Like Family

by Paolo Giordano

  The Seven-Times Table

  Among the articles pasted inside Mrs. A.’s credenza were a few that had particularly intrigued me: An American, Terry Feil, had died thirty years after absorbing radiation in Nagasaki, where he landed soon after the explosion of the bomb. In Britain, in the seventies, fifty thousand people a year died owing to pulmonary and cardiovascular disease, the theory being—according to the article—that the consumption of nicotine had something to do with the deaths. In Italy a harmful drug had remained on the market for more than five years. Ionizing radiation, pulmonary carcinomas, drugs—it was as if the shadow of death, which at that time had already darkened Renato’s field of vision to some extent, were advancing toward Mrs. A. and her husband was aware of it. Looking at the newspaper clippings he’d so meticulously preserved, I wondered if he’d had a premonition about his wife’s end. Perhaps he feared it more than his own—and in those seemingly disconnected accounts he had been searching for a way to save her.

  Instead, thirty-five years later, Mrs. A. is offering her left arm to a needle that contains an alarming concentration of unstable isotopes of fluorine. She has always had thin, fragile blood vessels, making injections torture, but today she is full of optimism and isn’t bothered by the nurse’s clumsy attempts. If she goes by how she’s been feeling for a couple of weeks—energetic and spirited, with smooth skin and a bit of appetite that has quickly allowed her to regain more than four pounds—she can’t help but be convinced that she’s cured or has at least embarked on the road to rapid improvement. The PET scan will confirm it for sure. The thought never crosses her mind that the upturn is entirely due to the abnormal doses of cortisone she’s been taking for months; the doubt doesn’t arise even when, at the end of the scan, she meets the uncomfortable gaze of the technician who, from inside the protective lead-walled cubicle, has seen her diaphanous body displayed on the monitor, the ghost of a woman who has lit up in several areas besides the lung: the L1 vertebra, the ileum and the right femoral neck. The cancerous cells have emitted packets of positrons that in annihilation with their negative twins have been converted into light, a clear sign that the cancer has now entered the bloodstream and is taking full possession of the body.

  But Mrs. A. doesn’t know it yet, and for the moment she’s relieved, a relief motivated also by something beyond her physical well-being and of which she feels somewhat ashamed. A week ago the painter died, quietly, in his sleep. That evening he ate and drank heartily, and in the morning he did not wake up. What this means, in addition to the inexorable shortening of the list of people with whom she’s shared the past, is that the bird of paradise had not come for her: they’d both been wrong about that. It’s good news, no use pretending otherwise, and in any case the painter had nothing to complain about. “For a midget he went far beyond what could be expected,” is Mrs. A.’s cursory summation, “and he enjoyed it, all that glory and those women. He enjoyed every minute of it!”

  _____

  I think that at the time of the PET scan, before being informed of its disastrous verdict, Nora may have shared Mrs. A.’s unfounded optimism; she may even have encouraged it in some way. When I asked her, though, she denied it, saying that in any case the idea of acupuncture hadn’t been hers but her mother’s.

  “Acupuncture? Did you seriously take her to have acupuncture? When exactly?”

  “Before the report came.”

  “She had an advanced-stage cancer, and you two . . . I can’t believe it.”

  Nora’s tardy confession came one night when we had a couple of friends over for dinner: not very close friends, a daughter the same age as Emanuele, a similar lifestyle and an acceptable geographical proximity. It happens more often than we’d like that certain omissions between us emerge while we are in the company of others, as if we wanted to make sure we had witnesses or accomplices—or, even more cowardly, as if we were trying to mitigate the other’s possible reactions by having an outsider present.

  Nora went on the defensive. “If it’s as ineffective as you say, then it makes no difference.”

  Her reasoning was impeccable, yet I felt there was something wrong with it—that falling into the trap of superstition, convincing herself that there was an easy remedy, was the ultimate trick the cancer had played on Mrs. A. Her sixteen-month ordeal still wasn’t enough for me to decide whether the biggest favor we could do her was to make her face the truth or, conversely, to foster a false hope, but I was certainly leaning more toward blunt realism.

  “Which would you prefer?” I asked our guests. “Given such a diagnosis, I mean. Wouldn’t you at least like to have the honor of not being taken for a fool?”

  They both hedged. They sensed that I was more involved than I let on, and perhaps the cancer of a person close to someone didn’t seem like a topic to engage in over dessert.

  “My lucidity is more important to me than anything else,” I said. “I wouldn’t like to betray it at the very end.”

  “How sad,” Nora remarked, implying that not only was I embarrassing our friends but that I had just offended her.

  “Why do you say that?”

  She picked up the empty bowls abruptly. “Drop it. You wouldn’t understand.”

  When we were alone, I tried to coax her to forgive me by making her laugh. I reminded her of how she had insisted that we consult a vegan pediatrician, years ago, for Emanuele. “Remember? He wanted us to wean the baby on caraway and millet seeds, like a chicken.” And about the time she’d sent me to a renowned hypnotist in the city to treat my insomnia. (Both her mother’s suggestions.) At the hypnotist’s I had not lapsed into a state of trance—in fact, I was more alert than ever the whole time. “What do you see?” the doctor kept asking me in a baritone voice.

  “Nothing, sorry.”

  I sensed his irritability growing, and I in turn got worked up because I felt like I was disrespecting him. At one point during the relaxation exercise, my head had started spinning sharply. He quickly latched onto that symptom, interpreting the dizziness as the residual effect of a cochlear disorder. “I bet you had the mumps.”

  “You’re right. When I was five, though.”

  “Aha, there you are. You were scared, weren’t you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you were scared! Think about that helpless child experiencing a dizzy spell for the first time. He has no idea what is happening to him, and he is afraid, so afraid. Do you see him?”

  “I . . .”

  “Pick him up.”

  “Pick him up? Who?”

  “Take that child in your arms. Cradle him gently, caress him. Take care of the child you were, whisper to him not to be afraid. . . .”

  One, two, three!—and, satisfied, he woke me up.

  “All those things I always mistook for atrocious traumas could be the result of mumps,” I said to my wife, who was finally smiling. “See what you led me to discover, you and that visionary mother of yours? Come over here, a little closer, help me cradle the suffering child in me.”

  _____

  The fact is that Nora, her mother and Mrs. A. had indeed gone to the acupuncturist; all three together went to the blind doctor who had enabled my mother-in-law to quit smoking and then to quit gorging herself on ice cream in the middle of the night, who had relieved her low-back pain, the migraines that had become excruciating after the divorce, an episode of hemorrhoids and some general problems of self-esteem.

  “How can an acupuncturist be blind?” I took the liberty of asking her one day.

  “He became blind as a result of diabetes. Sometimes he forgets to remove a needle, but you realize it when you take a shower.”

  At the very least, on that occasion Mrs. A. had undressed in front of someone who couldn’t attest to her sad decline. The doctor sought the points in which to insert the needles by probing her skin with warm, sensitive fingertips. Mrs. A. was shaking (partl
y because of the cold); he noticed it and placed his palms over her ears for a few seconds, whereupon the shivering ceased instantly. How long had it been since a man touched her so gently? The doctors always protected themselves with gloves, and they were almost all young and glacial, but the acupuncturist with the unseeing eyes . . . he had a delicate touch and a lovely voice, mellow and deep.

  He’d explained to her how the whorls of the auricle contain the form of an upside-down fetus, a fetus waiting to see the light, and how by opportunely stimulating the nerve centers of that miniature individual it is possible to heal the body in its entirety. Mrs. A. listened intently, eating up his words and picturing the diminutive copy of the tumor inside her ear; she imagined it pierced by the needle. At the same instant, by magic, the one in her chest dissolved as well.

  “Will it hurt?” she asked.

  “Not at all. The needles are very fine.”

  “Too bad.”

  She wanted the monster in her to die painfully, for it to experience what she’d been going through, at least for a moment. The ambivalence that she exhibited toward the cancer at that stage was curious: on some occasions she spoke of it as a trampled part of herself, on others as an alien life trapped inside her body, to be eradicated, period.

  “Now close your eyes,” the blind doctor had said, “and think of something pleasurable.”

  Something pleasurable. And so, for the first time in a long while, as she lay on yet another bed in yet another doctor’s office, motionless so that the needles sticking out of her body like a porcupine’s wouldn’t bend or move or penetrate more deeply, Mrs. A. recalled the day in late October when Renato had married her, the maple trees with their bloodred leaves like wounds on the valley’s slopes. She’d worn a dress that a seamstress had sewn, identical to that of Paola Ruffo of Calabria, but to make it more personal she had ordered a coronet of white rosebuds from a milliner on Via XX Settembre. Everything must still be in the armoire, the dress and the coronet’s frame, along with her wedding trousseau, which she had quickly stored away and then never dared take out again. She was stung by sharp regret thinking about the sheets and tablecloths, so costly and never used due to excessive regard.

  Then, through some train of association, maybe because he was in the habit of opening all the closet doors in the house to see what was inside, Mrs. A.’s attention shifted to Emanuele. She recalled the morning when he decided to let go of the chair leg, take three uncertain steps toward her and finally cling to her stockings. It had been Mrs. A. who’d witnessed that miracle. Nora and I were slightly affronted, in part because she had not stopped crowing about it. “He started to walk with me,” she would proclaim proudly, and then she’d start to describe the scene all over again. Emanuele heard her repeat it so many times that he ended up mistaking that story for a memory. “Yes, I’m sure. I let go of the chair and toddled over to her. I clung to her stockings.” Since Babette passed away, we’ve given up contradicting him.

  _____

  There was something that Mrs. A. often said about our son: “Just try to measure him up against ten other boys his age. Compared to him they all seem like monkeys.” To some extent she was not mistaken. From the time he was born, Emanuele’s body had been well proportioned and harmonious, his features flawless, the difference between him and his peers already visible when he was in the ward, surrounded by the other plastic cradles. In the hospital room, Nora and Mrs. A. exclaimed over the perfect shape of his head, so small and round—the C-section had favored that—and his skin, clear and smooth from the beginning, none of the redness that made other newborns look blotchy.

  A few weeks later, I, too, who considered myself immune to the wonder, had fallen under the spell of his beauty. I kept him glued to me as long as I could, until he was four or five years old. Sometimes a shameful thing happened to me: holding my son’s soft, naked body close stirred uncontrollable signs of sexual arousal. They were physical responses unrelated to any thought, but all the same they left me appalled, and for that reason I pulled away more than once. When Nora noticed it, she caressed me first and then him. “There’s nothing wrong with it,” she said. “I, too, can feel him with all my organs.”

  Then Emanuele grew up, more quickly than we thought, and we found ourselves wanting him to grow up fast, not realizing that we would soon miss him as a little child. He was never quick enough, he was never responsible enough, his reasoning was never sufficiently thought out. Only with Mrs. A. did he allow himself to regress to the condition of the small child he still felt he was. She held him in her arms, rocking him for hours; she let him be capricious and repetitive in his expressions, and she attended to those things that we thought he should already be doing on his own. (Yet didn’t Nora and I behave the same way with her, abandoning ourselves to her care?) Maybe it was her hovering presence that prevented me from seeing Emanuele as he really was: not a prodigy but an average, if not slightly below-average child, one inclined to be touchy, for whom grasping something, especially something abstract, always involved effort, anxiety and the need for exhausting repetition. Realizing that was as painful for us as it was for him, and, perhaps unfairly, I find myself blaming Mrs. A., since for a long time she was his shield.

  I remember an incident. In kindergarten Emanuele had not shown any aptitude for drawing; his doodles had something alarming about them, but we didn’t pay too much attention (how important is it in life to know how to color within the lines?), at least not until the afternoon when I went to pick him up at school and I noticed the children’s self-portraits in tempera paint, arranged next to one another to form a border. Emanuele’s was different from the others: a shapeless pink blob with two black slanting strokes to indicate the eyes. Conscious of the difference, he felt compelled to quickly set the record straight. “Mine is the ugliest,” he said, as if there were any need to state it.

  Later I told Nora and Mrs. A. about it. It was a sheer outpouring of disappointment: if our son was further behind than the others in drawing, that was a clear sign that he would be behind in a host of other things—I drew very well at his age—and we would have to deal with it. Being a parent, it seemed to me, also involved being constantly exposed to the possibility of humiliation.

  Nora and Mrs. A. listened to me with their arms crossed. Then, not saying a word, without my having the slightest idea of their intentions or any way to stop them, they left the house and marched straight to Emanuele’s school. There, acting together just like a mother and daughter, they insisted on the immediate removal of the tempera paintings. Then they returned home victorious, their outrage still not having simmered down.

  Nevertheless, going forward, our son’s comparison with his peers became increasingly apparent, and their countermeasures were no longer enough. By the beginning of second grade, Emanuele continued to confuse b and d, right and left, before and after: to me it seemed unacceptable.

  “It seems unacceptable to you because your concept of intelligence is limited,” Nora retorted. “He has a great imagination. But for you and your family, that doesn’t count, right? For you people, scholastic perfection is the only thing that matters.”

  “What does my family have to do with it now?”

  “Two anthropologists and their young physicist, with the most brilliant academic grades and journal publications. Tell the truth, why don’t you admit that having a son who is not a mathematical genius makes you feel diminished?”

  Oh, was she ever right. But that time my answer was deliberately spiteful. “Unfortunately, a bent for mathematics is genetic.”

  She shook her head. “And he was unlucky enough to inherit it from the wrong side, I suppose?”

  _____

  Now here we are, Emanuele and me, facing each other on yet another Saturday morning, the moment we both hate most in the entire week. We’re sitting at the dining-room table, a table of raw beechwood that Nora commissioned from one of her designers in Belgium and h
as now made us terrified of using, for fear of leaving ballpoint marks on it. Slowly I leaf through the arithmetic notebook, the smell of the glossy plastic cover taking me back to an identical one from my childhood. It looks like a battlefield: there are red marks everywhere, diagonal lines crossing out entire pages, objections and exclamation points.

  “What happened here?” I ask.

  “The teacher tore out the sheet.”

  “Why?”

  “I got it all wrong.”

  We struggle for half an hour with the multiplication tables, both of us more and more sullen.

  “Seven times one?”

  “Seven.”

  “Seven times six?”

  Emanuele counts on his fingers, painfully slow. “Forty-four.”

  “No, forty-two. Seven times zero?”

  “Seven.”

  It’s ironic, or rather no, it’s atrocious: with a degree in theoretical physics, a major in quantum field theory and a general familiarity with the most advanced formalism of calculus, I am unable to transfer into my son’s head an understanding of why any number times zero results in zero. I seem to see the inside of his skull, the brain floating in a foggy mist where assertions dissolve without constructing any meaning.

  I lose my patience. “It’s zero! Zero! If you can’t grasp it, then just get used to it!”