In almost complete immobility—able to move only his neck and head—Flavio, a 24-year-old, soars through extraordinary mental acrobatics, exploring the world within him and the world around him.
He writes with the help of a computer. Since childhood, he has lived with an illness that initially seemed like infantile paralysis but was diagnosed as spinal muscular atrophy after hospitalization at the Gaslini Hospital in Genoa. He attended school with excellent grades through his second year of scientific lyceum. Then came another hospitalization, in a coma. Death, as he recounts it, reached the patient in the next bed and "missed him by three meters." He survived, but the illness had progressed, and since then he has been nearly completely immobilized.
In his book—part autobiography, part profound reflection on his life and his handicap—he offers us the chance to know, as much as we are able, that "house not quite familiar" which is his body: the body that limits him, so sensitive and so still.
In truth, it is his whole self that he allows us to approach. That bridge he dreams of—the one that might lead others, or a young woman, to him, and him to them—he has already built it within himself. As the chapters unfold and his life and thoughts pass before our eyes, this capacity for "acrobatics" and his willingness to find what is good despite everything grows more and more compelling. Through imagination and clear-eyed observation alike, in human relationships and in solitude, his awareness deepens gradually into a maturity that becomes growth for us, friendship toward him, gratitude.
And we want to say to him: "Thank you, Flavio, for the effort you made for us. What you write, we wish we could have sensed on our own, but it seemed impossible until you said it so well, with your strong words, sincere and even smiling. The bridge you show us leads toward us too. And you seem to have built it also for all those who live as you do and cannot find words; you built it for all of us who read you and who cannot grasp the small or great sign that life offers."
We will remember this growth of yours, which must become ours too, this capacity of yours to observe, to overcome your handicap, and to live fully. We will remember your amused smile, and the effort (yet also the pleasure, we feel it) that your journey within yourself and toward us has cost you."
- Natalia Livi, 1994
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