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

to my side of the desk. Leaning heavily on his cane and lifting his bad leg slightly off the floor, he rests his hand on my shoulder.
    “It’s important that we get along; it doesn’t take much.”
    I put his manuscript into my satchel.
    “Keep me posted,” he says. Then, in dialect, he says, “One hand washes the other, isn’t that so? What do you say to that?”
    “Goodbye,” I say. We’re at the door. “I’ll see what I can do.”
    “Me too!” he exclaims, with laughing eyes. “And you know what I think? I think we’re going to make it!”
    I shake his hand. An uncomfortable solidarity has formed between us that pleases him.
    “Do you want me to call the elevator for you?”
    “No, I’ll walk down.”
    “Lucky you!” he says. “I always have to take the elevator.”
    “Right,” I say with a nod. “And if my son has to come upstairs, he’ll have to take it too.”
    “We’ll take it together!” he calls out, as I start down the stairs.

Pleasure Island
     
    We take our seats on the folding chairs that have been arranged in a semicircle around the exercise mat on which she sits, cross-legged. She’s wearing a black sweat suit that covers her long angular body. She glances at her Day-Glo wristwatch and smiles sarcastically as a woman with heavy makeup languidly enters the room in a cloud of perfume.
    “We’ve been waiting for you,” she says.
    Without adjusting her pace, the latecomer makes her way over to the folding chairs and slowly takes a seat in the second row. Her son’s case is not serious; he has trouble walking, and physiotherapy alone will probably take care of it. She tends to observe us with careful and detached curiosity, like a first-class traveler visiting the third-class deck. She never neglects to mention the minor nature of her son’s condition. When we’re discussing the most difficult cases she opens her eyes wide in a kind of theatrical solidarity, but you can tell that hearing other people’s stories simply offers her yet another form of reassurance. She’s not the only parent to react like that, just the most obvious and perhaps the stupidest. None of us are immune to it. We’re always glad to comfort those who are worse off and, in so doing, comfort ourselves. A classification of handicaps has become a silent object of competition between us. If we compete like this among ourselves, I suppose we shouldn’t really be surprised at how others react.
    “All right. Is everyone listening?” the doctor says, rising up to a crouching position, one hand on the mat in front of her.
    “You’ll have to talk about yourselves. That’s right, about yourselves,” she said solemnly at the first parents’ meeting at the Center. And then she pointed at us, making us instantly feel guilty.
    We have to get to the root of the problem. We need to talk about things sincerely, to use that infamous word; that’s how she defined it. Her instructions are accompanied by shrill laughter, the kind she feels helps lessen the tension. How we experience the handicap, how the handicap has changed us, who we are now. Our experiences will be compared and gathered into a dossier by the Center. Eventually the material may even form the basis of a book.
    “Are you pleased?” she asks.
    A dark silence follows that finally unites us. We stare straight ahead, trying to avoid her gaze as she looks around the room in careful scrutiny. We’ve regressed back to schoolchildren; none of us dares look at the teacher while she decides which one of us to call on.
    “We won’t talk about what goes on here at the Center; it will be our Pleasure Island. I want you to talk about what goes on outside.”
    “Enough of this ‘Pleasure Island’!” a heavy man says gruffly, his neck puffing out like a toad’s, his eyes dilating, his cheeks turning purple. “Let’s begin by doing away with the name!”
    “Why, don’t you like it, Signor Colnaghi?” the doctor asks calmly, rocking back on her heels and