Free Like Family by Paolo Giordano Page B

the spell of his beauty. I kept him glued to me as long as I could, until he was four or five years old. Sometimes a shameful thing happened to me: holding my son’s soft, naked body close stirred uncontrollable signs of sexual arousal. They were physical responses unrelated to any thought, but all the same they left me appalled, and for that reason I pulled away more than once. When Nora noticed it, she caressed me first and then him. “There’s nothing wrong with it,” she said. “I, too, can feel him with all my organs.”
    Then Emanuele grew up, more quickly than we thought, and we found ourselves wanting him to grow up fast, not realizing that we would soon miss him as a little child. He was never quick enough, he was never responsible enough, his reasoning was never sufficientlythought out. Only with Mrs. A. did he allow himself to regress to the condition of the small child he still felt he was. She held him in her arms, rocking him for hours; she let him be capricious and repetitive in his expressions, and she attended to those things that we thought he should already be doing on his own. (Yet didn’t Nora and I behave the same way with her, abandoning ourselves to her care?) Maybe it was her hovering presence that prevented me from seeing Emanuele as he really was: not a prodigy but an average, if not slightly below-average child, one inclined to be touchy, for whom grasping something, especially something abstract, always involved effort, anxiety and the need for exhausting repetition. Realizing that was as painful for us as it was for him, and, perhaps unfairly, I find myself blaming Mrs. A., since for a long time she was his shield.
    I remember an incident. In kindergarten Emanuele had not shown any aptitude for drawing; his doodles had something alarming about them, but we didn’t pay too much attention (how important is it in life to know how to color within the lines?), at least not until the afternoon when I went to pick him up at school and I noticed the children’s self-portraits in temperapaint, arranged next to one another to form a border. Emanuele’s was different from the others: a shapeless pink blob with two black slanting strokes to indicate the eyes. Conscious of the difference, he felt compelled to quickly set the record straight. “Mine is the ugliest,” he said, as if there were any need to state it.
    Later I told Nora and Mrs. A. about it. It was a sheer outpouring of disappointment: if our son was further behind than the others in drawing, that was a clear sign that he would be behind in a host of other things—I drew very well at his age—and we would have to deal with it. Being a parent, it seemed to me, also involved being constantly exposed to the possibility of humiliation.
    Nora and Mrs. A. listened to me with their arms crossed. Then, not saying a word, without my having the slightest idea of their intentions or any way to stop them, they left the house and marched straight to Emanuele’s school. There, acting together just like a mother and daughter, they insisted on the immediate removal of the tempera paintings. Then they returned home victorious, their outrage still not having simmered down.
    Nevertheless, going forward, our son’s comparisonwith his peers became increasingly apparent, and their countermeasures were no longer enough. By the beginning of second grade, Emanuele continued to confuse
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and
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right and left, before and after: to me it seemed unacceptable.
    â€œIt seems unacceptable to you because your concept of intelligence is limited,” Nora retorted. “He has a great imagination. But for you and your family, that doesn’t count, right? For you people, scholastic perfection is the only thing that matters.”
    â€œWhat does my family have to do with it now?”
    â€œTwo anthropologists and their young physicist, with the most brilliant academic grades and journal publications. Tell the