Deviation

by Luce d'Eramo

  *

  But the reader knows that story. He has already read the (outwardly) matter-of-fact account of that all-encompassing imprisonment, as I lay in a body that I could no longer feel, that supposedly belonged to me but did not respond to me, did not know me, existed for its own processes that did not concern me, the me within it (where?) unable to destroy it because that damn body was alive, extremely vital, fond of living; stronger than me, it held me prisoner, forced me to go along with its wishes, vomited my inebriations on me, so that I didn’t know where to turn, what with my broken ribs, exposed back, burned skin, split forehead, useless organs, so I poured my whole heart into foolish inanities, as compensation, in the need to matter in some way, futilely, superficially, to endure the blow, to loosen the hold of that body that immobilized me and kept me alive. And I clung to finding goodness in the people around me, warming myself with forced sentiment to try to melt the ice that bound me, that was me. Because this body oppressed me, I didn’t want to be alone with its storms, which raged continuously within the ice. That was partly why it had gotten on so well with the crazy women in the asylum in Munich, in Bavaria; there was a current that ran between bodies that had escaped the minds they housed, organisms that lived for themselves, which even seemed to feed on those mushy brains, flourish against all logic, including my own.

  Retaliation is what it was, getting back at that half-wit that was me, reproaching the doctors, boasting about being loved by the crazy women. It was the same in the cattle car with the wounded Germans, the same solidarity of bodies struggling against death had created a visceral understanding, made up of shit and urine and gangrene, which I had entered into with my small, petulant, ubiquitous “I” who’d had herself carried in and out on a stretcher in the stations the train passed through, rooted in paralysis on her bed of plaster, with the suprapubic catheter mentally wielded as a weapon, demanding food, hospitalization, respite for those human bodies abandoned on the straw in the stench, the same colitic, feverish bodies as in Dachau. In the fitful need to not identify with the devastation of her corporeal prop, that small self, with her frenetic attempts to see to things, her determination by then metaphysical to not allow herself to be devoured, extolled herself by handing out little lessons right and left, by distinguishing slaves in her own way, in a bizarre racism that reversed that of the Nazis, equally physiological, in which the physically afflicted were those who had eschewed the rules of the game, answering to no one, deserving of love.

  Victories over the body urged it on. Paradoxically, perhaps, but in appearance only. Having shunned traditional relations of power, individuals answering to no one could ultimately understand and help one another and, together, recover from the death forced on them. I was living proof of it. In the cattle car, in the asylum in Munich, and on the “white” train, in less than three weeks, with makeshift treatments, with no hygiene, the sores on my ischia and coccyx were healing. The tissue was growing back by itself, activism on its part as well, a swarming of cells parallel to the bustling of my small self driven to obtain food and medications, to shepherd the whole heap of rotting flesh that lay groaning on the planks, slammed about as the train rolled along the rails. In embracing the crazy women, stroking their faces and uncoordinated limbs, my flesh was healing unbeknownst to me. I realized it in Merano.

  In ’45 the rules of the game had been crystal clear, as hopeless as my devastation. There was nothing to understand except that the bulk of humanity was at the mercy of factors over which it had no control.

  I was so crushed by my destruction that I saw it everywhere. In the rubble. In the foreign workers still amazed at having survived the Lagers and the bombings alive, dubious about looting food and clothing so long denied to them, millions of beggars throughout all of Europe who had learned to accept one another, only to return home marked by the subjugation they’d endured, scattered as before, on hand for the next war that would again mobilize them, shunting them back, on opposing sides, to mutilate and mangle one another, until the next truce, when they would be obliged to thank the winners.

  I saw my inability to govern my own body extend into the starving, bewildered German population, which after seeing its cities razed to the ground, its men killed in the war, its youth shattered, found itself saddled with the guilt of the regime that had suborned, enticed, and deluded it. I couldn’t stand the fact that, just at a time when these people could reflect on the mechanisms that had influenced them—might understand that they had let themselves be led by hopes of collective advancement, in a unanimity that did not face facts and therefore did not consider at whose expense—that just at that time these German masses were prevented from dispelling the fog but were sent back, hammered, frightened, and demoralized, and made to keep exonerating themselves, to justify themselves, to go begging. Those who submitted once again as they had submitted to Hitler were absolved. Accordingly, bow your head, always.

  So I reasoned then. And, constrained by the irrelevance of my paralyzed body, I recognized my limitation in the very air I breathed, measuring the vanity of the rancor that had driven me to join the deportees in Verona, and to escape from Dachau in order to convince my fellow internees that one did not have to bow one’s head. And for what? To end up in a wheelchair.

  I was beaten. Here the most unseen enemy awaited me. There was no collective salvation. The final struggle was an individual one, with death. And it was a struggle so hideous, irrational, and unequal that the rest was nothing by comparison.

  If I looked at someone and thought about the fact that he would die, it took great effort to apply reason. Faced with the disproportion between men’s blindness and their extinction, I was amazed that they continued to keep going, to trudge along, to convince themselves of something. I admired them for that. How could I confound them with the final truth (the one I carried in my body)? All I could do was distract them, cheer them up, give them confidence, restore a slim measure of continuity: not to cringe, at least, not to devote what little time there is to fear, to anxiety, to the minute cowardices that crumble the insignificant nothings that we are.

  I certainly had not been able, at age fourteen, to prevent the outbreak of war in ’39, nor was I now able to arrange it so that it had never happened: you couldn’t be any more insignificant than that. I’d been a drop in the ocean of tens of millions of people moved about from one front to another, from one Lager to another. I had taken part in it with such a mass of humanity that it couldn’t be considered a personal matter. How to determine why one individual had cracked and his neighbor had remained undamaged? A calculus of probability that not even the most powerful electronic brain could solve.

  What I actually needed, no matter where I’d been on the day and time of the accident in Mainz on February 27, 1945, was for things not to have gone any differently. Not because it was destined, mind you: I just happened to be there. A sequence of events in which I had gotten caught, but it could have happened to someone else. Twists of fate humanly impossible to control. When I recalled the wall’s collapse, I never failed to say that at that moment I should have been filling water buckets at the adjacent hotel; I should not have been on that slab under the wall ramming the beam against the nearby shelter. But Johann, who should have relieved me, had sprained his ankle. And I had stayed at the beam with our companions, to balance it out and ram it more forcefully into the gap that widened under the thrusts; after each shove I looked to see if the opening was wide enough, furious at the Pole, the buried victims, the damned concrete, jamming down with my body’s full weight to break through … I never forgot the German soldier killed on the spot by a brick across the street, where he’d thought he’d be safe.

  The very idea that I could have escaped the fate that fell to me drove me crazy. It knocked me senseless, weighed down by the same impotence that had crushed me on the night I attempted suicide, when I wanted to go back to life and couldn’t. I couldn’t bear to think about it for more than a fraction of a second. For years it woul
d flash across my mind whenever I unexpectedly caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror or in a windowpane, sitting in a wheelchair or else standing, leaning on a walker with my legs supported by braces around my knees. Suddenly my condition plunged me into my body. Steady (I told myself), as I very slowly pulled myself out of that slump. Paralysis is a practical complication to be resolved on each occasion, nothing more (the important thing was not to let it mark you).

  *

  From what I’ve recounted so far, it’s clear that the deviation in my mind had already begun when I was still experiencing the events that I later repressed.

  That gesture in Verona, which was the most social act of my entire life, had become in my hands a moral act (of which I was ashamed) as soon as I had done it, from the moment my partner-in-diarrhea in the freight car had directed it against me. The need for social justice, which had seized me in Verona, was instantly reduced to an incommunicable episode, a private secret in my personal story. I was so voluntaristic, my feelings about the social chasms was so recent and generic, so black and white (rich/poor, educated/uneducated, slave drivers/slaves), that I was certainly incapable at the time of continuing to follow, solely on my own, the path embarked upon in Frankfurt-Höchst, shown to me by the comrades who had organized the strike at IG Farben. The rapid succession of unforeseen turns of events prevented me from dealing with the difficulties that lay before me. And the daily necessity of surviving made the shifts of my mind imperceptible to me, though today it makes me shudder to think that, after throwing away my documents in Verona so that no one in my social class could save me, I ended up as the girl in “As Long as the Head Lives,” in the hospital in Mainz, that Luzi in a wheelchair who gets to the point of boasting about having been a Fascist, as the last act of liberty left to her after all she’s been through.

  At the time it’s still understandable, given my upbringing, my inexperience, all the mixing and clashing of feelings …

  But afterward?

  Rome, April 1977

  VII

  Reader, I’m back. It’s been six months since I left you at the preceding page. I spent that time trying to answer the question “But afterward?” on which I had (once again) gotten stuck.

  It was a grueling task, which nearly brought me to the edge of insanity, reviving the relationships, endeavors, and struggles of thirty-one years of life, looking for that memory gap that was everywhere and nowhere. It became a kind of hallucination in which I continually disassembled and reassembled recollections, rooting through passions that awakened under my mind’s touch, confounding my purpose, so that I no longer knew what I was looking for.

  In fact, things I did not believe emerged, errors, swerves, obstinacies, completely forgotten facts, those too repressed, which I now saw as the most pivotal. But as soon as I examined them, they no longer responded to my question. It was never the event I was looking at but one close to it, the one just before or just after it, that would have clarified the underlying reason for my repression. That event too, however, studied more closely, took a new turn. Not only did I not uncover the need for such a long silence concerning the episode in Verona, but I also wondered why I had reacted that way and not differently, so that each recollection became a new problem.

  Yet I had to admit that the huge gap in my memory had determined the course of my existence. On the other hand, common sense made me ask: Did a person necessarily have to repress two long-ago periods of voluntary service in the Lagers in order to get married, give birth to a son, obtain a college degree, teach, and publish several books?

  So I changed my technique. Follow the facts, I said to myself, and we’ll see what emerges.

  But even here I found myself in trouble.

  The facts were voluminous and presented such an eventful picture of my life that what remained was a dissatisfaction, almost too much of everything, both joys and sorrows, the ruminations, the activities, the resolutions. It seemed as though I was always just about to hit on the right path, a succession of turning points. I had to come to terms with that as well. And I willingly set about examining the facts one by one to see where the road had forked, where the choices had lain, and whether I had taken that path or not. And so the summation of my life stretched out for hundreds of pages.

  I had to acknowledge that I was dealing with an immense story that I did not know what to do with: it went beyond the account of the distortion of my German memories from which I’d begun, but had not broken free of them. As a result, it was neither the clarification it was intended to be nor a narrative that stood on its own. It had the same flaw that I had noted in my life. This in itself demoralized me.

  But that wasn’t the worst part.

  All those forgotten events had brought me face-to-face with a series of subterfuges enacted by my memory. Curiously, it was almost always the unpleasant scenes, behavior that was at the very least embarrassing, that I had stored in a place of oblivion. For example, I would remember an argument. Unintentionally, I got into the part, I became heated: the quarrel had arisen from the fact that the other individual had touched a raw nerve, some feeling that I now understood had its roots in the repressed experience of the Lagers. I had no sooner reassured myself when presto! some overlooked detail popped up (a gesture, a look) to show me that it hadn’t been like that at all.

  I was dejected. I knew it was the wrong way to reflect on one’s life and I reproached myself: It doesn’t hold up, does it? You retained a quite different picture, didn’t you?

  My new objective became the unmasking of my mental tricks. By now I mistrusted them to the point that I saw them everywhere. If a positive memory appeared, I felt ashamed and rejected it, viewing it as a trap meant to serve the ideal image that I had sifted from my reality.

  Whether because of the intensity with which I went about it or for some other reason (that too yet to be understood), my memories were of no help to me. They joined forces to coalesce against me as a team and would not let me pass. It was like a traffic jam. No sooner had one collided with another when a third one sprang up, and so it went; new ones kept coming so that their respective positions were constantly changing. And then they got angry with me. Each one insisted it was a true memory, not that domineering one that wanted to outshine it with a push from my imagination. From time to time each of them was so convincing that I made changes to its neighbor, which, however, took offense, until I was no longer able to distinguish between what was real and what was fictitious in what floated up from the past.

  “Enough,” the literary compartment of my brain told me, “don’t you see that you’ve digressed? Can’t you understand that your assumption was wrong, that you can’t attribute to one single repression a sequence of griefs and joys, of ties and attitudes that, for better or worse, had an internal necessity of their own, their own motivations? Haven’t you realized that you can’t relate your every action to that mental block regarding your Germany? Yet you continue to compare your actual life with what it would have been if you hadn’t forgotten. No wonder you feel like a worm and can no longer distinguish between what happened and what might have happened. This path won’t get you anywhere. If you continue on this way, you won’t be able to make head or tail out of this or any other story.”

  “To hell with literature!” I said. “I want to know who I am, who it is I’ve been carrying inside me for half a century, don’t you see?”

  So while the literary compartment of my brain continued to dissuade me, the ego from its little corner wanted clarification and, sometimes in the dead of night, I would slip out of bed to rush to the file cabinet in my wheelchair and check my old diaries and agendas, piles of faded letters, to see if invention (in its sense of rediscovery) had restored the incident to me, or if I had imagined it. Depending on the response and my frame of mind, I would resume frantically delving into the past or I would lie down, inert. But vigilance would not keep still on command; from the mind’s magic treasure chest I continued receiving information about my past
that overturned yet again memories that had already been verified. Even when I put down my pen, the task continued to rise in my brain as if fermented by a frightening yeast. Memories erupted on their own by now as if a dike had burst, worming their way in even in my sleep. In my dreams I rewrote scenes already written while awake, and the next day I tried to capture on paper the fleeting trace of those nocturnal variations.

  After four months of such total concentration, I no longer dared stir up my memory. For entire days I remained in bed, in the dark, while outside it was sunny mid-August (remember, reader? I had left you in April), lying supine like a corpse, for fear that the slightest sign of life would bring back the full weight of the past that hung over me, unstable.

  *

  In one of those moments, drained and dead tired, the enormous effort of my life suddenly hit me. It’s curious how the body has no memory.

  In rummaging through my papers, I had found an infinite number of medical reports, X-rays, analyses, hospital records, which showed that I had undergone fifteen or more surgeries, had about a dozen plaster casts put on my pelvis, that I’d lived for years with a fever, apparently while continuing to work to earn a living, to study, to take care of the house, to love. Whole periods when I didn’t stay in bed but went out, even traveled. One summer at the beach, I swam every day, with a toxic myocarditis that cut off my breath each time a wave slapped my face (the heartbeats gone haywire). Bizarrely, in chasing the past, I had skipped over all that, I hadn’t given it any importance, an insignificant aspect. I had reconstructed my feelings, my human relationships, my actions, glossing over the trying physical conditions in which they had all taken place. The infinite application to reactivate my muscles and restore my functions. Hours and hours contracting and releasing the bladder to urinate on command. And what about the training sessions to facilitate sexual intercourse? (I had not forgotten my embarrassment at Johann’s approaches.) Hours of exercise, supine on the bed, pulling up my legs as though they were lifting on their own, with an offhand gesture that would go unnoticed, a slight, casual nudge, almost a caress below the calf, by which I actually raised my passive limbs, until the move came to seem so natural that even to my eyes my legs rose by themselves. Hours of bending, sitting down, until I could touch my toes with my hands, or lying facedown until I was able to sit up on my calves, in short, all the exercises that I had done earlier in Mainz, along with massages. I don’t know how much time I spent in front of the mirror, monitoring whether I slid gracefully from the bed into the wheelchair and vice versa. A secret drudgery, nonstop, to delimit my physical incapacity mainly in the eyes of others. Just thinking about it, I wondered why I took such pleasure in being with people, what was the point of such a desire to live that, given my lack of confidence, seemed indecent.