Born Twice (Vintage International) Page 3

  “I’ll look into it,” I say.

  I did. As Horace says, in the middle lies virtue, not truth. Had it been otherwise, the problem would have been solved long ago. But the truth, whatever it may be, is always something else.

  Cornali doesn’t have hearing problems. He has problems with his students. In this regard he’s no different from the rest of us. Who would ever deny it? No, it’s true, some people would, but they belong to a class of blissful idiots who go on TV proclaiming things like “Life has given me everything I could possibly hope for”—fine people, if only they weren’t so arrogant, always hoping to arouse envy in others for their imagined lives.

  In particular, Cornali has problems with people with problems. Disabled people can arouse all sorts of reactions among normal people. Just think of Hahnemann’s nineteenth-century principle of “like cures like,” the basis for homeopathic medicine. Cure the weak with the weak. I’ve seen it applied to human relations again and again; it can be both frightening and illuminating. For example, if a disabled child inadvertently gets mixed in with a group of normal children, people will respond with curiosity, amazement, or dismay, depending on the degree of cruelty in their point of view. The only people capable of withholding judgment and retaining a more ambiguous view are those willing to see in the child a reflection of themselves. Others, overwhelmed with fear at the mere suggestion of such a notion, take refuge in escapism; still others, in aggression. And yet they will have to return to it, their dark destiny, their downfall. That one neurosis attracts, intensifies, and appeases another is a fact that is easily proved in the endurance of many marriages.

  Cornali took immediate aim at the girl. He faked his every effort to hear her—or so my informant told me during our hallway conversations, amid passing glances and knowing nods from her fellow students—and instead asked her at length about the cause and details of her disorder, thereby managing to aggravate it. When pretending not to hear her he’d lean forward over the lectern, but always at a distance. He never let her speak into his ear. The one time she moved toward him, he pushed her violently away and she burst into tears.

  I discover what I should have known all along: All the teachers, depending on their subjects, have a problem with the girl, but everyone has found a way around it. This attenuates the pride I took in my own versatility. To be primus inter pares never satisfied an ambition, especially when “equals” includes everyone else. The only exception is Cornali.

  Once he sat next to me during a midyear faculty meeting in which we were discussing the students’ grades. “Can you hear anything she says?” he whispers to me, when her name is called out.

  “Yes, everything,” I reply.

  “What do you mean, everything?” he says. “Then I must be deaf!”

  “Maybe you are,” I say, glancing quickly at him.

  “No, really! I’m serious. Tell me the truth. You only hear a part of what she says.”

  “I hear almost everything.”

  I cover myself by saying almost, thereby conserving the credibility of everything.

  He shakes his head. “I’m not going to pass her.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t hear a word she says,” he replies flatly. “I suppose I’m limited.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  “We all have our limits. You have yours and I have mine.”

  “Can’t you try and overcome them?”

  “I’ve tried, believe me,” he says, with some regret. “But I just can’t.” After a pause, he adds, “It’s a real shame.”

  “What is?”

  “To have that defect. I don’t know what to call it—whether it’s cerebral palsy, asphyxia, extreme shyness, or some other kind of emotional block.”

  “You know what the real shame is?” I say, staring straight ahead of me at the iron fixtures on the window. “To have a brain like yours.”

  I hear him breathe in sharply but he doesn’t reply. Then he says—and I’m not sure if it’s a question or a threat—“You’re joking, aren’t you?”

  “No. I’m not joking,” I reply. “I might be exaggerating, though.”

  To discourage anger in others they say you should stay calm.

  “The real tragedy,” I go on to say, “is the brain itself. Even Christ said it: Evil is what comes out of the mouth, not what goes into it.”

  “Could you please leave Christ out of this?” he hisses. “I can’t stand your talking to me like that.”

  Actually, people can stand an infinite number of things, even when they deny it. He doesn’t scare me; I’m twice as big as he is. I hear my pulse hammering in my brain. My mouth is dry. I retreat a little bit.

  “I didn’t mean to offend you,” I say quietly, as if confiding in him. “I just don’t like being thought of as old-fashioned. You accuse me of it continuously. If I’m old-fashioned, what are you?”

  It’s always a good idea to pretend you’re being attacked when you’re really the one doing the attacking. He takes advantage of the alibi I’ve offered him and moderates his tone.

  “I think you’re too demanding.”

  “What about you? What do you expect from a handicapped student?”

  That was probably the first time I ever used the adjective that was destined to condition my life. I fear I’ve spoken it with a flourish, the way people do who are not directly affected by it (politicians and intellectuals make a grand show of this). He reacts with brutal nonchalance.

  “What do you mean, handicapped? She’s just immature! You can tell by her behavior. We mustn’t coddle students who have weaknesses; we must encourage them to overcome them!”

  The principal peers over his glasses at us from the head of the table. He’s a quiet and patient person, an expert on Zanella, six months away from retirement. Forty-three years of experience have taught him that, in the dictum “respect for discipline,” one word is superfluous: discipline. Respect would be enough.

  “Excuse us,” I say.

  He nods, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose.

  I notice that my use of the indirect object “us” has had a mitigating effect on Cornali, if only grammatically. Actually, grammar has a far greater effect on that which remains obscure in our unconscious than is generally assumed.

  “I’m sorry I spoke like that,” I whisper almost imperceptibly, in a voice not unlike the girl’s.

  He nods. Maybe he doesn’t want to reply. Maybe he just doesn’t want to disturb the principal.

  “Forgive me,” I add.

  He bites his lip, pensive. I assume he feels compensated, spared a future exchange of hostilities. Then I make a mistake.

  “What grade are you going to give her?” I ask.

  “An F.”

  The struggle to save the girl from Cornali’s sentence went on for several more months. (I will now shift into the past tense, which in my own personal grammar I usually reserve for historic events.) It was inserted into a broader context—a slanderous campaign by Cornali against my teaching methods.

  More than anything else, Cornali considered himself a harbinger of the new pedagogy. The very same man who could humiliate a person, already humiliated by fate, by pretending he was deaf committed himself to the fight for students’ rights. He proposed and achieved—though not without the tacit opposition of those of us who were more sensitive to the issue— the abolition of the formal manner of address. A lot of people believe that equality should be reflected in pronoun usage, and they’re not entirely wrong. It’s just that the same people who fight for it are often the same people who’d like to see grammar done away with altogether.

  By asking his students to consider him their contemporary, Cornali, given the thirty-year age difference, made them feel uncomfortable. He was like one of those parents who profess to be their children’s best friend and deceive themselves into believing that they can share in both their games and their age.

  Cornali’s next step was to let the students decide
their own grades. I had abandoned a similar experiment during my second year of teaching as soon as I realized how dangerous it could be. The humbler students, leaning toward self-effacement, gave themselves lower grades than they deserved while the shrewder ones gave themselves stellar ones. In the end, we were all dissatisfied, both the students and I. Cornali, meanwhile, ideologue that he was, dispensed altogether with the experimental phase and passed on to the corrected version. He raised all their grades—both the chaste Lenten grades of the serious students and the overgenerous grades of the less deserving ones. His students, geniuses and hidden talents each and every one of them, were practically euphoric. He told me about it one day, while comparing our classes.

  “You see,” he began, in that composed and meditative way that is so typical of the passive-aggressive, “you address your students formally and I can understand that. You’re much younger than I am. You need to put distance between yourself and them. But then you make the mistake of interpreting that as a sign of authority. I, on the other hand, at my age, can address them informally. I don’t have to simulate authority. I have it, and I choose to relinquish it.”

  He had one of those minds that was constantly in flux. Ideas would simmer together, come to a boil, and then flow uncontrollably over the edge while he, their chef, would look on carelessly. Taken one at a time, the ingredients might have been savory, but together the mixture was unpalatable.

  “I can tell that discipline is important to you,” he added. “You’re so uptight! Discipline is nothing but the last vestige of an authoritarian system.”

  “No,” I insisted, “it’s the other way around. The chaos in your classroom is a sign of authoritarianism: Whoever has the loudest voice dominates. I expect silence so that when I explain something or when someone has a question, the others can hear. If not, they can go elsewhere.”

  “Don’t you see how old-fashioned you are?” he asked in amazement, as if he had discovered a criminal. “You expect total silence.”

  “Of course I do,” I said. “Like a pianist, I need silence to play so others can hear.”

  “What surprises me most,” he concluded soberly, “is that the students actually respect you despite the fact that you are so demanding.”

  He looked up at me, stupefied, radiantly confused. He couldn’t begin to conceive that this was precisely why my students listened to me.

  “Why, of course!” he exclaimed. “It makes perfect sense! Authority—the recognized state of superiority that Horkheimer talks about—doesn’t need a pretext!”

  What about those who don’t have authority? I thought to myself. What do they do?

  Both his twisted sense of logic and his partial reasoning, which he considered complete, generated new misunderstandings between us. He enjoyed discrediting me in front of other teachers by saying I had made listeners out of the students by relying on a false sense of egalitarianism, not by threats or punitive measures. Essentially, he encouraged undiscipline, and he’d rage against those teachers who didn’t know how to deal with it.

  “One more reason to guarantee it to them,” I’d object. “If teachers don’t know how to take charge of their students, do you really think they should be left at their mercy?”

  “That’s their problem,” he’d say, with a glint in his eye.

  “What about their subjects? Who will learn them?”

  “No one,” he’d reply boldly.

  And that’s precisely what happened. It wasn’t his future, so he didn’t worry about it. (That’s the cynical truth about him that I have come to accept over the years, even if cynical isn’t generally used to describe someone who embodies a behavior but rather a person who repudiates one.)

  Hordes of students abandoned their classes, both materially and figuratively. Walking down the hall, you could hear the teachers shouting, either for silence or simply to make themselves heard above the din. And it was only when the students were ready to let these exasperated and shrill commands have an effect on them that the teachers would gain an audience.

  Rather than being on the students’ side, Cornali was primarily against his fellow teachers. His divining rod for wrong causes led him to ignore the more important reasons for siding with a generation in revolt, even if we only felt its muffled, distant rumblings at our school. My own position on things—at some times of alliance, at other times of dissent—seemed more like a question of prudent strategy to him than the issue of choice that it actually was. Once he even accused me of being intelligent. Another time he scolded me for my analytic capacity, a typical retort for someone who doesn’t have the most basic grasp of things. His greatest contribution to the reformation of the education system at our school was to assist in the dissolution of order. I don’t know what the situation is like now, because I stopped teaching long ago, but I’m tempted to believe that, in this light, things are actually worse than they were. While lack of discipline might have been seen as revolutionary then, today it is part of the institution. Nowadays the best teachers manage to neutralize the situation by dedicating themselves to the task at hand, but they constitute the minority. The other teachers, abandoned in high seas, act as one would imagine— they try to lighten their load. They expect less of their students and yet, judging from the amount of bureaucratic paperwork, the sancta sanctorum of the new system, they manage to obtain more. There’s no better way to raise the profit level of a class than by lowering the yardstick of success, a compromise that the mortified teachers keep to themselves and the inexperienced students do not notice. This is what I’ve gathered from the more forthcoming teachers, unless I make the wrong kind of friends.

  Cornali, who fought for the abolition of a grade for conduct (a notion that the future itself would make superfluous), decided to implement a change in the structuring of his course. He decided to study the retrogressive history of art, from the twentieth century back to the Stone Age. It was like telling someone that they’d get somewhere faster if they walked backward. At first the students were attracted by the novelty. Then they realized it would actually take them longer to study in this way, as they frequently had to stop and examine things in both directions. But by then it was too late to go back to the old system.

  “I don’t like making comparisons,” he’d say, in the manner of someone who’s about to do just that, “but your class obeys you; mine follows me. You invoke fear in your students; I arouse sympathy. I make them feel like geniuses; you make them feel like laborers.”

  I’d listen to him in amusement. There was a genuine warmth in the geyser of his ideas; it was his most sympathetic trait. He considered himself “a creative type” and loved to remind you of it. He’d propose the most improbable hypotheses and then erase them with a wave of his hand, as if they were the pure follies of genius. A passage from the Veda, a phrase by Lao Tzu, a saying by Confucius: all added a hint of orientalism to his words—at least that was the intent. Indeed, as long as you didn’t dwell on what he was saying, the effect was of lightness. As with many so-called “creative types,” he was far more interested in the creative act than in the creation itself, although he did expect applause for the latter (and it was never lacking). In his uniqueness he was a product in a series. He was typical of our society but didn’t know it. He probably would have been horrified to see his image reflected in someone else, an experience that life had spared him.

  “It takes nine months for a baby to grow,” I’d remind him bleakly. “School lasts nine months. At the end of the year we’ll see who’s right.”

  “How will you know?”

  “The students: They’ll let us know.”

  Toward the end of the year, just before the final faculty meeting in which we were to announce our grades, the maestro had his coup de théâtre. He told every student what grade they’d be receiving and explained the curve on which it was based. He gave the lowest grades to the best students (for not making full use of their talents) and the highest grades to the weakest students (as a reward for thei
r efforts).

  The students reacted as anyone, except the prophet himself, could have guessed: with complete silence. It was an emotional catastrophe. Aware of my issues with Cornali, the students came to me for comfort. They came in dismay and despair and with lowered heads. The best students in the group didn’t know how to react to the injustice of being ranked below the average ones. Cornali had figured—with the blinkered imagination of all ideologues—that they would be insensitive to grades. But to find a young person insensitive to grades is about as hard as finding one who’s insensitive to money. As for the weaker students, Cornali had thought they would have been ecstatic to receive the coveted grades. While good grades would certainly have pleased them, marks of excellence made them feel ashamed, as though they had been acknowledged as complete failures, beyond hope or measure. The most deluded of them all was Cornali himself, who was amazed that the younger generation hadn’t generated a man genetically different from his own.

  Cornali’s vision of history had led him to imagine modern man like one of those extraterrestrial monsters with an enormous cranium and spindly legs. The head needed to be large so it could accumulate the experience of millennia, while the body replicated the fragility of a child. To discover, instead, that they had to begin all over again each time made him see in the twilight the world that others see in the dawn.

  The most disconcerting thing about Cornali’s behavior at the close of that turbulent year was his visible anger toward the girl. The energy with which he fought for the rights of the disabled was matched only by the hostility with which he persecuted her. And yet he saw no contradiction in this. He was convinced that the girl wasn’t disabled. He was reluctant to believe in mental illness altogether, perhaps because he felt threatened by it. Instead, he insisted she couldn’t overcome her problems by reason alone because she was inherently weak, lazy, or indecisive. Cornali suffered from seeing things in a doubly distorted manner: he thought her symptoms were voluntary choices and he believed that punitive measures could rid her of her troubles forever.