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In the previous image: Tito and I are walking in Venice. I am counting his steps, one by one.
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A passage from my fourth and last novel.
The protagonist, Pimenta Bueno, who has injured one foot and is unable to walk, is being carried on the back of his servant, Azor:
PIMENTA BUENO: Count the number of steps to Utiariti.
AZOR: One … two … three …
PIMENTA BUENO: I want to work out how far we are from our goal.
AZOR: … six … seven … eight …
PIMENTA BUENO: It can’t be many more kilometers now.
AZOR: … ten … eleven … twelve …
PIMENTA BUENO: We’ve been walking for more than six hours.
AZOR: … fifteen … sixteen … seventeen …
PIMENTA BUENO: According to my road map, we should have arrived by now.
AZOR: … twenty … twenty-one … twenty-two …
PIMENTA BUENO: Never trust Brazilian maps.
AZOR: … twenty-four … twenty-five … twenty-six …
PIMENTA BUENO: We always get the measurements all wrong.
AZOR: … twenty-eight … twenty-nine … thirty …
PIMENTA BUENO: We lack mathematical reasoning.
AZOR: … thirty-two … thirty-three … thirty-four …
PIMENTA BUENO: We lack any real familiarity with numbers.
AZOR: Is it thirty-six or thirty-seven?
PIMENTA BUENO: What do you mean?
AZOR: I’ve lost count.
PIMENTA BUENO: You’ve lost count?
AZOR: I can’t remember if I’ve taken thirty-six or thirty-seven steps.
PIMENTA BUENO: Start again.
AZOR: From zero?
PIMENTA BUENO: From zero.
AZOR: One … two … three …
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The novel was entitled Against Brazil.
It was published in 1998, two years before Tito was born and ten years before he took his three hundred and fifty-nine steps.
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Counting Tito’s steps in Venice, I could still reason, but only “occasionally,” and I could even acquire knowledge, but only the knowledge I could pick up “without stooping, or reach without pains.”
Counting the steps of Pimenta Bueno in Mato Grosso, though, I was only able to exhibit the kind of academic pride that could be “taught to any schoolboy in a week.”
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For Marcel Proust real life, the only fully lived life, was literature. For me, real life, the only fully lived life, became Tito. After his birth, I rejected literature and went off to earn some money.
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To quote myself again:
Rimbaud beat up Verlaine. I envy Rimbaud. I would like to have beaten up Verlaine. I would like to have beaten up any symbolist poet. Verlaine took his revenge on Rimbaud some years later in a hotel room, firing two shots at him. I also envy Verlaine. He just wasn’t a good enough marksman. In 1875, Rimbaud rejected literature and went off to earn some money. In only sixteen years, he did everything that anyone with an ounce of integrity would have wanted to do: he plunged into the Ethiopian desert; he bought and sold slaves; he trafficked guns of many calibres, thus facilitating the massacre of thousands of innocents; he got a tumor in his knee and had his leg amputated; he died alone in Marseille in terrible pain and praying to God, who, in his capricious way, refused to help him.
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When Tito walked three hundred and fifty-nine steps on 11 January 2008, I was earning money writing a weekly column for the magazine Veja. I also earned money from Veja Online, writing a weekly comment column, and from Manhattan Connection, taking part in one TV program a week.
I became the Rimbaud of cerebral palsy. Journalism was my Ethiopia.
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In the previous image: the propaganda from the Action T4 program, comparing the money the state spent each day on an invalid — 5.50 reichsmarks — with the amount spent each day on a family of five — the same 5.50 reichsmarks.
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Alfred Hoche was one of the inspirations behind the Action T4 program.
In 1920, in a small work entitled Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Being Lived, he calculated the financial burden of invalidity:
I estimate that the average annual expense of keeping an idiot alive to be one thousand three hundred marks. It doesn’t take much intelligence to calculate the enormous burden this imposes on the national wealth for an entirely unproductive end.
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Twenty years later, these calculations were submitted to a detailed analysis by the economists of the Third Reich.
A chart preserved in the euthanasia center at Schloss Hartheim — that’s right, under the command of Franz Stangl — calculated that the killing of 70,273 invalids by 1 September 1941 had saved the economy 245,955 reichsmarks and 50 reichspfennigs a day.
This was the equivalent, over a period of ten years, of 400,244,520 kilos of food, among which: 189,737,160 kilos of potatoes, 13,492,440 kilos of meat and sausages, 3,794,760 kilos of margarine, 531,240 kilos of bacon, 12,649,200 kilos of flour, 5,902,920 kilos of jam and, lastly, 33,731,040 eggs.
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To go back to Tommaso Rangone: the food that proved most harmful to the health of the people with cerebral palsy who were killed under the Action T4 program was the food they stopped eating.
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In the case we brought against Venice Hospital, we had — just like those Third Reich economists — to add up all the money spent on Tito’s cerebral palsy.
What with physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, equitherapy, a classroom assistant, an orthopedic specialist, a neurologist, an anesthetist, medical tests, Botox, a communicator, a walker, orthopedic callipers, the hospital in New York, the hospital in Boston, plus legal expenses, Tito cost, on average, 230 reais a day.
That is the equivalent, over ten years, of 3,497,916 eggs.
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Because of the money they were taking from society, the people with cerebral palsy who were killed under the Action T4 program were called “bloodsuckers” or “parasites.”
My parasite was Tito.
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