A Perfect Vacuum (12 page)

The young prose writer Gian Carlo Spallanzani is audacious to the point of impudence. He pretends to take the opinions of the experts as gospel, only later to sling mud at them. For his
Idiot
alludes to the novel of Dostoevsky not merely in its title: it reaches further. I do not know about others, but personally I find it easier to write about a book when I have seen the face of the author. Spallanzani is not prepossessing in his photo; he is an ungainly youth with a low forehead and puffy eyes, the small dark pupils of which are peevish, and the dainty chin makes one uneasy. An
enfant terrible
, a knave of low cunning and with a mean streak, an outspoken wolf in sheep's clothing? I cannot find the right term, but I stick with my impression from the first reading of
The Idiot:
such perfidiousness is in a class by itself. Can he have written under a pseudonym? Because the great, historical Spallanzani was a vivisectionist, and this thirty-year-old is one also. I find it hard to believe that such a coincidence of names is completely accidental. The young author has cheek: he furnishes his
Idiot
with an introduction in which, with seeming candor, he tells why he abandoned his original idea—that of writing
Crime and Punishment
a second time, as “Sonya's,” the story told in the first person by the daughter of Marmeladov.

There is effrontery, not without its charm, in his explanation of how he restrained himself because he did not wish to do injury to the original. Albeit against his will—he would have had to (so he says) chip away at the statue that Dostoevsky raised up in honor of his shining prostitute. Sonya in
Crime and Punishment
appears intermittently, being a “third person”; a narrative in the first person would require her constant presence, even during her working hours, and that is the sort of work that affects the soul as no other. The axiom of her spiritual purity untouched by the experiences of the fallen body could not emerge whole. Defending himself in this devious way, the author does not ever address himself to the real question—of
The Idiot.
This already is double-dealing: he accomplished what he wanted, for he has shown us the general drift; his impudence lies in his having made no mention of the necessity, of the imperative, that compelled him to take up a theme after Dostoevsky !

The story, realistic, matter-of-fact, at first seems set on a rather prosaic level. A very ordinary, moderately well-to-do family, an average, respectable couple—upright, but uninspired—has a mentally retarded child. Like any child, it showed delightful promise; its first words, those unintentionally original expressions which are the side effects of one's growing into speech, have been preserved with loving care in the reliquary of the parents' reminiscences. Those blissful, diapered simplicities, in the framework of the present nightmare, mark out the amplitude between what could have been and what has happened.

The child is an idiot. Living with him, caring for him, is an anguish all the more cruel in that it has grown out of love. The father is almost twenty years older than the mother; there are couples who in a similar situation would try again; here it is not known what hinders such an act, physiology or psychology. But for all that, it is probably love. Under normal circumstances the love could never have undergone such magnification. Precisely because he is an idiot, the child makes prodigies of his parents. He improves them to the very degree to which he lacks normality. This could be the sense of the novel, its theme, but it is merely the premise.

In their contacts with the outside world, with relatives, doctors, lawyers, the father and mother are ordinary people, deeply troubled but restrained, for indeed this situation has been going on for years: there has been sufficient time to acquire self-control! The period of despair, of hope, of trips to various capitals, to the finest specialists, has long since passed. The parents realize that nothing can be done. They have no illusions. Their visits to the doctor, to the attorney, are now to ensure some decent, endurable
modus vivendi
for the idiot when his natural protectors are gone. They must see to a will, safeguard the inheritance. This is done slowly, soberly, with due deliberation. Tedious and scrupulous: nothing more natural under the sun. When they return home, however, and when the three are by themselves, the situation changes in a flash. I would say: as when actors make their entrance on stage. Fine, but we do not know where the stage is. This is now to be revealed. Without ever making any arrangement between themselves, without ever exchanging so much as a single word—that would be a psychological impossibility—the parents have created, over the years, a system of interpreting the actions of the idiot in such a way as to find them intelligent, in every instance and in every respect.

Spallanzani found the germ of such conduct in normal behavior. It is known, surely, that the circle of those who dote upon a small child emerging from the infant state makes as much as it can of the child's responses and words. To its mindless echolalia are attributed meanings; in its incoherent babbling is discovered intelligence, even wit; the inaccessibility of the child's psyche allows the observer enormous freedom, especially the doting observer. It must have been in this way that the rationalization of the idiot's actions first began. No doubt the father and mother vied with each other in finding signs to indicate that their child was speaking better and better, more and more clearly, that he was doing better all the time, positively radiating good nature and affection. I have been saying “child,” but when the scene opens he is already a fourteen-year-old boy. What sort of system of misinterpretation must it be, what subterfuges, what explanations—frantic to the point of being outright comical—must be called into play to save the fiction, when the reality so unremittingly contradicts it? Well, all this can be done, and of such acts consists the parental sacrifice in behalf of the idiot.

Their isolation must be complete. The world has nothing to offer him and will not help him; it is of no use to him, therefore —yes, the world to him, not he to the world. The sole interpreters of his behavior must be the initiated, the father and mother: in this way, everything can be transformed. We do not learn whether the idiot killed, or put out of her misery, his ailing grandmother; one can, however, set out side by side the different points of circumstantial evidence. His grandmother did not believe in him (that is, in that version of him which the parents had established—true, we cannot know how much of her “unbelief” the idiot was able to sense); she had asthma; her wheezing and rattling during the attacks were not shut out even by the felt-padded door; he could not sleep when the attacks intensified; they drove him into a rage; he was found sleeping peacefully in the room of the dead woman, at the foot of her bed, on which her body had already grown cold.

First he is carried to the nursery, and only then does the father attend to his own mother. Did the father suspect something? This we never know. The parents do not refer to the topic, for certain things are done without being named; as if they realize that any improvisation has its limits, when irrevocably now they must set about doing “those things,” they sing. They do what is indispensable, but at the same time conduct themselves like Mommy and Daddy, singing lullabies if it is evening, or the old songs of their childhood if intervention becomes necessary during the day. Song has proved a better extinguisher of the intellect than silence. We hear it at the very beginning; that is, the servants hear it, the gardener. “A sad song,” he says, but later we begin to guess what gruesome work was likely done to the accompaniment of precisely that song: it was early morning when the body was found. What an infernal refinement of feelings!

The idiot behaves dreadfully, with an inventiveness sometimes characteristic of a profound dementia that is capable of cunning; in this way he spurs his parents on ever more, for they must find themselves equal to every task. Now and then their words are fitted exactly to their actions, but that is rare; the eeriest effects of all occur when they say one thing while doing another, for here one type of resourcefulness, the cretinoid, is pitted against another, a devotedly ministering resourcefulness—loving, giving—and only the distance that perforce separates the two turns these acts of sacrifice into the macabre. But the parents by now probably do not see this: it has, after all, gone on for years! In the face of each new surprise (a euphemism: the idiot spares them nothing), there is first a fraction of a second in which, along with them, we experience a thrill of fear, a piercing dread that
this
will not only shatter the present moment but will overturn, in a single blow, the entire edifice that has been raised with tender care by the father and mother in the course of long months and years.

We are wrong; an exchange of glances, purely reflexive, a few laconic remarks to shift gears, and in the tone of a natural conversation begins the lifting of this new burden, the fitting of it into the created structure. An eerie humor and an arresting nobility are in such scenes, thanks to the psychological accuracy. The words they venture to use when it is no longer possible not to put on the “little smock”! When they do not know what to do with the razor; or when the mother, jumping from the tub, must barricade herself in the bathroom, and later, having made a short circuit in the entire house, so that darkness descends, by feel removes the barricade of furniture, since its presence is—to her version of the child, which binds her—more damaging than a defect in the electrical installation. In the vestibule, dripping wet and wrapped in a thick rug, no doubt on account of the razor, she waits for the father to come home. It sounds coarse and awkward—worse, unbelievable—summarized like this, taken out of context. The parents act in the knowledge that to reconcile such incidents to the norm, through completely arbitrary interpretations, is an impossibility; therefore it was a little at a time, themselves not knowing when, that they passed beyond the boundary of that norm and entered a realm inaccessible to ordinary office or kitchen mortals. Not in the direction of madness, not at all: it is not true that everyone can go insane. But everyone can believe. To keep from becoming a family defiled, they became a family sacred.

That word does not appear in the book; nor is the idiot, according to the faith of the parents (for faith it must be called), either God or a lesser deity; he is merely other than all creatures, a thing unto himself, unlike any child or youth; and in that otherness he is theirs, irrevocably loved, their one and only. Farfetched? Then read
The Idiot
yourself; you will see that faith is not merely a metaphysical capacity of the mind. The situation is in all its substance so constantly rooted in harshness that only the absurdity of faith can save it from damnation, which here means: from psychopathological nomenclature. If the saints of the Lord have been taken by psychiatrists for paranoiacs, then why can it not also be the other way around? Idiot? The word does make its appearance in the action, but only when the parents go among other people. They speak of the child in the language of those others, of the doctors, attorneys, relatives, but for themselves they know better. Thus they lie to others because their faith has not the mark of a mission, and therefore not the aggressiveness that demands the conversion of the heathen. The father and mother are, anyway, too level-headed to believe for even a second in the possibility of such conversion: it does not concern them, and besides, it is not the whole world that needs saving, but only three people. While they live, they have their mutual church. It is not a matter of shame or of prestige, or of the insanity of an aging couple, called
folie a deux,
but merely an earthly, transitory thing, taking place in a house with central heating; it is the triumph of love, whose motto reads
Credo quia absurdum est.
If this be madness, every faith can be reduced to that level.

Spallanzani walks a narrow line throughout, for the greatest danger for the novel was to become a caricature of the Holy Family. The father is old? Then that is Joseph. The mother is much younger? Mary. And in that case the child ... Well, I think that if Dostoevsky had not written his
Idiot,
this line of allegorization never would have presented itself, or would have remained so veiled as to be hardly noticeable, and only to a few. If one can put it thus, Spallanzani has absolutely nothing against the Gospel; nor has he the least desire to make free with the Holy Family; and if, in spite of everything, there does arise—one cannot altogether avoid it—precisely such a connotative ricochet, then the “blame” must be borne entirely by Dostoevsky and his
Idiot.
Yes, of course: to this end alone was the demolition charge of the work primed and set, as an attack leveled at the great writer! Prince Myshkin, the saintly epileptic, the misunderstood innocent-ascetic, the Jesus with the stigmata of grand mal—he serves here as a link, a relay point. Spallanzani's idiot resembles him at times, but with the signs reversed! This is, you might say, the maniac variant, and exactly thus might one picture the adolescence of the pale youth Myshkin, when the epileptic seizures, with their mystic aura, with their bestial spasms, for the first time knock to pieces the image of angelic little-darlingness. The tyke is a cretin? Incessantly, yes, yet we get the communion of his vacant mind with sublimity, as when, suffocated by the music, he smashes the phonograph record, wounding himself, and tries to devour it along with his own blood. Well, you see, this is a form of—an attempt at-—transubstantiation: something of Bach must have knocked upon the door of his dim consciousness, if he sought to make it a part of himself—by eating it.

Had the parents turned the whole thing over to the institutional Lord God, or had they simply created a three-person substitute for religion, a kind of sect with a mentally deficient stand-in for God, their defeat would have been certain. But not for a moment do they cease to be ordinary, literal, maltreated parents; they never even considered the way of holy ambitions—they permitted themselves none, nothing that was not of immediate, on-the-spot necessity. Therefore, they did not actually build any system at all; instead, through the situation, a system was born and revealed itself to them, not wanted, not planned, not even suspected. They received no revelation; they were themselves in the beginning, and themselves they remained. And so it is only an earthly love. We have grown unaccustomed to its power in literature, a literature which, schooled in cynicism, its old romantic back broken by the blows of psychoanalytic doctrines, has become blind to that part of the amplitude of human destiny on which thrived—and which cultivated for us—the classics of the past.