Born Twice (Vintage International) (10 page)

“Where did you teach before?”

“In Bolzano, for three years.”

“Why did you leave Bolzano?”

She hesitates for a moment.

“Because of a person. Bad judgment,” she says.

I nod as if I knew who she was talking about.

“The wrong person,” she adds.

Perhaps I too am a wrong person. We never stop discovering that others are the wrong people in the belief that we can extricate ourselves from a common destiny. But it’s never a good idea to delve into these details with our closest relatives; we are always badly surprised.

“Are you over it?” I ask.

“Yes, but only recently.”

She’s not over it yet.

“It must have been very important for you.”

Important
is an adjective that people like because it makes something seem important per se when actually it’s important only for them.

“Yes,” she answers quickly. “Teaching saved me.”

So there’s the road to salvation, I think. Ultimately, her misadventures will be important for Paolo too.

“What a delusion,” she adds.

“I bet,” I reply.

Vague images run through my mind of contemporary stories, as well as of stories that happened hundreds of years ago. Miss Bauer runs a hand through her hair as if she wants to distance a thought.

“Do you help your wife?” she asks.

“At times, yes,” I reply, looking down.

“What do you mean, ‘at times’?”

We’re on the ground floor. I open the elevator door for her, and she steps out into the unlit lobby.

“Sometimes I’m absent,” I add.

“Physically, you mean?”

“Physically and mentally.”

“And you say so without remorse?” she asks, turning to look at me.

“No, I say it with remorse.”

“Why don’t you do something about it?”

We go down the three steps toward the front door.

“I suppose because I’m egocentric,” I reply, opening the glass door for her. I know it’s too simple an answer. To admit one’s errors is the first alibi for repeating them.

In fact, Miss Bauer doesn’t let herself be distracted. “Maybe there’s some other reason?”

I get the clear feeling that I am being put on trial. Who gives her the right? Me, probably. There’s nothing like feeling guilty for having someone attribute it to you.

“It’s a question of strong points,” I reply. “I, for example, would be a terrible teacher for Paolo.”

“Really?” she asks incredulously.

Miss Bauer is becoming incredibly oppressive. She’s avenging herself on me for the wrongs that she has suffered.

“Yes, I’ve tried. I become aggressive, nervous, and impatient.”

“Couldn’t you change?”

“You can’t. Or rather, you can but the other person suffers as a consequence. The results are negative for both of us.”

We’re walking down the sidewalk. It’s a warm evening.

“Which way are you going, Miss Bauer?”

“To the subway station.” After a few steps, she turns to me and asks, “So what are some of your strong points?”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” I say with a smile.

It’s odd to find myself at sunset on the crowded sidewalks of Corso Buenos Aires defending myself to my son’s teacher.

“What did you mean then?” she asks, without letting up.

“That I only do a portion of what I could do. I know the alternative would be a failure.”

“And your wife?”

“She does practically everything.”

I avoid looking at her so I don’t have to see her triumphant smile. I know about female solidarity and how it has the notinsignificant advantage of reason. That’s why I usually cling to the remnants.

“And she doesn’t ask you to do more?”

“No. It would just make things worse.”

Miss Bauer attracts indiscreet glances; people turn to look at her. She defends herself with a show of indifference, typical of someone who sets too much store by this sort of thing.

“Your wife is happy.”

It’s impossible to tell whether it’s a question or a reluctant affirmation.

“No. But you see, that’s not the point.” It’s getting hard to speak; I’m discovering what I think. “The point is that we are always at our extreme limits. If I carve out spaces for myself—we can even call them privileges—I can manage to hold up—”

“Otherwise you’d run away from it all,” she interrupts. “Is that what you want to say?” She doesn’t even give me time to answer. “Many men would act the same way in similar situations.”

“Why do you think so poorly of me?” I ask.

“I don’t think poorly of you.”

“You mustn’t forget about the institution that doubles our neuroses.”

“And what would that be?”

“Marriage, Miss Bauer. And don’t laugh.”

There, I got her. I feel better now.

“I didn’t think you had those kind of feelings about marriage,” she says.

“Sure you did!” I exclaim. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have piled up so many accusations against me.”

“They’re not accusations,” she says, reacting in the way that she, Miss Bauer, knows she has to react. “They’re questions so I can understand how the work with Paolo gets distributed.”

“Unevenly,” I reply. “That’s the truth. I’m not happy about it, but that’s the way it is.”

I’ve reacquired a resigned pride in my wrongdoings. She has moderated her tone. As long as she was judging me she felt invulnerable. But to be judged as an accuser has made her slightly more cautious.

“It’s a very complicated situation,” I go on to say. “Very hard. Luckily, I don’t think Paolo has suffered because of it. However, if you feel the need, you can talk to me about it any time.”

“Fine,” she says, stopping at the stairwell that leads down to the subway. Her cheeks are bright and there is a soft expression in her eyes.

I reach out and shake her hand, pausing to squeeze it for a moment.

“I think we can use the
tu
form,” I say. And then with vertiginous perception, but late, almost comically, I add, “Between colleagues.”

“We’ll see,” she replies.

She’s become Miss Bauer again.

She starts to go down the stairs, then turns to wave goodbye. From where I stand on the sidewalk I watch her disappear into the darkness.

A rosy light radiates over Corso Buenos Aires, illuminating the faces of passersby as they emerge from the shadows.

I turn toward home. My mind is confused. I am tired and stunned. It’s as if I had been fighting, first for Paolo and then for myself.

Paolo’s cause has been won, at least for now. But what about mine? I tried to persuade Miss Bauer, but who was I really trying to convince? Now, on this glowing evening, I am tearfully certain that I’ll never succeed.

The Go-Cart

He goes to school by go-cart. The go-cart was one of Franca’s ideas.

I used to take him to the park in his stroller. He would sit on a bench by the fountain and watch the ice-cream vendors and the balloon salesmen, the children rolling on the grass and the joggers on the crunching gravel, always the same panorama. Only now can I imagine the torture. Back then I just couldn’t bring myself to think about it. I was too worried: about my own personal survival and—without surrendering to the moralistic complacency of self-abnegation—my family’s. I was forced to be cruelly selective in how I distributed my energies (at least that was my alibi at the time). In that luminous festive park landscape, though, the pedal-powered go-carts always caught Paolo’s eye. The children behind the wheel were exultant; they cruised between people and crossed easily over the paths. You could rent them from the parking attendant under the plane trees, near the entrance to the Planetarium. At first the man wouldn’t tell us where he had bought them, fearing who knows what kind of competition. Fearful people see danger in everything; they practically invent dangers in order to intensify the pleasure of avoiding them. All in vain, too, because fear is born on the inside, like the insatiable thirst of a person suffering from dropsy.

When questioned by my father-in-law, however, the coarse repugnant man revealed the name of the mechanic who repaired the go-carts for him. From there it was easy to trace the factory where they were made.

When Alfredo saw the shiny red go-cart with its sculpted rubber racing wheels in the courtyard of our building he couldn’t hide his intolerance. For two consecutive Christmases, when he was six and seven, he had asked for one. Now he was too big. He couldn’t fit into it. When his mother saw him trying to squeeze into it from the balcony, she scolded him, telling him he was too old for such things now. He probably suffered because of it, as if we had confiscated a childhood he had not been able to enjoy. Once I even saw him kick the tires; I smacked the back of his neck in the very same place my father had smacked me when I had knocked over a fishbowl. Then, when he started crying miserably, I observed how we repeat on our own children the very same acts of violence we ourselves were subjected to, albeit unwillingly. (How the unconscious assists us!) Criminology texts talk about such things, but Renaissance documents on the family do not.

Paolo, on the other hand, could easily be lowered into the go-cart from above, but at first he could barely make it move. To push one foot and then the other in alternation did not come instinctively to him; it was a conquest. From the window of our apartment I’d watch him in the courtyard below, lurching forward with irregular movements. At times I’d curse at life in a whisper, even if there was no one around to hear me.

Sometimes Paolo would rest his forehead against the steering wheel. I couldn’t tell if he was overwhelmed by a sense of powerlessness or by fatigue. I remember a young physiotherapist who once compared the reaction of a disabled child faced by a flight of stairs to that of an elderly person. “Now do you understand what they feel?” she’d ask. We nodded our heads, but an elderly person’s experience of stairs was just as foreign to us as that of a disabled child. Only by verifying the effect of time on our own bodies does the pain become comprehensible and the foreignness familiar. Everyone knows we grow old—but, as Trot-sky said, old age is the most unpredictable event that happens after the age of forty-five. From a theoretician of the permanent revolution, this confession should not be undervalued.

The young physiotherapist gave us other examples having to do with muscles and fatigue. She had an extremely flexible associative capacity, which was at times disconcerting and confusing. We’d make the wrong connection and understand even less, distracted by images that didn’t make sense. At other times—gesticulating with powerful mimicry and speaking with unexpected enthusiasm—she’d help us understand the particular problems of a handicap as well as situations on which the handicap had an indirect effect. Finally, we understood that everything has an indirect relationship to handicaps. When we say that such-and-such an experience helps us understand the experience of the handicapped, we omit the most important part: Dealing with the handicap helps us understand ourselves.

She told us, for example, how similar some muscular exercises are to the various phases of the Tour de France. The cyclists who ride day after day don’t “see” the mountains ahead of them. If they could “see” that, cumulatively, they rise higher than Mount Everest, they’d give up trying to break records and they’d always be looking back to see what they had accomplished. Overattentiveness to a partial goal induces us not to think about the final one, keeping us, in many cases, from ever reaching it.

Paolo transformed the go-cart into an anomalous car; it became a mechanical projection of himself. While Franca observed that he improved each time, I’d observe that he was making too little progress. But mine was less an observation than a fear. (How frequently we substitute fears for observations!) After three months of practice, Paolo was zipping around the courtyard, turning the wheel boldly to avoid crashing into the columns. He must have particularly loved that maneuver, because I watched him do it over and over, each time getting a little closer to the obstacle. Then he learned how to go backward. He experimented with slamming into things, practically knocking himself out of the seat. After four months, he was ready to go beyond the courtyard.

He careened down sidewalks and zigzagged between people. Some of them smiled and stepped aside so he could pass; others would turn around, frowning hesitantly, to verify if what they had seen was actually so.

He’d enter the schoolyard through a side gate. There was a small hill. He had to pedal hard to make it to the top. Then, triumphantly, he’d lift his feet off the pedals and let the go-cart cruise down the other side, until he stepped on the pedals again and either skidded out of control or came to a complete stop. Franca, who’d follow him on foot, would scold him each time in the same complicit way. There’s something reassuring and ritualistic about familial scolding: the certainty of continuity through disapproval.

The go-cart was a luminous presence in Paolo’s boyhood. During the day, the janitor kept it locked in a closet under a stairwell. The envy of all the other children, it helped transform his inferiority into a superiority. It was a temporary sensation, but no more illusory than many others we consider long-lasting.