A Place to Live

by Natalia Ginzburg

  With regard to the Giubergias, the article sounded insulting. Between the lines it seemed to be saying: “You people didn’t do right by her, but now our bountiful social agencies have put her in Paradise.”

  The bountiful social agencies treated the Giubergias like dogs. They hounded and humiliated them and shoved them out of the way. Couldn’t they have let them see the child again, at least once? “You have another child,” they were told. “That’s enough. Now get out of the way.” Nazario, their other child, has suffered bitterly over his sister’s disappearance. The judges say that sorrows, separations, and losses are healed by the “plasticity of his age.” But this “plasticity” exists only in their pronouncements. Why must two children pay for the errors of adults? That question goes unanswered.

  Regardless of the article that so amply and triumphantly portrays her in her new family, in the eyes of the people, Serena remains a desaparecida. Do these new parents, Papa Franco and Mama Luisa, really exist? People wonder. They may be wrong to wonder, but they do. Could they have been fabricated? Seaside vacations are mentioned, beaches and restaurants. Then why has no one ever caught sight of her, such a well-known child? How do they shield her from curiosity-seekers, or from journalists, who are ever ywhere?

  Let us hope that the article is true at least in some sense. Let us hope that Serena finds herself with understanding people who love her. And let’s hope she’s not still shut up in an institution, as many people believe.

  Some say that by this point, nothing more can be done for her; she is destroyed forever. Others still hope she might return to Racconigi, where the Giubergias keep waiting for her. I believe that were she to return, the Giubergias’ enormous happiness would spill over and make her happy too. Her brother would also be happy. If the welfare of the child comes first, why not consider Nazario, too? Isn’t he a child as well, a child who saw a happy era of his life destroyed with no plausible explanation, who saw his sister and daily companion vanish overnight, his parents devastated as if someone had died, and yet he knew no one had died? At this point I cannot tell if there is any real basis for hope. In terms of justice, though, true justice, the matter appears by now to be a lost cause.

  Some say, why take the destiny of this child so much to heart? There are plenty of children like her, who have been taken from their parents by the authorities and whom no one knows about because there was no press coverage. “Thousands Like Serena,” one headline ran. This is quite true. However, it is not the proper way to think about a misfortune. It means diverting your gaze from reality and diffusing it by contemplating an immense, anonymous series of similar cases all over the world, and in effect no longer seeing anything. The sheer size and impact of the numbers crush and eventually bury the details and features of one single, solitary calamity. On the contrary, whenever we witness one person or group of people suffer a misfortune or injustice, our indignation should be felt specifically on their behalf, and should remain vivid in our memory along with the specific details of their misfortune and injustice: indestructible, unique, unlike any other. Serena Cruz must not be forgotten, even if from now on her name need never again be mentioned in the press.

  The magistrates complained a good deal about the media uproar. “Stop all that racket. The child has the right to be left in peace.” Yes, that would suit you all too well, my esteemed magistrates. The child had many other vital and essential rights, which were stubbornly and ruthlessly trampled on.

  People don’t trust the public agencies. They used to trust them in matters of adoption and children. They thought they were acting for the public good. Now their trust is gone. They fear them. And so when a sudden silence descended on Serena Cruz, when the whole affair was veiled in secrecy, they saw her as a desaparecida, even if it seemed appropriate to protect her with silence. For there is something sinister about bureaucratic silence and secrecy. Everyone recalled the word desaparecida, a word of sad memory.

  It has since come to light that nobody actually heeds the rule laid down by Cory Aquino, requiring anyone planning to adopt a baby in the Philippines to establish residency there for eighteen months. But the Giubergias must have thought they had to obey it to the letter. So perhaps to avoid breaking one law, they stumbled over another, more serious one—assuming, again, that the judges’ and the media’s version of the case is the truth.

  If that is so, most likely they were poorly advised. The poor are poorly advised. Had they been rich, they would have had plenty of good advice. Had they been intellectuals, they would have used the language of intellectuals—fluent, unconstrained, respected—when responding to the court later on. And they would have known how to speak the language of the lukewarm, the aseptic, disciplined, controlled, and verbose language that prevails nowadays, the language we so often hear spoken in conferences, debates, and panel discussions.

  III

  This is not an essay on adoption, nor does it make the slightest claim to be. It is merely a series of notes on various matters that came to mind in connection with Serena Cruz, the Giubergias, and other events alluded to in the press that are in some way related to the Serena Cruz case. I began making notes early in October; now it is December. In October I hadn’t met the Giubergias. I hadn’t even seen them on television, where I know they appeared once. Someone who knew them slightly had told me about them. But I didn’t know them and had never taken the train to go and meet them. Since I am not a magistrate, I had no obligation to get on the train, but because I was writing about them, trying to envision them in my mind, I felt I ought to meet them, and felt guilty for not having done so. And so toward the end of November I got on the train (I live in Rome) and went to Turin, then drove to Racconigi in the afternoon with three friends, who also had never met the Giubergias.

  The Giubergias are unusual and admirable people. This was my impression. I found them quite similar to what I had imagined, only better, because I hadn’t envisioned their strength of heart or their good sense or their great patience. However, I didn’t learn much more from them than I already knew. They told me little or nothing about Serena in her own country, or about Francesco Giubergia’s second trip there. For my part, I asked very little, out of awkwardness or discretion. I understand and respect their reserve. It stands to reason that they should be reserved with strangers on so delicate a subject. And I was a stranger. An outsider who was on their side, but an outsider nonetheless.

  They have spent and continue to spend all their savings on lawyers, in an effort to have the child restored to them; they aren’t resigned to losing her. You can find consolation after a death, they say, but for a loss like this there is no possible consolation. They loved her like their own flesh and blood. They wait patiently for her to be returned. Just the other day they heard about a couple whose adopted Peruvian daughter had been taken away, like theirs, on a charge of illegality. After nine months she was given back. Couldn’t the same thing happen to them?

  Is it impossible? A mad, wild, absurd hope? But hope is mad only when there has been no inhumane act to begin with. If there has been an inhumane act, it isn’t mad to hope it will be reversed. It shows faith that in the end, people may prove to be better and more just than they first appeared.

  The court has told the Giubergias they will never have Serena back again. Go ahead and adopt other children, they told them, but you will never have Serena again. Meaning that they are worthy of adopting other children but not this child? That’s certainly something to puzzle over, day in and day out.

  They loved her like their own flesh and blood. What does it matter if she wasn’t? They’re very concerned about her health. She had problems, she had perforated eardrums. She needed a lot of care. Who knows if she’s getting the care she needs? They had seen to all the various vaccinations, they still have all the certificates, yet when she was taken away, no one thought to ask if she had been vaccinated. Nobody even mentioned it. It may seem an irrelevant detail, but it’s a sure sign of carelessness. Not even to ask whether
or not she was vaccinated?

  They show me a court document dated last June. As in the Stampa article of September, it describes Serena in her new family. So we have to assume this new family really exists. The name Serena Cruz appears at the end of the document, but elsewhere she is called “Chicca.” They wanted to take away her true name, just as in the community shelter they immediately took away her earrings and necklace. The report is quite detailed. “Chicca,” it says, fits happily into her new family. Nevertheless, between the lines one senses a vague astonishment that she never makes the slightest reference to the past. The world she left behind seems two-dimensional. After reading the report, just as after reading the article, I have the sensation of having wandered through a stage setting, where something is concealed, not only the names and places but something equally crucial….

  The whole time I was at their house, Nazario stayed close to his mother. Our presence troubled him. I think he was remembering the visits of the social workers who sat in the kitchen drinking coffee, then took his sister away. He is a frightened child. He went to nursery school for three weeks, then didn’t want to go anymore for fear that someone would carry him off, far from his family, as happened to his sister. Upstairs, in the room where he and his sister used to sleep, are two small wooden beds with railings. But he didn’t want to sleep up there anymore and now all three, parents and child, sleep downstairs. The house is quiet, low-roofed, surrounded by fields, a house that seems made for children to grow up in peacefully. Everyone in town knows and loves the Giubergias; everyone shared in their great calamity. Whatever aversion and hostility were expressed elsewhere, here in their own town they were helped and sustained by the friendship and solidarity of their neighbors.

  In the kitchen are albums of photographs from Manila, of the hotel where they brought Nazario when he was seven months old, so weak and sick that he couldn’t eat, and where his adoptive mother spent hours trying to make him swallow a few morsels of food. The hotel was air-conditioned, which he wasn’t used to and couldn’t tolerate; he immediately developed a high fever. They had to turn it off. They had been told that in order to be found fit to adopt, it would be best to stay in an upscale hotel, and Rosanna Giubergia was also advised to change her outfits often. Rich people are given preference in adoptions. In the last photos, taken shortly before they returned to Italy, when Nazario had been with them for two months, he already looks like a healthy baby.

  There is a large photo of Serena taken during her last days in Racconigi, a photo I had seen in the papers earlier. What a happy face! “Fourteen months of violence in Racconigi,” the president of ANFAA [National Association of Adoptive and Foster Care Families] allegedly said at a conference in Rimini. Does the president of ANFAA know what the word “violence” means? Could he really have said that, as reported? Should someone for whom words have lost their true meaning be permitted to make public statements? For anyone with any grasp of reality, of the kind of life Serena led with her parents in Racconigi, don’t those words take on the accents of madness? Could this be Rational Italy?

  IV

  …In dealing with children, the judicial system can move with lightning speed; then again, when speed is required, it moves at the pace of a caterpillar. In the Serena Cruz case, with the court already suspecting some illegality when the child had been in Italy just a few days, a swift resolution was essential. But it was only a suspicion, they say. And so months and months went by. When the machinery was finally set in motion, it moved like lightning, heedless of anything in its path. If they intended to take action, shouldn’t they have done so before such a strong and deep bond had developed between the child and the Giubergias? The bureaucratic suspicion lasted fourteen months. Then they made up their minds in barely more than a day, and their decision was lightning swift, lacerating, and merciless….

  Those working in the field of adoption maintain that a child must be given a family, and not, as before, that a family must be given a child. On this we can all agree.

  The interests of the child, the well-being of the child, must be at the heart of every choice and determination.

  Give a family to a child and not a child to a family. Obviously. However, when a child is adopted, his destiny is at once linked to the destiny of those who adopt him. If they love him and are happy with him, then the child is happy with them too. Well-being, in its universal and actual sense, meaning harmony and mutual understanding, cannot help but be mutual. Once the adoption takes place, the child and the family become one unit. So if one really thinks about it, that seemingly very obvious sentence makes no sense at all.

  After the Serena Cruz affair, we would often find stories in the papers about children taken away from their parents, both adoptive and biological. Stories of children carried off from home or school or day-care centers by social workers and police under court orders, and put up for adoption. The judges then select whichever new families they please. The parents will lose the children forever, never see them again. In some cases it’s not a question of parents, adoptive or biological, but of grandparents or aunts or uncles who have raised the children because they were orphaned. The specific grounds given by the court vary with each case. The family’s poverty or misfortune. An illegality in the adoption, in cases of adoption. The grandparents’ advanced age. The aunts’ and uncles’ precarious health. So nowadays anyone who is poor must live with yet another terror: their children may be taken away. The same goes for anyone old or sick. But the way the child is carried off is generally the same—social workers and police. And the basic justification is always the same: the well-being of the child. The child’s life is destroyed so as to rebuild it better. Better, that is, as the bureaucracy interprets it. But in the meantime it must be destroyed. These days we know all too well that childhood trauma begets irreparable consequences. Everyone knows that. It is common knowledge. And still the traumas continue, inexorably, with the force of law behind them….

  Parents and relatives protest in every possible way when their children are taken away. Very often neighbors, friends or concerned strangers protest along with them. Committees are formed, letters go off to the Pope, the President of the Republic, the Attorney General. But usually all in vain. The magistrates in charge of child welfare do not usually reverse themselves. Their will is irrevocable, their decisions written in stone. For a few days, sometimes for months, the papers report the parents’ despair and the indignation of the citizenry, at least of those citizens who find such acts outrageous and inhuman. Then comes silence. The various committees give up and gradually disband. What is to be done? From then on, no one knows what happens to the children. No one hears anymore about them. They vanish into institutions and the Juvenile Court puts them up for adoption. Are they actually adopted or placed in foster families, or do they stay in institutions for years on end? No one ever knows. Only the authorities know. And how can people trust the authorities? They have no more trust. After so many strange and cruel incidents, how can people still believe that the authorities really trouble themselves about the welfare of the child?

  What is genuinely good for a child is to grow up with someone who loves him. This may not be the same thing as his well-being , but it is his good. Well-being, material well-being, can vanish overnight and leave no trace. But good stays rooted. To uproot and destroy it can leave a child miserable for the rest of his life. To the end of his days he will harbor the memory, conscious or unconscious, of the day his home and family, everything he thought he possessed, disappeared in a flash.

  What is good for a child is to be brought up by someone for whom he is of supreme value. Children who grow up in institutions can sense that they are not of supreme value for anyone in the world.

  But love in and of itself may not always be good, the psychologists say: it might be an unhealthy, oppressive, or obsessive kind of love. Yes, but it is still love. The nature of love can be misleading. A love that seems calm and stable one day can become oppressive the next. Meanwhil
e it is still love. No one can predict the future. But for today, grant a child what she needs today. Today she needs to grow up with a person or persons for whom she is of supreme value. If she is growing up this way, let her be. No one should be allowed to interfere with her….

  What should public agencies do? It is so simple and so obvious that it shouldn’t need to be spelled out. If the family breadwinner is unemployed, they should help him or her find work. If the family is homeless, they should find them a home. If the children are being raised by old grandparents, they should get help for the grandparents and the children. If the children are not properly washed or dressed, if they have lice, the social workers should take the trouble to bring them clothes and ointments and see that they are kept clean. Otherwise why have social workers at all? What purpose do they serve?

  Or is the job of the social worker merely to submit his suitably wordy reports to the courts, reports that contain not the slightest awareness of real life and real people?

  Does the government of a civilized country behave this way? Send police into people’s homes? Make children vanish into thin air?

  The citizens make up the State. It is their absolute right to be assisted by the State when they are in dire need. It is the State’s strict duty to come to their aid. It does not do so. It should, but it doesn’t. Instead it grinds families to bits. It separates children from parents. Brothers from brothers. What must we think of such a State? What kind of trust can we place in it?

  Only in the most extreme circumstances should children be taken away from the people who are raising them. When those people are doing them harm—tangible, actual, obvious harm. When a child shows real and evident signs of disturbance or pain or depravity in the family, or signs of abuse or mistreatment. When it is impossible to resolve a terrible situation except by separation. Then it is a matter beyond any help. Only then does the State have the right to intervene. Otherwise, every intervention of the State is violent and unjust; indeed, any intervention of the State into people’s private lives without valid justification is violent and unjust….