Deviation Page 13

  When he grasped the meaning of my words, he laughed scornfully until he turned pale and told me that he should have known that I was false, treacherous, a true Italian, he explained.

  “You’re right,” I said again, with an indifference that made me feel proud.

  He threw back at me the fact that I had let him kiss me.

  “I was so sick then! What did I know…”

  I should have stopped myself at that point, but I couldn’t resist the misguided temptation to add, with a hint of derision, “But now I see things clearly. Now I’m recovered, even if I’m paralyzed.”

  Hearing that word, he couldn’t take any more; his fighting spirit vanished, and he begged me to marry him because I was the only one he loved. If he had never known me, he might have been happy with the other girl, but as it was, he was always thinking of me; he spent his time drinking and making love, just so I wouldn’t always be on his mind, and he’d turned into a brute and it wasn’t a life worth living.

  When he said “making love,” my heart shrank. “I’m dead,” I told him, and rang the bell.

  “Don’t send me away!” Footsteps were approaching. “She knows I love you, I confessed everything, she understood, she’s a good person, we broke up.”

  I smiled scornfully.

  “You’ve always hated me,” he said, talking fast. “You despise me.”

  “See how intelligent you are? So spare me your pity.” I was about to burst into tears.

  “That’s not true!” he protested. “How could you think that. You don’t understand.” The orderlies, at a sign from the nun, stood alongside him. He glanced at them distractedly.

  Then he turned impetuously to Sister: “Which one of us is more pitiful,” he asked, “Luzi or me?”

  When he was gone, I finally let myself go, sobbing under the covers. Was living really worth it in the end?

  VI

  I woke up suddenly, with a thud, as if I had fallen, and found my hands gripping the sides of the mattress, my heart pounding, in the dark, alone, with no one who could understand my struggle, who could help me. Sister Vincentia herself had advised me to die.

  I relaxed my grip; I had to breathe deeply. I closed my eyes and waited.

  Nothing had happened.

  Johann had never existed. Before, in fact, he hadn’t interested me.

  No.

  Johann existed and, just as I had grown attached to him after he saved my life, I would now, as naturally, forget him. That’s all. I had not been defeated. “You won’t bring me down,” I whispered to God, but it wasn’t an accusation; I felt He was on my side. Moreover, even the worst father is relieved when a child can manage on his own and doesn’t always go running to him. I could just imagine all the prayers, lamentations, and complaints that men addressed to Him: “I’ll bet You must be tired of it too,” I said with a sigh, and went on to reflect on life.

  It was beginning to be clear: it seemed to me that I was preparing for something far-off and difficult for which I would perhaps struggle all my life, though in the end I could not fail. I was calm and confident and I grew drowsy.

  Around nine o’clock I was awakened by a caress from Johann, who stood there studying me. I smiled at him and winked against my will.

  “Out!” The voice of Sister Johanna rang loudly as she descended on the room. “Visiting hours are the same for everyone, Thursdays and Sundays from three to five!” Her face flushed, she swept out the door with a great rustling of her skirts.

  Soon afterward Sister Vincentia appeared and with a gesture encouraged him to leave. They stopped to talk in the hallway. I couldn’t make out what he was saying; then she replied calmly and distinctly:

  “Everything is fine, but leave her alone, she hasn’t asked you for anything. Luzi doesn’t need anyone.”

  I underwent treatments and did my exercises and spent every free moment studying.

  By now people were no longer dying and in any case the real morgue had been rebuilt. Brought to my room were annoying middle-aged women who’d just had stones or ovaries removed, who rang the bell for no reason and complained endlessly.

  “Luzi!” Sister Vincentia approached me. “How come you don’t call? Can you be the only one who never needs anything?” And every so often, during the hot hours, she came in with a cool drink, an apricot juice, and massaged my behind. “There, now you’re nice and cool,” she said, lifting my foot to look at it.

  In the afternoon I received several visits: from Germans recovering in the hospital, and from American and French soldiers with whom I had become friends and who had the right to come in at all hours.

  If Johann appeared, “Go away,” they whispered to him, “the doctor doesn’t want visitors, you’re not a soldier, you have to keep to the normal visiting hours.” And in front of him, I became more expansive toward the soldiers; a sudden familiar mood came over me. Sometimes I even went out with them. “Bye-bye!” I said, apologizing to Johann, who would arrive all worked up. “I have a prior commitment, I can’t cancel.”

  As the soldiers pushed my wheelchair through the streets of Mainz, people would look at our little parade and I smiled, thinking about the impression all those healthy young conquerors surrounding my vanquished body must have made. I gazed at the trees, at the faces of passersby, as though watching a pageant.

  Often Johann followed us on his bicycle, skinnier than during the time of the Germans, unshaven, his eyes flashing. The French guys warned me when he showed up. And together we laughed at him.

  I got along better with the French than with the Americans because it was easier to talk and because our way of seeing things was similar.

  With one or the other group, I usually went to the park. They even sat me on a grassy flower bed, under an oak tree. We played games. I had started the fad of playing cocuzzaro among the Americans. They had to pronounce the ritual phrase in Italian. Seeing those hulking young men, both whites and blacks, seated in a circle on the lawn, their faces diligent and focused—watching them jump up when their number was called and stumble over the words “Perché quattro cocuzze” (Why four pumpkins?), I couldn’t keep from laughing, and they laughed with me. Toward evening we ended up making such a racket that knots of curious onlookers stopped to look at us, laughing in reaction.

  The Americans particularly liked to shower me with gifts of food, and at every outing, a new one appeared asking permission to come too.

  One afternoon toward sunset when I was in the shady park with my two best French friends, one of them was raising the wheelchair’s footrests to allow Cunegonda, swollen and sweaty, to stretch out, when Johann rushed at him. The other young man jumped on Johann from behind, Johann pulled a knife, they twisted his arm, and Allied soldiers came running to help, dragging Johann away.

  Some time later, Johann jumped through the window into my room one night—luckily I was alone—with such an expression that I was truly frightened. Still, I made sure to act as though I were worried about him, as though I were concerned that the night watchmen might arrest him, whereas I had actually asked the watchmen to do just that, because I’d been expecting a breakin like this from Johann sooner or later. I played my part so well that not even five minutes had gone by—he was planning on kidnapping me, freeing me, was talking about the doctors and orderlies as if they were my jailers—before he let me convince him to leave so as not to get me in trouble.

  The easier it was for me to handle him and make him change his mind, the less he counted in my heart. Very soon I reached the point where seeing him that way—filthy, shabby, eyes always on the alert—compared to the trim Germans in their Sunday best, and even more so with the Americans and the French, so upstanding in their immaculate khaki uniforms, made me ashamed of him.

  By now even the gifts he brought me looked like they were stolen and were no longer permitted, including cans of vegetables marinated in oil and vinegar, in keeping with the German practice of preserving anything edible: chickens, rabbits, eggs. He would pull them
out of his shirt with a furtive gesture, too imprudently, so I insisted he hide the stuff as quickly as possible in the bedside table or in the suitcase under the bed. Seeing him coming and worrying about making a bad impression became one and the same to me. At first thinking about his German girlfriend rekindled my malice; now, though I rarely thought of her, it only made me shrug.

  “This is not the way to drive him off.” Sister Vincentia voiced her disapproval. “It’s not charitable.”

  “And I don’t want his charity either!”

  “Don’t you ever ask yourself what you gave him?”

  “I didn’t mistake him for someone he isn’t. Let him learn to know someone the next time before he comes forward.”

  “It’s you who provoke him,” she replied.

  “He should regret me as long as he lives.”

  *

  I remember that at that time I was constantly agitated and emotional. I would wake up at night repeating lists of foreign words, constructing sentences, thinking; the chirping of birds before dawn, the rustling of the trees in the evening, the impassioned shrieks of the maimed and crippled children playing with boisterous fervor in the garden, everything gripped my heart, moistened my eyes, gave me a warmth, a “yes” inside.

  There were also the Germans and their problems. They were hungry and I had provisions, from the soldiers’ gifts and Johann’s, that I willingly handed out to them: Sister Vincentia took care of the distribution. But above all the Germans had favors to request of the occupation authorities—special permits, certificates, various licenses—and since I was visited by the Americans, the Germans came to respectfully ask me to intercede for them. They entrusted lengthy petitions to me, they left gooseberries and asparagus on my nightstand, though their eyes were famished. I would attach a note and pass the papers on to the Americans. Often the supplicants received a note summoning them to Command and obtained what they wanted and would have obtained just the same without me. But they preferred going through my channels and considered me an important person.

  Some gave me letters to be forwarded to America. Civilian mail wasn’t functioning yet. Word spread and, curiously enough, they schemed more to give me their letters than they would have done for useful concessions. They were seized by a fervent epistolary mania. The American soldiers, who mailed these letters with their own sender’s address on the back, asked me to please go easy on them because they were forbidden to include non-military correspondence in their mail and they didn’t want any trouble with the military censor. But the Germans were unreasonable on that point, doubling the gooseberries and asparagus: putting the sheet of paper and envelope in my hand.

  I decided to go through the letters on my own, eliminating those that were too obsequious or incoherent. In the evening after dinner, I went to the treatment room, wheeled in with my bed and all, and, along with another victim from February 27, a witty forty-year-old German woman, began the secret reading. Schwester Luise brought us raspberries sprinkled with sugar and helped us in between her rounds.

  The letters to be discarded were torn up and thrown in the toilet; I pulled the chain, and the following morning I told the interested parties that I had mailed them by sea. The sensible ones, instead, I gave to the soldiers, telling the letter writers that they had gone by air.

  I remember a German who wrote to a distant relative of his wife, whom he had not heard from in twenty years, as it turned out. He proposed setting up a toilet paper factory in the Rhineland, explaining that toilet paper was a much sought-after commodity in Germany, which had been suffering for years because Hitler, swine that he was, had sabotaged its production. The man asked the relative for an exorbitant amount of dollars for the initial setup costs—but by return mail, before anyone else stole the idea.

  After laboriously deciphering it, Fräulein Schwarzmann exclaimed: “What a bright idea! Meanwhile, not to waste time, I’ll use this one to wipe myself.”

  One morning in late July a man with a folder came to see me. He was from the hospital administration: he wanted to know when I would vacate my place.

  “I don’t know.”

  What? What was the Italian Red Cross doing instead of assisting their wounded?

  “I put off my departure.”

  He didn’t understand.

  “Many foreigners remain in Germany.”

  Perhaps these foreigners were self-supporting: “But who pays for you here?” So I had to leave, there was no need to be alarmed, they would officially see to having me repatriated.

  To buy time I made up a story that my parents had moved to France and were expecting me there, and that I was just then waiting for an important reply.

  I got a two-week extension, but I had to sign a document to the effect that if I had not left by the end of the fourteen days, the administration would decide my case with no restrictions whatsoever.

  Two days later I received a communication from the French Ministry of Health, at the hospital’s request, according to which, having been born in France, I could move there once I presented: (a) my birth certificate; (b) my parents’ French residency certificate; and (c) a document from them summoning me, certified by the consul general, in which they guaranteed to provide for me economically.

  Having turned twenty-one, and due to the privilege that being born in France conferred on me, I could opt for French citizenship after at least a six-month residency on French soil, and from that time on I would be able to benefit from France’s rights for war invalids.

  My case was not a simple one because obviously in my condition I wouldn’t contribute any revenue to the French coffers, but the health office stationed in Mainz had nonetheless recommended me highly thanks to the good contacts that I had there.

  *

  I had to confess to my friends that my parents were living in Italy and that I had fooled the administration because I did not want to go home.

  They didn’t give up, but with no relatives in France, there was only so much they could do for me.

  The Italians in gray-green, with the health department armbands, showed up one morning, called to my bed by the administration, despite the extension. They were the same ones as before, based in Wiesbaden; they had that difficult way typical of Italian males with women they consider homely or undesirable, whereas they make everything easy for attractive girls. I got rid of them quickly, declaring that I was Italo-French from Paris and stressing the French r, which inspired them to utter a few gallant phrases to me.

  The very thought of Italy depressed me.

  I went from the one extreme of yearning for my country to the other extreme of a terror that was practically aversion, with no middle ground.

  I dreamed of my mother often, and in the morning I felt a need to lean on her and sleep some more. I thought back to my friends there, admirers; I would recall an episode and laugh, all by myself, moved, but when I thought of seeing them again, of being with them again, a chill came over me. If I imagined scenes of meeting them, I actually froze. No place in Italy where I had been appealed to me. I was especially wary of any relatives. “You wanted to see for yourself. Look what came of it. If you’d only listened to us. Naturally it had to happen, you had to have it your way.” And at my slightest initiative, a chorus of protests: “Isn’t what happened to you enough?” And a whole wall of prohibitions, for my own good.

  And my parents, surrounded by these comments, torn between the pride of not showing how deeply my adversity struck them and their apprehension over what new misfortunes might await me. Unable as I was to act on my own, my father would have inevitably ended up laying down the law: “That’s not appropriate; this is unsuitable,” according to his uncompromising criterion of what is good and what is bad for a female child.

  I thought about Mama’s ingenuous ideas of what is noble and what is not worthy of a “proper” person’s interest; I thought about everything that I had seen, observed, learned. She was the inexperienced child. But how to make her see that? She would always f
eel the need to guide me, fortified by my misfortune: “What did we gain, chasing after ideals? What good was it, I ask you? There was no one under that wall, and you went rushing in.”

  I did not agree.

  The wisdom of adults—“When I was your age I too wanted to do this and that, at your age you always think that … then you calm down and realize instead that…”—had poisoned my adolescence. I was not like them, I would not settle, surrender, be directed. Don’t lose heart, in the long run the truth triumphs, I kept telling myself. If it seemed that evil was successful, it was because of the positive values that made it effective, its joie de vivre, its knowledge of the world, its unconventionality and daring; if it seemed that good was oppressed, it was because of its inertia, its sentimentality, its ignorance of reality; if it didn’t protest this or that outrage, opening its eyes too late, this only meant that it lacked the requisite energy to act, and so it wasn’t genuine goodness after all, but mere passivity.

  My brain worked nonstop during the night as I awaited dawn, as if only then could I lower my guard and rest.

  At times I remembered with a jolt that I was paralyzed, as if it were something new, and that fact reconciled me with everyone and everything, with my youth, with my memories of my parents. A lump in my throat, tears streaming down: “Mama, Papa, goodbye.”

  I knew, from the time I accepted His challenge, that I would go to Russia, “where they repudiate You,” but my two French friends were against it and wanted to try someplace else first.

  They accompanied me to the American Command center, at the town hall of the lower city, where I was received by various officers, one after another. Each of them listened to me affably, questioned me over again, and let me speak at length, after which they declared that it wasn’t possible for them to send me to America. I could, however, return to Italy, relying on the charitable operations of the Vatican, which would put me in contact with a benefactor willing to assume my travel and living expenses and ongoing care costs: such philanthropists abounded in the United States, and it wasn’t out of the question that one might be found for me. I explained that I knew several languages and was able to work and pay for myself. If I had been in good health, of course, they themselves would have hired me, gladly, but as it was, they told me that I was very smart to know so many languages (which I had listed for them), that I should continue to study, and they wished me all the best.