Francesco and I

I don’t know why in almost two years of the mailing list I have never talked about me and my brother.
Maybe because it happened many times in self-help groups I joined in the same period and before, or maybe, more likely, because I didn’t feel like doing so and the few times I felt like it, the moment passed, or I didn’t feel like feeling like it…
I also have to say that it took me more than a week to decide to write down the few things I will tell today.
I hope, for me as well as for you, not to have lost all the emotional charge kindled by that brief moment of ecstasy.
It was a Friday, around 1 o’clock in the afternoon.
Francesco works at McDonald's from 9.30am to 1.30pm, his days off are Tuesdays and Sundays. As a relative, as a brother, I also sometimes have difficulty in filtering his moods when he returns from work and heaps upon you the hostility bottled up from the moment he walked out the door at 8.20am. The shower "every" morning (a ‘Utopia’), buses that never come, cars blowing their horns, scooters crashing and frightening him, colleagues on his back and picking on him when they see him sleepy: all things that have bothered him or that didn’t go just as he wanted to are precisely summed up as soon as he enters the house.
Now I don’t live with my parents any more, and I don’t hear these nags so often anymore. Still, now as before (to this day Francesco has been working at McDonald's for 8 years), I know that more or less something has gone wrong in his morning at work. And now as before I also know that my brother is in good company, definitely not being the only employee who has to face every morning the inconveniences of work, the moods of his colleagues, the sarcasm of his superiors; on the contrary, besides listening to his remonstrances, I have to put up with the almost daily ones of my fiancée. Stating which inevitably makes me compare Francesco with all other people: all of them, including him, have their own way to face the tricks of a workday. Hence another sacred statement, saying that for our brothers and sisters, with a shade of generality, the matter is a bit different, since they remain always and anyhow (with permission of certain assistants) people with a mental handicap. In conclusion, my favourite way of thinking is a bit ‘Solomonic’ I’m afraid, but basically we are all very different.
Having performed all liberal-progressive duties and having immolated a tribute to banality, I may return to talk about that Friday, clearly feeling a discomfort inside which is the ultimate reason for the silly things I’ve just written.
Francesco needed to work another half hour, therefore, after hanging around in the restaurant, I stayed at the entrance, trying not to attract attention and observing him while he was preparing drinks, his usual task in the organisational fast food structure, his link in the global chain. My friends, I tell you what: if I had, which I don’t, the tendency to show my emotions in a natural and instinctive way, in that moment my eyes would have been filled with tears, my sight dimmed, and I would have had to search my pockets to find a handkerchief, a dirty one, to quickly dry the tracts of those karmic tears. Instead, as barren as a brick, I stayed there, half stupefied and half ecstatic, watching my brother tapping Coca-Cola, nodding to himself for carrying the operation through successfully, and starting all over again.
It was so reassuring to see him integrated – how many terms could I have skipped if I weren’t the brother of a disabled person… – among his colleagues, who actually, besides picking on him, treat him respectfully and caringly; so satisfying to know that even when he’s not with his family, with me (and I mean: with me!), he can be safe, helpful, and find his feet; he being so vulnerable, easy to manipulate, submissive (but when he feels like it, determined, sturdy, strengthened). My being incognito lasted only five minutes: he didn’t need any longer to turn round and understand his brother was there. Yet, let me say from the bottom of my heart: it was five beautiful minutes, pure, crystalline emotions, a hyperbole of fierceness, impotence, and joy, till the culminating moment, when I believed I could slowly lift form the ground, like those Mexican mediums asserting to acquire, in the moment of utmost concentration (and after a generous doze of mescaline), the faculty of soaring in the air. After those inveterate-voyeur’s five minutes, posing like an old fashioned mannequin, Francesco turned to my side, looked at me for a second, turned back to the Sprite cup that was almost full, looked blank trying to guess if his exotic eyes had deceived him, turned back to me again and lost himself in the most extraordinary, full, authentic smile.
Two seconds later: the incognito was exposed, my ecstasy gone, and the Sprite spilt over.

Giulio Iraci
February 17th 2003

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