Deviation

by Luce d'Eramo

  But my masterstroke had occurred before that, in Munich, Bavaria, when I’d left the transit camp of Dachau (like Jean de Lille). I’d gotten a job with my real name at Siemens, the most humane factory that I came upon in Germany, where Osten and Westerners ate at the same canteen and German managers came by to taste. But I’d become overconfident, convinced I was uncatchable, and had stolen stamped sick-leave forms from the factory doctor’s office; then, instead of working, I’d go walking around the city (there were no fences at the camp connected with the Siemens facilities). One day I was summoned to the manager’s office, however, and I had no choice but to disappear.

  I’m summarizing because I’ve already written about these events in the fictionalized accounts I composed during the years of my marital crisis, stories in which the hardships, the escapes, the terrors had a poignant immateriality, the unmoored precision that drugs can provide. If among those texts, some published and some unpublished, I chose “Thomasbräu” and “Asylum at Dachau” to begin this book, it is because they are the only stories in which, at the time, I retraced the events I’d experienced without adapting them to a narrative thread, but letting them unfold as they’d actually happened. That is, if you don’t count the feeling of unmooredness and blunted materiality that no longer seems to characterize those months on the run, but to have been superimposed by me as I recalled them. Just as that kind of sexual anxiety that disturbs the protagonist, especially in “Thomasbräu,” doesn’t represent reality, but my imagination at that time: it’s not the runaway minor but the betrayed woman in her thirties who views the deportees’ acts of intercourse as slimy tangles of snails with monstrous antennae.

  There’s another reason for choosing “Asylum at Dachau,” however. It is immediately clear that both the Gascon engineering student and the Italian clerk with the slicked-back hair, though they have different sensibilities, thought only of not being touched by the baseness of the camps, not getting soiled. It was important to them to preserve who they were earlier, to forget the Lager as soon as possible. As I too had done later, after the war. The matter affected me. You can tell by how I insist, in the story, on their wanting to remain apart from the others. Unlike those who were not of our class. The Russians, Jean de Lille, didn’t feel they were above what they were experiencing. For that reason I never grew tired of bringing them to life: I was trying to recover myself by remembering them. By remembering entire families of Soviet deportees who offered shelter to escapees at the risk of being shot; of little Jeanine, for whom striving to do her utmost was as natural as breathing; of undernourished Benito …

  But I no longer hoped to find them.

  Intolerant of the criteria by which my surroundings judged me and sought to demoralize me, I was nonetheless trapped by them. In my mental confusion, I wasn’t even certain of my way of viewing things. I doubted my own feelings, my own memories, I had second thoughts, I didn’t dare give myself any credit. As mentioned, I read books about the Lagers and, even knowing that they were written by officials or by internees with “mental capital,” as the Nazis called it (the so-called Akademiker)—that is, by civilians who had protected themselves within the niche of their preexisting morality, and never as workers, as fugitives, or as those who shared their vulnerability—I distrusted my direct perceptions all the same. Even when describing accounts of escapes and life underground in the Third Reich that had never been written before, I tried to correlate my recollections with the accurate memories of authors who had been recommended to me—for example, by Elio Vittorini—as essential models. “You must free yourself from the oppression of memory,” he wrote to me in 1957, when—under the constant barrage of the exact same advice from my father and from my uncle in the Pontine Marshes—I’d done nothing but that. Surrounded by the sensitive people with whom I lived, I’d done nothing but put blinders on my brain so as not to look at things realistically: a modicum of aesthetic detachment is essential. Vittorini even found “Thomasbräu,” that mild, almost idyllic account with which I timidly faced the past, too encumbered by the oppression of remembrance.

  Literary intimidation also prevented me from completely dispelling the fog that surrounded my running, trapped as I was, and taking refuge in Nazi Germany.

  In fact, the accounts of those months, from the end of October ’44 to the end of January ’45—continually relived and re-created in stacks of notebooks—invariably broke off before my reappearance at the Lager in Frankfurt-Höchst, in early February 1945, a story I haven’t yet told. A reappearance that deep down had been the purpose of my joining the deportees in Verona: to let my companions know that I hadn’t run out on them. There was no conscious resistance on my part to that episode, however, it was just that my memory always exhausted itself on some earlier situation before I could get there. The memories scattered, all by themselves, into a succession of displacements and instantly consumed human contacts, in which thirteen months of brutal confrontation had been touched up and disconnected to seem like nothing more than a few weeks of tragically light adventures, crammed into the void.

  Yet those modest memories, set down in endless detail almost for fear that they might get away, gave me respite. Little by little, superimposed on my present imprisonment, they helped me deal with my decisions. I stopped secretly begging the lawyer to hold off on initiating my request for a marital separation. I ended my agonizing tête-à-têtes with my presumed rivals. I abandoned my guard duty behind closed doors.

  In the lull after the storm as we awaited the legal ruling, Domenico and I were almost equable. The acrimony, the cruelty had blown over. He devoted every free moment away from work to perfecting my means of locomotion. (I actually think that during those months he went without a lover; I now believe that maybe one reason why he’d cheated on me there at home was to be so in the wrong that he could leave me the child without seeming like he was giving in to my “crazy demand.”) He was designing a wheelchair for me that I still use: small, lightweight, and able to be disassembled, it would afford me the greatest agility of movement, yet be stable and comfortable. There wasn’t an elevator, cinema, or theater that Domenico entered without measuring the width of the narrowest aisles and the height of each seat or chair from the ground. But the mechanics always raised objections, saying it wasn’t feasible, that such a chair wouldn’t be steady, and how would I manage with the rear wheels jutting out? He started over, measuring my hips, my back, my legs, and redesigned the model from scratch.

  As soon as he saw me sitting quietly, he appeared with his folder of plans under his arm, a sampling of nuts and bolts in his hand, and sat next to me with a sigh of relief. He asked me if I thought one type of screw was better or the other one, if I preferred that such-and-such a support be tubular or flat. And to top it all off, I found him boring.

  In the spring of ’55 the proceedings were complete. Domenico retained parental authority over our son and I was given qualified custody.

  X

  As if having to make up for lost time, I rolled up my sleeves. After Domenico left, my home became a real caravanserai. I took in former prisoners, young unmarried mothers, half a dozen cats. In short, the period that I later referred to as “my parenthesis of secondary fronts” began. During those years I did nothing but accrue parentheses: there was “the German parenthesis,” then the “marital” one, when Domenico and I got along, “the Italian parenthesis” (said sarcastically), and now this one.

  My relationship with my son, who was nearly eight, was good. He didn’t mind the mayhem, especially since he added to it himself with all his little neighborhood friends coming and going. And oddly enough, he had never been so diligent and focused about his schoolwork. A precocious reader, he loved history. He collected picture cards sold at newsstands, which he pasted into thick notebooks, by time period. There were Romans, Gauls, Carolingians. If he saw me busy reading, he’d ask, “Where are you? I’m in the Crusades.”

  “I’m in the First World War,” I’d reply, or in the Renais
sance, depending on the private lessons I had to prepare for that day.

  Every now and then we would invite each other into the centuries in which we found ourselves at that moment. We read the captions behind the pictures, consulted books, enriched our knowledge about the figure with the helmet, or the character with a sword at his side, who eyed us haughtily from the flamboyant image.

  By that time I was tutoring university students or exam candidates in classical studies almost exclusively. My subject areas were Italian, Latin, French, and German, along with history and philosophy (in the interim I had also earned a doctorate with a thesis on Kant’s reflective judgment). I wrote dissertations for a fee; I remember three in particular, on Sallust, on La Rochefoucauld, and on Unamuno. I made good money.

  But I’m digressing again (an inveterate bad habit). The truth is that I maintained an expensive tenor of life so as not to have my son pay the price for my physical privation—which is why I’d also hired a governess for him, in addition to the housekeeper who saw to the household chores and the laundress who came to help the housekeeper (an unmarried pregnant girl). Then there was the beach villa rental for summer vacations, trips and excursions, inducements; I wanted to make up for everything so that the boy wouldn’t feel like he was different, the only son of a mother who was an invalid and alone, as too many people reminded him. Poor little thing, they sighed, patting his head.

  In fact, I was seized with a frenzy to prove that I could make it. In my feigned detachment, nothing got to me so much as allusions to my son about my being in a wheelchair: “There now, Lorenzo, be a good boy. Don’t you see your mother isn’t well?” the relatives would say. “Hurry, run! Your mother needs help,” an anxious female voice urged if I dropped a pencil, a match. “Pick it up for her, Lorenzo, bending down tires your mother out, don’t you see she can’t do it?” they said, giving me a smile of pedagogical complicity. As if I had generated a living prosthesis, a creature forced to grow in the shadow of my misfortune. The most tragic thing for me was the fact that words like these were well-intentioned, meant to be thoughtful.

  On the other hand, my “defiant way of life” drew a number of eyebrows raised disapprovingly, especially with regard to the dubious individuals I protected. You could tell that what was lacking was the firm hand of a man who would restrain my “intemperances” and keep me in my place. Poor Lorenzo, forever the only child of a mother who was not only an invalid and alone but also irresponsible; in short, the same hotheaded, reckless girl who ran away from home when she was eighteen, an “asocial” (as the Nazis had already classified me). And I, to show them that …

  Later on, I moderated that raging hunger of mine for freedom and joyfulness, my obsession with personally helping the most vilified people at the drop of a hat. Partly because my protégés, used to being mistreated, took me for a gullible fool for taking care of them, even thinking they were doing me a favor by living off me. I also gave up my retaliations.

  Yet I remember those years with pleasure. Lorenzo grew up as an outgoing child, always engaged, nice, and sturdy, his laughter effusive. One day I’d caught him too competing with a little friend on the terrace to see who could urinate the farthest—the target was an oleander plant a couple of meters away—and I quickly withdrew so as not to disturb the contest.

  In the end, however, I didn’t make it. Due to the excessive obligations that I had created for myself, that pace of that life, overloaded with vitality, relationships, work, overwhelmed me, and I began to go adrift.

  *

  Fall of 1960. I landed in a home for the disabled, Villa della Pace, at the eleventh kilometer of the Ardeatina, on the outskirts of Rome.

  I arrived driving a huge beige Studebaker that I’d bought secondhand and whose resale I was negotiating. I’d purchased it a couple of years earlier, when small-engined cars with the qualifications required by my driver’s license didn’t yet exist.

  I won’t describe the sinking feeling I had as I parked among the figures abandoned on wheelchairs or on benches, in the wan sun of late September. Dozens and dozens of disabled war veterans who looked at me as if I were a rare beast. I’d returned to my proper place, to the role of aid recipient that society had assigned me. At age thirty-five, I found myself back where I started; what’s more, loaded with debt and sitting on the soft, pale suede seat of an impressive custom-built car.

  But my economic difficulties and my argument with charitable assistance were the least of my worries. It was something else that truly depressed me.

  There must have been about a hundred residents at this institution, most of them accompanied by a family member, due to the directive that they not be isolated from their environment, and to the savings in staff costs that family assistance afforded the administration. They lived in large cottages grouped around the garden in front of the gate. Looking around, I was so upset at seeing my physical disability multiplied in the patients that for days I shut myself up in my room (a single with bath).

  “I can’t come to the door,” I shouted to anyone who knocked.

  If I left the room to go to the dining hall or to have a massage and ran into crippled or maimed individuals, paralytics, those whose limbs trembled from Parkinson’s disease, I didn’t know how to turn away. I humiliated myself repeating the plaintive litany that many of these disabled people had heard from their healthy relatives: the perpetual “Lucky you, you can walk, good for you, you’re doing well,” murmured with sidelong glances. The endless discussions about health, intestines, bladders, stomachs, joints, their eyes lit up, engaged, obsessed with their own bodies. I slinked away, pleading commitments I couldn’t put off.

  But one night when I was gripped by colitis, shivering in the bathroom in my nightshirt, watching for intestinal spasms so I could make it onto the toilet bowl in time without soiling the wheelchair, I suddenly saw myself in the mirror of my mind: there I was, me of all people, looking at my comrades in physical humiliation with an aesthetic eye. I myself had become that societal eye that had blighted my existence.

  I was so crushed that I forgot the rumblings of my bowels (the colitis had passed). I sat there in front of the toilet bowl, doubled over in shame as if before a confessor. I, because I was thankfully spared the incontinence of bodily functions, because of a little hard-earned motility, felt superior to my fellow patients, arming myself with their disabilities so they could be used against them. What had happened to me during those years to reduce me to this vulgar aristocratic revulsion from physical contact with those who are dependent and infirm? I sat there like a killer who has mentally slaughtered her subhumans. How easily my class-conscious skin had grown back, like that of a snake.

  *

  Finally, I started venturing out. Hadn’t I once scuffled for a potato, a turnip? Hadn’t I shared slices of bread as thin as hosts with my comrades? Didn’t I know that we are always most absorbed by what we lack? And now here I was wrinkling my nose because these new companions, hungry for good health, spoke of nothing else. I was reminded of my volunteer experience in the Lagers, in Frankfurt-Höchst, my initial squeamishness toward the internees due to the overly delicate refinement of my senses. But so great was my shame—shame is clever, it becomes reserve, silence—that I didn’t talk about it in “As Long as the Head Lives,” written while I was in that home for the disabled.

  Besides, it’s not even true that they were only focused on their own bodies.

  I remember Amedeo, a gaunt Ligurian in a wheelchair, about forty years old, wounded in Africa. Once a metalworker, he had become a skilled watchmaker. He offered to teach his art to anyone who wanted to learn it, and designed models for small presses or other tools that even someone with only one hand could use.

  Giovanni, a bachelor from Bologna wounded in Greece, had a form of paresis that was the opposite of mine. Following a laminectomy that had decompressed the medulla, he had recovered movement but not sensation. He wanted to organize a union for both disabled war veterans and those injured on the
job. But he met with a lot of resistance because most of the “war surplus,” as he called the residents of Villa della Pace, had a superstitious aversion to politics. They inundated him with questions about subsidies and assistance, which he compiled and forwarded to the relevant entities, but they drew back as soon as he spoke to them about the need to organize.

  Vincenzo, from Friuli, was a little younger than me. A partisan in the mountains, he’d been struck by a bullet at age eighteen. His spinal injury was also unique: though depriving him of control over his motor nerves, it had left him the ability to have sex. Always standing upright on metal braces, tall and robust in the midst of our wheelchairs, he was fighting to get an “annual checkup, like they do with engines.” He continued his battle over the years, finally leading a mass occupation of a hospital ward in Florence, in ’73, which the national press reported cursorily (I myself only managed to publish a ten-line paragraph in a left-wing, extraparliamentary paper).