Born Twice (Vintage International) (18 page)

“How do we get to Lato?” I ask at the hotel.

“I suggest you don’t go by car,” the concierge replies in Italian.

“So how do we get there?”

“There’s a taxi driver who can take you. Otherwise you’ll ruin your car.”

“It’s probably better if we don’t go,” Franca says.

The concierge looks at her, a glimmer of understanding in his eyes.

“Why not?” I ask.

“The lady is right,” the concierge says, still looking at her. “There are only ruins out there. The road itself is a ruin.”

We’re on our way to Lato with the taxi driver, the car bumping up and down as if it’s crossing a dry riverbed. There are sandy patches, stony parts, pebbled areas, and expanses of dust and dirt. Paolo is thrilled.

“What’s so special about Lato?” Franca asks.

“Two acropoleis on the mountains.”

There they are, high up in the blue and green. The driver stops the car in an open area halfway along the valley, blocked in by low stone walls.

“I’ll wait for you here,” he says with a half smile, both in pity and as a challenge. He points out a steep path that winds up the barren hillside.

I help Paolo over the stones and ruins. We advance slowly, hunched over and contorted under the blazing sun.

“Let’s take the shortcut,” I say, pointing out some steps carved into the wall.

Never trust shortcuts (and not just those in the mountains) if you’re trying to conserve your energy. Our fatigue is multiplied; the steps gradually transform themselves into a rock slide. I help Paolo along with my right hand, until he simply cannot go any farther. He can’t get down. He grasps the wall, his arms and legs spread-eagled against it. I let myself slide back down in a tumble of stones to the path where Franca is standing, shaking her clasped hands at us in an act of disapproval or prayer, I’m not sure which. Then I climb back up toward Paolo. What am I doing? Who am I, standing here in this baking heat, in this valley, at four o’clock in the afternoon, panting, clawing at the cracks in this archaic fort? Things never feel quite so absurd as in moments of extreme danger, perhaps because they summon us to our destiny.

Sweat streaming down my face, I manage to grab Paolo by the ankles.

“Let go of the wall!” I yell.

He doesn’t trust me.

When I finally manage to get him down and pass him on to Franca, who reaches up for him, I think of the deposition from the cross. I don’t know why. He is exhausted but pleased. “I’m going to tell Alfredo about this,” he murmurs, from where he’s lying on the ground.

“You’ll see him in three days, when we get home,” Franca says, also flat on the ground, her arms open to the sky.

Lucent Crete: sunset, leaves on the trees, terraced vineyards, the car crawling along between rocky walls. The high Minoan road, which traverses the mountains of the island, is now behind us. The sea is not far away, the sun is on the horizon. There’s a sudden peace. Silence and ruins on the hillside.

“Stop,” I say to Franca, who’s driving.

But it has already passed.

We stop at a restaurant on the coast. The sun filters through the reeds covering the pergola. A giant Greek salad, colorful and refreshing. Franca ordered the spicy cheese, Paolo the grilled fish.

“Homeric food,” I say.

It has less effect now than when I said it two days ago at the Hotel dei Cureti, facing Mount Ida, a large platter of roasted mutton on the table. Never repeat yourself. They no longer notice the cleverness; they notice that you’re repeating yourself.

I look at the waves breaking on the beach below, between the rocks. A few suntanned kids glide along the crest of the waves.

“How about a swim?” I ask Paolo with a smile, avoiding Franca’s eyes.

“Now that’s enough,” I hear her say.

I look at her. She doesn’t know what to make of things anymore.

I do. I know she’s generous and indomitable. She puts up with two great burdens. I don’t know which of us is a heavier load, him or me. I place my hand gently on her shoulder. She can guess what I’m thinking. I smile; my eyes are shiny. I raise my glass of resinous white wine.

“To Franca,” I say.

Paolo, amazed that I didn’t say
mamma,
raises his glass too.

We go for our swim at night, under the stars, in front of our bungalow. The water is salty and warm. Paolo has finally learned how to do the breaststroke, taking deep breaths and dunking his head under the water. When he emerges from the glimmering surface, I tell him he looks like a dolphin. He keeps doing it until he’s exhausted, like I would do when I was young, when I knew someone was watching me. He floats on his back, panting, facing the sky.

“Come back!” Franca calls to us from the shore.

In front of the Heraklion Museum, leaning against the wall in the bright luminous colors of the afternoon, is a row of horse-drawn carts.

Paolo points them out to me. “Don’t you want me to ride in one?”

I look at him, crestfallen. “But you don’t need one,” I say. “Why do you want to go in one?”

“Because it’s less tiring,” he replies.

Put Yourself in His Shoes

Bertoia, an elderly man who’s ill, comes to visit me occasionally. I’m not really sure what he’s got; he’s reticent about discussing it. When asked, he becomes elusive, raising his eyebrows in a threatening way. He’s slightly cross-eyed. He follows conflicting therapies that have gradually deformed his body. He’s extremely thin and fragile. I see something of Don Quixote in him—not Cervantes’s but Doré’s. He walks into my study like an engraving, a mass of lines preparing themselves for decomposition.

“Have you ever tried putting yourself in your son’s shoes?” he says at a certain point.

Is this a question or an accusation? “Well, I try and imagine his reactions,” I say.

“No,” he says, shaking his finger at me.

It’s an accusation.

“You have to do more than that,” he says, staring off into space, the creases under his eyes deepening. “You have to get into his head!”

“But I can’t,” I say.

“What do you mean you can’t?” he asks darkly, hunching over as if to protect himself from an attacker. But he’s the one attacking here. “I did!”

I lean back dismally in my chair. Why has he come to see me? Why now? It’s late July, my most coveted moment: vacation in the city after exams. I’ve been planning for months to read
Five Weeks in a Balloon
by Verne. Who gives him the right? He always felt like my protector. Formerly an accountant at the Art Institute, he was a zealous bookkeeper, a devotee of schedules, a maniac in an almost mystical phase of life.

“I often think about your son,” he says. “I have gotten into his head.”

He looks like he’s hallucinating. I’m not sure if it’s the illness or the medicines that make him feverish.

“You should too,” he adds. “You’ll see how well you’ll understand him.”

I understand it’s a monstrous proposition but I try anyway. Who else will listen to us if not the insane?

I try to think,
I am Paolo,
but am struck by a sense of terror and vertigo. I have neither his past nor his future, I cannot imagine what he imagines, I cannot share in anything he experiences. We can never, as they say in that ruthless and horrid expression, get into someone’s brain.

“I can’t put myself in his shoes,” I say.

He extends his skinny arms along the length of the chair and proudly raises his hollow face. “What about an actor?”

“They do it for fun,” I say. “They’re neither themselves nor the other.”

“Can I tell you what I think?” he asks, looking straight ahead of him.

“Of course.” People only ask that when they think badly of you.

“You are trapped in your own egoism.”

“That may well be,” I say firmly.

He has that horrible air about him that older people have when all they can do is predict the misfortune to come. Maybe Cassandra didn’t have a choice, she simply foretold the future.

“Step outside yourself,” he says, “and get into Paolo’s head.”

“No, I’ll stay in mine,” I reply. “He’d prefer it that way too, believe me.”

He grips the arms of the chair, like a monarch at the theater. “Then you will never know,” he says, raising his bony finger, “exactly who your son is.”

That’s right, I think to myself, I won’t.

Scolding

I lent him an expensive camera for a school trip and he forgot it on the train. He takes rather interesting photographs. It’s not so much the fleeting moment that he captures as the precarious point when his eye blinks and his body precipitates forward. His pictures, at times oblique and with slanted shafts of light, communicate a mobile and adventurous existence, the complete opposite of the posed universe that haunted the official class photographers in the schools of my youth.

I give him a scolding, condensed to its essence. Rapidly. I believe that rapidity, in scolding, is a much appreciated quality. The unpopularity of sermons, in any given situation, derives more from their preconceptions than from any particular accusations. My parents, in the recent Paleolithic age, held the superstitious belief that litanies of words produced great works. “Never tell lies! Do you understand? Under no circumstance!” fathers used to say, dazed by the very lies they were telling. Then, only a few minutes later, when the phone would ring, they’d shout out, “I’m not home for anybody! Do you hear?”

Then came the age when conventional psychoanalysis transformed our children into toys whose movements could be programmed. “He demolished the motorbike and now he expects me to punish him,” said a young colleague of mine, for whom paternity seemed like a marvelous opportunity to try out pedagogical theories. “So without punishing him,” he went on to say, “I bought him another one. I surprise him, you see? I disorient him. That’s how I teach him.”

His son was effectively disoriented. I didn’t follow all the phases of his education but I do know he was the first one in his age group to try drugs. But I don’t want to establish a relationship of cause and effect here. It’s certain that the son, taking everything into account after the accident, couldn’t have been too comforted. His weak father didn’t even consider him worth scolding.

Paolo listens to me. I have a serious discussion with him. He’s starving for seriousness; he never has fun when I’m having fun with him. I know it, but I continue to have fun with him by returning to that phrase he uses when a joke bombs, that idiotic alibi “But it was a joke!”

This time I say, “You made a mistake. You won’t be able to use the camera for a few months.”

He replies, “Thank you for talking to me about it man to man.”

I tell my colleague.

“Disabled children are more mature,” he says.

The Electroencephalogram

Another word that always threw me into a panic is electroencephalogram. I associated it, mistakenly, with alterations of the brain, deformations of the mind, a loss of thought processes. A reading would have shown us what was wrong inside his head. And I was shocked by the general indifference surrounding a word that meant, for me, a crack in his liberty (when we talk about liberty we all become legal scholars, wrangling over intangible definitions).

If I think how my fears have changed over the years, I could synthesize them this way: by accepting the cracks. It makes me think of the recurrent imprecation in the adventure novels by Salgari—“You old wreck!”—used indiscriminately for people or sinking ships. It’s something of a piratical antidote to the cult of the body, which in its obsession with healthy diets and hormonal regimes seeks to fix the ongoing metamorphosis of the human organism in the immutable perfection of a butterfly.

That the thought of being handicapped is disconcerting to young people is, in itself, a tribute to growing up. Eternity lasts until the age of forty, ambitions are soberly reduced to a single word: everything. Then, as the years advance, some people regress toward a kind of retrospective youth. The most euphoric among them only try, but the stupid ones actually succeed. But the handicap, in the meantime, has become an appendage, a familiar experience; it becomes real and visible in others before finally rooting itself in us. The small omissions that we forgive ourselves become the unforgivable dormant craters of our elders’ memory, of our future. To challenge one’s limits as an end to itself (otherwise known as the fashionable imperative) derives from the fear of accepting one’s limits. Never before as in this age has pushing beyond one’s limits constituted an escape from recognizing them.

When I think about the questions I used to ask myself about Paolo’s intelligence, I wonder about the ones I should have been asking about my own. And when I look around for inspiration, I don’t find many comforting examples. We tend to isolate the occasional brilliant comments that we hear; they become memorable and help us scan the phases of our lives. The idiotic ones cancel each other out; they do nothing to better the quality of our lives. While encephalograms might show no damage, they will always be less telling than other tests. Handicaps, whether mental or physical, are far more subtle than they appear to be; we are closer to our limitations than to overcoming them.