A Place to Live

by Natalia Ginzburg

  Not one of the judges ever bestirred himself to go and see the child. Only two doctors from USL went to see her, and both testified that the adoptive parents were taking good care of the child and her health was fine. Nor did the court-appointed guardian ever go to see her.

  The fact that during those fourteen months not one of the judges or the guardian ever made a move to see her in the Giubergia household strikes me as outrageous and inexplicable.

  She was seen by Professor Vittorino Andreoli, a psychiatrist called in by the Giubergias. He spent an entire day at their house and wrote a long report which was promptly submitted to the judges. He said the child suffered from phobias and nightmares. To remove her from the home she had been living in for fourteen months would be extremely dangerous. However, Andreoli was acting on the Giubergias’ behalf. Then how come no court psychologist was called in to verify the truth of Andreoli’s report?

  On March 7 all of Racconigi, a town of 10,000 people, goes on strike. Stores, restaurants, bars are all closed. “In the name of true justice,” the entire town, including the parish priest and the mayor, demands in unison that Serena remain with her adoptive parents, in her own home.

  A Serena Cruz Committee is set up in Racconigi. In the town hall, people sign petitions proclaiming solidarity with the Giubergias. The newspapers give the affair prominent coverage. More Serena committees are organized all over Italy and thousands of people sign petitions.

  The President of the Republic intervenes with the judges. The judges, “standing shoulder to shoulder,” warn him not to interfere with their actions.

  Why stand shoulder to shoulder? Why not go to Racconigi instead and see how this child is doing with the parents they judge to be illegal? Wasn’t it their strict duty to go there, before assuming such a grave responsibility and making a decision that by their own admission they found painful?

  On March 17 Rosanna Giubergia Gaveglio, the unlawful adoptive mother, tells Serena she will be taking her to a nursery school where she can play with other children. The social workers who came early that morning gave orders that Nazario should be shut up in his room and told nothing. Rosanna Giubergia dresses Serena; on her back she puts a little knapsack in the shape of a bear, recently purchased. She carries her in her arms to the province’s public shelter, as ordered. She obeys, fearing police intervention. Police officers swarm around the community building. “Worse than if we were the Red Brigade,” she would recall later. On seeing her enter with the child, the officers lower their heads as if they are ashamed to be there. Once inside the building, Serena shrieks and cries desperately, clinging to her mother. She wants to go home. The social workers tear her from her mother’s arms. They take her into another room and tell the mother to go home. She can return later on to see the child, they say, whenever she wants. Rosanna Giubergia goes home in tears. They lied to her, for they do not let her see the child again. Not her, nor the brother, nor the father.

  An acquaintance of the Giubergias who heard the desperate screams from the street remembers to this day the harrowing noise, which went on for hours.

  The mother has to explain to Nazario, who sees her return alone, that Serena won’t be sleeping at home that night. The next day, again she has to give some explanation. I know it’s not your fault if she doesn’t come back home, the boy says. It’s because of those ladies who came and had coffee.

  When she entered the public shelter, Serena was wearing earrings. Her mother had bought them for her, since she had pierced ears. She had a little gold chain around her neck, a gift from her grandmother, Francesco Giubergia’s mother, who also lives in Racconigi, on a small street not far from their house. Serena was very fond of these trinkets. In the shelter they were immediately taken away. She must keep nothing that could remind her of her past.

  Serena stayed in the shelter, which was quickly invaded by a horde of journalists, only eight hours. At night she was carried off to another shelter whose location was kept secret.

  Don Aldo Marengo, the parish priest of Racconigi, learned several days later that the child had cried incessantly and hysterically. He learned that a pediatrician, when informed of this, suggested that the social worker put a few drops of Valium in Serena’s soup. After that evening, various other tranquilizers were administered to calm her. Later on, the parish priest would deny any such rumors: he had never heard anything of the sort.

  On March 21 the Giubergias appeal the ruling. Francesco Giubergia asks that the child be returned to him in foster care. Without her family around her, the defense argues, surely she is terribly upset. Any child would be upset. But Serena Cruz more than the ordinary child, because, as Professor Vittorino Andreoli’s report states, she is very troubled; she has phobias and nightmares as a result of the neglect and deprivations suffered during her first year in the Manila orphanage.

  On March 31 the appeal is denied. The judges say it would have been granted only if new facts had been presented, for instance, if the child had shown genuine signs of trauma in her new situation. So in effect the judges admit that they might have ruled otherwise, had they thought it fitting. They admit it was not impossible. It was quite possible to rule otherwise: they chose not to.

  The child showed no signs of grief, according to the judges. So said the social workers who took care of her, as well as the psychologist and the doctor who saw her in her new environment. They even sent along audiovisual documentation. She was eating well and playing with the other children. Not once had she asked for her mother.

  This we find hard to believe. As far as the audiovisual documentation, it proves nothing. Obviously a child may eat and play and be in despair a moment later. What the parish priest originally said he heard seems far more accurate, more plausible, and more normal.

  More plausible, more normal, and even less alarming. For in fact it is well known that a child’s semblance of indifference in painful circumstances is a very bad sign. Let us hope, then, that Serena cried and screamed day and night, the way normal children always cry and scream when separated from their mothers.

  As we have said, not only did the judges fail to see her in the Giubergia household; the various psychologists later consulted by the court didn’t see her there either, nor did any of the people responsible for deciding her destiny. A court psychologist interviewed on television by Enzo Biagi said she had seen her only afterward, when she was already in the public shelter. She said she found her in good spirits, playing and eating normally, and seemingly unaware of her parents’ and brother’s absence….

  “Serena is better off now,” the judges proclaim in chorus. Now? In the shelter she was brought to? Better off than with the Giubergias? How can the judges know this, if they never saw her before?….

  She is better off, the judges said, because the Giubergias, frightened and guilt-ridden, had an “anxiety-producing” relationship with her. Let us suppose that the relationship was “anxietyproducing.” How could a child with phobias, tremors, and nightmares, raised in an “anxiety-producing” relationship, possibly be cured as if by magic the moment she is away from home? Who could believe this? As for all that “uninterrupted and peaceful” sleep, how can one help but think she was stuffed with drugs?

  Either the Giubergias had an “anxiety-producing” relationship with her, whose long-term symptoms could hardly vanish in the space of a few hours, since the damage from any such relationship is not so readily curable. Or else, as the townspeople who saw her every day attest, they were bringing her up well, trying to reassure her and help her overcome her difficulties, which made her an essentially strong and healthy child despite her phobias and nightmares. That the separation from her brother and her parents was devastating to her heart and soul is beyond a doubt. One needn’t be a psychologist to grasp that. The grief of that blow and its consequences, however, will be revealed only over the course of many years. The long-range perspective the judges refer to means imagining Serena fifteen or twenty years from now.

  Her apparent i
ndifference to the separation—described with notable satisfaction by the court psychologists—her calm and nonchalance, if authentic, are a sign not of health and stability but rather of self-control and dissimulation. They indicate her ability to hide her state of mind, to discipline and conceal her anguish and desolation. We must bear in mind, however, that those psychologists were looking at a child they had never seen before.

  Let us suppose that the Giubergias’ relationship with the child was indeed anxiety-producing. Suppose the house was dense with shadows and tension. The judges never saw that house, but they pictured it as plunged in gloom. Still, they loved the child, and loving her as they did, they were happy with her. It is possible to be simultaneously happy, anxious, and fearful. Guilt-ridden and happy at once. True affection cannot be opaque and gloomy. True affection is limpid, and clears the air.

  In truth, how many households or families are without anxieties or fears or guilt from various sources, whether overt or secret? Do the Turin judges know many such households, many such blessed families?

  Francesco Giubergia offered to go to jail, if only the child might be spared and left at home in peace. To the best of our knowledge, he has never admitted that he lied. To the best of our knowledge he admitted only to handling things in a confused and clumsy way. The newspapers reported that he asked to go to jail. His request was not granted.

  If they consider him guilty and if he himself requested it, I can’t see why they didn’t send him to jail. Because, someone told me, to fine him or sentence him to a few months in prison would be neither significant nor exemplary enough. In the eyes of the world, only depriving him of the child would suffice. Or, as one of the judges commented, he wasn’t sent to jail because he and his wife had already suffered a great deal and had realized the error of their ways. This sudden and unlooked-for mercy suddenly lavished on two people whose daughter they had snatched away, I find bizarre in the extreme.….

  II

  It goes without saying that lies and deception can be dangerous for the adoption process. To overlook them can create a dangerous precedent. Illegal adoption practices are frightful. The buying and selling of children is frightful. In this case there was no buying and selling, the judges themselves acknowledged. Still, there was an illegality, they say, a fraud.

  But precisely because judges must be so wary of creating a precedent, shouldn’t they be equally wary of being driven to ruthlessness? In the face of a risky situation, yes, one must take courage, one must hone and perfect one’s tools and focus the gaze sharply on the future. Nevertheless it is wrong to plead fear as an excuse for relinquishing an acute focus on the present, the place we are in right now. It is wrong to conjure up abstract images that obliterate all sense of the present in its concrete reality and uniqueness.

  Would we rather risk a thousand abstract images, called to mind as abstractions, or endanger and ultimately strike to the heart one real person, right now, right before our eyes—one defenseless child? Would we rather protect the images in our head or protect a single flesh-and-blood reality? That is the issue. Which do we choose?

  Granted that Francesco Giubergia’s deception, if it was one, could be dangerous. Let us assume it was a deception. Let us assume everything took place as the judges claimed and as the press reported.

  Granted, it was dangerous. And being dangerous, it was serious as well. And yet looking at it in context, the broadest possible context, I cannot find it truly serious. If we set it against the panorama of all the things that go on in Italy today, if we place it alongside the ignoble, vile and sinister frauds that are committed daily for vile and base motives, then this man’s crude deception, if it was one, appears slight. Bear in mind that he was told the child was dying and he had to act quickly if he wanted to save her. He didn’t buy her. Buying and selling children is vile, but of this he is innocent—the judges themselves say so. If he lied, he lied to save time. He lied thoughtlessly and recklessly, but his motives were generous. In every fraud, even in every crime, the judges obviously take into account many factors at once: the people involved, the motivations, all the minute details, the events leading up to and following the act. But above all they consider character and motivation. At least they should. I don’t know if they always do. Here, however, it seems the judges focused solely on the lie and deception, ignoring or disregarding all the rest. Shrewd operators cannot be allowed to go scot-free, they said. But Giubergia was no shrewd operator. He was anything but a shrewd operator. It’s not hard to imagine why, if he began to lie, he had to persist in his lie. He got tangled in a mass of thorns and clung to these thorns, unable to extricate himself.

  And once again, remember that he was convinced he was acting in the interests of the child.

  The end doesn’t justify the means, as we all know. Even the end of saving a child from suffering does not technically justify breaking the law. But those words, “the end doesn’t justify the means,” can be taken in the opposite sense. The end of protecting all children does not justify a cruel act against one defenseless, innocent, uncomprehending child.

  The end doesn’t justify the means: in essence, neither the Giubergias are justified, if they lied, nor the judges. But we must weigh the gravity of the illegal act against that of the cruelty marshaled to strike down an innocent person. We must compare the gravity of the illegal act done out of thoughtlessness—and therefore more understandable—with the gravity of the cruelty used against an innocent person—and therefore ruthless and incomprehensible. We must ask ourselves which action is more just, in the light of true justice. In the case of Serena Cruz, the judges turned their backs on this light. They moved in darkness. Let us assume, as the judges claim, that Francesco Giubergia lied to the authorities and was not Serena’s biological father. But is there really so great a difference between being a biological father or not? When a man takes upon himself, and in the eyes of the world, the sober commitment to be a father to a child, does it make any great difference whether he and this child are bound by blood ties?

  People say the Giubergias persisted in their lies for too long, until the judges became exasperated and ruled as they did.

  But aren’t those judges duly sworn never to yield to anger? No matter who provokes them, no matter what the circumstances? If not, then what kind of judges are they?

  The judges say: Because the Giubergias lied about the child, we find them unworthy to bring her up. They are immoral and not fit to be her mother and father. Living with them, the child would grow up surrounded by lies.

  But if the Giubergias lied, they lied to the judges. It is quite possible that one might lie to a judge and yet be an excellent parent to one’s child.

  Once Serena was grown, it wouldn’t have been so difficult to explain the events of her early childhood. Where is the great difficulty? As an adult, she would have understood.

  Meanwhile, what in God’s name did all the social workers and functionaries tell her in the public shelter, to explain why her family had suddenly vanished and why she wasn’t being taken home? How many lies did they tell her?

  If we consider the facts in a purely moral context, why is it worse to lie to a judge than to a child?

  Marlene Vito Cruz, the girl who in the documents is shown to be Serena’s birth mother, was traced in Manila. Several reporters made inquiries about her and her family, a large and poor family living on the outskirts of Manila. Marlene Vito Cruz is now seventeen, not eighteen as the documents state. She says she has never given birth to any child. Nevertheless, if the child is now three, she must have been fourteen at the time. It happens. It does happen, but it didn’t happen to her. So she says. She never abandoned a child in a garbage can. She doesn’t know Mr. Giubergia, indeed this is the first time she ever heard that name. Her father said that the child is better off in Italy in any case. They already have a houseful of children—his own, with various wives. The papers reported this last spring. The girl might well have kept the truth to herself.

  Last
spring, the Serena Cruz case split Italy in half. One half found the court’s decision fair and unobjectionable, the other half found it unjust and inhumane. Every day the papers ran articles expressing contradictory views.

  When the matter came up in conversation, I would find myself unexpectedly agreeing with unlikely people and disagreeing with people who I was sure must share my feelings. I had the strong and distinct sense that an injustice had been done, that an unfortunate child had been sacrificed for a captious legal principle, and that a nuclear family had been devastated and trampled underfoot for the sake of an abstract principle. I still have this strong and distinct sense even though I have wondered, at times, if I might be wrong. But the feeling is stronger than right or wrong. People tell me that the law is the law and must be respected at all costs. Dura lex sed lex.12 But it seemed to me then, and still seems today, that laws can sometimes be flawed and deficient, and at times even be poorly understood and poorly interpreted. I also have strong doubts that the words dura lex sed lex are fixedly and incontestably true. Laws need not always be harsh. They need to be just. And those who enforce them must furnish them with eyes and ears, to perceive clearly when firmness is required, and when tolerance and understanding. Above all, laws cannot be used as a noose to strangle people. They must be used rather in the service and aid of humanity.

  I found myself in disagreement with people I love and esteem. I cannot and never will see things as they do. They say there are millions and millions of defenseless, innocent children who are victims of swindles and trafficking and other illegal acts, and these millions of children must be protected. But I believed, and still do, that it is unjust to harm one child, to tear her from her parents’ arms, be they legal or illegal, in order to protect millions of abstract children, children without faces or names. These faceless children can be protected tomorrow. Meanwhile, today, let us protect just one, the one whose name and face and identity we know.