Diary of the Fall Read Free

surrounded by a green area with benches and flower beds, and from there we could see the nurses, the visiting relatives, the occasional uniformed care assistant, and sometimes a gentleman in a motorized wheelchair equipped with an oxygen cylinder. My grandmother and her friend discussed the latest TV soap, the violence reported in the newspapers, how people in the street were growing ever ruder and the cold days ever longer, and at no point in the conversation, nor in any conversation I had with my grandmother until she died, more or less as her friend in the home had done, except without a heart attack along the way, and the stroke she had was so massive that it spared everyone having to see her lying in bed during that eternity in which the person can neither speak nor move — at no point in her life did my grandmother mention my grandfather.
18.
    I mean, sometimes she would say very obvious things, that my grandfather didn’t talk much, that he sleptin long-sleeved pajamas even in summer, that when they were first married he would do fifteen minutes of exercises when he got up, and that he once fell off the ladder he would use to get into the loft, and I could continue that list until there were twenty items or perhaps even thirty, but at no point in all those years did she tell me the most important thing about him.
19.
    In the final years of his life, my grandfather spent the whole day in his study. Only after he died did we find out what he had been doing there, notebooks and more notebooks filled with tiny writing, and only when I read what he had written did I finally understand what he had been through. It was then that his experience stopped being merely historical, merely collective, merely attached to some abstract moral, in the sense that Auschwitz became a kind of landmark in which you believe with all the force of your education, your reading, all the debates you’ve heard on the subject, the positions you’ve solemnly defended, the vehemently condemnatory statements you’ve made without for a second feeling as if any of that experience were truly yours.

20.
    If I had to speak about something that was truly mine, I would start with the story of that classmate who fell at the party. About how he reappeared at school months later. About how I found the courage to go over to him and speak and ask a question when the two of us were waiting in the corridor for the next class and make some comment regarding the following week’s test or the teacher’s dandruff-covered jacket, and about the way in which he responded to my comment, as if we were having a perfectly normal conversation and as if either of us could possibly forget that he was wearing an orthopedic corset, and that whenever he stood up it felt as if everyone were watching to see if he walked any differently, raising one foot higher than the other, a slightly irregular rhythm that would stay with him forever, as it would with the other boys who were there at that party.
21.
    My classmate’s name was João, and as we grew closer I learned that: (a) his father sold cotton candy in the park because he didn’t earn enough as a bus conductor; (b) his father had brought him up alone because João’s mother had died before she was forty; (c) afterhis mother died, his father never married again or had more children or even a girlfriend.
22.
    About João I learned that: (a) he never said anything to his father about getting buried in sand every day; (b) he told him that the reason he never phoned up a friend to go out to play was because he preferred to stay at home studying; (c) he never attributed any of his problems at school to the fact that he wasn’t Jewish.
23.
    My school had a tradition of getting students into the best universities, the ones that produced industrialists, engineers and lawyers. João’s father thought it was worth the sacrifice to enroll João in such a prestigious school, and through the scholarship program he managed to get an