Free Born Twice (Vintage International) by Giuseppe Pontiggia

the language of the handicapped has become a victim of neuroses. People wonder why “blind” has become vision-impaired and “deaf ” is hearing-impaired. One plausible explanation could be that “blind” irreparably defines a person, while “vision-impaired” circumscribes the absence of a function.
    The antithesis of this is furnished by the example of the limping principal. The most circumspect definition for him, according to the current language of the handicapped, would be to say he has problems walking, in the same way the mother of a child who stutters would say her child has problems speaking. Another way of defining the principal, one that is elegantly cloaked in the formal language of culture, would be to say that he is claudicate. But “claudicate principal” reveals an all-too-obvious irony.
    The limping principal is a bitter, obstinate, and hostile man. His presence suggests both an authoritarian figure weakened by a physical defect and a devil—as in the novels of Lesage— perched high above the roofs of Madrid, the same image I was trying to suggest earlier. This confirms two things: that debility is a treacherous card to be played at just the right moment and that solidarity is not the most common attribute among those suffering from handicaps.
    Perhaps the best moment to ask the favor is when he comes back from his car ride with Paolo. He’s always nervous before leaving, as if he were preparing for a sortie against the enemy. He straps Paolo so tightly into his seat that the boy sits up stiffly; not even his head lolls forward. He still hasn’t gotten used to Paolo’s anomalies. His face lights up when someone doesn’t immediately notice Paolo’s “problems,” as if this reassures him of a future normality. “He’ll never be normal,” I once told him in exasperation. We can put up with our own mistakes but not when we see them replicated in others. “That’s what you think!” he had replied, adding, “Nature performs miracles!”
    He never assisted in Paolo’s physical therapy. Franca managed to involve friends, relatives, neighbors, and peers in turning his head and stretching his limbs, but she never dared ask her father. Or, rather, she limited herself to asking him once, recalling a Sicilian proverb that says when a friend doesn’t hear you the first time, it means he doesn’t want there to be a second time.
    Perhaps it seemed unnatural to him that a child should be as frail as an elderly person. It must have seemed like physiological subversion, even though I explained to him that, in fact, physiology anticipates such a subversion. If it didn’t, Paolo would never have been able to put alternate circuits into function, as the neurologists had predicted he would.
    “Why do you think Paolo survived?” I asked him once.
    “Because he’s strong!” he answered, with a humble jolt of pride.
    “No, because he’s weak,” I said. “He gains strength from his flexibility.”
    “Enough of your talk!” he’d replied. “I just don’t follow you.”
    Paolo offered him the most extreme opportunity to reexamine his beliefs, but that was the last thing he wanted to do. Dominated by hierarchical ideas on nature and society, he was forced to contend with his grandson’s condition, which posed insoluble problems to his understanding of the meaning of life. Contrary to what one would generally believe, diversity makes us feel diverse and we do not easily forgive that. My father-in-law died believing his grandson was diverse in appearance only. That was his most tenacious hope; the fear of being proved otherwise rendered him fanatical. Jung wrote that fanaticism is an overcompensated doubt, but my father-in-law never even managed to begin compensating for his.
    He once told me that as a young man he and his friends would wait in the cinema for homosexual men to give themselves away so they could ambush them and teach them a lesson or two. It struck me that he had used the word