The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  (A parenthesis about the last-mentioned category. Misogyny and resentment and perverse morbid fascination find an easy target in nuns. Far more than against priests, widespread anti-Catholic sentiment tends to be vented against these regimented creatures, who are easier to classify and place as a group or subgroup, as a caricature and through stereotypes and jokes, than as independent individuals.

  When talking about a girl who plays hard to get or is shy or dresses in a depressing style, or too prudishly, or doesn’t wear makeup, or goes to church, it is said with some annoyance that she is a nun, while it would never occur to anybody to say of her male equivalent that he is a priest.

  Which means that a nun has to be short and homely, with a mustache, or else, if she’s pretty, then it’s obvious that she must be a sort of latter-day Nun of Monza, that is to say, a slut in a habit, her lustful body barely concealed by her ample tunic, ready at any moment to explode, as is regularly described in a specialized sector of the pornographic film industry.

  Males and females, priests and nuns.)

  WITH TARASCIO, it was quite another matter. He manifested his maleness proudly, wearing a tank top even when the gym was freezing, and showing off his freckly old flesh, sagging slightly above the taut firm muscles of his shoulders, his visible deltoids, his pectorals covered with twisted white hairs. He seemed delighted to be able to show us the results of thousands of push-ups, performed over the course of various decades, the wrinkly gun shows of his biceps, and in fact, we were very impressed with the show. Despite all this, Tarascio struck us as an exceedingly ancient man, a mummy, a plaster cast of some athlete or boxer found under the ashes of Herculaneum: among other things, because Tarascio, all told, stood five feet tall, like the men of antiquity, to judge from their armor and the height of the doorways they passed through, short, muscular, virile.

  Tarascio was fixated with virility. It was his obsession, the purpose of his life, that we, his students, should be masculine, and if we weren’t already, that we should become sufficiently virile, what with weight lifting and Swedish stall bars.

  FROM THE FRUSTRATION of these fitful starts, these lunges at virility, there arose a singular form of narcissism. Precisely because we were losers, we had failed, and we continued to fail in the face of any challenge, even the slightest ones, we might be summoned to withstand when it came to virility, we were all the more inclined to fantasize our perfect virile identity, and we leaned over it to gaze at our images in it, as if in the image dreamed of we could see the reflection of our virility, and that reflection could shimmer onto our flesh-and-blood self, finally rendering it worthy, complete, fully achieved. How we admired ourselves! How we studied our reflections! But not because we loved ourselves, quite the contrary! The core of narcissism isn’t self-love, it’s anger.

  Among the various ways of getting to know yourself: gaze at length into the mirror, get sick, write letters, play soccer or Ping-Pong, fall in love, read, struggle. Or even returning insults, that is, the instinctive way we do it, hysterically, or menacingly and calmly, can tell us a great deal about who we are. If in fact we don’t subject ourselves to challenges that prove who we are and if fate doesn’t hold any in store for us, because the period doesn’t consider them important or the class we’re born into or the place we’re born exclude them from the outset, then virility has no option but to express itself through one’s outward appearance and attitude. Then our shoulders, the muscles in our arms, our pectorals replace courage, determination, decisiveness, and initiative. What we don’t do is underpinned by a great many other things that we do, a vast amount of agitation, bending, pumping, lifting, or thrusting: in the absence of a single action that can seriously be considered noteworthy and significant, we perform a myriad of other actions, in series of ten, twenty, or thirty at a time. The body in training repeats the same act countless times, it’s hungering for action but it’s forced to break that action down into minimum sequences, replicating them ad infinitum. In a gymnasium, an action is never complete. With Tarascio, we exhausted ourselves with push-ups, even though we knew the whole time that we had done nothing at all. But still, we’d feel that we were bigger and more confident, as we touched our chests through our T-shirts.

  BUT WHY AM I TALKING about gym teachers from my old school days? What is so interesting or particular about them? Can the sticky material that covered the gym floor become an object of regret? I don’t know, I doubt it. Perhaps it’s because they were the only ones to come a little closer to what truly touched us, to what troubled us and disturbed us, and turned us into the men we are now, the disordered bodies we are now, deployed between a urology clinic and the little apartment with the loft bed where a lover lives we see so infrequently that the affair might go on for ten or twenty years. (This last phrase is vulgar and intentionally striking, perfectly suited therefore to a book by a contemporary writer, which is what I am, but in part it also corresponds to the reasons a phys ed teacher and his students, males all—even if they never say anything meaningful to one another, and even though the teacher limits himself to bellowing orders and scolding the students, who swarm wholesale through a gymnasium where the squeegeeing footsteps of their rubber soles on the linoleum echo through the air—always share a profound secret.)

  LIKE ANY OTHER HUMAN RESOURCE, the body is made to be modified. That is, shaped, engraved, sculpted, with various intents, but in accordance with typically artistic procedures: make the clearly defined forms emerge from the indistinct, which is what adolescent bodies almost always are, emaciated, twisted, or still clothed in baby fat, which the kids make jiggle as they run or jump in their awkward ways. The body thus becomes a virgin expanse, ideal for experimentation. On that parade ground, all sorts of exercises and maneuvers are undertaken. To Tarascio, the idea of leaving his signature on the bodies of the fifteen-year-olds he sculpted was a source of delight. Why, of course, Gian Lorenzo Tarascio, like a Renaissance maestro. And in fact, when he wasn’t shouting, he was accustomed to murmuring under his breath, as if rapt in meditation: “The Discus Thrower . . . yes . . . the Gladiator . . . the Bronze Boxer . . . Michelangelo’s David,” as he supervised the completion of the series of exercises that were meant to push us closer, day by day, to those sculptural models.

  For a certain period, Matteoli and I, and a few other schoolmates, determined once and for all to build up our physiques, attended his private gymnasium, which was located in the area around Ponte Mammolo. We would go in formations of two or four, on our scooters with gym bags slung over our shoulders. For the most part I rode on the back of Matteoli’s scooter. He had a small gray Vespa. Matteoli was without a doubt the most faithful adherent of Tarascio’s, and the one who had most wholeheartedly signed on to the project to build up our strength, the same process that in those years was being applied, in fact, to the Vespa 50 cc scooters. Indeed, with a few simple modifications—so simple that even I, who knew next to nothing about engines, managed to complete them—a Vespa 50 cc became capable of going twice as fast as the legal, unmodified version. It’s a known fact that a 50 cc has the potential of becoming a veritable rocket ship, and that only the special devices and calibrations of the manufacturers limit their performance in order to comply with the rules of the road. Well, all you have to do is remove the manufacturer’s restrictions: pull out the diaphragms, widen the caliber of the carburetor, empty the muffler, and use a hacksaw to shorten the exhaust pipe . . . Modifications roughly equivalent to the ones being done to motor scooters behind closed garage doors were being carried out by Tarascio on the bodies of the boys who came to his gym near Ponte Mammolo, which, for that matter, must once have been a garage. Back then we had none of the complicated fitness equipment that nowadays even the most down-at-the-heels gyms possess, and the gym was equipped with nothing more than a couple of sets of stall bars, weight benches, a few barbells, kettlebells, chest expanders, back extenders, and other junk nineteenth-century bodybuilders might have used.

  OF THE FIGURE of Brot
her Curzio nothing remains to me now but a few fleeting images, including, as I’ve described, the unforgettable snapshot of Tor di Quinto, and the memory of a phrase that he once let slip while watching Arbus. “This isn’t calisthenics, Santa Madonna! This is St. Vitus’s dance!” he said, almost frightened at my classmate’s lack of coordination, along with the vigorous frenzy of his movements, his way of making up for his awkwardness.

  I can’t be 100 percent sure, but I think that I saw him again a couple of years ago, in the center of town, along the river, at the point where they were planning to excavate an underpass but then had to give up the project for fear that the million tons of Castel Sant’Angelo might collapse in upon it. He was old, unshaven, and on his head he wore a wig, thick and raven black, shiny as an animal’s pelt. How was I able to recognize him? You’ll never believe it, but he was wearing a tracksuit, that’s right, the old tracksuit from SLM, black with yellow and green trim, faded from repeated washings but not yet entirely in tatters. It must have been made of some really durable fabric! Curzio (perhaps it’s wrong to think of using the salutation “brother” now) was wandering around in circles, lost in his thoughts, then a shrill voice called to him, and a homely woman, who up until then had been rummaging around one of the last specimens of a pay phone in the city of Rome, caught up with him and grabbed him brutally by the hand, forcing him to stroll with her along the parapet overlooking the river, swinging their arms back and forth, like some parody of a couple of young lovers. Then he said to her: “You whore,” and in that single word I recognized the voice of my old phys ed teacher. He couldn’t manage to twist loose from that woman’s grip.

  Witnessing that scene, I assumed they were husband and wife.

  I’LL CALL the third phys ed teacher the Painter of Nudes, also known as Courbet.

  Courbet might have been thirty-five years old or so, but he always spoke of himself in the past tense, like a man in his sunset years, to whom all the good or bad things that are going to happen have already happened. We were astonished, amused, and worried by this tic. Could the arc of a male’s life be so brief? Feel oneself to be done for before middle age—could that happen to a vigorous man who, like our teacher, loves art and sports and women? Perhaps someone like Courbet felt it more than others, in a more intense fashion. What did he feel? His decline. Which for an athlete or an aesthete comes just after age thirty, and the exceptions certainly don’t contradict the rule, and even they, at a certain point, obey it. Courbet in a T-shirt and trousers, and I think of it every time I see him these days, crossing the piazza downstairs from my apartment, brushing close to the wall of LUISS University, or on Via Bellinzona, as he wanders hunched over through the Quartiere Trieste, or QT, dragging his feet as if he were shod in boots of lead, his gray hair hanging over his shoulders and his nose hooked like the beak of a bird of prey, resembling an elderly Apache, the faded leather of his face and a pair of stark, staring eyes, panting, if you can use an adjective like that one for a person’s gaze.

  But in those days, he struck us as a perfect specimen of the sensuous Italian male, gleaming hair, gypsy gaze, shiny white teeth, and the rest of him a bundle of clearly defined muscles and nerves so taut and responsive that you could bet money that he’d always be the first to strike the blow, pitiless. His skinniness made him look almost menacing, men without fat on their bodies and jutting cheekbones often are menacing or at least look it, which amounts to the same thing, since menace is a pure phantom quality.

  Now Courbet is nothing but a ghost . . .

  11

  COURBET’S NICKNAME came from the fact that he was not only a gym teacher, but also a painter. In fact, he was first and foremost a painter.

  He immediately established good relations with the few male students of class 5M, the last section of Giulio Cesare High School, the class of reprobates, decimated by their systemic flunking, to which I had been assigned the day I enrolled, with stamped on my forehead, like the mark of Cain, the emblem of the private school that I had left of my own initiative and free will, while at Giulio Cesare they just assumed I’d been expelled. It didn’t take long, a couple of months from the beginning of the school year, before one afternoon Courbet invited us to his studio, ten minutes away from the school. No more tossing the balls and sprinting from one side of the gym to the other. Far more serious and intense things awaited us here. His atelier was a barren cellar space that gained what little light it had from a pair of transom windows just above street level. A few large electric lamps illuminated a full-size bed, hastily remade, a long table made of construction planks and sawhorses, with paintbrushes and jars of paint, and then stretched canvases stacked along the walls. The whole place was white but dotted with stains, rumpled, grayish. Even the bedsheets, with the consistency of cardboard, seemed to have been painted white, rather than washed: and painted upon that white field were the shadings of the rumpled sheets. Seated or half-lying on those sheets, on Courbet’s bed, with cigarettes in our mouths, we watched the exhibition of his paintings, which our gym teacher turned toward us one at a time, without comments.

  He was good, Courbet was. And obsessive. He drew and painted only in black and white. He reproduced bodies of naked women nude in obscene poses or others sprawled so languidly they looked like they were dead. He did it with noteworthy, I’d say almost excessive, skill.

  It was then that I guessed at the link between artistic technique and masturbation, in every field of art where the virtuoso, the great virtuoso, capable of performing with the utmost mastery, is always, basically, masturbating: and that was, in fact, what Courbet did when he was painting, and what he wanted the audience of his paintings to do, canvases in which he reproduced with great minutiae the pubic hairs and the folds of the feminine bellies and the wrinkles in the models’ erect nipples, women who were for the most part dark, mature, in fact, slightly decrepit, who gave every indication of having been his lovers. Technique is a sophisticated way of producing excitement, and that is what the great virtuosos (Salvador Dalí, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Glenn Gould, Alvin Lee) are doing with the vortex of their feverish, skillful fingers: a whirlpool of autoeroticism.

  THEY WERE STRANGE and instructive afternoons, the ones we spent in Courbet’s studio. He’d pour himself glasses of whiskey and offer us orangeade, with a faint smile of scorn and superiority, but also of brotherhood, in the manner that an elder brother has, or ought to have, when he teaches his younger brethren about life: he enchants them, he weans them, and he pushes them away, out into open waters. Once we’d drunk our orangeade, we’d start looking at the nude women, thighs splayed, that Courbet had painted. Those open thighs ought to have united us, but the element that united us was, at the same time, a thousand miles away, out of our reach.

  FROM THE THINGS he said and the canvases he painted, you’d say that our teacher thought about nothing but women, only then he would surprise us with paradoxical lines of thought, which both amused us and filled us with doubts.

  “Sure, you talk, you all talk and talk . . .” while in fact we were saying nothing, “. . . but deep down, there’s not all that big of a difference in fucking someone in the ass and getting fucked in the ass . . . sticking it in a hole or having your hole stuck, what’s the big deal, after all?”

  At the sight of our baffled faces he would drive on. “The idea that a man should get all worked up over something like this strikes me as ridiculous. Do you feel like taking it up the ass? Then go ahead!”

  And then other prophecies we didn’t understand, concerning age and the passage of time, which was of course the exact reason we didn’t understand them.

  “You have no idea what it means for a man to get out of bed in the morning, bend over, and touch the tips of his toes . . . and what an immense miserable satisfaction there is in being able to do it.”

  He painted a lot and, from what he told us, sold his work briskly, at least a painting a week. When he ran out of canvases to show us, he limited himself to teaching.

 
“SO YOU THINK that the fact that you like nude women means you’re safe, right? If women excite you, you figure that you’re wired correctly . . . well, not necessarily. It’s just another way, a different way, of being effeminate. In reality, all men are queers, that’s right, all of them. The ones who don’t like women and who like to take it up the ass, they’re queers, obviously. But what about the ones, instead, who spend all day every blessed day thinking about women, like me . . .? Or like you? What kind of men are they, or I should say, what kind of men are we, what sort of males are those who have nothing but pussy in their heads? Who think about nothing but legs, skirts, high-heeled shoes . . . are these virile thoughts, in your opinion?

  “As a result, men can be divided into two categories: queers, who love other men, and half-queers, who love women. A real man ought to hang around with men only, but if he does that, then he’s queer. And in fact, in the old days, all those bands and gangs were queer . . . monks, sailors, pirates . . . even Robin Hood and his merry men!”

  And he’d throw back another glass of whiskey, at four in the afternoon. “So what’s left? The only thing left is to possess women brutally. To hold them in contempt. That’s the only way a male can feel safe from the risk of effeminacy. By scorning what you desire. But it’s such a depressing thing . . . so vulgar . . .” And at that point a great wave of melancholy swept over him.