Born Twice (Vintage International) (5 page)

Cornali, who fought for the abolition of a grade for conduct (a notion that the future itself would make superfluous), decided to implement a change in the structuring of his course. He decided to study the retrogressive history of art, from the twentieth century back to the Stone Age. It was like telling someone that they’d get somewhere faster if they walked backward. At first the students were attracted by the novelty. Then they realized it would actually take them longer to study in this way, as they frequently had to stop and examine things in both directions. But by then it was too late to go back to the old system.

“I don’t like making comparisons,” he’d say, in the manner of someone who’s about to do just that, “but your class obeys you; mine follows me. You invoke fear in your students; I arouse sympathy. I make them feel like geniuses; you make them feel like laborers.”

I’d listen to him in amusement. There was a genuine warmth in the geyser of his ideas; it was his most sympathetic trait. He considered himself “a creative type” and loved to remind you of it. He’d propose the most improbable hypotheses and then erase them with a wave of his hand, as if they were the pure follies of genius. A passage from the Veda, a phrase by Lao Tzu, a saying by Confucius: all added a hint of orientalism to his words—at least that was the intent. Indeed, as long as you didn’t dwell on what he was saying, the effect was of lightness. As with many so-called “creative types,” he was far more interested in the creative act than in the creation itself, although he did expect applause for the latter (and it was never lacking). In his uniqueness he was a product in a series. He was typical of our society but didn’t know it. He probably would have been horrified to see his image reflected in someone else, an experience that life had spared him.

“It takes nine months for a baby to grow,” I’d remind him bleakly. “School lasts nine months. At the end of the year we’ll see who’s right.”

“How will you know?”

“The students: They’ll let us know.”

Toward the end of the year, just before the final faculty meeting in which we were to announce our grades, the maestro had his coup de théâtre. He told every student what grade they’d be receiving and explained the curve on which it was based. He gave the lowest grades to the best students (for not making full use of their talents) and the highest grades to the weakest students (as a reward for their efforts).

The students reacted as anyone, except the prophet himself, could have guessed: with complete silence. It was an emotional catastrophe. Aware of my issues with Cornali, the students came to me for comfort. They came in dismay and despair and with lowered heads. The best students in the group didn’t know how to react to the injustice of being ranked below the average ones. Cornali had figured—with the blinkered imagination of all ideologues—that they would be insensitive to grades. But to find a young person insensitive to grades is about as hard as finding one who’s insensitive to money. As for the weaker students, Cornali had thought they would have been ecstatic to receive the coveted grades. While good grades would certainly have pleased them, marks of excellence made them feel ashamed, as though they had been acknowledged as complete failures, beyond hope or measure. The most deluded of them all was Cornali himself, who was amazed that the younger generation hadn’t generated a man genetically different from his own.

Cornali’s vision of history had led him to imagine modern man like one of those extraterrestrial monsters with an enormous cranium and spindly legs. The head needed to be large so it could accumulate the experience of millennia, while the body replicated the fragility of a child. To discover, instead, that they had to begin all over again each time made him see in the twilight the world that others see in the dawn.

The most disconcerting thing about Cornali’s behavior at the close of that turbulent year was his visible anger toward the girl. The energy with which he fought for the rights of the disabled was matched only by the hostility with which he persecuted her. And yet he saw no contradiction in this. He was convinced that the girl wasn’t disabled. He was reluctant to believe in mental illness altogether, perhaps because he felt threatened by it. Instead, he insisted she couldn’t overcome her problems by reason alone because she was inherently weak, lazy, or indecisive. Cornali suffered from seeing things in a doubly distorted manner: he thought her symptoms were voluntary choices and he believed that punitive measures could rid her of her troubles forever.

Getting to know Cornali through school motivated me to reflect at length on the theme of contradiction. I came to the conclusion that, despite everything, contradictions don’t really exist. That is, they exist only on a mathematical-logical plane. It’s undeniably true that people say one thing and do another, yet they never see that as contradictory. Both good people and criminals alike resort to the principle of contradictions to justify their mistakes, but ultimately their behavior can be completely understood only if one casts aside that very principle. One must look at the agency that compels things to happen, at the ungraspable coherence behind things, at the unknowable totality. Then those actions no longer seem contradictory but necessary, and the whole principle of contradictions is absurd.

I’m not talking about a Cartesian form of reasoning here. Nor am I referring to the world of dreams, where travelers lose and find themselves again. Rather, what I’m alluding to is that mysterious and obscure nucleus known as the individual and what rouses him or her to speed.

The girl understood that Cornali, by defending the disabled in general and yet simultaneously attacking her, was not a victim of contradictions, but that he was bending them to his will. In order to obtain his desired result he used the basest and most efficient weapon: reason. Ultimately, he got what he wanted. She refused to answer him; she shut herself into a guilty, impenetrable state of mutism. He told me about it triumphantly. He saw it as the definitive confirmation of her immaturity. It’s odd that the concept of maturity is most frequently invoked by the immature. Here too, things only seem contradictory. In reality, by accusing others of being immature, such people actually defend themselves.

The girl gave up studying for Cornali’s class during the last month of school. She continued to attend his lectures, though, perhaps because he was one of the few teachers who could still manage to hold them. I don’t want to contradict myself—fatal verb—but Cornali did have a fine mind, blinded as much by intelligence as by idiocy. He fought hard so that disabled people could come to school at a time when they were simply being turned away. It was the first time, albeit surrounded by oppression and violence, that we radically faced the problem of integration. This fact should not be ignored or forgotten, especially now, when each occasion for passing judgment spurs new inequalities and discriminations.

When the girl’s name was called at the final faculty meeting of the year, Cornali didn’t say a word. The rest of us spoke up on her behalf, but he remained silent. The principal, who in his formal manner sought to conserve the final vestiges of authority, turned patiently toward him.

“Please be so kind as to give us your assessment,” he said.

“D,” Cornali replied.

The Photograph

“Don’t move!” I say.

He’s holding on to the pole of the beach umbrella, his arms are stiff, his feet are planted deep in the sand, his body bends at a hypotenuse angle. He’s starting to slip; his mouth contorts in pain. He falls backward onto the sand, the palms of his hands spread wide open.

“Let’s try it a different way.”

I turn him over onto his stomach so he’s lying in the same position as the eighty-year-old woman on the lounge chair next to us and proceed to cover his back with sand. Her skin is covered with wrinkles, partly from old age, partly because of the sun. She’s sure that the sun is the source of good health; she thinks the more it seeps into her thick hide, the closer she will be to immortality. She dies a year later, looking as shriveled as a furnace-dried centipede.

“Rest your chin in your hands,” I suggest.

He tries, but his elbows slip out sideways and his head droops down onto the sand.

I help him back into the pose but by the time I bring the camera up to my eye his head has already fallen forward again.

“You’ll never get him to stay like that,” Franca says, picking him up and wiping off the sand. “It would be hard for us too.”

Now there’s a phrase that comes up repeatedly among those who assist the handicapped:
us
used as a term of comparison, a symbol of a supreme normality, an unreachable—and all too common—finishing line.

“Why do you insist on photographing him like that?” she asks.

I’m not really sure. I was thinking about cherubs, the way they lean on their elbows at the corners of Renaissance paintings. Why do I have to search for such absurd and remote models?

I sit him down in the sand and dig a hole around him. He falls forward. His face gets dirty. He doesn’t cry because he knows I’m responsible for his troubles. Instead, he looks at me with a mixture of disapproval and benevolence. Sometimes he’s almost fatherly with me; it’s one of his qualities that touches me deeply.

I brush him off and sit him down with his legs crossed like a little Buddha.

“There—stay like that—don’t move!”

I sound just like my father, one of the few vacationers before the war to own a legendary Zeiss, when he used to take pictures of me on the hills above Lake Como.

The little Buddha wavers unsteadily for a moment before losing his balance and falling forward. I snap the picture just as he turns his frightened face toward mine. In the photograph he comes out looking serious and worried. Normal.

“That one!” Franca says, picking it out from the rest and slipping it under the glass frame that now hangs in the hallway.

The Brother

Families know how to defend themselves against their enemies. They foster a sense of danger in much the same way the city of ancient Rome, according to Sallust, fostered fear among its citizens in order to bolster internal strength. But then they discover the enemy at home. Paolo has an enemy. It’s his brother.

Alfredo is three years older than Paolo. He has an enemy too. Before Paolo’s birth he was the only child. He didn’t have to share his parents with a rival. He was king.

What gives him away? His laughter. Laughter reveals so much about us, so much more than tears. Many animals cry, but besides anthropoid apes, as far as I know, very few laugh. Then there are humans.

Alfredo laughs for reasons that are often unclear. If his brother tries to walk from one side of the hallway to the other, he’ll laugh from the doorway of his bedroom. When Paolo couldn’t cry, when he could only sob, making him gasp for air (it’s horrible when a person can’t cry), Alfredo would explode into convulsive laughter.

“Nervous laughter,” Franca would say, updating an expression that she probably learned in her youth. Once, nerves were the unconscious. “It’s his nerves,” they’d say about someone afflicted with neuroses. “A nervous breakdown,” they’d say when he fell prey to the inner enemy. And, “crazy,” they’d say when he lost it completely.

I began to be suspicious of Alfredo’s laughter.

He’d laugh when his brother would trip. “Idiotic laughter,” Franca would say, in a variation on the theme. But when I told her what I thought, she said that everyone laughs when a person trips.

“At the movies, maybe,” I replied.

“No, in real life. We’re all sadists.”

This conclusion, presented so compellingly and universally, managed to confuse me. But on another occasion, when Paolo tripped on the stairs and Alfredo laughed, I turned to her and asked, “Why aren’t
you
laughing?” She was disconcerted by my question but she replied by hiding behind the alibi that we usually reserve for children when they wound us—that they’re young.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I can understand not worrying about a minor incident: it’s all right to be indifferent. But why laugh? Is it nervous laughter? Is it idiotic laughter? No, it’s gleeful laughter. We laugh at the movies when the pompous fellow slips or when the tyrant is deposed or when the archenemy surrenders. The key is that the enemy has to fall.

Whenever Alfredo saw his brother the enemy in trouble, a fleeting, soulless smile would cross his face. Soon he was laughing more frequently. A sinister euphoria, a bitter
allegria,
gave him away. It happened with particular frequency when Paolo was learning how to tie his shoes. According to a book we have on physical rehabilitation, learning to tie your shoes is one of the most important conquests on the road to independence. (I’m not sure if that’s reassuring or disturbing to know, but in any case it’s precious for our pride.) It wasn’t just his heavy-handedness that made it difficult; his body weight made him lose his balance and fall forward. Alfredo would watch him struggle, spellbound. Once Franca walked into the room and saw Alfredo laughing. “Why don’t you help him? He’s your brother,” she said. “Why should I? He has to learn on his own,” he had replied. People have infinite reasons for refusing to help, but the cleverest one is precisely because they want to help. “Help him!” Franca yelled, giving him a push and making him fall down next to his brother.

What amazed me most was not that this form of hate had been born but that it persisted. When I spoke to a psychiatrist friend about it, she smiled gently and knowingly, as if she had run into an old friend.