The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  ASIDE FROM ARBUS, the unrivaled champion, the fact that I might have been the most intelligent, or at least considered such, wasn’t actually such a huge source of satisfaction, nor is it even now when, far less frequently, truth be told, this refrain emerges once again, the idea that I’m supposedly the most intelligent in any given category, which may vary in type and dimension: of my school, of my contemporaries, of the contestants for a literary prize (where I usually place or show, coming in second or third, and in those instances it’s said in the spirit of consolation), the entire array of living Italian writers . . . Aside from the fact that it’s false, I take no pride from this primacy in relation to any of these categories; because what good are a man and his ideas, if he doesn’t know what to do with them?

  I cannot use even the one thing I possess in abundance.

  I recopy this phrase taken from a novel: “And looking up at the celestial vault above me, immovable, dumb, I felt like a tiny speck of life under that vast, transparent corpse.”

  AND MY CULTURE? My endless and inquisitive knowledgeability in such subjects as film titles Norse sagas nicknames of soccer players etymologies and word origins made me a sterile little champion out of some TV quiz, but one who stays at home, that is, the guy who answers the question from his easy chair, beating the contestant on screen by a tenth of a second (“Come on, Papà, why don’t you enter as a contestant yourself? You’d win for sure!”), in other words, the kind of know-it-all that everybody vies to get on their team when it’s time to play Trivial Pursuit.

  I MUST CONFESS that as a boy and later, as a teenager, I was inclined to tell stories invented out of whole cloth, or willfully false, in the hopes of arousing the interest of other people. If I’d had as many stories available that were just as interesting but true, I’d surely have told those instead of lying, but that was not the case. I was obliged to invent things because the reality that I knew was devoid of attractions, and my experience of extraordinary things was quite limited. The life of a boy from a respectable family in the city is rather empty and must necessarily be filled and supplemented with imaginary or borrowed adventures: I think that applies to a great many others, not just to me. Love and fantasies on the theme of amorous endeavors, for example, how could those two topics enter the life of an adolescent born in the middle of the twentieth century, unless it was in the form of half-lies and feeble boasts? When you still haven’t kissed a girl (and zero, the original, absolute zero, as we all know, isn’t even a number but a metaphysical entity), how can you help but lie, stating, with studied nonchalance, that you’re already on number ten? This could be called a lie, or perhaps it’s actually an advance on later luck, as if you were just helping yourself out a little in your reckoning by including the future kisses, which are sure to be given and received eventually, to the ones that for now exist only in dreams. Could this be a sort of loan, or a down payment?

  IT IS BY NO MEANS true that young men are superficial and inclined to distractions and amusements: in reality everything that seemed more solemn and serious than usual fascinated us. Only those things appeared very rarely.

  10

  EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE SECOND-RANK PLAYERS in the development of the story, a book like this can hardly fail to include a chapter on my gym teachers. Namely: Brother Curzio and Tarascio at SLM, and the Painter of Nudes, also known as Courbet, at the Giulio Cesare classical high school, where I took my battery of final exams in 1975. I call them gym teachers using the old terminology, even if the official description is “physical education,” and in some classes of school it’s even been modified into the still more generic and abstract “motor skills education.” That increasingly distilled and denatured language no longer dares to mention the subject or the concrete actions or the instruments employed in work: this is part of the process, gradual yet unstoppable, of the dematerialization of existence, which seeps from words to life and back again (the beginning of this mutation took place with “trashman” or “street sweeper,” replaced by “environmental engineer,” a classic, textbook example).

  A phys ed teacher in an Italian school is an alien body, or rather, he is a body, surrounded by so many other brains minds and souls, conversations, trains of thought, and calculations, and theories, and he’s just been placed there to remind them all, for a couple of hours a week, that students have legs and arms and lungs to breathe with and that, in short, there’s also another part of their individuality that is in need of training, needs to be rendered lithe and elastic, helped to grow, examined and, in the end, judged. Just like one’s intellectual resources, one’s physical resources need to be used and measured, even if that’s at a 1:10 or 1:20 ratio with the mental resources. The ability to leap over a horizontal bar or do a certain number of push-ups or shove a volleyball straight down into the face of the girl who was jumping up to the net with her eyes closed will be infinitely less appreciated than the skills that help you to find your way through the graph of Kant’s transcendental categories or let you solve for a square root. And yet they offer the subject, they have a teacher dedicated full-time to that subject, it’s not just fun and letting off steam and the exuberance of teenagers set free after hours of deformation of the spinal cord, nailed to the desk like so many geese being stuffed with vague notions. The most restless period in a lifetime—while in the body galaxies of unknown energies collide and a squall is blowing that would be capable of uprooting all and every thought—is spent in a state of physical immobility, like in some Byzantine mosaic. And then people complain about how kids are restless . . .!

  To meet their tapping feet partway, we have a period of phys ed.

  BROTHER CURZIO wasn’t all that young, but he had a trim physique. Always in a tracksuit, with the zipper half-open in the front, and underneath, over his chest, a simple white T-shirt (I’m talking about the skintight tracksuits of the time, in a semisynthetic fabric, with zippers on even the ankles). He was short, dark-complected and dark-haired, hair that he always wore neatly combed, parted to one side, with a five o’clock shadow even after he shaved. To just see him like that in the street, you’d never have guessed that he was a priest, compared with other priests with their emaciated look, or else the fat and jovial ones, like monks from the Middle Ages. But the right question to ask wasn’t whether he seemed like a priest, but rather why he was one, why he had ever become a priest. Was it out of a vow of some sort, or was it a form of self-mortification, in the aftermath of a long-ago crime, in search of forgiveness, like Manzoni’s Fra Cristoforo, or the knight played by Robert De Niro in the movie Mission? In fact, he was always serious, almost moody, very reserved indeed. None of us students had ever seen him in his tunic, nor had we ever heard him speak about God or the Madonna, and during his physical education classes he never referred—the way his brother priests did, even when they were talking about subjects that had nothing to do with them—to sins we were to avoid, temptations we were to reject, the importance of maintaining intact and chaste our bodies which were, literally, the raw material upon which Brother Curzio was paid to work (even though I never did understand how things worked with the stipends or salaries paid to priests in general and those at SLM in particular: whether their vow of poverty was absolute, whether they were given a per diem at least for their petty expenses, I don’t know . . . let’s say, in that case, that he was “called” to work, that that was his pedagogical and religious vocation). But more than once we had wondered whether among the priests, the ones who were assigned to teach physical education might not actually be the ones incapable of doing anything else, the most ignorant ones, in other words, the ones who hadn’t studied; or whether instead Brother Curzio had scrupulously studied as an athletic coach, with special courses in anatomy, physiology, and nutrition, or whether it had been Brother Curzio’s physique itself—compact, virile, lithe, shoulders straight, torso deep, tense, taut legs, not an ounce of fat, a belly tucked inward, but it wasn’t a pose, it was constitutional—that had persuaded the elder brothe
rs to assign him to teach sports, something they might never have practiced. It’s a strange thing, but in all the sports I’ve taken classes in, whether on an ongoing basis or a one-time, occasional thing, the instructor has always been as good at teaching as he was ungifted in the practice of the sport itself: my soccer coach was a terrible player, only capable of passing the ball flat-footed, hitting it with his foot open like a golf club, my swim instructor never let himself be seen in the water because he would have struggled to stay afloat, the elderly and very gay basketball coach would show us gracefully how, at the height of the jump, floating in midair, you could whipcrack your wrist to make sure the ball, spinning opposite to its direction of travel, would arc through the air, but his demonstration shots always hit the ring, so that he stubbornly tried four or five times until he’d turned red in shame and out of breath. Which only goes to show you that the better you are at teaching something, the worse you are at actually doing it.

  Good teachers transmit the best of themselves, instead of doing it in the first person; they arouse in others that same passion that in them often led to failure.

  End of the parenthesis, just to say that while Brother Curzio might very well have had an “incredible physique,” at age forty, ten times more powerful and tireless than us teenagers, he still seemed completely useless in its application to actual sports, such as, say, volleyball, which is probably the most widely pursued group physical activity in Italian schools, both private and public, all you need to do is take the kids and split them into two teams, on either side of the net, throw a ball into the air, and something is bound to happen. The Marist brother had only to give the signal, with a blast or two on the whistle around his neck, and the dances were on, and he could retreat behind the screen of his reserved personality. We loved him, actually, when all was said and done, if only for his distance from the standard priestly model: he might just as easily have been a factory worker, or a cameraman, or the proprietor of a hardware store, or probably even a soldier, that’s right, a soldier. The Madonna wasn’t foremost in his thoughts, nor was She the last thing on his mind. In rewards and punishments, hope and charity, he showed no interest at all. So why should someone like him have ever become a priest at all? Was he really a priest, then, Brother Curzio, or was there someone else hidden under that tracksuit, an escaped convict, or a deserter, a former mercenary who had murdered who could say how many negroes in his previous life, and who was paying the price of those crimes by presiding over those volleyball tournaments between no-talent weaklings?

  AN ANSWER THAT FAILS to provide a true explanation, but rather adds only a further tile of mystery to the mosaic, came late one night as we were tooling along on a moped down the long, dark Viale di Tor di Quinto, between Via Flaminia and Via Olimpica. I was on my way back from a soccer match played on one of the countless five-a-side fields that line the banks of the Tiber, shrouded in the mist rising from the river, forming a sort of luminous cube of humidity. I was with Rummo, and I was perched on the scanty little tail end of the saddle of his Morini 50 cc, a Corsarino, which in those days represented the dream conveyance of any and every adolescent.

  We had just pulled up in front of the shooting range when, by the light of a bonfire, we saw a man leaning out of a compact car to haggle over prices with the prostitutes who were warming themselves by the flames. There were two of them, both middle-aged, one in front, the other lingering farther back, almost entirely out of the circle of dancing light flickering tremulously around the steel drum with the fire burning inside it. The first one was blond, the second brunette, both with their hair teased out and short skirts revealing solid legs planted in ankle boots; and the man who was arguing about prices with them, his elbow protruding from the window of the Fiat 850, one of the classic Fiats of those years, a car that is inconceivable today for the barren simplicity of its features, well, that man was none other than Brother Curzio, identifiable from a good distance by the swept-back bangs and the serious grimace on his face. For that matter, the Fiat 850 was very familiar, since it served as the official runabout of both the headmaster and the school, and we knew like the back of our hands its squared-off silhouette, which we’d seen parked so many times outside the front gate of SLM or inside the courtyard of the school, which faced Via Nomentana. The chrome trim designed, as a child with a crayon might have done, its simple outline, its blocky back, with the grillwork on the hatch to give air to the engine: perhaps the most straightforward and familiar vehicle of those years.

  I doubt that Brother Curzio recognized us as we putted past, slowing down to take in the spectacle, on the service road. Viale di Tor di Quinto, in fact, is a broad thoroughfare with tree-lined service roads running alongside it, next to which are further turnaround areas. In later years, alongside the banks of the Tiber, a large tent theater would be set up, specializing in musicals, the cause of lengthy traffic jams due to the throngs of spectators arriving and leaving, but back then the dense shadows harbored only the bonfires and folding chairs of the prostitutes; while on the far side of the thoroughfare the Carabinieri barracks had not yet been built, and there were only meadows, and the soccer field where S.S. Lazio practiced.

  So was it him, Brother Curzio, the man who was frequenting these meretricious women? In spite of the fact that my eyes had certainly seen what they’d seen, a doubt still lingered as we shot to the right around the traffic jam of cars backed up along Via Olimpica. But Rummo rid me of my misgivings, swiveling his head to one side and twisting his mouth to make sure I heard him in the rush of wind.

  “Of course that was him. And what do you find strange about that? Did you think priests didn’t go with women? They go, oh, they go . . .”

  I was amazed that Rummo—who was a traditionalist, I’d even have said a bit of a conformist, if the term really has any meaning when applied to an adolescent, Rummo who served communion at every blessed holy mass—should prove to be such a realist, so cynical. But he was right. From that day forward, I saw priests in a different light. As if all of a sudden a glow or an aura had been revealed around them that had previously been invisible, a frothy wake made up of all the actions, the instincts, ideas, and desires, all of the missing parts of their lives, I mean to say, the parts that were missing to us students in order to complete their image as men, and not priests. Isn’t it only natural that this full-blooded man, full of repressed energy, should go out in search of a woman? And since he couldn’t fall in love with that woman, since he couldn’t actually declare his feelings for her and set up housekeeping together, since he couldn’t marry her and have children with her, what else was he supposed to do, if not pay her and fuck her, pay her to fuck her? I started to wonder whether all, I mean every last one of the priests, did it. No, impossible. There were some whom you truly couldn’t even imagine embracing, touching a woman’s breasts, others still who perhaps had the strength to resist, and yet others who clearly didn’t really like women so for them it wasn’t that much of a sacrifice to renounce their company. Just as men are different one from another, priests likewise differ, indeed, within their ranks they may be more widely diversified than the human race taken as a broad whole, and the uniformity imposed by the credo and the tunic is strictly one of appearance, indeed if anything it highlights the difference. There are all sorts of things, there are all sorts of people under that collar!

  In any case, the next year, after the summer, we went back to school and Brother Curzio wasn’t there anymore.

  HE HAD BEEN REPLACED by a lay teacher, Tarascio, muscular and wrinkled and twisted, perhaps from lifting too much weight over the course of a lifetime. Tarascio spoke with a strong southern twang, so that he never completed his words, striking the accent on the next-to-last syllable and simply cutting off the last one: at first, he’d give us orders with a moan, but he’d complete them in something approaching a shout. Those orders would always end with a word like “exercise” (esercitazione), “solution” (soluzione), or “justification” (giustificazione,)
with a double “z” and the last syllable cut off.

  “Fate at-ten-ZZIO’ . . . che ora faccia-mo la pre-pa-RA-ZZIO’ . . . pe’ la corretta ESECUZZIO’ . . .” Pay close at-ten-TTIO’ . . . now we’re go-ing to do some pre-pa-ra-TTIO’ . . . for the correct EXECUTTIO’ . . .

  We had no idea what had become of Brother Curzio. Some said that he had gone to South America. Others maintained that he had been defrocked for unspecified reasons, reasons that appeared all too clear to me. I still had the doubt that what we had seen in the dim light off Viale di Tor di Quinto, in the dancing glow of the flames and the passing headlights, might not be common knowledge, that is to say, that it hadn’t been an isolated episode at all, but rather a routine outing: what priests call a vice, in fact, the vice, the vice by very definition, and that the other brothers had caught him. In those cases, what happens? How does the system of investigation and repression proceed, who judges, who decides? What is the punishment? Are you expelled, and that’s that, or what else? Is a pardon even a possibility? And if so, then was Brother Curzio doing penitence who knew where, and who could say how much and indeed whether he still thought of women, which is to say, all women, not just the women in the street, the working girls, but also the mothers waiting for their children outside the school, actresses, images on newsreels, naked statues and women swimming at the beach and swimmers in pools . . . maybe even nuns.