"As it always is in life, a white period follows a black one, disappointments come after success. Everything changes, and must change. So it should be, so the world turns. I know this. I have no objection. All I can do is hope. Hope for a miracle. I sincerely wish, I desire with all my strength that my black period continues as long as possible, that it does not turn white. I do not like white. White is the color of powerlessness and damnation, the color of hospital ceilings and their sheets. Care and protection guaranteed, silence and peace: nothingness. The nothingness of hospital life flowing on without end. Black is the color of night and hope, the color of the night sky, the firm and clear backdrop of dreams, brief intervals of clarity between the endless orders, the white expanses of physical infirmity. It is the color of dream and fable, the color of the world behind closed eyelids. The color of freedom, the color I chose for my electric wheelchair".
Inverting the most common human aspirations and perspectives, Rubén Gallego makes black his destination, the trophy to be won. His entire life—his story told in Black on White (Adelphi, April 2004)—is marked by inverted truths: "I write of good, I write of victories, joys, and love. The victories and joys that a child of Spanish origin, born in Moscow in 1968, was able to experience after being separated from his mother and sent by communist Russia to special orphanages for the disabled.
"I am a hero"...a hero with cerebral palsy, a hero despite his limbs frozen, a hero by virtue of only two fingers he could move, or by the skill he acquired without a wheelchair—the ability to crawl through frozen corridors and reach the bathroom without troubling the attendants. A hero because of the vivid intelligence and clear heart that few are able to recognize in that "retarded" body.
You say he's intelligent? But he can't even walk!
Through these inverted truths, Rubén Gallego succeeds in captivating the reader—even one comfortably raised in the West—and draws him close to the paradoxical reality of suffering in which he grew up. Black on White truly tells the story of a hero's victories and joys; it is a fascinating polyptych that with images—scenes of life, characters—in strong, delicate, dignified colors, shows the miracle of a hope that never suffocates. Rubén recounts the attendants who insulted him, only to tell of the generous Russian women who cared for him with love; he tells of the loneliness of the ward to reveal the complicity and fraternal bonds that grew with his companions; he describes the terrible tastes and smells of some hospital meals, to help us understand the happiness he felt tasting his first pineapple:
The most beautiful moments of my childhood were tied to food, or rather to those who shared it with me, who offered it to me as a sign of friendship. Strange.
He describes the humiliating pity in some teachers' attitudes to tell of the solace that reading and education brought him: "I did not read simply to read. I wanted to understand how the world was made." He recalls with horror the months spent in a hospice—reserved for boys who, after the orphanage, could not be integrated into society, the antechamber to death—so as to describe the emotion, the relief, the euphoria he felt at his transfer to Novocherkassk. "It was a legend. They said that in the Novocherkassk orphanage you ate potatoes every day, summer and winter. They said that tomatoes grew in Novocherkassk. Not just tomatoes. In that fabulous city they grew apricots, watermelons, and melons, and also walnuts and corn, sweet peppers and zucchini".
There is one corner of Rubén's heart into which no ray of light can reach—the place reserved for the thought of his grandfather, the great and powerful secretary of the Spanish Communist Party in exile. The man who could have changed the course of his life with a letter or a word, or with a regular visit—a memory that would have nourished joy for years to come.
At Novocherkassk, Rubén's life changes. The reader does not know by what chance hope became opportunity, or how the disabled boy conquered freedom with all it entails: the possibility of leaving Russia, of finding his mother again, of marrying, of becoming a father.
To the black of finally fought battles, Rubén alludes almost in passing, rapid glimpses from which one grasps the final defeat of "Never"—"the most terrible of all words used by men"—and the great possibilities of the force within each of us. The force that overcomes every barrier and wins.
And when I in turn pass through the ranks of affable, sterile mannequins in white coats and finally reach my terminus, my own eternal night, behind me there will remain only letters of the alphabet. My letters, my black letters on a white background. I hope so.
Silvia Gusmano, 2004