Born Twice (Vintage International) Read Free

guilt is not imaginary, like yours. Mine doesn’t stem from childhood traumas, nor is it rooted in my unconscious. I’m guilty on several counts.”
    “Like what? The baby was born this way because of the doctors’ mistakes, not yours!”
    “I made mistakes too.”
    “When?”
    “When she was pregnant and you reappeared in my life.”
    “I knew you’d say it was my fault! I could have bet on it,” she says bitterly.
    “I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about me.” She waits for me to go on. “If I had been more present, maybe things would have been different.”
    She is startled. “Where, at the hospital? What could you have done? You couldn’t have changed anything!”
    “No, before. During the pregnancy. I’m referring to how upset she was about us.”
    She clutches the metal armrests of the chair.
    “You told me she didn’t know!”
    “She guessed.” I’m not sure if that’s completely true; it just comes to me.
    “All you do is lie—to her and to me!”
    “The doctors asked her whether she suffered during the pregnancy.”
    “What did she say?”
    “She said no, but I think she said it to protect me.”
    “I’m amazed by how much you’ve hidden from me!” she says angrily. “Why are you saying this now, to make yourself feel better?”
    “No, because I need to know if it had any effect on the baby. The doctors don’t rule it out.”
    “Did they say anything specifically?” she asks uneasily.
    “No, just in general.”
    “They say all kinds of things! Don’t torture yourself like this.” Then, with the streak of brutality that has always surprised me, coming from that youthful face of hers, she adds, “Think about babies born in wartime.”
    I have no reply. Ours has been a kind of war: a war of suspicion and betrayal, with traps and defeats, located somewhere between tenderness, hate, and fear.
    “You think that by confessing you’ll be able to make amends,” she says. “But you have to look at things differently. You’re not as guilty as you would believe. You share the guilt.”
    “With whom—you?”
    “No, her.”
    “Is that what your analyst would have you believe?”

Colleagues
     
    A colleague of mine, a teacher of math and physics, recently had a growth removed from his armpit. The operation seems to have made him particularly forthcoming on medical matters. He asks me about Paolo. I tell him the baby’s been discharged, the tremors have ceased, and though there is no local epileptic center—he devours my every word—the cortex has suffered some indirect damage. Still, according to the pediatrician who’s been following his case, the symptoms may never come back. The case studies are reassuring, though there is a slight chance that the symptoms will return briefly during adolescence.
    “Never again!” he exclaims, shaking his finger in a gesture that is both threatening and prophetic. “You’ll never be able to rest easy again. There’ll always be this sword of Damocles over your head!”
    I look at him in bewilderment. I don’t know how to react. I don’t understand what he’s trying to tell me. And yet it really is quite simple.
    “Once there have been cerebral lesions, even indirectly, there will always be”—and here he shakes his finger again— “the risk of a seizure.”
    “Thank you for telling me,” I say, in a voice not my own.
    “Not at all, my friend,” he says. “I know it seems harsh, but it’s always better to know things than to ignore them.”
    “Yes, of course,” I reply.
    My eyes glaze over. I head for the door. I’ll never forget this, I think to myself. And, in fact, I never have.

The Crystal Ball
     
    It’s an image favored by doctors who say they don’t have one when they really don’t want to comment on the future. “If only I had a crystal ball!” they say with a sigh, frowning in what they think of as wise perplexity. Or, rudely and authoritatively, they’ll say, “We don’t use crystal balls, you