The Art of Falling

People often ask me what it means to be a black belt. They expect the answer from the manual, the one padded out with Eastern mysticism and motivational rhetoric: it means perseverance, it means invincibility, it means you have reached the top of the mountain. For years I gave them that answer. I sold them the illusion that the black cloth tied around my waist was a magic armour against the uncertainties of the world. I was lying. Not out of malice, but out of necessity — the same necessity that makes a parent tell a child there are no monsters under the bed, even while the parent himself, in the dark, can hear them breathing. Today I am sitting on a wooden crate in a place that smells of engine oil and damp, light years from the polished parquet and the spotless walls where this story began, and I know the true answer. Being a black belt does not mean you have stopped falling. It means you have lost the shame of falling. It means you have understood that the floor — fine timber or raw concrete, it makes no difference — is not an enemy to be kept at a distance. It is the one partner that never lies, the one that always holds you up, provided you agree to come down to its level. …

Part One: The Geometry of a Narrow Space

Luca’s uncle’s garage is a rectangular den of barely thirty square metres that stinks of used engine oil, mould laid down in layers over the years, and abandoned dreams. There are no windows, only a rusting roller shutter that jams halfway up, letting a blade of dirty light in from below, and a single incandescent bulb, bare and yellowish, hanging from the ceiling and swinging like a hypnotist’s pendulum every time somebody slams the side door. For a teacher accustomed to polished maple, a filtered ventilation system and a sacred alcove, a tokonoma, with fresh flowers changed every morning, this place ought to be a nightmare of hygiene and taste. Instead, against all my snobbish expectations, it turns out to be a revelation.

We spent the first week not training but clearing out. In Japanese it is called soji, the ritual cleaning, an act supposed to purify the spirit through care of the space. But this was not a matter of passing a damp cloth over sacred dust in monastic silence. It was a physical battle against accumulation. We shifted old washing-machine motors as heavy as boulders, stacked mouldering car magazines from 1980, and scraped decades-old grease stains off the raw concrete with scrapers and chemical solvents that made our eyes stream. In that dirty work I watched the group align itself better than it had in a thousand hours of formal lessons. Arturo, whose knotted arthritic hands struggle to close into a fist, turned out to be a genius of improvised mechanics. He repaired the shutter spring with a piece of wire and a great deal of patience. He built a rack for the sticks out of scrap PVC plumbing pipe, turning rubbish into infrastructure. Giulia, who in the old Dojo grew bored if a theoretical explanation ran past two minutes, spent three hours scraping rotten plaster off a wall and found in that repetitive, furious action a form of moving meditation, mushin, that no kata had ever given her. And Luca … Luca took possession of the space. He was no longer the shy guest or the frightened student. He was the host, opening the doors of his kingdom to his clan.

Once the space was clear, we ran into the insurmountable technical problem: the garage is small. And it has two reinforced concrete pillars right in the middle of it. My old method, made of wide circular movements and long-range throws that need metres of space for the fall, is physically inapplicable here. Take too long a step in a lunge and you crack your knee on the workbench. Swing your arms into a wide block and you split your knuckles on a pillar. The architecture imposed the teaching, with a violence there was no appealing against. I had to shorten the martial art. I had to amputate the superfluous. No more high circular kicks, which we never loved anyway but sometimes did as stretching. No more wide evasions. No more safe distance. Here the law of close quarter combat applies. Very short range. The enemy is on top of you. The wall is at your back. There is no escape route, there is only the management of panic.