Born Twice (Vintage International) (16 page)

Paolo is perplexed.

“You have to be less childish,” I say. “Sometimes you’re a little repetitive.”

“You are too, sometimes.”

He knows that turning against me always works. I laugh. He’s gaining territory. Maybe that’s what I want.

“But, you see, that’s not the point,” I go on to say. “All men are, in some ways, infantile. We never really leave infancy. We stayed there for too long.”

He listens carefully. We talk less about him and more about men in general. I feel more interested in what I am saying. Do we teach only when we’re interested?

“That’s why women don’t mind when men are infantile. Just not too much and not always.”

He doesn’t say anything, but I think he agrees with me.

“You should try and meet one of those altruistic girls who are willing to face certain difficulties. Not that there aren’t nasty surprises with them too.”

“There aren’t?”

He quiets down when situations become complicated and when his case fits into the category of universal complications.

“Anyway, you know what I mean,” I say, to get out of my embarrassed muddle.

“No.”

We both laugh. Maybe we didn’t understand each other, but we’ve come to an understanding.

He takes advantage of the situation to make the last remark, which at this moment is very important to him—and helps me out—by saying, “All in good time, Papa.”

You Didn’t Think I Could Do It, Did You?

Paolo used to say it on various occasions between the ages of ten and fifteen, like the time I had gone ahead to press the call button and he made it up the three stairs that lead to the elevator from the lobby without my help. “You didn’t think I could do it, did you?” Or when he poured himself a glass of water without spilling a drop, his trembling hand still on the bottle. Or when he managed to throw a rubber ball into a wide basket without falling and hitting the back of his head on the gym mat. Or when he managed to buy tickets for a concert over the phone without having the operator hang up on him. Sometimes they’d interpret his slow and, at times, inarticulate voice for a prank call and hang up. Sometimes they’d ask him to repeat what he had said, ultimately with the same outcome. He’d break out in a sweat, his eyes would burn with determination, but he wouldn’t give up. It made me simultaneously proud and exasperated. I remember wanting to get on the phone and scream at the operator to listen more carefully and not resort to “I’m sorry, I don’t understand”—which so many people say complacently rather than regretfully.

“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 indulgence 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.