“No, I really didn’t think you could,” I’d reply, with excessive enthusiasm for my own sincerity. Then one day I realized that my reaction made him unhappy. It was as if I were constantly opening up a wound that he wanted to heal. He’d blush with a kind of retrospective melancholy that would poison the pleasure of the moment. His eyes would flash with an uneasy presentiment, as if an inextinguishable fear was being confirmed. I was trying to valorize the present, but this made the past even less bearable. To have one’s capabilities questioned by those for whom one cares the most is an atrocious experience. We’ve all been through it. It may have fortified us against our own back-sliding, but we paid for it in grim coinage, denying ourselves and others the pleasure of unself-consciousness.
Paolo didn’t want me to reinforce the sense of mistrust that so many parents have about their children’s development. In his repetitive and ingenious way, he hoped the present would free him from the past and the unappealable sentence that had been pronounced on his future could be modified with retroactive measures. Then, one evening, I thought about what a literature professor of mine had once told me in a vehement attack of stupidity and cruelty: “You’ll never know how to write!” It was a verdict I never forgot, and its unfairness has persecuted me ever since. That’s when I understood that I had to modify the past for Paolo in order to make it acceptable to him (it was no longer possible to do so with my own). So I told him, with that truthfulness that we find only when we’re altering the truth, “You see, it’s not that I didn’t believe in you. I hoped you would be able to do it, but I didn’t want to deceive myself. I knew that if I deceived myself I would get impatient with your mistakes. That’s why, even at the risk of going against my instincts, I preferred to be downbeat. Do you understand?”
I’m not sure he understood. Often, all people can intuit is that we are disturbed and we want to help. So they give us back that which we need most: their help.
From then on, Paolo never asked that question again.
A Girl on the Phone
He’s on the telephone. He turns pale and starts stuttering. He’s perspiring; his eyes are shiny.
“It’s a girl,” Franca whispers, passing me in the hallway.
He looks down and in his hoarse, slow voice he asks, “What’s your name?”
He listens silently. His breathing is slow and heavy. Then, perplexed, he says, “No, I don’t remember.”
He looks up and sees me. He looks away.
He takes a breath. Usually, if I’m around, I’ll gesture to him to reply quickly so that his interlocutor doesn’t get bored. But now I don’t say a word.
“So where do you want to meet?” he asks her slowly, but with a slightly knowing tone.
She must not have understood him because he repeats the sentence even slower.
He waits in trepidation. I’d like to run over and hug him.
“When?” he asks.
Then he looks at the receiver in his hand, stupefied and dismayed. I sit down next to him.
“Did she hang up?”
“Yes,” he says.
“Do you know her?”
He shakes his head. I’m afraid he’s going to cry.
I don’t know what to say, except the truth. Immediately. At least the truth.
“It’s a joke, Paolo. Don’t take it seriously.”
He nods.
“It’s a stupid joke. They used to do it when I was in school, too. Girls would call up boys from another class so they wouldn’t know who they were.”
I’m lying. (Speaking of truth!) But it could have been true.
“React!” I insist. “Don’t pay any attention to her. She’s stupid. Next time just tell her so.”
“No,” he says, looking at me.
“Yes, you have to! You need to know that there are stupid girls out there. Don’t make room for them.”
“But love is important,” he says, his voice at first choked up and then clear. “Maybe you didn’t know that,” he adds.
He tries to wriggle away from me, but I’ve grabbed him by the shoulders.
“No, Paolo, I do know it.”
“She spoke to me about—”
I know I have to distract him. I can’t give in. If he were to see me get emotional it would only make things worse.
“She’s a kid; you have to pity her,” I say, taking his hand in mine. “It was a stupid joke, but I don’t hate her either.”
He looks at me in amazement.
“That’s right, it was stupid of her to play a joke on you,” I say. “It was cruel. But she’s treating you the same way she would treat the others. Don’t feel sorry for yourself, all right? We don’t have to like her, but worse things can happen.”
I don’t know what I’m saying but I’ve succeeded in distracting him. And something I said must have comforted him. He’s calmer now.
“When she grows up, she’ll be the first one to understand how stupid she was,” I add.
The punch line doesn’t convince him. I fatally pronounced the additional word that manages to diminish all the others. Why bet on the girl’s future? Why so much deferred kindness?
“No, you’re right, Paolo,” I say. “She may end up being stupid for the rest of her life. There are so many stupid people in the world. Do you think any of them were smart as children?”
He starts to smile.
“There, that’s the way,” I say. “It’s not worth wondering why she did it.”
Suddenly, the expression on his face becomes serious. He’s disappointed.
“She did it because I’m disabled,” he says, in a low voice.
Prayer
Until Paolo was two years old, we believed that his recovery had to be complete. That’s what I asked for in my prayers on Sundays. I started going to mass again after many years. An inner voice (I heard it clearly, almost physically, and it didn’t sound like my own) had convinced me that my prayers would be heard.
Later on, I mitigated my request. I did away with the adjective complete. I was ready to settle for partial. I was ready, in my passionate and erratic dealings with the all-powerful, to accept a disability in Paolo. Concessions (I’m not sure whose, my own or the Almighty’s) that once would have seemed atrocious— his condition was much worse, we learned, than what we originally had expected—had become acceptable. After a very long silence, I heard the voice say, Yes, it will come to pass.
I left that encounter feeling heartened. I also felt pleased with my cunning. I didn’t make any promises that I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep. No, I wouldn’t leave her. I didn’t promise that. I couldn’t lose her purely as a result of my own unilateral decision, nor was I ready for an amputation I wouldn’t know how to live with. But, for that matter, the Almighty wasn’t asking me to leave her either. I felt pretty confident that he would tolerate it, though I certainly didn’t want to subject him—and myself—to the test. What on earth would I have done if he had said no?
I realize that this way of praying might seem absurd and irresponsible. In its defense I can only say it was my own. I won’t say anything about the rapture and fervor and devotion with which I prayed. I’ll leave that—as a narrator might once have said so as not to fall into a trap—to the reader’s imagination. Other people, these days especially, would talk about it, but I’m not sure the reader actually benefits. Emotions are besieged by commotion, which veils the sight and makes the voice falter. It’s enough for the reader to dip into his or her own experience to understand. One thing is sure; I didn’t pray to the Almighty with my hands stuffed in my pockets.
I made concessions, however, in the frequency with which I met her. I would see her one time less per week, even if this meant having to deal with her, and she didn’t care at all about my dealings with the Almighty. I also made certain sacrifices in my eating habits, which, all told, weren’t bad for my diet. I never would have been able to impose them otherwise. Here, for this utilitarian compromise, I think I counted on the long-suffering indulgenc
e of my Interlocutor. Not on his distraction, given his omniscience.
I’m not sure where I picked up this paranoid method of measuring giving and having. Maybe as a child, in the religious schools I went to, where we were taught that a final and divine justice guarantees the remuneration of all our covenants. When you compare this method to that of the Romans—the way their military commanders would hide in their tents before battle in order to avoid seeing any inauspicious signs from the gods that would have forced them to alter their plan of attack—I suppose it can be considered progress. I had been tempered by the centuries, perhaps. I chose not to follow formal legalism but opted for a softer approach.
I did ask for a miraculous recovery, recalling how, in Scriptures, it had been obtained through faith. But what exactly was my faith like? Intermittent and undulant: intense in times of need and circumspect and tenuous in others. When we ask ourselves if the ancients truly believed, we should be asking ourselves how we believe.
There was something overwhelming in my need to pray, a need as inevitable as it was contentious. It didn’t disturb me that my reason considered this need irreducible; it only served to make the need more evident. This was the perception of things that I had when I prayed; it was like the blinding glare of a lighthouse only a few meters away. Gradually, as I distanced myself, the light would diminish into the night or dissolve into the light of day. I would hear the words of Scripture that dismiss the faithful—“Go now, and you shall be healed”— but I felt them to be true only when I was close to the light. By the time I returned to the apartment, which had been transformed into a neurotic gym because of the slow rate of progress, the light was no longer with me. Only now, some thirty years later, can I begin to understand or acquire more patience, at least retrospectively. When we’re young we ask God for everything and immediately, because God is young too. When we grow older, it takes God a bit longer to get things done. After all, that’s why we’ve got time—to help us mature. Recently I went to see a young homeopath for something that had been bothering me. “Will it heal?” I found myself asking him. “Heal?” he said in amazement. “Think about death and you’ll see that the verb heal doesn’t have the weight you attribute to it.”
I nodded, amazed at how this person thirty years younger than myself had reflected so proficiently on the theme of healing. Even so, I changed doctors.
His words did help me understand that we never recover completely from stupidity. I changed my mind about praying, as I did about healing. Perhaps prayer and healing converge. Prayer is healing—not from pain but from desperation. Only prayer can interrupt the solitude of dying.
Still now, prayer puts me in touch with a voice that answers. I don’t know what it is. But it’s a deeper and more lasting voice than the one that tries to deny it. And each time I have denied it, I’ve rediscovered it in more difficult times. And it wasn’t an echo.
I know that both survivors and the dying pray. I know that winners pray as well as those who enter a losing battle. I gave up celestial accounting a long time ago; I gave up the balance sheets of giving and having; I gave up the fiscal expectations of the divine.
I’ll be content (a fitting adjective—both melancholy and lucid) with a final encounter with the voice. When all else is lost, I know it’ll still be there.
A disabled person has faith by way of compensation. That’s what other people think, anyway. Nor does this interpretation, which is both astute and generous, lack coherence. If we all turn to the Almighty in times of need (as happens in human relationships), who needs him more than a disabled person whose life requires constant assistance? This would confirm that my relationship with the Almighty is not so unusual.
“How very fortunate,” they say about Paolo’s faith. “Otherwise, in his condition . . .” the more sensitive among them delicately add, without completing the sentence. “What a wonderful help,” the most euphoric say. The cynics, feeling even more lucid than the others, take up Voltaire: “If it didn’t exist, it would have to be invented.” They don’t think about themselves, they think about him. It’s the marginal utility of the disabled, an economist of social pain would say. They are part of the collective delegate that suffers for others, and their burden is so large because it embraces the universal. The reality of it is only slightly different. Disabled people, accustomed to living with deformation—and to putting up with it—don’t have the same untenable image of it that those who are healthy do. Faith, for them, is not an escape but a conquest.
The poor will inherit the kingdom of heaven; that’s not such a bad trade-off. He who inherits the earth, even a little portion of it, has nothing to complain about but always does. That’s the grotesque side to a relationship in which the person doing the commiserating is actually the first one who deserves commiseration. Beware of telling him so, though. The person who shows pity toward others never imagines that he or she actually inspires it. That’s how they exorcise it from their lives. That’s how they try to distance it, when actually it’s the fastest way to earn it.
I know Paolo is attracted to ceremonies of all kinds. He prefers the festive ones, such as baptisms, communions, and weddings, but even funerals fill him with gratifying compunction. I pointed it out to him once, lightly and ironically, but he didn’t appreciate it.
He’s also good—people say—at consoling friends and relatives, a classic ritual that has fallen into disuse. He uses the resources of his slow and irregular voice to pronounce words that seem to come from some remote place, creating an emotional reaction in those who hear him. I am both proud and disturbed by this. I wouldn’t want these people to overestimate the strength of his words just because the vessel that transmits them is weak.
I decide to be sincere with him (in other words I need him) and I confess that this news makes me both glad and concerned. He looks at me with resignation and disappointment. Then, his voice weary, he says, “It surprises you, doesn’t it?”
Once, in smiling solemnity, he said something that had a scriptural quality to it: “You are not the only teacher.”
I find myself turning to him as an intermediary. You can tell I subscribe to the belief, without really knowing why, that people with problems have insider access to the Almighty. And that the Almighty is, in turn, easily influenced. I am so struck by this thought that I try to defend myself by imagining just how many people believe it. As a result, I magnify it to such a degree that a collective absurdity casts its shadow (or its light?) over me.
He looks at me and intuits the tortuous paths I have traveled in order to arrive at this request. He replies with a sentence he might have heard at mass or at a meeting of the church youth group (in trying to judge our children objectively we oscillate between beneficent megalomania and apprehensive underestimation). He has the power, however, of making the words his own at just the right time, which is how he manifests his originality.
“Prayer isn’t magic, you know.”
Able and Disable
To use a rash euphemism, Paolo doesn’t have good memories of one of the doctors at the Center. He continues to remember him with hate not only because he loathed his irony but because he was incapable of responding to it. An offense becomes intolerable when we add to it the embarrassment of weakness.
From what he told me I could tell that when it happened he’d feel paralyzed, like an insect caught in a spider’s web. It happened to me too when I was young, during my stint in the military, with a sublieutenant who was as uncouth as he was shrewd, as pusillanimous as he was mocking. Never would I have been able to convince him of my worth. With those who want to deny us, there’s always going to be a desperate struggle. The more we seek to prove ourselves, the more the other, intuiting our need to do so, denies us. And he’s the one we always want to convince; he is the incarnation of our invincible enemy, the one we suppress inside.
Paolo didn’t know how to respond to the doctor’s sarcastic remarks when he was accused, for example, of preferring his church youth group t
o the Center.
“But it’s true,” I tell him placidly, trying to induce him to think objectively. When we’re right, we like frustrating others— children and parents alike.
“No!” he burst out saying. “He was just teasing!”
I look at him incredulously. He’s exaggerating. He knows I enjoy his taste for hyperbole.
“He was being terrible! You have to make him pay for it!”
“Are you joking?” I ask.
I don’t know if I should entertain the maturity of a game or the immaturity of a deferred vendetta.
He looks at me to see whether I’m joking too.
“Yes and no,” he says.
He’s always divinely ambivalent, both infantile and knowing, subtle and simple. He understands that a coexistence of contraries provides its own access to knowledge.
“So he was just teasing a bit. What harm is there in that?”
“No, he was being perfidious.”
Born Twice (Vintage International) Page 12