I am a hero. Being a hero is easy. If you don’t have either arms or legs, you are either a hero or dead. If you don’t have parents, you have to rely on your arms and legs. And you have to be a hero. If you have neither arms nor legs, and you, on top of everything else, managed to come to this world as an orphan—that’s it. You are doomed to be a hero for the rest of your days. Or you die. I am a hero. I simply do not have a choice.
 
This is a small boy speaking, or rather a young man channeling that small boy, born with his arms and legs twisted so much that all he could do in a universe with no wheelchairs was to crawl. Crawl his way through a myriad of Soviet orphanages and old people’s homes once he was over fifteen, as befits a goner with cerebral palsy and an Hispanic name that sounds wilder than wild in the Soviet Union—Ruben David Gonsales Gallego. To write, the young man is using the only two fingers that work. Maybe those who speak of heroism as an exalted achievement of spirit and flesh simply have too many fingers with which to write. For Gallego, heroism is a simple necessity, a no-brainer for anyone with half a brain.
 
Until the age of six, Ruben Gallego dreamed non-stop about his mother, but then a kindly attendant at one of the orphanages explained to him that his mother was a black-assed bitch who had abandoned him. Unlike teachers, attendants did not lie. They were the only ones you could rely on to make any sense. ‘Black-assed’ was a much bigger insult than ‘bitch’. It encompassed the whole barbaric universe from the Caucasus to Africa. There, Ruben was told, people were like baboons, disposing of their offspring as they would of banana peels, their bare asses high in the air.
 
From that time Ruben could not dream about his mother anymore. Instead, he dreamed of being able to walk, because the ones around him who could pull themselves up on their crutches and drag themselves even a few steps were treated far better than the crawlers like him. It was not entirely inconceivable that the walkers could even have a future, be part of the world. Ruben went on like that for a while and then, at the age of eight, it dawned upon him that he would never ever be able to walk. And so without further ado Ruben David Gonsales Gallego launched himself into dreams of being a kamikaze, a precision torpedo filled with explosives.
 
Ruben is crawling down the hallway of a new children’s home he has just been moved to. It is dark in the hall and an attendant walking along the hall does not notice him at first. When she does, she shrieks and jumps back. Then she takes a few steps towards Ruben to have a good look at the boy. "I have swarthy skin, and my head is shaved. At first glance, in the dim light of the hallway, all you can see are my eyes, my big eyes, hanging in the air fifteen centimeters off the floor."
 
What does it take for the able-bodied to imagine being reduced to their eyes only, big unblinking eyes hanging still in the air?
 
Despite all his institutionalised years, Ruben Gallego was never really an orphan. His father was a Venezuelan student activist, once upon a time a dealer of ideals, and then, if you believe the internet, of quality drugs. His mother was a daughter of the Secretary General of the Spanish Communist Party. The two met in Moscow. Their romance, and the ensuing pregnancy, was anything but blessed by the young woman’s parents. Ruben’s twin died minutes after birth. The mother, apparently, was told that Ruben was dead too. This was technically true, of course, just a bit optimistic. As a dark-skinned, cerebral palsy-suffering ward of the Soviet state, Gallego was not supposed to be undead for long. Ruben did not meet his mother until he was a grown man. By that time, he was free from the state if not from palsy, twice-married and twice a father.
 
However, this part of Gallego’s story falls outside his memoir of childhood and adolescence. (White on Black, by the way, became a runaway success, a recipient of the Russian Booker Prize and translated into many languages, including English.) Inside the book is something else—a story of staying alive. Of the courage people need not to die before their death. When Ruben reads The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, he is astonished by all the fuss about D’Artagnan. ‘D’Artagnan is a hero? What kind of a hero is he, if he has arms and legs? He had everything—youth, health, beauty, a sword and fencing ability. Where is the heroism?’ Ruben prefers Quasimodo to the pretty musketeer. ‘People looked at him with disgust and pity like they do at me. But he had arms and legs. He had the entire Notre Dame.’ You would not dare feel either disgust or pity for Ruben. He himself seems incapable of feeling them, not for the armless and legless boys and girls around him, not for the two-armed and two-legged adults running the show.
 
A kindly maths teacher gives Gallego a massive catch-up lesson, and her look becomes ‘cold and distant’ when she sees Ruben’s perfectly executed maths test. Ruben understands instantly this transformation. When you are a moron, it is easy to know you because it is easy to ignore you. But once in a while because of their natural kindness or professional necessity people with arms and legs discover that you, the moron, are just like them inside. ‘In an instant, their indifference is replaced by admiration, and then admiration turns into deep despair confronted by reality.’ And then their eyes turn inwards and they switch off.
 
Switching off, as is well known, is a natural reflex, a mechanism of survival. Computers and toasters switch off from overload, so why can’t we? But there is something about Ruben Gallego that makes it hard to switch off. Not because he is some sort of towering moral presence but because just the opposite is true. He is devoid of accusations and bitterness although, God knows, he has things and people to point fingers at. The boy then, the man now, does not have the self-effacing attitude of a saint in the making; what he has instead is a love of life, so pure and complete it takes your breath away.
 
Gallego calls himself a hero. We are not used to that. Heroes deny being heroes. I was simply doing my job, they say. Anyone else would do the same in my place, they add, aflame with modesty. It is up to others to label them a hero, to celebrate and set them apart from mere mortals. Ruben calls himself a hero from the very start, yet there is not a drop of vanity or self-importance in his words because for him there is nothing heroic in being a hero. Heroism is one mother of a cross to bear; it is not the pinnacle of being human, but humanity’s putrid underbelly.
 
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