age of nine months, waited nine years in vain. Ambitious and bitter, never content with the cards that life had dealt her, wounded by what she had been denied, she put hyperbolic meaning into the humiliations to which she was subjected. Paolo, unsteadily taking his first steps, was to be seen as a champion, with utter admiration. She made her friends share in these triumphs. The tears that occasionally fell from her eyes were the only sign of her torment; they were enough to offset the disquiet that she felt upon his successes. If it’s solidarity you’re after, it’s good to let some kind of passive voice inhabit your stories. People will always be grateful for it. And you know they never love you as much as when you’re not doing well.
A dilettante in an amateur theater group in the town where she grew up, my mother never entirely abdicated her destiny as an actress. She simply sacrificed it in the name of pride. Julius Caesar, who would rather have been the top dog in a small town than an underdog in Rome, succeeded in becoming the top dog in Rome. But because my mother was afraid of not being able to emulate him in the capital, she gave up on the town. That was the difference between Caesar and my mother: he would have been happy with the town.
After giving up on the idea of making the theater her life, she decided to transform her life into theater. She loved ceremonies, parties, and receptions of all kinds. My father, a commanding officer in the Carabinieri, was originally seduced by her theatrical career but slowly came to find it nauseating. Believing that he shared in it, he never opposed what he saw as her aesthetic existence, although he never really understood, even at the very end, just how foreign aesthetics were to their lives. While my mother, during one of their parties, would stroll radiantly through an apartment far too small for her ambitions, he would withdraw into a corner, his unwavering stare revealing his struggle to stay awake. I never asked whether he betrayed her, a question children never raise until they, themselves, consider betrayal. And when they finally do ask, they discover virtual abysses in their parents’ pasts, hypothetical dramas and comedies performed with simulated patience. When I asked myself about it, I could never come up with an answer. He was much older than she, a fact that revealed just as much as if he had been younger. I continue to delude myself, however, that I can retrospectively interpret my mother’s behavior.
Despite the dramatic tone of the epitaph my mother had inscribed on his tombstone—struck down by untimely death— my father left her longing less for his person than for the uniform that he had worn. That’s what she remained faithful to, dreaming in her patriotically visionary way that she had been the lifetime companion of a hero.
When he was accidentally killed during a military exercise, she shut herself off in theatrical mourning for years, raising her children to venerate his memory. As happens with many widows, her conjugal life became more desirable in retrospect than it actually had been, mainly because it was over.
I don’t think I could ever rise to such deification in the eyes of my two sons. Franca would never contribute to it, the boys would be stunned, and I along with them. As for my mother, my repudiation of any kind of uniform was the exact opposite of what she had hoped for.
That’s how domestic gods are born. And that’s how they fade.
Periodically, when the fatigue of Paolo’s rehabilitative therapy and life with us would make itself felt, my mother would return to her own house. She lived in the hinterland, a word she had easily adopted, perhaps because she thought it ennobled her degraded Italian suburb with a touch of English. She shared the house with a woman her age, the widow of a pensioned police captain. They had nothing in common except a garden. And yet, over time, they learned to get along, each conceding superiority to the other in a subject they cared little for: my mother took culture, the other woman got common sense. Each of them secretly doubted the legitimacy of this division and would let it show in sarcastic comments. Still, they learned how to distance their skepticism for the benefit of a common good that the passing years made more important than anything else: armistice.
My father-in-law often drove Paolo out to her house. Sometimes I’d go with them. She would stand under the arbor and welcome us. She always commented on what enormous progress her grandson was making, but her enthusiasm ultimately frustrated me. If she had simply said progress, I would have believed her. Excess reveals lies; truth doesn’t want superlatives.
Her hospitality followed the pattern of ancient rituals. False surprise, followed by apologies for the disorderly state of things, the offering of a frugal yet accurately calculated lunch (always the same). In her asides, not onstage with her guests but in the solitary zones of her garden, she revealed her deeper humanity. Everything that makes up man is human, but humanity has a stronger, more mysterious sense. It forces us to surrender in the face of truth. Standing in a corner of the garden, between the sharp angle of the renovated chicken coop and the plastic garden chairs stacked by the robinia hedge, my mother surrendered to truth. She told me, for example, that she was no longer sure she would see my father again. For a fatally fanatic believer such as herself—or, rather, for someone who was completely intolerant of her own doubts—it was an unexpected admission. Nor did she seem too upset about it; that was another sign of her belated sincerity. “I’m not sure of anything anymore,” she confided to me one day, pouring hot chocolate into one of the cups that were part of the service she bought in Faenza in 1932.
On another occasion, a quiet and breezy September afternoon with the wind blowing through the fruit trees, she confessed wearily, “Do you know why I don’t want to die? Because of the sun.”
I wasn’t sure if this was a domestic revival of the sun as adored by the Egyptians or a rephrasing of the words she had uttered as Antigone sixty years earlier or one of her anthropocentriccosmic intuitions. Perhaps it was simply an expression of solitude warmed by her domestic environment, by the long afternoons that she spent in the garden, sitting by the fence and watching the cars drive up the ramp onto the highway.
In her final months, my mother began to see time as if through a lens. She no longer lived from day to day but from hour to hour. She had reached ninety, an age she had imperiously assigned to destiny, and considered herself a survivor. She adhered to the present with a disconcerting intensity, with neither regrets nor hopes.
She tended a small vegetable patch in a distant corner of the garden. She looked dreamy, like she did when I was a child. Although I had never shared in her illusions, I began to listen carefully to her anecdotes about the growth of vegetables. She had become a minor visionary.
She became more understanding about Paolo’s handicap. At first she had hated it, but now she loved his serenity. She no longer asked what he couldn’t do but rather what he enjoyed, what made him feel good. And the tears that ran down her smiling face were of melancholy joy.
I like to think she would have enjoyed hearing what the old priest said on the morning of her funeral. He spoke about life, not death; about the resurrection of the body, not of its dissolution; about the brilliant light, not the darkness. He spoke with a happiness that threatened to disturb the masks of those present, both the more serene ones of family members and the serious, austere ones worn by the tourists of mourning. He didn’t say anything about her. That seemed like a providential sign. It would only have been inadequate.
On leaving the church after that unusual ceremony, more of an ancient ritual than a metropolitan one, more of a festivity than a funeral, it was as if we were accompanying her on a last stroll through the countryside. As we walked behind the hearse on that clear June morning down narrow country roads, flanked on either side by old stone walls, shaded by the trees, I found myself thinking about the sun and how she had learned to love it, how it shone through the branches, so distant and yet so near.
A Late Consultation
Among the many doctors who attended to Paolo, I recall one in particular about whom I have forgotten practically everything— h
is name, his face, the circumstances of the appointment. We went to him, I think, when Paolo was about thirteen. He was a famous specialist with a wealth of experience; a mutual friend had suggested him. We were hoping to get some kind of support and encouragement for the regimen we had been following, and possibly some clear suggestions that would accelerate the undeniable progress Paolo had made so far. I can barely remember where his office was located, nor do I recall any particular details about it, although often I’m more interested in the surroundings than in the occupants themselves. I do recall that we were feeling somewhat less tormented by the distressing thought of the future, a thought that never leaves those with a disabled child, and waited calmly for our consultation.
All I remember is his opinion, which I will here transcribe in the manner of the ancient historiographers (even though they don’t always make this explicit), which is to say, I’ll use my words to reproduce the unequivocal sense of his:
“I’m sorry, truly sorry, for all the work that you—and above all you, Signora—have done up until this point, but it has been entirely useless. I have absolutely no faith in the Doman method. Its only worthwhile characteristic is to accelerate the progress that the child would inevitably make on his own. To rotate the child’s head one hundred and eighty degrees several hundred times a day and to bombard his brain with stimuli will certainly have some effect. But so would a continual caress on his toe or a walk through the park in his wheelchair. The powerfully reactive physiology of the child knows far more than the aggressive Doman therapy. I know this may come as a bitter surprise to you, but the child, as far as I can tell, has made progress. Is it so very important to know why?”
It’s very possible that he then turned toward us and smiled, feeling both accountable for and proudly deferential to his own knowledge.
It just so happens that I remember our reaction—perhaps it was not as casual as I would think—and it surprised both of us. Man is always unpredictable. It was as if we had been dealt a trick that had been intended for someone else. The speech didn’t upset us, as its author had hoped it would (today, years later, I can see that). I would never say to one of my ex-students that all their work had been futile and they would have learned more if they had opted for another path than the one they had so laboriously undertaken. Often cruelty is dubbed unconscious only because it hides behind a smile; the blade sinks in between the ribs, but the person who knifed you is holding you up so lovingly and thoughtfully! As for doctors—with the exclusion of the very best—they have the additional alibi of sincerity (another is stupidity, but they don’t know that). The specialist we met with on that occasion had gotten a thrill out of telling us that our ten years of work had been a waste, yet it was precisely that perception that debased him and tipped the balance of credibility. Doubtless he had exaggerated because he found it paradoxically pleasing to be cordially hostile. And somehow this delicate ferocity was reassuring.
I am reminded of a story by Maupassant, I think it’s called “The Necklace.” In the story, the protagonist, after sacrificing years of his life to pay off a debt for a diamond necklace that someone had lent him and which he promptly lost, discovers, at the end, that the necklace was a fake. We didn’t react with panic, we didn’t even have retrospective panic, and this defined the difference between the two situations. Those years had been like climbing a mountain—for Paolo as well as for us—and they had given us hope. Through the daily torture of obsessive gymnastics we had probably transmitted to him our irresponsible faith in his recovery. This, in light of the results we obtained, must have counted for something.
We never talked about that doctor again. Nor does the threat of the return of repressed memories haunt us. Maybe we didn’t repress his memory. Maybe we just forgot about him. Still the doctor was right about some things.
It was just him. He himself was wrong.
All in Good Time
“Yes, like all boys his age,” Franca says.
“How do you know?”
We’re sitting in Paolo’s room. He’s down in the courtyard, learning to ride the moped. She points to his bed.
“I make it every day.”
“And you’re sure it’s not a case of nocturnal bedwetting.”
“No, it is not nocturnal bedwetting.”
“Have you seen him do it?”
She looks at me impatiently. “No, but it’s as if I have.”
I try to seem indifferent but I’m not. “It’s normal,” I say with a nod. I don’t know whether to feel relieved or upset.
“You should talk to him about it,” she says.
“About what?”
“Not about that,” she says seriously. “About the subject generally. It might help him mature a little.”
“Why, does he seem infantile to you?”
“Please, don’t start,” she exclaims. “The doctor told you he’s intelligent. The only thing you worry about is his intelligence!”
I try not to look at her. “I worry about the important things.”
“Fine, but you have to remember that his knowledge is limited compared to other children his age. That’s why you should talk to him.”
“Do you think it would do him good?”
“Yes,” she says, surprising herself. “He listens to you,” she says, with conjugal disbelief.
I am silent.
“Besides, you are a teacher, aren’t you? Teach your son something!”
“All right,” I say, also in disbelief.
He’s lying on the bed, with a pillow behind his head, knees bent, feet together.
“Paolo, don’t you think we should have a little talk?”
That’s the essential proposition behind the most important problems, the kinds we have the least amount of time for.
He frowns apprehensively, clearly unwilling.
He makes me feel like a badly timed visitor, one of those people who calls at dinnertime, just as you’re sitting down to eat, because, they confess, they know they’ll find you at home. My thoughts go to a friend of mine who told me about the inexplicable resistance that she encountered in her daughter. “It doesn’t come as a surprise, knowing you,” I had said. Then after a moment of seriousness, I had said, “Don’t you think that dialogue has to include silence?”
I am making the same mistake.
“OK,” he says, sitting up with difficulty on the bed. “What do you want to talk about?”
“About your relationship with girls.”
I’ve acquired a detached tone, as if I am pursuing a strange idea that has suddenly crossed my mind.
His legs flinch but then are still.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
He nods.
“You know why I’m asking you?” I say. “Because when I was your age, I didn’t know anything about it either.”
It’s true. He looks at me with some concern. I had figured out some of the pieces of the puzzle, but I didn’t know how they fit together. I remember thinking that women had some kind of pump into which they sucked men. Absurd—yet almost true.
“You’re a good-looking boy. You have problems walking and speaking, but still, girls will like you.”
He nods tentatively.
“You have a great sense of humor and you’re very kind. Girls like that. You’re gallant, too.”
I wink at him, and he smiles for the first time.
“What else do you need to win them over?”
I take for granted that he’s missing something. He retreats into a state of unease. Another mistake is asking him for the answer you should be providing.
“Maybe there is something that you’re missing.”
He looks at me with detached curiosity. He knows adults ask questions so that they can answer them themselves.
“A tiny bit of malice,” I add. “You have to make them curious. You have to try and surprise them.”
I’m telling him exactly what my mother, who used to get involved in my relationships, would tell me
about women when I was his age. She talked about them as if they had programmable reactions. She even showed a certain disdain for them, but no less than that which she reserved for men.
Paolo is perplexed.
“You have to be less childish,” I say. “Sometimes you’re a little repetitive.”
“You are too, sometimes.”
He knows that turning against me always works. I laugh. He’s gaining territory. Maybe that’s what I want.
“But, you see, that’s not the point,” I go on to say. “All men are, in some ways, infantile. We never really leave infancy. We stayed there for too long.”
He listens carefully. We talk less about him and more about men in general. I feel more interested in what I am saying. Do we teach only when we’re interested?
“That’s why women don’t mind when men are infantile. Just not too much and not always.”
He doesn’t say anything, but I think he agrees with me.
“You should try and meet one of those altruistic girls who are willing to face certain difficulties. Not that there aren’t nasty surprises with them too.”
“There aren’t?”
He quiets down when situations become complicated and when his case fits into the category of universal complications.
“Anyway, you know what I mean,” I say, to get out of my embarrassed muddle.
“No.”
We both laugh. Maybe we didn’t understand each other, but we’ve come to an understanding.
He takes advantage of the situation to make the last remark, which at this moment is very important to him—and helps me out—by saying, “All in good time, Papa.”
You Didn’t Think I Could Do It, Did You?
Paolo used to say it on various occasions between the ages of ten and fifteen, like the time I had gone ahead to press the call button and he made it up the three stairs that lead to the elevator from the lobby without my help. “You didn’t think I could do it, did you?” Or when he poured himself a glass of water without spilling a drop, his trembling hand still on the bottle. Or when he managed to throw a rubber ball into a wide basket without falling and hitting the back of his head on the gym mat. Or when he managed to buy tickets for a concert over the phone without having the operator hang up on him. Sometimes they’d interpret his slow and, at times, inarticulate voice for a prank call and hang up. Sometimes they’d ask him to repeat what he had said, ultimately with the same outcome. He’d break out in a sweat, his eyes would burn with determination, but he wouldn’t give up. It made me simultaneously proud and exasperated. I remember wanting to get on the phone and scream at the operator to listen more carefully and not resort to “I’m sorry, I don’t understand”—which so many people say complacently rather than regretfully.
Born Twice (Vintage International) Page 11