When I was Stupid

Damn Professor Zimmergaut. Who asked him to make that hole in my brain? To say it as it is, it is my mother’s fault. Yes, okay, but what about me? Did they inquire if it suited me? “But you were mentally incapacitated”, they would say. “They” are my family. “And I was better off!” I would answer, indeed, I answer, because for four months now, I have been repeating it to everyone. To be precise, four months minus twenty days. I spent the first five to regain consciousness, the other fifteen to settle down a bit. The real tragedy began later.

When my mother was handed a bloody bundle in her arms about twenty years ago, she didn’t immediately realize that I was a Mongoloid. Down, as they say now, or rather, Zimmergaut, after the operation. She undrstood it the next day, when she heard the others say that I was a wretch. The kindest called me a monster.

She wanted to throw me away, on the spot, then she thought better of it and took me home. At first it was like with the other three she’d had: suckling, peeing, drooling. All as expected, so that it seemed almost impossible that I was not normal. I mean, she had a baby, she smelled him, sucked his little hands, stuffed his tit in his mouth and all that.

It was when I started bouncing around on my feet that she noticed the difference. As for understanding, I too understood, of course, but as a dog understands. Come here, mind there, are you hungry? But I was ugly, and I got worse every month. Drool, flattened nape, big hands always stuck between the teeth, Chinese eyes but of a stupid Chinese. I haven’t been able to say “mom” for years, and even when Zimmergaut drilled my skull, I never could get it right. My siblings were afraid of me. Mom loved me. But she cried every day.

But these were Mom’s problems, not mine. I was fine. I spent the afternoons disassembling my sister Irene’s dolls. She screamed and I laughed, in that slobbering way I laughed, and then I turned on the TV. Everything, from cartoons to anti-grease detergent, was full of colors, sounds, lights, cute people who smiled. Nothing to do with what they do on television now.

And to think that I have passed twenty years like this! Time didn’t pass then, it was I who was in the middle of it. I’ve been in it for twenty years and it didn’t bother me. No, boredom was a word I didn’t know. I was like a baby in the crib. I looked at my hands and the hands were enough. I sucked my thumb and there was everything in the thumb. A lot of fun.

Even when my sister Irene drowned in the goldfish tank in the park (because I had pushed her while mother was talking to the newsagent) I remained there blessed watching the fish biting into her carrot-colored locks.

I did not yet know that somewhere there was a cursed Professor Zimmergaut who was already experimenting with monkeys while waiting to have me on hand.

It was the big brother who told mom that in Austria this brain full of beer operated those like myself. He claimed that I was hopeless, that I could no longer be kept at home, that sooner or later I would kill the whole family.

Poor mother, she immediately threw me on the first train to Vienna. She did not want to abandon me, she cared about me, and, underneath, she also harbored the hope that the family idiot would become the top of the class. Maybe he even got a degree.

They visit me, they tease me, they x-ray me in all positions, like a chop on the grill and then off to the operating room.

I woke up four months ago and the first thing I saw was an old woman snoring in the next chair. That crone then turned out to be my mother. Given that it was impossible that in the five days of my operation she had aged thirty years, I had to admit that perhaps she had always been like this, only I hadn’t noticed it before. I had always seen her beautiful, with red hair like Irene’s, and young. But you know, before I was stupid.

When they brought me home, I staggered here and there without recognizing anything. The walls were smaller than I remembered them, the ceiling lower, my sister more clumsy, the kitchen dirtier, the dog old and mangy.

I also discovered that I did not have a father. When I asked about a little girl with red curls and skinned knees, they told me that I had drowned her thirteen years earlier.

The mirror, of which I had never cared, if not just enough to smile at another child like me, now sent me the image of a being of irremediable ugliness, with alien and grotesquely oriental features. A kind of mix between a Tartar and E.T. Honestly, I did not find much comfort that now, as Father Lattanzio pointed out, “my face shone with the sublime light of the intellect”.

In the days that followed, I discovered that God does not exist and neither does Santa Claus, I discovered that my brother hated me and my sister was afraid of me. I discovered that the neighbors had stopped taking pity, and would have gladly fed me to the dog. I realized that what I had always believed to be giant papier-mâché flowers were billboards; I learned that you can buy three drums of detergent for the price of two and that the horns are not organ pipes.

Even today, when I work as a bartender’s assistant, I don’t understand why the city looks so ugly when I go home in the evening along Corso Garibaldi illuminated by street lamps. I finish work at six, I collect the leftovers for the dog, then I stop to chat with the tramps of Ponte S. Giovanni. Even mom has stopped waiting for me at the window by now.

But perhaps all is not lost. Yesterday, at the bar, I came across an announcement. There seems to be a professor in Milan who is capable of helping the Zimmergauts.

It will take me at least ten years of savings to put aside the amount they told me over the phone this morning. But I’ll make it. I will save money on the cinema and the newspapers, I will work overtime and in the end I will be able to go back to what I was before.