. . .
Arnold spent much of his convalescence talking to Grandpa Jacobo. But as soon as the bandage came off, he forgot about the connection and went about his normal four-year-old business—asking questions. Anna would read to him—picture books about animals.
“Why is a fox called a fox?” he asked.
“It’s called a fox just in English. In Italy, it’s called un volpe.”
“But it’s a fox? The same fox?”
“It’s the same fox, but it has a different name.”
“How can it have a different name if it’s the same?”
“I don’t know. It just does. Italians call things differently than Americans.”
He began to cry.
Or, another time:
“Would you drink a glass of my spit? If I filled a glass with my spit?”
“No! Don’t be disgusting.”
“Would you drink a glass of your own spit? You spit into a glass until it’s full, then you drink it?”
“Arnold, enough of spit!”
“Would you?”
“No!”
“But what’s wrong with spit? You swallow your spit and you don’t mind. You swallow lots of your own spit.”
“Arnold, zitto!”
“Spit, spit, spit!” and more tears.
The child began to perceive a rigid stupidity among adults, even his own parents, who knew most things. Did time have a beginning? he wanted to know when he was learning about clocks. If you went back and back, would you get to a place where there was no more back? He asked every grownup he met—it was his question of the month. No one would take it seriously. “I don’t know.” Period. Or, “Who knows?” Why weren’t they perplexed, or even interested? This was no idea-question, it was a real question. He was trying to understand. Surely grownups must know simple things like that. Did time ever begin? Or will it ever end? They just took the whole thing for granted. “That’s how things are. Talking isn’t going to change them. Discussing is a waste of time waste of time waste of time.” What else did he have to do?
At four and three-quarters he hit the books for answers. He didn’t know how to read, but he could do research anyway. There was a big book filled with pictures of paintings and sculptures and buildings, the 1926 edition of Art Through the Ages. There was the Bible and La Bibbia Santa. Did God speak English or Italian? If He was so smart, maybe He spoke both. There was La Divina Commedia, with scary etchings; Italian Through Pictures, a book with funny stick people pointing at themselves; The Blue Guide to Italy with a string bookmark at the map of Ferrara, page 262. There was a book called The Naked and the Dead with no pictures at all, neither naked people nor dead ones. And that was it. Some cooking magazines.
His favorite was Art Through the Ages. It had so much to show him—not just the world of artists and architects but the whole possibility of Otherness other-than-Mansfield. There was a picture of a big church in Milan, in Italy, near where his mama had lived, and Milan was very far away. And even if you could only see one building, for Arnold it was proof that Milan existed, proof that Italy existed, proof that even far away, things existed.
Nobody ever thought of reading Art Through the Ages to him, and when he asked for it, he was told it wasn’t a reading book, it was a looking-at book. So he looked and looked at the pictures, and he invented stories about them, for example, a story about the naked lady standing on a seashell, and why she was standing on a seashell, and why she was naked. His father didn’t like him looking at naked ladies, but his mother let him anyway. She had Botticelli hands. When she looked at the book with him, she told him about how this building or that painting had been destroyed in the war. In this way he learned about destruction.
Arnold was determined to learn to read since, except for Art Through the Ages, there seemed to be in books many more words than pictures. So the words must be more important, right? He could make up his own stories, but bookwords would tell him the real stories.
It was an epiphany. The marks on the pages turned out to be instructions about sounds. If he could learn the sounds and put them together, he would wind up with—words. Amazing! Wouldn’t it have been easier just to have little pictures for everything? Stick figures like the ones in the book to learn Italian? But no. This was the way the grownups did it, and they must be right. George and Anna taught him the alphabet. He cried when he found out that “c” could be pronounced “k” or “s.” Why do you need “c” at all if it doesn’t have its own sound? His parents didn’t know. When “ph” and “qu” showed up, Arnold didn’t cry but became furious, then petulant. By this time, he was beginning to sense some conspiracy of the old against the young. If you can’t trust grownups, whom can you trust?
But “c,” “g,” “ph,” and “qu” became finally minor annoyances—exceptions to the fascinating task of stringing letters together to arrive at—miraculous—familiar words! Each time a difficult sound sequence popped into place, he experienced a tingling up the back of his neck. Sounding out words: what a clever and good thing to do. Noble. Like scientists and detectives. The act of reading was as fascinating as the content—but daunting, too. Would he now have to read everything, of which he was sure there was much? Would he be allowed to stop if he wanted to? Not yet five, he was cognizant of some anticipatory, menacing commitment.
And if he could read, he would have to write. Assiduous, he practiced his alphabet. His first written note—vetted by his horrified mother—was to his friend, Sam. It read, “YU AR A GRATE BIG DOODEE HED, AND I WILL FLUSH YU DOWIN THE TOYLET.” She wouldn’t let him send it.
Why not? Why not? He had worked so hard on it. The letters were all recognizable—even neat. Anna explained that “doody” was not a nice word, and that Sam would not like being called a doody-head and might not want to be friends with him. “But he calls me a doody-head.” And, again, he burst out crying. Eventually, Arnold gathered that there were good words, which you were allowed to say and write, and bad words, which you were not. But what made a good word good and a bad word bad? Grownups were nuts.
Needless to say, when he started school that fall of 1956, he found Dick and Jane, whose mother had two legs, not one and a half, insufferably stupid. They seemed to live in a world only vaguely related to his own, some kind of harmless, cute, safe place, without dirty words, without the bombs and dead people his mother would talk about, without the niggers who could be his friends after school but who couldn’t go to school with him, and whom people hanged on the flagpole.
“Mama,” he called out during a self-assigned homework session, “you know what?”
“What?” Anna turned delightedly to her little scholar.
“There’s no story in the Dick and Jane story.”
“What do you mean? Doesn’t the dog run with the ball, and . . .”
“I mean like the story of the naked lady on the seashell, or the girl turning into a tree.”
Though Anna found them charming, such thoughts did not bode well for his career at Mansfield Elementary. He did not love school; he loved his own gathering of words, which revealed to him the infinite world of things, the many forms of the specific, of the substance and strategy of the world. He was the best reader in his class, he was popular, he got the best marks in all his subjects, but he became expert in deceit. Verbosity, exile, and cunning.
Four
You will remain in truth as long as you maneuver within its limits.
Edmond Jabès, Hand and Dial
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