Diary of the Fall (8 page)

João never knew that I fought with my father because of all this. That I hurled a Scotch tape dispenser at him because of all this. That for a moment there was a chance I could have hit my father on the head and injured his face, resulting in an operation on the cheekbone under general anesthetic, leaving him with one eye that he would never be able to open again and all because my father — with his stories about the Holocaust and the Jewish renaissance and the obligation every Jew in the world had to defend himself
using whatever means he had — was in some way responsible for what happened to João, making him the enemy who will always be there before you and who will always be in your thoughts because now he’s in a wheelchair.

I never told João that the quarrel with my father was the closest physical contact I’d had with him for thirteen years. On the day I found out he had Alzheimer’s, I went to a bar and ordered a whisky and then another and then several more and ended up leaving the bar and sleeping on a park bench. When I woke it was broad daylight and I was filled with a feeling of immense weariness when I thought about how I was going to break the news to my father, and I remember that one of the things I thought was whether or not I would touch him when I gave him the news, whether I would take his hand or place my hand on his shoulder or give him a hug or attempt a smile indicating a minimum of optimism about the initial prognosis.

I never told João what happened to me after I saw him fall. Surely he must have thought about it. Did
he, for example, imagine that I became his friend out of pity? Or out of guilt? Or because I was alone and no one else would speak to me after my conversation with the coordinator? Or for any one of those reasons that would justify the resentment that would perhaps have remained hidden had it not been for the new circumstances, the new school, the new classmates, the numerous friends he’d never had before and who allowed him to do something he had perhaps always wanted to do, a month after the start of term, two months, then three, and there comes a moment when João realizes that he doesn’t need me anymore, that I serve only as a reminder of the worst moment of his life, and he needs to move on from that memory and it’s then that he can do something he’s been planning for a long time, the one occasion on which he doesn’t bother to lie when his new classmates ask him about the previous year.

I’m not sure whether it happened in March or in April or at the latest in May, João telling them about the birthday party, the one occasion on which he let it slip in the middle of the jokes they had got used to making about me, at least they would sound like jokes now,
after all the years that have passed and all the times someone has looked at me and talked about money and about a conspiracy by the rats that have infested our houses ever since the Middle Ages and spread discord and hatred among decent people. I wasn’t there on the day, of course, and it wasn’t perhaps João’s deliberate intention, not directly anyway, but the fact is that it became public knowledge that I had allowed him to fall at his birthday party, my Jewish rat paws letting go of his head, my Jewish rat instinct fleeing in the ensuing confusion, my parasitic moneymaking cancerous Jewish rat nature betraying the rest of the gang in order to save myself and to continue sucking other people’s blood and health.

The next day everyone at school knew about it, but this time I was prepared, as if anesthetized by what I’d experienced the previous year and which I would clearly go through again: the way people immediately changed the subject whenever I came into view, my name and the Star of David chalked on the wall in the corridor, and this time I myself would quickly rub it off so that no teacher would see it, so that the coordinator at the new school wouldn’t call me into
her office and express her profound regret at that display of religious and cultural intolerance, and so that faced by the coordinator’s sympathy I wouldn’t again run the risk of feeling sick and vomiting up the names of the classmates I believed had done it, or even giving João’s name, because he must have known who was doing it, João who now only spoke to me in class or when we were alone together, where he wouldn’t have to demonstrate in public that he had been or still was my friend or feel obliged to invite me to some party at the weekend, and gradually I would cease to know anything about João’s life outside school, if he was still stealing tokens from public phone boxes, if he was still smoking hash and sniffing glue, if he had a girlfriend and was the first in the class to have one, and I started going straight from school to home and from home to school, cut off from João and all my other classmates and from any other possibility apart from studying and my bedroom and my life, which didn’t change throughout the eternity of every day, every hour of eighth grade.

Of the six hundred and fifty Jews sent to Auschwitz along with Primo Levi, six hundred and thirty-eight died within the first year. Of the twelve who survived, Primo Levi was the only one to write a book,
If This Is a Man
. Unlike my grandfather, he was concerned with recording every detail of the camp routine, from his arrival in 1944 to his liberation by the Red Army when the war ended.

Before
If This Is a Man
, no one knew about the card placed beside a tap just inside Auschwitz, warning inmates not to drink from it because the water was dirty. The rules also forbade sleeping in your jacket or without your underpants, or leaving the hut with your collar turned up or not taking a shower on the prescribed days.

Fingernails needed to be trimmed regularly, but that could only be done with your teeth. With toenails, the friction of the shoes was enough. The shoes were distributed in a completely arbitrary fashion, and each prisoner had only a few seconds in which to choose, from a distance, a pair that appeared to be the right size, for there could be no changing them later, and according to Primo Levi, this was the first important decision to be made, because a shoe that is too tight or too loose causes blisters that burst and in turn cause infections that make the feet swell and stop you walking or running, and the rubbing of the swollen foot against the wood and cloth of the shoes causes more blisters and more infections that end up taking the prisoner to the hospital with a diagnosis of swollen feet, a complaint for which there is no cure in Auschwitz.

Primo Levi says that in Auschwitz death begins with the shoes, and I wonder if he was referring only to his time in the camp or to the decades that passed after putting on the pair he managed to grab during those five decisive seconds. Primo Levi died when he
was sixty-eight, in Turin, Italy, having written thirteen books, many of them about the Holocaust and many of which had been translated into various languages, and having resumed his career as a chemist, and married and had children and received prizes and become a literary celebrity in Europe and the world, and I wonder: was he thinking about that choice of shoe, too large or too small, or perhaps, with rare and enviable luck among the million and a half prisoners who passed through the camp, a shoe that was just the right size, was he thinking about that when he opened the door of his apartment, walked over to the stairs and fell down the stairwell, an occurrence that almost none of his biographers believes to have been accidental.

Death begins in many ways, and I don’t know if my grandfather ever managed to pinpoint the seed, the crucial moment when it ceased to matter that he had survived Auschwitz who knows how, and left there in who knows what state, and recovered in Poland or in Germany or who knows where, and managed to get himself on a boat heading for Brazil after overcoming who knows what difficulties, because from
that moment on it was pretty clear that he would spend the rest of his life much as Primo Levi did. The only difference is that, instead of leading an apparently normal family life and decades later throwing himself down a stairwell, he led an apparently normal family life and decades later began writing those notebooks.

Milk — a liquid food with a creamy texture, which as well as containing calcium and other substances essential to the organism has the advantage of not being highly susceptible to the development of bacteria. Milk is the perfect source of nourishment to be taken by a man when he is about to spend the morning alone
.

I saw a film once in which the son goes into his father’s office and discovers that all the drawers are filled with loose cigarettes arranged in neat rows, this happens the day after his father has had a nervous breakdown in the shower and smashed the glass door, and I wonder if something similar occurred with my father when he read the first page or the first line of those sixteen notebooks.

Sesefredo — guesthouse in the center of Porto Alegre, a clean spacious establishment, quiet in the mornings and cozy and welcoming when night falls, located in a building that is perfectly solid despite having survived afire and that has a pleasant aspect to the sun, located in a street full of commercial establishments of unimpeachable reputation such as a kennel and a butcher’s shop. Any guest of the Sesefredo who falls ill is sure to be well treated thanks to its owners’ kindness, which manifests itself in their sympathetic, cordial manners, in German, and with a rigorous attention to hygiene during the period in which, due to his need for healthful repose, he cannot be disturbed while alone in his room
.

Kennel — a place of long, brightly lit corridors run by professionals of the highest human and social caliber and where the animals are treated according to the most rigorous and humane of hygiene regimes. Anyone visiting the kennel will be provided with all the information he requires on the health of the animals as well as their legal position and the necessary adoption procedures and he can enjoy the small lawned courtyard and the
wooden bench where a man who wants to sit there alone will be undisturbed by the noise of barking or other disagreeable sounds
.

Pregnancy — condition in which the wife spends entire months without a single illness and in no danger of diseases of the uterus or of high blood pressure. The wife learns she is pregnant and immediately tells her husband so that he can take the necessary decision: to have the child or not? A decision taken by him without hesitation because it crowns the expectation of a new life that has long been planned by him, his profound desire for continuity and a loving, giving relationship. His wife’s pregnancy is observed with joy on his part and accompanied by him with diligence and love, confirming the good luck he has always enjoyed in life. During the wife’s pregnancy, she is directed by the doctor and by her husband to apply the most rigorous hygiene procedures during the pregnancy, making due use in the home of alcohol and disinfectant, laundry soap, brooms, mops and various kinds of cloth. The wife’s sole preoccupation during the pregnancy should be to ensure that her husband is given the necessary peace and quiet when he wishes to remain alone in his room or study
.

My father told me about the notebooks in the conversation we had after the fight, when I was thirteen. Up until then, he had kept them a secret, ashamed to show me or anyone else the proof that my grandfather had spent his final years in the manner one would expect of someone writing those entries — the period when my grandfather would allow no one to enter the study where he spent all day, the endless days necessary to complete what he must originally have intended to be far more than those sixteen volumes, and I can imagine my grandfather planning to create an entire encyclopedia,
as the world should be
, relating each line of each page of each of the far more than sixteen volumes to the fact that he needed and wanted and could now only bear to be alone, with my grandmother having to leave his food outside the study door, and my father was surprised once to see how long my grandfather’s beard had grown, and my father would often hear him talking to himself, and once my grandfather started shouting so loudly that my grandmother summoned two nurses and, from then on, my grandfather had to take medication, which didn’t make a great deal of difference, apart from stopping the shouting, because he continued to spend all his time alone.

My grandfather never talked about Auschwitz, and so my father had no option but to plunge into Primo Levi’s description of it: the men who steal soup from each other in Auschwitz, the men who pee as they run because they don’t have permission to go to the toilet during the working day in Auschwitz, the men who share their bed with other men and sleep with their face next to the feet of those other men and just hope that the latter haven’t trodden on the same floor as the men suffering from dysentery, and Primo Levi’s ability to bring home to us what it felt like to wake up and get dressed and look out at the snow on the first day of a winter that would last seven months and during which you would work fifteen-hour days with the water up to your knees, carrying sacks of chemical material, all of which helped my father to explain my grandfather’s final years. It’s easier to blame Auschwitz than to accept what happened to my grandfather. It’s easier to blame Auschwitz than to submit oneself to a painful exercise, which is what any child in my father’s position would do: seeing my grandfather not as victim, not as a grain of sand crushed by history, which would automatically make my father another grain of sand at the mercy of that same history, and there
is nothing easier than to feel almost proud to be that grain of sand, the one that survived the inferno and is here among us to tell the tale, as if my father were my grandfather and my grandfather were Primo Levi and the testimony of my father and my grandfather were the same as Primo Levi’s testimony — seeing my grandfather not as a victim, but as a man and a husband and a father, who should be judged just like any other man or husband or father.