Born Twice (Vintage International) by Giuseppe Pontiggia Read Free Book Online

while the other one can only accuse me. How many times did I pretend to react the way they expected me to? And while I know that mine was a fiction, can we be sure their proofs were flawless? That the reactions I simulated were the only “right” ones? Life is so much more than a proof. Anyway, they were the wrong reactions for me. Perhaps maturity means respecting the injustice of one’s own reactions. Perhaps maturity means substituting the injustice of conventional thinking with unjust freedom. Even if this—I am beginning to realize—sounds like the introduction to a manual on criminal behavior.
    Alfredo, who was not living up to my expectations, could have relied on the very same alibi. If he felt aversion toward his brother, was it really his fault? And wasn’t I also not living up to his expectations of understanding and solidarity? The rationales of the weak make sense to us only when they become our own.
    Alfredo had been dethroned and could not be resigned to that. To top it off, he didn’t even like his brother. The frailty that should have made him feel more tenderly toward him—there’s that should again—actually drove a stake between them. The pathology distanced him. His discomfort changed to repulsion. I knew what he was going through because sometimes I felt the same way.
    This made it feel foreign to me. We’re reluctant to accept those flaws that, magnified in others, we fear in ourselves. Because of the difference in scale and the accompanying sense of remorse, they become unacceptable. Alfredo would smirk when Paolo would try, and fail, to catch a ball. Then, when it happened a second time, he’d laugh. That’s the difference between us: I’d get exasperated while he’d be amused. (There’s never a lack of comparisons that favor us.) But Paolo, on the other hand, who stood between us, sometimes just couldn’t take it anymore and would start to cry; his hands would grip at the smooth floor as if it too might slip away from him.

One on One
     
    The principal of the elementary school is disabled. He limps when he walks, dipping slightly with each step, his left leg extending out to the side. When he sits down, he plants his cane in front of him like a baseball bat and rests his chin on top of his hands.
    Writing about him now, after so many years, I realize that I never knew—nor was I ever curious to know—the cause of his impediment. It could have been the war. Maybe he had polio. My general indifference, which is even more telling because of my personal case, teaches me something about the distance that exists between the disabled and us.
    In any event, his impediment was eclipsed by his enormous vitality. He’d get up from his desk suddenly, violently, rotating his stiff leg outward. And when he came down the hall—tall, bearded, and gaunt, hunched over his cane with that lopsided gait of his—teachers and children alike would move aside to let him by. And if someone didn’t notice in time that he was advancing toward them, they’d leap out of the way to avoid an encounter. He was fully aware of the uneasy feelings he provoked in others. Indeed, he often chose to intensify them by waving his cane in the air to emphasize his words or to point someone out, in both cases managing to transform a simple gesture into a threat.
    I knew he was feared within the school as a serious womanizer. All the female teachers had to defend themselves from his gruff rapacity. From the older women he expected the smallest display of sexual loyalty, a kind of temporary and immediate relief. Though somewhat more careful with the younger ones, he was no less insistent. Once, called before the Superintendent after being accused by one of his victims, he shamelessly managed to have the charges reversed in the name of corruption. I’d like to hope that today such a reversal wouldn’t be possible and he wouldn’t be able to get away with it. But back then the victim gave up trying, as she said, to nail