by Luce d'Eramo
For my part, I wrote articles with titles like “Guilty of What?” in newsletters for the disabled and promoted debates on social psychology. Insignificant things, but I felt like I was beginning to be myself again.
*
After the Christmas holidays, which my son had spent skiing with a group of friends in the mountains, Lorenzo joined me at Villa della Pace. He’d left his father, who had reclaimed him when I had my downfall but was now going through a stormy love affair. The boy had refused to move in with his grandparents, either paternal or maternal. I was the only one left.
“I’ll come and stay with you.” He winked at me: “Tell the management that I’m your attendant,” he said, as if he’d come up with a clever ruse.
The predictions had come true: Lorenzo was growing up in the shadow of my misfortune, at the most difficult age, early adolescence.
Every day he rode his bicycle to school, in the center of Rome, covering about thirty kilometers there and back, rain or shine. We lived in the same room with two beds. I dressed and did my exercises when he wasn’t there. He seemed untroubled as he went over his lessons with me. We counted the liras for him to see a film, have a drink at the bar, go roller-skating with his friends in the city. But he also painted some dark heads of Christ whose features were red rivulets like clotted blood.
I noticed that Lorenzo sometimes came back to the room as if he were fleeing something. If someone knocked, he locked himself in the bathroom. He would go out but then race back to ask if a schoolmate had phoned him. One day when he’d dialed a number numerous times, he looked at the phone in his hand and chuckled: “Two people can’t communicate when they’re busy calling each other, it seems.” He replaced the receiver.
If one of the patients in the garden called him over, “Come here, you who can walk,” with a plaintive insinuation that, even after I’d resigned myself to it, continued to get on my nerves, he just grunted and kept going.
A wheelchair-bound man in his thirties, who must have been injured at more or less the same age that Lorenzo was then, was the most insistent upon beckoning to him, detaining him, touching him. He couldn’t watch Lorenzo go by in the garden without asking him to do something for him. Usually, if he didn’t feel like he was being waylaid, Lorenzo volunteered to help, rushing over on his own as soon as he thought someone needed anything (with the same easiness as his father). It was that “you who can walk” that irritated him, that made him run off.
One day when he was returning from school, hungry after covering fifteen kilometers on his bike, that same man grabbed hold of his sweater and warned him: “Watch out, it can happen to you too.”
At which the boy broke out of his grip and in a shrill voice that occasionally cracked into deeper tones said, “So does that make me a criminal if I can walk? Is it my fault if I’m not crippled?” And the dark eyes in his round face welled with tears.
It was in that jumble of feelings and thoughts that I wrote “As Long as the Head Lives.” I recognized myself in the period in Mainz where I had first confronted paralysis. Perhaps, in recounting it, I emphasized my couldn’t-care-less attitude of that time because I was seeking a strength that I now needed. And, to buoy myself up, I concocted the cunning, false fable that good always triumphs …
School closed at the end of May and Lorenzo went to spend the vacation at his paternal grandparents’ farm, on the Gran Sasso plateau, along with a swarm of cousins who gathered there in summer. I didn’t want him to start the school year at Villa della Pace again, and I spent my days overcoming old difficulties on paper, almost as if by doing so I could ward off tomorrow. I completed that story in August. But there was nothing on the horizon. I didn’t have the money to set up house again. I’d just paid off my debts and sold the Studebaker, and I’d purchased a small DAF 600 with automatic transmission, a recently launched model. Another month passed.
By now it would soon be a year that I’d been living in that home for the disabled, when finally some German friends, whom I had put up in the prosperous days when I had a home, offered me an apartment in the Taunus. Lorenzo wrote from Abruzzo, enthusiastic about the plan (later, however, in that village in the forest, in the snowy silence, surrounded by foreign words, he must certainly have felt lonely). I made arrangements by mail with a local housekeeper to come and clean.
In late September, the boy returned from Gran Sasso, invigorated, tanned, all muscle. We loaded up the DAF 600 and set out for Germany. An electrician friend headed for Hamburg spelled me at the wheel.
*
On one of his last aimless nights at Villa della Pace, while I chatted with friends in another room, Lorenzo, left alone as usual, read my manuscript. More than anything else, my brief mention of the Höchst factory had intrigued him. So when we were almost at the end of the trip, approaching the turnoff to the Taunus, he suggested that we continue on to Frankfurt instead, before settling in Glashütten, the little village set amid fir trees where we were headed, close to Königstein: “Come on,” he said, “we’re on the road, let’s go to IG Farben!”
“But it’s quite a drive.” I hesitated. “Won’t it be too long?” We were already racing north.
“Were you seriously a worker?” Lorenzo laughed. “With shifts and all? Operating machinery?” he asked, in the deep newfound voice of a young man, still gangly, his face still beardless.
The electrician had been dropped off by then and I was driving. We reached Höchst in the late afternoon. We proceeded at a snail’s pace amid the angry honking of drivers irritated by my slow driving. Finally, I found my gate, the one where I used to stamp my card. I stopped the car. I felt a sense of emptiness. My eyes fixed on the details. The brick wall that enclosed the facilities seemed blackened, darker than I remembered it, the housing in front grayer and more barrack-like.
“Why don’t you tell me about the work you did? And your fellow workers, did you get along?” Lorenzo encouraged me.
I started telling him about the Russians, about Director Lopp, about the Warsaw prisoners, and I became animated. Then somehow I wound up telling him about the strike too, because he kept asking questions, even when I was ready to be done remembering.
“Do you think you could have pulled it off or not?”
I got flustered, I said yes and then I said no. It depended, maybe he hadn’t considered that … “Why are you looking at me like that?” I said, noting a hint of sadness in his face.
“But did you think you could succeed?”
“I don’t know. But we saw that we could at least try.”
“Sure, that much at least,” he said hastily, but it was as if he’d missed the essential point. His fourteen-year-old baby face remained saddened.
Now I think that he couldn’t stand the idea that our action was doomed to failure, but at the time, as we sat in the car in the twilight opposite my gate at IG Farben, I had the feeling he was wondering where my past had gone to—though, actually, this was what I was wondering, worried that my account might have made my story seem like little more than an impulsive act that had amounted to nothing, one of those myths of the past that every parent crows about and that are of no interest to their children.
“Shall we continue on?”
He nodded, and I pressed the accelerator.
The years get mixed up.
The judicious face of the boy with the dark, impudent eyes, sitting beside me in the car watching for the road signs, turns into the face of the bearded twenty-year-old who, sometimes with glasses and sometimes without, pored over the newspaper and magazine photos rediscovered among my papers during the months when I was searching for my past. One image in particular recurs, from the spring of ’68. On top of a ladder, Lorenzo is with his university friends, brandishing chairs to fend off a squad of big men with clubs rushing at them from below. Lorenzo is bent forward, in three-quarters view, his mouth open in a snarl, his face grim and scared.
In other photos he appears in demonstrations, his gaze relentless. But then he’s
by himself, half a page for him alone, his expression defiant, his fist raised, his determination so different from my own at that same age, on my Siemens card. His is more intimate, more tormented. Now he’s clean-shaven, rather pale; when he’s focused he speaks in a low, contained voice, the dark, narrowed eyes recalling those of the boy who at Höchst wanted to know about the IG Farben strike.
As we drove through Frankfurt that night, Lorenzo shouted, “Pizzeria!” Pointing to the Italian sign on the ground floor of an old building, he rubbed his palms delightedly over his thighs as his watchful eyes followed my maneuvers to park. When we went in, however, the burst of joy faded at the sight of the poorly dressed immigrants crowded into the room, almost all from the south, their faces guarded, their eyes fiery. They helped me manage the steps in the wheelchair, asking and answering questions. They lived in the barracks, of course, the ones outside the city, in the camp called Pfaffenwiese, on the way to Mainz, yes, that’s the one, the old Frankfurt-Höchst Lager that had later been adapted for foreign workers.
XI
Afterward I never looked back on my wartime experiences, until ’75. For thirteen years I felt no need to think about them. Thirteen years is a long time, all the more so since, on balance, up until ’62 I had actually clarified very little about that entire chapter: episodes of escapes and hospital stays recounted for pages and pages, whereas I’d dedicated just a couple of paragraphs in “As Long as the Head Lives,” about twenty lines, to my first nine months in the Lagers. Not even stopping by IG Farben with Lorenzo, after leaving Villa della Pace, had made me want to more evenly balance my memories of that part of the past. Apparently, I was content with having come to terms with the paralysis and satisfied at having finally atoned for my crime of volunteering in the Lagers.
I must say that in ’62 I had only one purpose: to have a home again and establish a circumspect way of life, in part so that my son—albeit belatedly—could grow up in a stable environment. To actually realize that goal took me years.
I gradually distanced myself from my social class by creating a vacuum, telling would-be visitors that I did not have time to receive them. “I’m so sorry,” I said to avoid them. “Excuse me for taking the liberty of existing,” I would add sweetly. No one understood anyway, and the words, intended to be sarcastic, sounded like an amusing witticism. And, d’emblée, the usual astonished admiration—“You dress yourself? Shoes too? But how do you manage?”—immediately became less frequent.
I rationed my physical and moral strength by the milligram. And little by little, in part because I had done away with the marathons and in part because I took better care of myself, my health stabilized. The need to earn was less nagging. Lorenzo had come of age; I was doing better.
Consequently I was able to work more calmly: essays, articles, lectures. Then Lorenzo became independent and went to live in Paris, where he did socioeconomic research while writing for an Italian communist newspaper.
In addition, and perhaps most important, the times had changed. A progressive culture had taken hold and opened minds a little; conventions had become somewhat freer everywhere. Young people were no longer subject to the kind of prejudices that had cost me so much energy to neutralize.
This for me was the ultimate confirmation that my memory block had been linked to the struggle against the social pressures that wanted to confine me to the role of invalid. In fact, I fully recovered my past in the Lagers once that struggle was over, with the added triumph of living on my own, with no assistance other than that of an aide who comes for a few hours in the morning to straighten up the house, do my shopping, and above all run work-related errands, at the photocopy shop, post offices, and agencies. (Although there is always someone who asks, “What! You live alone?” in a mournful voice. “What if you were to fall?”) And it had not been necessary for me to be despondent, crushed, and deranged for memories of my Germany to reemerge again: all it took was a simple move.
Toward the end of ’75 I received an eviction notice from the sixth-floor apartment where I’d lived since I’d finally set up house, after the downfall that had sent me to Villa della Pace with my son. I was a little worried about all the stuff that had accumulated and, to begin with, I took a first crack at clearing out my file cabinets. I happened to come across my worker’s card from my time in the Lagers, which I didn’t even know I still had. The heavy face in the photo called up my frame of mind back then, later repressed, and I wrote “In the Ch 89.” Afterward an apartment in the same building opened up and I moved to the third floor, just three flights down. I completed an editorial assignment I had, but it was clear, at that point, that the episode in Verona would not be long in emerging either. In fact, as soon as my mind was uncluttered, it imposed itself so forcefully that it occupied me entirely. All the repressed events, from prison in Frankfurt and subsequent to that—not just the repatriation and the days in Verona but, perhaps even more intensely, the twelve weeks of constant astonishment at the “normality” of Dachau—appeared before me, sharp and precise, with no difficulty. And I faced the deviation.
Now that it was all clear, however—this happened in September—I had a nagging feeling. I wasn’t at all relieved, as I had expected to be. I felt almost as though I’d been left empty-handed. Everything added up so well that, for some reason, it didn’t convince me. Especially that virtuous ending: freed of physical dependence (so to speak) and suddenly freed of everything, of her social class, of any interior void. Who was I trying to fool? And then too, when did I ever lead a solitary life? Far from it. In reality those were the years when I met and frequented many people, not friends handed down from my milieu, but friends found in Rome, Paris, Berlin.
Oh God, all those months of racking my brain only to wind up with this edifying story of a disabled person who made it despite all the odds—the classic American fairy tale, meritocratic, individualistic, the untarnished heroine who through mistakes and misunderstandings overcomes all adversity, an example and a warning, albeit with the modernly muted epilogue of an actor discreetly leaving the scene—the rhetorical figure of moving down to the lower floors—without any bombastic nineteenth-century theatricality. And on top of it I felt liberated. But from what?
A lifetime of denying others the right to judge me by the yardstick of my paralysis, only to do so myself. They won. I am them.
It may seem strange to you, reader, that I did not get discouraged. For sixteen years now I’ve known that I’m a social snake, and when I shed one old skin and grow an equally conservative new one it now takes me less time to realize it. I had shed the rainbow-colored, iridescent skin of the complex creature whose memories overflow for hundreds of pages into scattered streams, and had slipped into that of the wounded being, misunderstood at first, then lost (drugged, megalomaniacal), who ultimately redeems herself.
Fine, I said to myself: now I’ll pit one skin against the other. I’ll dismantle the deus ex machina of the wheelchair with other memories of my problematic image. We’ll see if they don’t annihilate one another.
And so, six weeks ago, I went leafing through the hundreds of pages in which, for days and nights, in spring’s coolness and summer’s suffocating heat, shut up in my room (as I am now), I had tried fruitlessly, though less prejudicially, to recompose my life. Thank you, I exclaimed to myself as I reread: I’d left out thousands of episodes to focus only on those that magnified my battle against the pillory of my physical affliction! But there were plenty of them that contradicted this premise. Once again I had only to pick and choose. Starting with Merano, in December ’45, after I was let off the train of veterans from Russia.
*
For a couple of weeks I had been lying in a hotel pressed into service as a transit hospital for wounded veterans, in a small room, waiting for one of my family members—officially informed of my arrival—to show up. And I see standing in the doorway a young man whose green eyes lock onto mine, behind the load of flowers and gift boxes piled up in his arms.
&
nbsp; I stared at him, astonished. I would have expected anything except to see before me the last boyfriend I’d had in Rome in ’43, before moving to the north with my parents. It was him, his long, almond-shaped eyes, full lips. The Cossack hat on his head accentuated his oriental features that at one time I hadn’t noticed, the wide nostrils, broad face.
“I’m Gheorg, don’t you recognize me?”
I had started going with him when I was seventeen and we’d stayed together for several months, constantly squabbling because he was anti-Fascist and I was the opposite, but we always went looking for each other and, arms tightly around each other’s waist, we would disappear into the Palatine ruins just a short walk from my home (I lived on the Aventine and came up with all sorts of excuses to leave the house). We went on meeting like that, in secret, even after he had formally asked for my hand, as was the custom then.
He was a Romanian count, exiled from his country during the exodus of the members of the aristocracy closest to King Carol, at the time of Codreanu’s insurrection, later superseded by Antonescu’s coup d’etat. His family had sought refuge in England, and he had come to Italy with a study grant from the Academy of Romania (Antonescu’s pro-Nazi regime had kept a concerned eye on the aristocrats in exile). He’d asked me to marry him and stay in Rome with him, as soon as he heard that my father planned to move to the north, where the Fascist government had been reestablished following the liberation of Mussolini at Gran Sasso (late summer of ’43). I said yes, if he came with us.
Those had been fretful days; we begged each other, tore each other apart, each accusing the other of not loving them, with tears and exchanges of letters that we delivered by hand, until the moment of separation came and he’d told me, “It will bring you bad luck, I can feel it,” and I made horns at him.