The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  There is one extreme consequence of this predatory attitude toward women, caused by an absence of familiarity: and that is rape.

  THE OTHER POSSIBLE VARIANT, men being with men: homosexuality.

  PEOPLE FREQUENTLY ASK SOMEONE like me who works in a prison whether convicts in there practice homosexuality or become homosexuals just because they’re always among men, and can see women only during visits, when they can only lust after them in vain. Like a sum of cash uninvested, then, their sexual desire would be assigned to the only gender available. To say nothing of those cases, so often depicted in movies about prison, in which homosexual relations are imposed by force, usually upon a new arrival, who finds himself tossed into a cell with rough and powerful men, horny and implacable; or else upon someone too weak to defend himself.

  PAS DE CHANCE was tattooed on the bodies of the convicts described by Cocteau, with arrows pointing to the anus.

  If I turn the same question around and ask the convicts, they give me only evasive answers. The only confessions, the only stories that I hear waver somewhere between the sarcastic and lascivious, concerning some “goodfella,” who might very well have a wife and children back home, but who in prison got a crush or actually fell head-over-heels in love with a transsexual in the G8 wing who was making goo-goo eyes at him. Sure, you know the way things go . . . love is love . . . but if you stop to think about it, this, too, is a desperate quest for the lost feminine component, rediscovered between the hard, upright tits of some male Brazilian nearly six feet tall. Strictly speaking, there’s very little about prison that can be called homosexual, indeed, often these love stories are brimming over with the classic saccharine boy-meets-girl formula. And there’s another curious detail worth adding: the ones who really fall hard for the trannies are often the guards.

  ONE TIME, this is how it went.

  There was a tranny in tenth grade.

  The cells that serve as classrooms are arranged in pairs, one across from the other, at the far end of a short corridor, twenty or twenty-five feet long, which in turn feeds into the wide hallway that leads to the G11 wing.

  The school occupies four of these side corridors, for a total of eight cells, five of them used as classrooms, where lessons can be taught, two others as workshops with computers, and one as a teacher’s room, with lockers, a Xerox machine, stationery, and all the rest.

  Between one period and the next, the students leave class to stretch their legs and smoke a cigarette as they wait for the teacher for their next class, who is often, however, arriving from a different wing of the prison: for example, he might be coming down out of the maximum security wing, which is two stories higher up and requires you to pass through a number of gates.

  Some of those gates are opened remotely, others by hand so you have to wait for the guard to show up with the keys: this manual opening may be done with haste, indifference, insolence, deliberate slowness; kindly or brusquely.

  The normal shifting of teachers at the end of the period can draw out into a full-fledged recess.

  But the convict students don’t take advantage only of the time between periods to loiter in the side corridor: often, during the lessons, they will ask permission to step out and smoke a cigarette or else, on their return from medical examinations or meetings with their lawyers, instead of going immediately back into class to face up to the formulas with which the teacher is filling the blackboard, they’ll hang out there to savor those few minutes of paradoxical liberty that consists of being locked up in neither a cell nor a classroom, but instead in that sort of no-man’s-land which is, in fact, the little side corridor, seven or eight paces, no more.

  There is a relative margin of tolerance toward this custom: the teachers turn a blind eye, and the guards who are in charge of keeping an eye on the school are satisfied that the convicts don’t go out into the main corridor, but remain confined in the side corridors.

  To prevent too many comings and goings, every once in a while the guards will shout down from their lookout points, in weary voices, “Everyone inside . . .” or else, “You knooooow iiit, don’t you? . . . that you’re not allowed to haaaang oooout in the haaaallways . . .” after which they walk the side corridors to shut all the gates with the pebbled glass inserts, so that the loitering prisoners sneaking a smoke won’t be noticed by any superior officers who may be walking down the main corridor, thus avoiding unnecessary dressings down, remonstrances, and reports that might ensue—to the detriment of both prisoners and guards.

  Anyway, there was a tranny in tenth grade who spent more time outside the classroom than in it.

  She had a hard time paying attention to the lessons, she had to get up and stretch that body which, since the last time it had been immobilized behind a desk in school, had unquestionably became more shapely. Too shapely.

  She had fairly discreet manners, certainly not as shameless as the pair of explosive beach balls that swung from her chest.

  She was standing with her back against the wall, at the far end of the side corridor, frequently with one long leg stretched forward and the other one bent with the heel against the wall, smoking and chatting, with a tremulous, nasal voice, along with the eleventh-grade students, who had also come out of the classroom out of boredom or tobacco addiction.

  We had all noticed, as we walked down the main corridor between periods, or on our way to the laboratory, that nearly every time the tranny was out of the classroom, on the other side, leaning with both elbows on a radiator in the central corridor, there was a prison guard, a handsome, relaxed young man.

  They would talk to each other from that safe distance, in a faint voice just loud enough for each to appreciate the other’s wisecracks: every so often the guard would flash smiles while the tranny laughed, flattered, with those squawks and gurgles and high-pitched squeaks typical of those who have hormonal imbalances and mucous linings permanently inflamed by cocaine.

  When the rest of us walked between them, we were never able to make out a single word of what they were saying to each other, whereas they understood perfectly.

  It was like a secret code they were speaking.

  And yet the current of interest between those two was quite visible, it became almost instinctive to apologize as you passed through the middle of it.

  IT SHOULD COME as a surprise to no one.

  The guards are ordinary young men and the transsexuals are more womanly than real women.

  Not all of them, but certainly some, possess a communicative charge that is not merely erotic in nature; what’s more, they give the impression of successfully having escaped from the grim reality of prison.

  As they sashay along the corridors and hallways with their awkward or regal gait, depending on the length of their thighs, they joke, they constantly joke, they poke and prod one another, they pretend to quarrel and to take offense, it’s never clear whether or not they’re serious, they preen and promenade, they flirt for the most part with one another, they conduct their conversations with extremely rapid exchanges in falsetto like in an opera buffa, transforming the prison into a theater where even vulgarity becomes poetic and the custodians leaning on the handles of their mops are the audience.

  This amateur production can irritate or seduce, or it can be the target of sarcasm (I, for example, feel all three reactions at the same time): but when the phantasmagoria fails to culminate and the colorful dust evaporates off the butterfly’s wings after too much flapping, it veers toward the darkest tragedy.

  And the hysterical butterfly dies.

  AFTER A FEW WEEKS, we noticed that the prison guard had narrowed the distances, now he was standing at the threshold of the pebbled-glass gate that leads into the side corridor, that is, the gate that he was duty-bound to close to keep the smokers from getting out.

  With his legs in the main corridor and his torso leaning toward the interior of the side corridor, he would sway on the threshold of the gate, while the tranny was still down at the far end, giggling and shaki
ng her hair.

  Gradually, as their friendship became explicit, almost flaunted, well beyond the bounds of prison protocol, their conversation grew increasingly intimate, an uninterrupted swap meet of jests and tender words, tinged with the airy irony that only those who truly understand can achieve, those who express themselves in a language that is allusive, but perfectly clear to them.

  Their, shall we say, professional relationship, of prison guard to convict, had evaporated into a human, personal flow.

  A miraculous naturalness that aroused concern in some of us, annoyance in others; still others, and I was among them, were filled with admiration at the way the life force finds a way, stubbornly burrowing along like the grass that flourishes in the cracks in the pavement and sidewalks.

  I know, I know, that a prison guard should never have such close relations with a convict.

  Especially not a convict with great big silicone-filled tits.

  There can be vicious twists, sexual extortion and all sort of dirty dealings, and in fact it is normally in the wings where trannies are imprisoned that this sort of business flourishes, at night.

  Let’s be clear on this point.

  But there, at school, in broad daylight, right before the eyes of one and all, the story took on another aspect.

  If it had happened in any ordinary high school instead of behind prison bars, you could have imagined it as a platonic love story between a custodian and a female student.

  Something that runs against commonsense rules but not against the deeper nature of desire.

  In a school in the outside world, it all would have been settled with muffled laughter at the expense of the two lovers and at the very most a dressing down from the headmaster.

  But this is prison, all adults, and there is no headmaster, and the guards are cops.

  IT CONTINUED like that until the last days of school. The beauty let her locks hang over the balcony, and the prison guard resumed his serenade, on the threshold of the side corridor, and occasionally from the interior, as if with all that swaying on his arms, his impetus had catapulted him inside.

  Closer to his fair interlocutor, her smile.

  Until one fine day, when the lessons are over and the classrooms have emptied out and the students have all gone back to their wing, a female teacher who has stayed late in the laboratory straightening up the equipment is walking silently down the main corridor on her way to the exit. She still has to go through six gates before she can leave the building, but in her mind she’s already in the outside world, she’s thinking about other things by now, about preparing lunch and her son who will be getting out of his school soon, and as she passes down the corridor she darts a glance into the secondary side corridors, out of an inbred prison instinct that drives you to always look around corners, to check every intersection.

  The gate is open, there’s no one there, at the far end the doors are thrown open, the classrooms are deserted.

  She walks past the first side corridor, the second, and then when she comes to the third she has a moment’s hesitation and a double take that pushes her to retrace her steps . . .

  It’s strange, through the gap in the half-closed gate she glimpses someone down at the end of the side corridor: could it be that the custodians are cleaning up now, when it’s time to start making dinner? she wonders, and stopping in her tracks and almost leaning backward, she goes back to peering through the gap in the gate that’s standing ajar.

  Only from there can she see clearly.

  At the end of the side corridor with his back to the wall is the guard, his eyes closed and his hands resting on the shoulders of a person who’s kneeling before, shaking her long hair and moving her head up and down, to the right and to the left, pulling away suddenly and then plunging back down into the man’s pelvis.

  Despite the unmistakable meaning of this scene, the teacher cannot seem to connect this image right away with its significance, and she was ashamed afterward of that fact.

  Otherwise, she would immediately have turned her gaze away and taken to her heels.

  Instead she stood there for a few seconds, in any case, for too long, staring at the scene, openmouthed, until the guard opened his eyes wide and saw the teacher, in the gap between the sheets of pebbled glass, their eyes meeting.

  He didn’t say a word, he was flushed with pleasure.

  There’s a short story by Chekhov in which a peasant overeats, splurging on caviar, gets indigestion, but can’t stop eating, until he finally dies, but the caviar was just too good, he couldn’t stop.

  The head continued to bob up and down, yessir, with those side shakes that instead suggest a negation, a refusal.

  The female teacher slipped away, trying not to make any noise with her heels on the cement floor.

  A LOVELY SCENE, canonical, after its fashion.

  Deeply moving.

  It was the only way the two of them could enter into contact, in the briefest and most intense manner possible, like a move out of the martial arts, which concentrates in a single gesture, applied to a single point, the power of the entire body.

  They had concentrated their desire.

  Love manages to express itself even in a narrow range of actions, and after so many words, all that was left for the two of them was to burn it up in a physical act, and little did it matter that it was the exact same act that the convict regularly performed, in the outside world, for pay.

  The maximum amount of spontaneity in there couldn’t express itself in any way but a typical meretricious performance.

  A blow job.

  I’m willing to swear that in the outside world, that would have been a kiss.

  3

  I HAVE OFTEN THOUGHT THAT GOD EXISTS, that it’s right that He should exist, and that if there is no God it’s because there are a great many gods and they inhabit the things of the world and are inside us, they speak through our voices. But between this elementary thought and a true faith there stretches an abyss, and I don’t have the necessary courage, but not even the basic impulse, to cross it. I am moved when I listen to “My Sweet Lord,” but I don’t experience any of the feelings described in the song.

  In other words, even if God exists, I don’t love Him.

  He loves me but I don’t burn with desire to meet Him (I really want to see you . . .), I imagine that He’d scorch me to a crisp, like a dry leaf.

  But I necessarily have to place a subject in all these sentences I write: God. It is just like in the exercises of grammatical analysis that I invent for my students, they’re interchangeable grammatical schemes such as “The peasant harvests the wheat” or “Gianni’s dog bit a policeman,” as I write them on the blackboard I’m certainly not thinking about who this peasant or the dog-bit policeman might be, instead of a policeman as far as I’m concerned he might as well be a thief, a direct object he remains, I like the fact that the language manages to function on its own, but instead my students immediately start asking me who this Gianni is, and they laugh with satisfaction at the fact that that bastard of a policeman should have been bitten by the dog, good work, Gianni, you trained your dog right! In other words, they’re able to believe the words, so they’re willing to believe in God, who cannot be anything more than a concept for them. If you name something, you’ve already brought it into existence.

  My students are ontological by nature.

  I’m not.

  I’m not ready.

  I don’t even match the evangelical cliché of the “man of little faith.”

  I remain outside the temple, even after I’ve entered it.

  But because I’ve always liked words, if for no reason other than their sound, I would read Holy Scripture at mass.

  I’D ALWAYS REFUSED to serve the mass.

  But I still needed to pile up points for the end-of-year prizes, and you could earn points not only by serving mass, but also by doing the readings.

  Why not? I liked the idea.

  Readings were more dignified, ther
e was no need to dress up like an altar boy or to obey anyone’s orders: your moment arrived, you went to the lectern, and you read aloud.

  Once you had finished the assignment, you went back to your seat.

  The first times I read, I just took care to enunciate each word clearly.

  Then there was what we might call an actorial period: once I started to feel a little more sure of myself, I started to interpret and dramatize the text, with pauses and changes of the tone and register of my voice, when the characters in the Gospel speak in the first person.

  “What would ye that I should do for you?”

  “Lord, that our eyes may be opened!”

  I would make my childish voice ring out as impressively as possible . . .

  “O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you, and suffer you?”

  And I intoned such emotions as indignation and compassion; I let ring tones of prophesying.

  “And if thy right hand offend thee . . . cut it off, and cast it from thee! And if thy right eye offend thee . . . pluck it out, and cast it from thee!”

  One day it dawned on me just how ridiculous I was.

  Since then, I have always felt a certain mistrust toward actors, who are good at performing but almost never good at reading, because they’re never satisfied to just read.

  As soon as I stopped insisting on being inspired and moved, I realized that the inspiration and the emotion were there, yes, but they were in the text, in the words before my eyes, they were already inspired and it did no good to add emphasis or drama, it wasn’t necessary to push them or hurl them like stones, it was enough to let them slide one after the other, give them back, give them back, that’s right, you need to give them back the way you would do with something borrowed that has only been entrusted to us for a while.