LA VITA É BELLA

(FROM A WEEKEND NOTE, THE EDITOR'S LETTER IN STYLE WEEKEND, MANILA BULLETIN'S WEEKEND SPECIAL, EVERY FRIDAY, 9 MAY 2008)

Everything we know about parents is suddenly in question, with the emergence of Elisabeth Fritzl from the dungeon of her own father’s cruel, subhuman, nonhuman perversions. I cannot think of any man in my immediate world who can do such a thing to any person, let alone his own daughter, but what keeps me aching for more of this incredible tragedy is where Josef Fritzl’s wife figure in all of this.

Is God up there? —Felix Fritzl, 5, upon seeing the moon for the first time ever

I’m not sure if you’re following it over on CNN or on the Internet. Just search “Dungeon Kids” to get the full story. But here’s a gist: Elisabeth was 18, when her incestuous, rapist father dragged her handcuffed to the basement of their apartment in Amstetten, Austria, where, literally in the pits of the earth, she stayed for the next two decades, what’s left of her life confined within a windowless cellar “behind a concrete door locked with an electronic code,” no sun, no air, except for the little brought in through a small vent on the wall, no contact with the outside world, except for a small television set, and no help every time her father came down to rape her, repeatedly, remorselessly, without any trace of humanity.

In the course of 24 years, in which she remained trapped in this hellhole, she gave birth to a total of seven children, whom, for my own sanity, I’d like to consider her very own, and not her father’s, whose role in their lives, except for a few million imperialistic sperm cells, does not have any shred of the necessary components of fatherhood. One of the children died shortly after birth and was reportedly burned by the evil old man on the furnace.

Is it real? Is it possible for one father to be so evil toward his own daughter? But if we must thank God for small mercies, evil personified might have been persuaded or, for no other reason but practical ones, might have thought it a good idea to bring three children—Lisa, now 16; Monika, now 14; and Alexander, now 12—upstairs one at a time to be cared for by his wife on the pretext that his “runaway daughter” returned now and then to leave one child after another at the doorstep for the grandparents to take over raising them. The eldest daughter, 19-year-old Kerstin, the second child, 18-year-old Stefan, and the youngest, five-year-old Felix, stayed below ground to grow up like animals, no medical care, no dental care, no care period, not counting the care their mother gave them despite her most helpless condition. Reports have it that due to a lack of social exposure as well as any level of education, the children speak their own language, “growling and cooing at each other” to communicate. Felix “prefers to crawl despite his five years, but can walk upright if he wants to” while Stefan walks with a permanent stoop, the ceiling in the cellar being barely five feet and five inches from the floor.

How do we teach our children to trust the world if this kind of story is real life? To me, the most dramatic potential in this yet-unraveling tale is in the mind of Rosemarie, Fritzl’s wife, who slept upstairs while the most atrocious crime was committed on her missing daughter for over 20 years by the same man who shared her bed when he was not busy abusing his daughter-turned-sex slave. Did she have any idea? Have her maternal instincts ever come to play? Does she want to throw her husband, now 73, down the cellar and leave him there to burn in hell?

But even in hell something beautiful emerges. Notwithstanding the horrors she went through and the childhood she herself was deprived of (her father first raped her when she was 11), Elisabeth Fritzl, now 42, tried to create an illusion of normalcy for the three children left in her care. “She read to them, told them fairy tale stories, and sang them lullabies to help them sleep,” said the Daily Mail.

It was reported that Elisabeth kept it from her children that they were imprisoned, helping them create a make-believe world by making models out of cardboard and glue, telling them stories of “princesses and pirates,” and watching adventure films on TV with them.

Elisabeth’s ordeal reminds me of La Vita é Bella (Life is Beautiful), except that, without any of the comedic relief in the Roberto Benigni film, hers is more harrowing, more horrific. In this context, her attempt at raising her children the best way she could is nothing short of heroic. After all, rather than a Nazi concentration camp, it was real life, her own life, her whole life that she was up against.

A
post me at aapatawaran@yahoo.com.