The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  Take a little nail . . .

  And a little hammer . . .

  Come and join us, drive a nail or two . . .

  To the tune of “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo,” the novelty song from Disney’s Cinderella, it was a blasphemous little ditty about the Crucifixion. Something so stupid and embarrassing that Mr. Golgotha didn’t even manage to understand it, indeed, didn’t even perceive it, taking it for background noise from the classroom and the hallways, from the school as a whole. A school, in fact, is nothing other than an enormous echo chamber for bothersome noises, or a concert hall where all the instruments are being tuned. Along with the orchestra, there’s a choir vocalizing in voices high and low, light and dark, a thousand singers, all rehearsing their parts. How could Golgotha have noticed that little ditty, how can you single out one individual piece of idiocy when you’re soaking all day every day in a sea of idiocy? Every student is well aware of the fact, and if it ever happens that the student in question one day becomes a teacher, and he chances to find himself, so to speak, in the somewhat hyperbolic phrase, “on the other side of the barricades,” he’ll certainly bring that awareness with him: the fact that teachers notice practically nothing of what their students say, think, and scheme behind their backs, and not even the things that they do openly before them; they cannot control the reactions and the laughter and the passed notes and the smirks and the whispers and the obscene gestures; they manage to grasp one out of ten of the wisecracks that target them.

  STRANGE TO SAY IN A SCHOOL run by priests, but our religion teacher wasn’t a priest. Who knows why. The most crucial subject at a religious school was taught by someone who wasn’t a religious, by a dilettante, so to speak, even if he was animated by a great and abiding passion. Perhaps too much passion. In fact, the students called him Golgotha, or Mr. Golgotha. Golgotha was the refrain in nearly all the things he had to say, which revolved around Mount Golgotha, in fact: the image of Golgotha, the prophecy of Golgotha, the Golgotha that can be found inside each of us, and if it’s not inside us it’s right before us, before our eyes, in our destiny, on the horizon, even if we can’t see it, and if we don’t see it, that’s because we don’t want to see it, but the Golgotha is there, right there, awaiting us.

  Why don’t you come hammer with us . . .

  Hammer the nails of Baby Jesus

  Put an end to all this fuss!

  Without any need to respond to Eleuteri’s provocative ditty, Mr. Golgotha already had tears in his eyes, they’d been there even before he set foot in the classroom. It had been a difficult year for him, more than difficult, insurmountable. The idea of hiring a layman to teach religion in a school run by priests had been a risky one. Perhaps it had been done in order to demonstrate the openness and modernity of a school that nonchalantly chose to entrust the teaching of the subject that constituted its very reason for existence to an outsider. Good job, smart choice, compliments on your democratic pluralism. The problem was that, as a result, it wasn’t clear, and especially not to us students, just what authority Mr. Golgotha enjoyed, whence it derived, since he was not a priest, in other words, why on earth we ought to sit and listen to someone like him talking to us about Jesus, after the priests themselves had already talked about Him quite a bit, more than enough I’d say, at catechism and at mass. We’d have been willing to undergo the umpteenth tirade about the Christ who illumines, the Christ who magnifies, the Christ who redeems, the Christ who forgives, the Christ who loves, if it was being delivered by a young brother filled with the spirit, newly graduated from the seminary, or else a hidebound old priest, who would harshly throw his appeals to goodness into our faces like so many roundhouse punches: but how could we believe and obey that hypersensitive, ill-shaven young man, whose vocation for that matter was so weak and uncertain that it hadn’t even led him to wear the black skirt?

  Since Mr. Golgotha was anything but stupid, he had understood immediately, from the very first day, the atmosphere he was going to be working in, and that the year he was going to spend with us was going to be sheer torture if he tried to follow the path of catechism and doctrine like any other priest: he absolutely had to emphasize the difference. He had therefore chosen to play the extremely risky card of the innovator: someone who wants to change, be more modern and up to date, bring a breath of fresh air. Now, this type of teacher tends to arouse among his students very little enthusiasm and a great deal of suspicion, and among them there are immediately those who plan to take advantage of him. What’s the trick? wonders the majority. While a disciplined minority, naïve or idealistic, follows the teacher in his revolutionary programs, the more cynical students scheme to make a fool of him. That’s the price progressivism always has to pay. And if the subject matter is religion, it’s not clear how you can lay it down in a new way. And yet Mr. Golgotha had given it a try.

  HE HAD PROMISED from the very first lesson that he wouldn’t talk about God (a subject about which we already knew all there was to know, that is, truth be told, nothing), but instead about ourselves. What is that supposed to mean, “ourselves”? Well, about our problems. About our psychological problems. About our problems “as young people today” (in every historical period, obviously, there are “young people today” and they always have their own specific set of problems). “We want to talk about our problems” meant nothing more than an aspiration to say something, anything, to vent. At least, that’s what Golgotha seemed to think. Who knows why he imagined that young people’s problems are always psychological in nature, and therefore inevitably stem from the family, when instead it’s pretty evident that what’s really making them suffer is first and foremost their physique, their body, their skin, their hair, their stomach, their genitals, their muscles, their legs—maybe too short or too skinny or too hairy—and then their gums and oily flesh and armpits and hair follicles and acid reflux and body odors and dry skin and dandruff . . . all being traced back to their psyches, as if these were mere projections, fantasies, ghosts.

  (Might it not be appropriate to talk about zits with a religion teacher, would it be too basic to put zits first in your thoughts, in your “problems” . . .?)

  Adolescents are stuffed into their bodies like so many sausages, often with hormone levels raging out of control, and in spite of that, they are still peered at through the lens of the soul, by people trying to figure out what it is that’s not working right in their heads. For that matter, in the years during which this story unfolds, psychoanalysis entered—in some cases on tiny cat feet, in others with impetuous recklessness, touted as an explanation, a solution, a discovery, or a revolution—into a vast and diverse array of settings, the companion piece to any conversation or topic. A psychoanalytical interpretation came hurrying to the rescue of a rather feeble theory, in the midst of a controversial debate, and it was used as a crowbar to force open unsolvable problems, revealing the mechanisms that lay behind all decisions. Everything could now be reviewed and explained through the lens of psychoanalysis, which magnified to a dizzying extent details, revealing things that had never been seen before: politics, literature, art, society, the family, war, fascism, cinema, as well as history and even the hard sciences could be colored with meaning from the spectrum of psychoanalysis now being beamed onto them. So why not religion, too? What difference does it make if, instead of the soul, we talk about the psyche? That’s changing just one word, a word that, for that matter, means the same thing. And in place of the usual brandishing of menacing passages from Holy Scripture, offer current, personal experiences, taken from our everyday lives. Instead of Jacob and Elijah, the stories of your friends—and your own stories, too. Setting aside the old books, numbered line by line, let’s talk about ourselves instead, freely, let’s talk about “our problems” (some these days might talk about “problematics”).

  Like any progressive teacher, Golgotha thought he could get away with it, with this reduction of God to ego, of metaphysics to history and of history to current events, of religious doctrine to run-o
f-the-mill advice about how to live, in the belief that that’s what we needed, what we were thirsting for. If I toss the Bible overboard and instead start talking about Oedipus complexes and obscure drives, or about sexuality, this longtime taboo, the boys will stir out of their apathetic boredom, they’ll pay attention to what I have to say or at the very least they’ll stop shooting spitballs at me when I have my back turned, busily writing the names of the prophets on the chalkboard: that’s what Mr. Golgotha must have had in mind. But he’d miscounted his aces. Just imagine. With his idea of letting us open our hearts and bare our thoughts, he had no idea what he was up to. In fact, here is a good phrase from the Gospels that would have suited him to a tee: Forgive him, Lord, for he knows not what he does. He did not know, in other words, that we had no thoughts in our heads whatsoever, and the thoughts that we did have were unspeakable, unconfessable, that we would never have dreamed of revealing them to anyone, and certainly not to a teacher in front of the rest of the class, or else that we might even have done it, and this actually happened, I think, only a couple of times in all, and was greeted with a hail of laughter and shrill whistles as the other boys mocked whatever our classmate was confessing. Deep down, this is what Golgotha wanted from us: he wanted to hear our confessions, he wanted us to reveal our sins, and to feel relieved in so doing, with no expectation of the shame that would envelop them, these revelations, or the gusts of noisy heckling that would sweep them away.

  Therefore, poor, mortified Golgotha often found himself standing there spouting soliloquies, preaching in the wilderness of our indifference and mistrust, reading practically incomprehensible passages taken from the classic texts of psychoanalysis, passages that left no marks on our consciousness, our slumbers interrupted only by the clanging bell marking the end of the hour. This, of course, is the common fate of all those who teach a subject considered to be of lesser importance, with only a few hours spread out among a great many classes and a vast number of students who, after months and months, barely know who the teacher is, so rarely have they laid eyes upon him, and who can scarcely remember his name, much less Mr. Golgotha, who fooled himself into believing that he could draw an individual psychological profile of each of us. Who actually believed that he could use The Interpretation of Dreams or The Psychopathology of Everyday Life to bring out our obsessions and heal them.

  And who had even dared, to the absolute astonishment of us students, to venture into the seething-hot territory of sex, questioning us about our desires, sampling and testing our knowledge and expectations, a truly courageous undertaking, all things considered, or else completely mad or reckless, a pioneer of a new subject, a religious studies teacher in a school run by priests venturing within a footstep, just a hairbreadth from sex education! That subject, about which a debate was raging at that time, in the wake of the larger reforms in society’s morals and customs, as to whether it ought to be taught at school, introduced as a full-fledged topic of instruction as, for example, it was said they were doing in Sweden—sure, of course, Sweden, the eternal touchstone, the emblem of an advanced nation behind which ours lagged, underdeveloped as always. Sex education was just added to the list of great innovations discussed and called for in those years, when people advocated “reading the newspaper in class” (which newspaper? Our unfailing response was Il Corriere dello Sport, basically the sports pages, in other words, while among the magazines most often suggested, we offered Le Ore and Caballero, rough Italian equivalents of Hustler or Playboy) or suggested that instead of going on field trips to the Reggia di Caserta or to Bomarzo, we should be carted off to farms or factories to get a closer look at manual labor, executed by those callused hands which, when displayed, according to a parable still touted in our elementary school primers, one would promptly gain admission through the pearly gates.

  Until someone came along who decided to pay Golgotha back in the same coin. It was, in fact, the same day that Eleuteri had greeted our religion teacher with his mocking and irreverent little ditty. But it was Arbus, unexpectedly, who took the pantomime to the next level.

  That morning, in fact, Golgotha had got it into his head to take on the topic, without warning, of the “drug problem,” that is, one of the main “problems” of “young people today,” the biggest new development with respect to the same old problems as ever. It would have been a safe bet that he would get there eventually, there wasn’t a single adult in the world, and for that matter there isn’t one now, who didn’t glimpse the sinister shadow of drugs looming over any given aspect of young people’s lives; much less would any of these adults give up the chance to refer—perhaps in strictly ritual terms, as a verbal duty that must be performed, whatever the situation—to the “dangers of drugs.” There were two possibilities: that drugs were the cause of the problems, or else their consequence; either you have a problem because you’re on drugs or else you’re on drugs because you have a problem. From the words he used that day, it was clear however that Mr. Golgotha set out from the assumption that he was introducing us to a totally unfamiliar topic, one we were familiar with only because we’d heard about it from others. He wanted, in other words, to protect us, to put us on our guard: it never would have occurred to him that the chosen topic could be anything more than a useful moral exercise, a simulation undertaken as a sort of preemptive war game, if we ever actually happened, someday in the distant future, to come face-to-face with those problems.

  “It is the weakness of the spirit,” he said, “that drugs take advantage of.”

  Golgotha talked about drugs as if they were a single person, endowed with will and awareness, and it was always therefore treated in the third person singular. Drugs were a treacherous individual, a dangerous companion who offers to lend a hand, then takes everything for himself.

  “But you can’t let drugs offer to help you.”

  “Then who?”

  It was Arbus who had posed the question. He asked it with curiosity, not insolence, though the two things tend to resemble each other to an uncomfortable extent in any adolescent, let alone Arbus, our own Nobel laureate. If someone asks questions, it means they’re not satisfied with what’s been said, or they don’t entirely buy into it, and therefore every question, even the most guileless and innocent, is bound to be seen as a criticism, or a challenge.

  “You don’t know, Arbus? Of course you know.”

  “No, teacher, I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”

  “Do you have friends you can count on?”

  “Real friends, teacher?” and Arbus ran his eyes around the class and in the end sat gazing at me, though not for long, just long enough that everyone understood that his gaze was a clear indication, an answer to Golgotha. I didn’t enjoy being dragged into the challenges, intellectual and nonintellectual, that Arbus stubbornly insisted on hurling at teachers, at priests, and at authority in general. I didn’t like mental arm wrestling back then, and I’m sure I never will enjoy it. If I fight back, I do so instinctively, but I’m never the first to wave a red flag, I’d rather stay out of squabbles, neither create them nor wade into them, it bores me to watch them and I feel anxious when I have to take part in them. Having been tapped by Arbus to participate, it meant I had to take sides, or rather that, like it or not, I had already taken sides with him in what promised to be a diatribe, a stupid diatribe, and with whom? With that wretch Golgotha! Fun times! Start something up with a teacher like him! Why couldn’t he just have let him spout off on his own? Golgotha would eventually have run out of steam, and with him, like the flickering flame of a wax taper burning down to the candleholder, the religion class. But at the same time, under the annoyance at being called into combat in that manner by Arbus, I felt a warm surge, a physical pleasure not unlike the touch of an unexpected caress. That glance of his was a fine declaration of friendship, which embarrassed me and filled me with pride at the same time. Nonetheless, I didn’t return the gesture, and I did so deliberately, I turned my eyes away from my friend’s eyes and looke
d at the floor instead.

  “Well, teacher? Is it enough to have a friend to defeat the scourge of ddhrugs?” That’s how he pronounced that last word, in an imitation of the drawling cadence that Golgotha practiced in his sermons, a cadence that surfaced especially when he grew heated. Some in the class, among the few who were actually paying attention to the exchange of views between student and teacher, laughed, but it was clear that Arbus wasn’t putting on a show for them, he hadn’t parodied the teacher for their benefit, or had he, though? After a fashion, Arbus enjoyed a curious popularity, in other words, he was a character.

  Mr. Golgotha went on, placidly inspired. It was clear that he was falling back on his last remaining resources, he’d consumed all the rest during that year spent preaching to the four winds, winds so powerful that the seeds he’d scattered didn’t even touch the ground but simply went spinning into the whirlwind and then blew back into his face. Residual energies seem to have a special quality, it’s firewood that burns bright, and so what he said next was truly inspired and yet, at the same time, incomprehensible, both because of the elevated concepts contained in his words, and because those words sank into an even darker gulf of dialect, verging on some other language, you might call it a dead tongue, like Ancient Greek or Aramaic. Blessed were those who did understand him, because that very day he entered into heaven. I certainly didn’t understand him, so profound were the things he said, I couldn’t follow them in the slightest, they made an impression on me, sure, but I didn’t really grasp them, and that is why I can’t reproduce them here. Only Arbus seemed to follow the thread. Then, when he descended from the realms of the empyrean back to the sphere my intellect could reach, and once again began speaking in Italian, a dazzling archaic Italian full of laments, not unlike what I imagine was spoken by Giordano Bruno—Il Nolano—or Tommaso Campanella, or Bernardino Telesio, he said more or less the things that I render here in a somewhere simplified language.