The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  So whose fault was it?

  I DON’T KNOW if I’m alone in remembering school in these terms; probably there are those who were enthusiastic schoolgoers or who now imagine or remember the experience, finding themselves pining for the good old days, since it’s impossible to surgically remove the bloc of “school” without destroying the larger bloc of “youth,” so that people wind up believing that the two were the same thing; there are some who can say in all sincerity that they “had fun” at school, that they loved their classmates or teachers, and if I were to maintain, with contempt, that “nothing of the sort ever happened to me,” I’d no doubt come off as a miserable person, well, all right, then, I too had fun, but it was always fun with clenched fists, and I made friends, but it wasn’t the school that created those friendships, indeed, if anything, the school ostracized them, shoving us all together like thirty mice in a shoebox. More than friends, we were fellow prisoners, and I can safely say that I learned at my own expense just how illusory, albeit briefly intoxicating, this kind of solidarity can be—the camaraderie engendered by constraint, how morbid and rotten the “us against the world” kind of companionship can be, the involuntary brotherhood celebrated by the poets of wartime.

  SCHOOL, then, was conceived as a patient period of waiting, a gestation lasting many years, over the course of which formidable and explosive things took place, first and foremost in our bodies and our minds, which seemed to be under the effect of extremely powerful narcotics, so great were the psychedelic transformations (the product of our minds and bodies themselves, certainly not the effect of any of the lessons . . .), and even more so in the outside world, which was bursting with new developments to the point of becoming unrecognizable, another world, just a completely different chapter of history, between 1962 and 1975, that is, from when I entered that school dressed in a student’s smock until I left wearing elephant bell bottoms. You need only compare photos and TV footage from the period.

  A period as changeable and dangerous as a serpent slithering through the forest.

  And what were we doing, in the meantime, at school? We were waiting. We were waiting, ruminating over formulas, poetry, theorems, lists, transcribing, erasing everything with the white eraser or the blue one, chalking up blackboards, tossing medicine balls, carving into the grooves on our school desks with our penknives, looking at the trees outside the window . . .

  If it were possible to pile up all in one place the rubber shavings produced by our furious erasures, if we could fill up a swimming pool with all of the ink spilled, I’m not even saying in all our translations from ancient Greek and from Latin, from start to finish, but just the ink used in making mistakes, in writing the words that were destined to be marked wrong by the teacher in red pencil, and if it were possible to line up, end to end, all the red segments of the corrections . . .

  PERHAPS as late as age fourteen or fifteen, it was still possible to coexist with school, doing no more than to mock and parrot the teachers the second they had their backs turned, aping their physical defects and the way they spoke, and, in the breaks between these exercises in boorishness, absorbing here and there scraps of lessons, the more elementary passages or, now and then, the more difficult ones, for no purpose other than to recite them later, during the oral exams, mindlessly verbatim, without having actually understood a thing. Deep down, it was an easy, cowardly recipe that anyone—unless they were just talentless or truly rebellious, by which I mean rebellious to the depths of their soul—could put into practice and scrape by one year after another. We needed only to behave and keep a low profile to avoid trouble and this, really, was the only condition that the priests insisted on our respecting, to hell with matters like scholastic achievement, broadening our horizons, knowledge, and all that, what was actually required was a modicum of hypocrisy and contrition, just like in the confessional, and we were sure to be promoted to the next year, or, in other words, absolved of our sins. And allowed to run free like little lambs frolicking on a hillside. There are religions that ask their faithful nothing more than this: pray, bow, turn the other way when I tell you to, murmur and whisper instead of shouting, and as for the rest, do more or less as you please. Pay a small, small bail fee and you’re free! Our priests were actually not very demanding, even a Nazi could have met their requirements, and it’s no surprise that more than one actually did. They accepted, accepted, and accepted—in accordance with the mystical precept of “accept everything.” That is, the totality of a man, with all his deplorable aspects. That was the credo handed down by the founder. They forgave and forgave, or else they simply overlooked. We, on the other hand, refused, hindered, rejected, and we’d have rejected school as a whole if it hadn’t been so simple, in the final analysis, to just put up with it, its burden distributed throughout the span of the year, and in exchange, as part of the pact, while we agreed to be good (buoni, or better, increasingly Roman in inflection, boni, boni, “state bboni . . .”), we accepted a handful of vignettes of surreal humor, the occasional furtive snicker, and passing grades in the class ledger—passing grades, just eked out, conceded graciously, squeaking past, amended, rounded upward, but perfectly valid.

  But after that a singular phenomenon unfolded: even though we all remained so many ignorant and incomplete amoebas, suddenly we felt superior to our teachers, as if by some automatic promotion due to seniority, a sudden promotion on the field of battle, we had, that is, the impression that we had caught up with them and overtaken them and that therefore none of them (except for Cosmo) was any longer capable of striking fear in our hearts. Respect was something they had never been able to inculcate. In certain of our classmates who were particularly self-confident and arrogant, this meant treating them like doormats. This was all about money, in the final analysis and as usual, as I’ve said before. They had discovered, that is, that the all-powerful teachers actually had very little money of their own.

  Others instead felt (rather unjustified) intellectual haughtiness, convinced that they now knew and understood far more than their teachers in the very subjects they taught. Giovanni Lorco, for instance, had convinced himself that the priests must necessarily be a herd of ignorant bumpkins drafted straight out of divinity school and sent into the classrooms after being given a hasty scrub: whereas the others, the lay teachers, had no certificates or degrees, and were losers from the outset who had figured out a work-around to avoid civil service exams, turning up at a private institute of education the same way they might show up at a soup kitchen. And so Lorco was always checking his books to make sure the things they said in class were accurate. He was just waiting for a chance to catch them making a mistake.

  Others still were seized by a singular enthusiasm that made them feel ready to experience extraordinary adventures; these classmates thought of school as nothing but useless ballast and the teachers as heavy objects, like so many carved marble animals to be used as bookends. These students already had an eye on afterward, the years after school, and couldn’t wait to be emancipated from the flock of children and their grim custodians.

  1

  THOSE WERE HAPPY TIMES, when in order to live the way you’re supposed to all you had to do was follow a script! Faithfully, adding only a few personal variations. For instance, the roles of men and women. Well written, extensively tested, invariably recognizable to those around you who witnessed your performance and judged it. From which you could, at the very most, escape by committing an act of conscious revolt, violating its rules. By rebelling. But if there are no rules at all, how are you supposed to break them or change them? And here you are, then, a prisoner of the absence of rules, or else wandering, blinded by their nebulous vagueness. How bitterly ironic, to be a slave to rules that don’t exist. The problem with vows never uttered is that they cannot be broken. Study, work, mate, have children, age . . . die . . . but also laugh, quarrel, fight, and kill . . . these were all things for which the individual, according to sex and age and social condition, found models ready to
use, only asking to be applied, boilerplate to be slotted in, with a little patience and care, like the patterns you could find in knitting magazines for making a pullover or a cardigan: we only needed to follow instructions step-by-step. Everything seemed boring and oppressive and, really, it was, but at the same time, how very reassuring! Reassuring even for those who chose not to follow the script. The risk, so to speak, possessed a solid certainty all its own: like the opposition in a dictatorship, you knew perfectly what faced you, the penalties meted out to those who rebel. Not the way things are these days when, even if you take all your clothes off and have sex with a sheep in front of the Italian Senate, either no one pays the slightest attention to you, or else your act will be interpreted as a laudable provocation or a statement of protest toward which we should all express our solidarity inasmuch as it is an expression of a widespread malaise or even as a piece of performance art. The muscle of interest is riddled in vain by the tickle of the most violent and foolish provocation: it won’t start, it won’t react. Today, we troop out into life in scattered order, so many stragglers, with no signal (with the possible exception of money, perhaps, which is at least something) to tell us from the outset what we ought to do and what we ought to refrain from doing, what we should aspire to and what we should avoid. Everyone goes their way, stitching together as they go a random patchwork of attitudes and half-conventions scavenged here and there, to avoid being left naked and incomprehensible to other people, even though you can see from a mile away that it’s all made up, improvised or borrowed, cadged off TV series or talk shows, advice columns, and tidal waves of online recommendations. There is no substance, there’s no deep foundation, and there isn’t even a nice, fully rounded form of hypocrisy to be adopted, a well-enameled surface, a vacuous yet impeccable model, compact in its social array, like what we had, for example, until not that long ago, in the bourgeois model. In this harlequinade, in the assemblage of incongruous patchworks of identity and social models, there is a hierarchy of males, distinguished by their levels of resentment and frustration and ridicule, perhaps because their traditional mold has been shattered to smithereens, not for dramatic and progressive reasons, as was the case for women with feminism, but in a derisory and regressive fashion. Feminist radicalism had, at least, an obtusely heroic aspect, an epic thrust the way that all protest movements do at the moment they first arise, when they spontaneously gather and wave the banner. Male fumbling in search of a new role resembles nothing so much as the jerky movement of a lizard’s severed tail, the nervous laughter that greets a witticism or a wisecrack that has simply baffled instead of amused. So the man becomes hysterical, the woman becomes combative, strange, isn’t it? So at variance with the old clichés . . . all of these new and contradictory images began to rain down on us right around the time when this story unfolds. While we were just boys. There were those who weren’t at all in search of a new role for men, and who took up stances in favor of the old ways, of their crumbling walls.

  YOUNG MEN back then found themselves ping-ponging between two diametrically opposed conditions, each equally unsettling: one, the most commonplace and quotidian, was the frustration of not fucking, the other, the anxiety of performing adequately when they did in fact fuck. Sex, both desired and practiced, caused a general uproar in one’s entire being. To say that we were agitated and uncertain about how our genitalia would react when put to the test, even though we could hardly wait to have the chance, would be a gross understatement. It was a suffocating blend of anguish and morbid curiosity. This adolescent fear would accompany every male for the rest of his life, unless he were to decide to take a vow of chastity and managed to stick to it. The authentic will to power, in fact, is expressed not in coitus, but in the renunciation of coitus. That is why the rare individuals who are actually chaste are often intolerable to be around: because they make a muscular display of their choice. By repressing themselves, they’ve liberated themselves, and now their intact, undispersed energy becomes a brash, overbearing social tool, a sort of cat-o’-nine-tails with which they can lash the world. The frightful farsighted power of the celibate man! No objective is out of his reach. Baudelaire used to say that we have two ways to elude the tedium of death: one is work, the other is pleasure. The sole difference between the two is that work increases your strength, pleasure consumes it. Actually, though, it is my modest opinion that both work and pleasure consume your strength.

  SEX was a subject to be studied at the drawing board, a difficult theorem to explicate and to apply. There was nothing natural about it, except that muffled, imprecise drive, the pulsation that verged on queasy sickness, impossible to translate into concrete acts unless they smacked of banality: banality pervaded the things you had to say to get there, banality infused the ways in which we groped and stroked, truly grotesque when it came to the act of removing your underwear, and ridiculous the way they tended to twist and tangle around your ankles . . . And stranger still is the way we had of trying to resolve it, once we managed to get on top of a female body, by delivering great and awkward thrusts, frantic back-and-forth of the pelvis, with a soundtrack of grunting. Is that really how it was supposed to go? As if those enthusiastic and clumsy efforts could solve the brainteaser. Some clearly thought that it might be a way of leaping to conclusions—the harder you pushed, the closer you got. No different from a test of strength at an amusement park.

  NOW THE DESTINIES have become star-crossed, the customs have been overturned, and the exact point of the crossover were the years of my youth: in a more puritan society, in the early years of psychoanalysis, people learned for the first time that many nonsexual acts had a hidden sexual source; now, in contrast, we realize that many sexual behaviors have a nonsexual motivation. In the old days we used to hasten to strip the body bare and reveal its nudity; today, in order to understand something, we have to dress it again. The symbolism has been overturned: a girl with a popsicle in her mouth was, deep down, sucking a cock, nowadays she might be sucking a cock but maybe she’s really thinking about a popsicle.

  2

  UNTIL PUBERTY, it’s not even a matter for discussion, it doesn’t even come up. Then, over the course of a single season, the girls are transformed in such an explosive and spectacular fashion that their diversity becomes unbearable: too powerful to look at, too powerful to think about. It’s no longer possible to pretend nothing’s happened. The countless series of American films with porkies and pom-pom girls and lunatics and nerds and Elvis wannabes and taking girls’ dormitories by siege and showers with holes in the walls so you can peek inside—none of these give even the slightest idea of the whiplash that young men undergo while witnessing the uncontrollable flowering of secondary female sexual traits: any comparison with the tortuous and strained development of their virility, which unfolds in parallel, seems unfair, manifesting itself laughably in the form of goatees and acne and breaking falsetto voices and the tendency to hunch over due to the weight of muscles that, truth be told, they don’t yet possess. That diversity changes from virtual, statistical, to tangible, corporeal: and whether because it’s attractive or because it’s repugnant, sometimes because of both things at once, it’s unlikely to leave you indifferent.

  Yes, of course, there are adolescents who care nothing about the phenomenon of young girls in flower: out of every five young men, there is one who is so sure of himself and his charm that he’ll inevitably lay waste to a bevy of female hearts precisely because he’s cold and imperturbable; one who feigns indifference strictly because he is paralyzed by a shyness so great that it prevents him from even thinking of talking to girls, much less actually talking to them; a third is seriously uninterested, and what comes first in his hierarchy of personal interests is: the soccer team he roots for, his mother, his collections, chemistry, cars, or even (yes, there are kids who are already thinking about it at age fourteen . . .) money; a fourth young man, perhaps the most common type, is simply slow to catch up, he’s a few time zones behind on the meridian of sexua
lity, capable of remaining firmly attached to that childish point of view until he turns sixteen or even twenty, or even maintaining that virginal trait, stuck to him for the rest of his life; the fifth young man is queer and still doesn’t know it because he doesn’t feel anything yet, or else does feel something, but strictly for other boys.

  THERE WAS ONE CLASSMATE in particular who seemed simply incapable of making sense of the metamorphosis—Iannello. His discomfort was unmistakable. The discovery had caught him off guard, wrong-footed him. But perhaps it was he who had changed, his gaze, from the end of one school year to the beginning of the next, had so to speak grown heavy, seeing that women had existed previously, but he had simply never noticed. I mean to say that the libido splashed and sprayed out of his own eyes, rather than out of the bodies that those gleaming eyes, alight with curiosity, pursued with such feverish interest.

  “Those bodies, fuck! Those bodies!” Iannello murmured. I spent a tormented school year sitting next to him.

  “All you need to do is go away for the vacation and when you come back . . . they’re practically scary! And my sister, the same thing, how she changed this summer, her eyes, her hair . . . you won’t believe it, but even her hair has changed, for fuck’s sake! I don’t know how to explain it. Now her hair looks like my mother’s hair, and I’m sure of it, she didn’t do anything at all, she didn’t go to the beauty parlor . . . but her hair doesn’t look the way it used to.”