The Palazzo Dario was “good for God’s worship.” The Palazzo Corner was “good for man’s worship.”
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I never worshipped God. I never worshipped Man. However, I began to worship Tito. I began to worship domestic life. My gospel is an electricity bill. My temple is a greengrocer’s shop.
Tito is Everything. A tomato is Everything.
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The Palazzo Dario and the Palazzo Corner have spent five hundred years debating the great themes of humanity, shouting their arguments to each other across the Grand Canal.
If the Palazzo Dario was Socrates, the Palazzo Corner was Meletus. If the Palazzo Dario was Dante Alighieri, the Palazzo Corner was Farinata degli Uberti. If the Palazzo Dario was Don Quixote, the Palazzo Corner was Sancho Panza. If the Palazzo Dario was Naphta, the Palazzo Corner was Settembrini. If the Palazzo Dario was Lou Costello, the Palazzo Corner was Bud Abbott.
Only Venice could give me this.
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After designing the Palazzo Corner, Jacopo Sansovino was commissioned to design the reading room of the Biblioteca Marciana — St. Mark’s Library.
Pride of Science and Pride of State revealed themselves in his imposing vaulted ceiling in the Roman style.
In 1545, the ceiling collapsed.
That’s right: The Fall.
Jacopo Sansovino was arrested and ordered to rebuild the reading room in the Biblioteca Marciana at his own expense. Jacopo Sansovino was forced to replace the imposing Roman-style vaulted ceiling with a flat ceiling.
I am the flat ceiling of cerebral palsy.
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I moved to Venice in 1987. I was twenty-four years old.
For me, the best thing about Venice was its regressive nature. For me, the best thing about Venice was its nonconformist reactionaryism.
Living there was like living in an Amish town. I saw Venice as an Amish town for intellectuals. Its lofty irrationality is in sharp contrast to the enlightened popularism of my time. Its splendidly anachronistic nature makes a mockery of any kind of haughty progressivism.
A child from an Amish village who had not been allowed to be vaccinated could die of measles. In Venice, as I discovered some years later, a child could die at birth.
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When I moved to Venice, I was writing my first novel.
After writing my first novel, I wrote my second novel. After writing my second novel, I wrote my third novel. After writing my third novel, I wrote my fourth novel.
When Tito was born, I was writing my fifth novel.
That was how I saw my future: living in Venice and jumping from novel to novel.
Tito’s birth changed all that.
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The first months of Tito’s life were just like any other baby’s.
He breastfed. He was taken for walks. He slept.
Every six weeks, we took him to the neurology department in Padua Hospital.
The doctors tested his reflexes and measured the size of his brain.
The results were always perfectly normal. The doctors assumed that Tito had escaped unharmed from his bungled birth.
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In the previous image: a perfectly normal Tito.
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Just before he was six months old, Tito went for another examination at Padua Hospital.
His neurologist lay him face down on the stretcher. At that moment, he should have rolled over onto his back. Instead, he merely waved his little arms about, but — like a turtle — he was unable to turn over.
That was the first sign that he had cerebral palsy.
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I had found out that my wife was pregnant exactly one year before.
I wrote about it on 23 February 2000 in my column in the magazine Veja.
I started by saying that, up until then, my rejection of fatherhood had been one of the rare, unquestioned certainties of my life. I went on to say that my wish — and I quote word for word — was to have “a turtle child, and whenever he became too agitated, I would just have to roll him onto his back and he would lie there, silently waving his little arms.”
I got my turtle child.
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Some days after the examination at Padua Hospital, we received the results through the post. According to the neurologist, Tito had suffered “damage to the extrapyramidal system.”
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I know how to read.
Reading is my job. I think by reading. I feel by reading. When we received the result of the examination at Padua Hospital, I read all about the extrapyramidal system. Nothing I read prepared me for what we were about to discover.
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Now I know what Tito has.
According to the neurologists who have examined him over the last few years, the damage to his thalamus was caused by his bungled birth. The thalamus is part of the extrapyramidal system. The damage is infinitesimal, so much so that no machine has ever yet managed to detect it. But it’s serious enough to affect all his movements.
Tito can’t walk, pick things up or talk normally.
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After examining Tito, the neurologist at Padua Hospital sent him to a physiotherapist at Venice Hospital.
During the weeks that followed, the physiotherapist put him through a series of tests.
It was only when all the tests were over that — with a feeling of fear and panic — I first heard the term which, from that moment on, would come to dominate my life.
Tito had cerebral palsy.
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The fear lasted a week.
Then it passed.
The reason why it took only a week for the fear to pass was a fall.
Tito was sitting on my lap. I was sitting on the sofa in the living room reading the newspaper. My wife, who was rushing about, caught her foot on the rug and fell flat on her face in front of us. When Tito saw her fall, he laughed out loud. We both pretended to fall over. And he laughed and laughed and laughed. And we laughed with him.
Tito’s cerebral palsy immediately became more familiar. Slapstick was a language we all understood.
Tito falls. My wife falls. I fall.
What unites us — what will always unite us — is the fall.
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(Picture Credit 1.11)
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In the previous image: Abbott and Costello Go to Mars.
On a voyage into outer space, Lou Costello gets his astronaut’s boot caught in a storm drain and falls over when he wrenches it free.
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Francesca Martinez is a comedian.