It's Raining Cows
One day, amused, Massimo—one of the young men living in the Capodarco Community in Rome—observed that it was raining cows. Nearly ten years later, one of his fellow conscientious objectors answered him with a film: comic, moving, true. The director Luca Vendruscolo had returned to Capodarco to realize a project and a dream. He enlisted professional actors and community members. He filmed the endless "shifts" with Renato, paralyzed by accident, involved in more or less lawful dealings, anything but affable; the effort required to learn to listen to Lela, a vivacious fifteen-year-old girl, quadriplegic, who does not speak but somehow manages to say everything; the delicate intimacy that emerges when you wash and change Alex for the first time; the love for Beatrice, beautiful and alluring in her wheelchair. "It's Raining Cows" tells, at times with deliberately paradoxical tone, a story of mystery and falling in love. It is the story of the deep bonds that a difficult community has managed to forge with so many frightened, often reluctant residents. The protagonists—Matteo and the other civil service workers—allow themselves to be drawn into a surreal everyday life, and slowly they recognize in it the same rules that govern the world outside. For one year they share the lives of people they have never met and did not choose. And from those people they receive a teaching they will carry forever: the value of respect for every human being and for their autonomy.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Mark Haddon's "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" is the work of an English writer in his forties. It reads almost like a mystery, but it is also a story of personal growth—of battles fought and won against one's own terrors and the hostilities that surround you. The narrator is a fifteen-year-old boy with autism, Asperger's syndrome. His mother is absent, perhaps dead. His father loves him but sometimes loses his temper or lies. His neighbors are poor, aggressive, or weak and elderly. But Siobhan, a young educator, is his friend. She believes in his abilities. She offers him a few, clear, and remarkably useful pieces of advice that help him navigate the jungle of life and his own thoughts. And Christopher, drawing on a strength of spirit and capacity for intuition he discovers within himself, brings his investigation to its end. He takes his first solo journey. He passes his mathematics exams—exams that will allow him a life, at least in part, different from before. An adventure and a journey that signify, in the classical sense, the passage from a condition of childhood, sheltered and shaped by adults, toward the beginning of a difficult but more conscious adolescence.
Achilles Heel
"Achilles Heel" is the "epic-modern" novel by Stefano Benni, the satirical author of many successful books. Let us say at once: this is a book written for adult readers. Written in realistic language, it presents situations and expresses convictions that may trouble and displease many of our readers. We understand that. And yet it seems to us an honest book, authentic, born from one of those extraordinary encounters that life sometimes grants us. It tells the story of a brief, difficult, passionate friendship between Ulysses—a writer in crisis, blocked creatively, anxious about his work, scornful and critical, in love and unfaithful—and Achilles, a sick and deformed boy, intelligent and highly educated, confined before a computer, persecuted by invincible obsessions, self-imprisoned in his father's house for terror of forced admission to a care facility. Ulysses and Achilles: two opposite forms of suffering, yet an immediate revelation of how different they are. One has chosen how to be. The other faces an absolute, total impossibility of choice.
We who have seen and read so much about disability, for one reason or another—how are we to understand the attention of these new writers and filmmakers to the world of disability?
Achilles contacts Ulysses by email, reveals himself, establishes an initial pact, and gives him no respite, invading his days with his suffering, his messages, his family troubles. Ulysses observes him, listens to him, fears him, admires him, indulges him. And the reader senses clearly that the experience is marking him. "I'm not who I was before," he says simply, after Achilles dies.
We who have read and seen so much about disability—for professional reasons, for interest—how are we to interpret the attention of these new writers, screenwriters, and directors to the world of disability?
Perhaps it is the new fragilities we see more and more in human beings, the fear we feel for the world's future, that drive them now more than ever to investigate the secret of every life—without sentimentality, without romantic elevation, but with respect and authenticity.
And perhaps it is no accident that the impulse to forge such new and genuine human relationships has emerged after the collapse of great ideals, entire systems of values.
"They," through the testimony of their difficult lives, through the courage of their resistance, force us to put ourselves at stake, to acknowledge our cowardice, our privileges, and often the misuse we make of them.
Once you meet, for them and for us it becomes a matter of friendship and honesty.
Achilles is the innocent hero who resists as long as he can, with every means available, until death itself, the catastrophe that hangs over him. Ulysses—the bitter observer of a society he condemns but to which he is also bound and compromised—is chosen as witness and companion in the final phase of this existential journey. It will leave him, for a brief time, as if stunned, but destined afterward to be only and forever a "nearly..."—like all of us.
Tea Cabras, 2003