Mario's birth & defects: the half-bow

The book's clearest portrait of the single-entendre human being. Two things happen in this sentence and both are the theme. First, Mario receives kindness and cruelty "the same way" — he has no ironic filter to sort affection from mockery, no defensive apparatus that would make him flinch from one and preen at the other, so both land identically on a surface that takes them plain. Second, his self-mockery — the half-bow that ribs his own canted posture — is done "without pity or cringe," which is to say without irony's essential ingredient, the protective wince. Mario can mock himself and mean nothing defensive by it; his self-deprecation is not armor. This is sincerity as a different physics, not naïveté but the absence of the reflex the rest of the book cannot switch off.