“What about names?” Franca had asked. “What about when he gets stuck on names?”
“Names—of course.” The doctor opened his arms wide as if he were greeting an old friend. “Let him struggle with them. Doesn’t it ever happen to you?”
“What?”
“To forget people’s names.”
“Why, sure.”
“And yet, you’re young. We call it benign forgetfulness; it starts at about forty. The phenomenon is a little bit different in his case. Eventually he will begin to forget names for ordinary things.”
There was a brief pause.
“It’s common,” he said. He liked that adjective; it gave him distinct pleasure. “We call it anomia.”
“For him it’s a tragedy,” Franca had said.
The tragedy began—and it’s not a rare evolution—as comedy. We all forget names, but the first sign of aging is not to forget them but to struggle to remember. Another sign is involving everyone around you in that incessant search, creating debts as well as hidden comparisons. “Now, what’s his name?” has statistically proven to be the most frequent question aging people ask. It’s also the least interesting, because it caters to their needs alone. My father-in-law began to be inexorably drawn to these kinds of questions, until ultimately he came to seem what he feared most: someone who’s lost his memory.
A small didactic parenthesis: Anyone with minimum teaching experience knows that a student under examination hears questions no one has asked. He or she will search vainly for answers to these questions and in so doing embarrass the teacher who had originally wanted to help. If asked to comment on a poem, for example, the student is not expected to know the date and place it was written or the person to whom it might have been dedicated. But knowing that information is missing, the student is compelled to confess.
I’ve always advised my students not to reply sincerely to indiscreet questions about their knowledge of a subject. (This is Italy, after all!) I’ve urged them not to admit their ignorance but to defer that information somehow. Only the worst students ever actually listened to me, learning to delay the invasive curiosity of their examiners by procrastination. The best students could never stand up to the challenge; they’d irrevocably confess their lacunae and surrender themselves instead to the ordeal of faithfulness, guilt, and punishment. It’s a fascinating point of convergence. It demonstrates how sacrificial will in antiquity didn’t concern the priests and their faithful alone but their victims too. It’s a solid circuit that reinvents itself continuously.
My father-in-law began with simple mnemonic forays, which were as bothersome as they were unjustifiable. He insisted in particular on names, dates, places, and titles, which his interlocutors generally ignored. The unevenness of this game produced a losing winner; his opponent’s ignorance could never compensate for his own amnesia. Gradually, though, the roles were reversed.
My mother-in-law, for example, took an unanticipated revenge on the man who for fifty years had imposed an authoritarian yoke on her ( coniugium: “both people under the same yoke” is a word coined by the Romans, a people who knew about yokes, conjugality, and authority). Suddenly, the man who had heedlessly grilled everyone, the man who had laughed at her when she couldn’t remember Tasso’s first name (Torquato! he had shouted at her so that she could finally include the name in her crossword puzzle) could no longer remember the word for grape. “You know, those small red things we eat in autumn,” he would start to grumble. “Berries,” my mother-in-law would say. “No, not berries,” he would reply impatiently. (No one is as impatient as the person who gets impatient with someone who can’t help them remember.) “Blackberries,” my mother-in-law would say, beginning to enjoy herself. “What?” my father-in-law would complain. “You don’t eat blackberries in the fall.” “Of course you do,” my mother-in-law would reply, now seriously offended. “Both in the summer and in the fall.” “Well, not blackberries,” my father-in-law would say in desperation. Then he would try to clarify things. “You squash them to make a drink.” “Oranges,” my mother-in-law would exclaim, throwing out a wrong word so that he’d be even farther from the right one. I’m certain that she’d deny it just as much as she desired it, at least unconsciously (let’s not deny her the alibi that we’ve extended to everyone else). My father-in-law would give up in humiliation, staring into space, probably trying to find the word on his own. Sometimes his face would light up and he would joyfully shout out the name.
“Grapes! Grapes!” he’d say in exultation, over and over, and then he’d get angry with her. “Why didn’t you think of it? I told you they were small and red.”
“What are?” my mother-in-law would ask, knowing the game would begin all over again. My father-in-law would retreat, struck by a new sense of anguish.
“Go get the dictionary,” he’d say, gleaning from the imperative the grammatical mode of his life. My mother-in-law would look up the word grape and read him the entry like a bureaucrat until she got to the word bunch.
“That’s it,” my father-in-law would say excitedly. “Bunch! A bunch of grapes!”
The last time he came to dinner I noticed how much his condition had worsened. He couldn’t remember my name at all. When he talked to Franca he would simply point at me and say “him.” It might have been the pronoun that he always used to talk about me in private, but in public it made me feel uncomfortable.
We also invited Marco over to dinner. “Hello, where’s Antonio?” my father-in-law said to him when he saw him in the entrance. “I don’t know, who’s Antonio?” Marco replied. “He’s my son,” my father-in-law said impatiently. “No, I’m your son,” Marco said.
My father-in-law, vexed, walked up to him and looked him straight in the eyes. “I know,” he said. Then, after a pause, he added, “So you’re Antonio.” “No, I’m Marco,” the other had replied.
It’s his circulation, the doctor explained. Alterations in blood pressure, metabolic variations. In fact, when my father-in-law sat down in the living room across from Marco, he began to regard him as his son. Marco started telling his father about his veterinary practice.
Because Marco had a tracheotomy to remove a tumor, every time he wants to speak he has to press a valve under his shirt at about the height of his sternum. If he doesn’t press it at the right time his voice comes out at first aphonally, like in a horror film, and then bubbly, and finally, when the hole closes over again, raucously but clear. He went through the operation and a course of postoperative treatment without complaining, at least to other people, which many would agree is an admirable quality. “Heroic” had been my own definition, an adjective that at the time gathered popular consent.
Marco, sitting in an armchair facing my father-in-law, puts his hand under his shirt and, after a scratchy sound, like an old crystal set, says that his practice is growing, despite the operation.
“What operation?” my father-in-law asks.
Marco points to his throat and, in a voice that explodes from inside, replies impassively, “This one.”
My father-in-law doesn’t say anything. He knows Marco isn’t fooling him, but he just can’t remember. He looks at me to see if I can help but he never expected much from me, still less on an occasion like this.
He exerts himself fiercely to smother his dismay.
“Shall we go to table?” he asks.
I don’t think I’ll invite them over again. Family reunions have a lugubrious quality. Given the physical or mental difficulties of any of the members, it’s better not to make things worse by putting additional pressure on them, even if some mental handicaps can be a source of humor. Drunks and amnesiacs know a thing or two about that, though I never really understood why, perhaps because the world finally appears upside down. Still, it’s good not to let down one’s guard.
I’m afraid that’s precisely what happened the other evening. I too suffer from a problem that occasionally disturbs me. I lose my voice. It’s a form of aphony. Ambushed by my emot
ions and undone by the retreat of this or that capacity—not unfamiliar to the respiratory tract and mouth or to the labors of teaching— my voice folds in on itself, gets lower, turns into a ghost, disappears, and then comes back, altered. “Your unconscious doesn’t want you to teach anymore,” a specialist once told me. “Unfortunately, the problem is my consciousness,” I replied.
The other evening I rationed out my interventions, distributing my voice in calibrated doses. “Normal people can speak with no limits,” the specialist had said, “but not you. Your voice is a tank, it has a limit, like a car, and you shouldn’t go into reserve or you’ll break down. For how long? Maybe only for a little while, as long as it takes to replenish itself. But it’s better to stop earlier and avoid inconvenience.”
To avoid inconvenience I let other people talk, which actually is the most appreciated form of behavior in someone who invites you over to listen to what you have to say. At a family gathering, however, abstention is judged with suspicion. When I spoke, my voice came out sounding crackly and dry, like an otherworldly whisper.
My brother-in-law pressed the valve under his shirt.
“What did you say?”
I swallowed to gain time and to breathe. Paolo, who understands my disability because of his own, answered for me in his raucous voice.
“He said that’s not the point.”
“Well, what is, then?” my father-in-law asked, with unexpected rapidity.
The entire evening he drove us crazy with his frenetic search for the most common words: bicycle, taxes, beer, school, summer. He thought up the most labyrinthine paraphrases for a word as simple as fish. The things that live underneath. Worms? No. Miners? No. Speleologists? How ridiculous! That live under where? The stuff you drink. Water? Yes. Fish? Yes, fish! Fish! Was that so very hard?
Language had become a mined and dangerous field where any advance could prove fatal. We’d hesitate every step of the way. “What do you call . . . ?” was the exasperating beginning. And together we’d scout it out—worn out, het up, confused, oscillating between comedy and tragedy on the pendulum of life. When he ventured off into more abstract concepts like virtue, the need to define became more desperate than that of a convocation of philosophers. Sometimes, though, unlike them, we would have to end in an enlightened and superior state of defeat.
If he asked for a simple clarification, everything seemed normal. I decided to hold off explaining what the point was anyway. I waved it away with my hand, as if it were a minor case of indigestion. I put off solving this problem and others to the future.
Paolo, who knew that saying the most terrible things would make me laugh, asked, at midnight, when all our guests had left and only he and I were awake, “Will you become like that too?”
“I don’t know.” I laughed.
It was a hypothesis I had never thought of, though evidently it wasn’t as improbable as it had once seemed.
And then, with the gloomy bravura that compensates for so much else in both him and in me, he added, “The problem is, what’s going to happen to me?”
From a Distance
Occasionally, from a distance, I’ll see him coming down the long narrow street where I live. He keeps close to the walls of the houses so there’s something to lean on if he trips. He walks awkwardly. Instead of following his body’s commands, his body weight seems to take advantage of him, lurching him forward suddenly.
Some people recognize him and say hello. He’ll stop and lean against the wall, always glad to chat. I can tell that some people treat him like a child, the same people who treat children like idiots and who ultimately put themselves on an equal footing. He is capable of saying things that these people wouldn’t even begin to understand, but he limits himself to smiling back at them.
People who see him for the first time are not always satisfied with one glimpse. They have to stop and turn around and look at him closer. He knows it when they do; I think he walks off with a pained expression. But maybe not, maybe he’s just being careful. He’s used to being watched. It’s me who’s relentless. It’s my face with the pained expression. That’s what unites us, from a distance.
Sometimes I shut my eyes and then quickly open them again. Who’s that boy walking unsteadily near the wall? I’ve never seen him before. He’s disabled. I try to think about what my life would have been like without him in it, but I can’t. We can think of many lives, but we can never disavow our own.
Once, when I was watching him as if he were someone else and I were someone else, he waved at me. He leaned up against the wall and smiled. For a moment it was as if we were meeting for the very first time.
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, OCTOBER 2003
Translation copyright © 2002 by Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Random House, Inc.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Pontiggia, Giuseppe, 1934–
[Nati due volte. English]
Born twice / by Giuseppe Pontiggia ; translated from the Italian by Oonagh
Stransky.—
1. American ed.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-0-307-42508-9
I. Stransky, Oonagh. II. Title.
PQ4876.O53 N3713 2002
853’.914—dc21
2002016259
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