A few yards away from me sat a mother with a small boy in a stroller, sitting quietly, big blue eyes, fair exceedingly fine hair, emitting little noises of contentment, turning his head to look at his mother and trying to grab the various objects that she held out to him in an order so natural and precise that it seemed preordained. The child had small, white, very prehensile hands.
5
ANOTHER TIME I WENT TO SALVATORE’S HOUSE was much more interesting and unsettling than our visit to the MSI chapter.
This time, my friend asked me: Do you want to see something?
What are you supposed to say to a question like that?
He went into his brother’s bedroom—his brother wasn’t home—rummaged around anxiously in a drawer as if he were afraid that his brother might be about to come in at any moment, and pulled out a stack of Polaroids.
We hurried back to Salvatore’s room and sat down on the bed to examine them.
From the very first I was swept by a violent emotion that took my breath away.
They were pictures of nude girls.
I’d seen naked girls before, in various porn magazines, in Caballero, which was a tabloid newspaper, and in Le Ore.
It wasn’t uncommon to find pages torn out of these magazines, or their covers, blowing along the street, or abandoned beside garbage cans, or in public bathrooms: as if whoever had managed to get their hands on them hadn’t been able to resist ripping them to pieces.
And so the magazine was divided and multiplied.
It was common for packing paper or food wrappings to consist of pages from erotic magazines.
But I had never before seen pictures of nude girls taken in private, girls who were, so to speak, real girls.
Their very reality somehow made them repugnant.
The flash lit up their bodies in dazzlingly white close-ups, or not so much white as gray, as if they were dead, and the rest of the room remained partially in shadow.
It wasn’t entirely clear whether some of these bodies were female or male.
They were glabrous and boneless, the bellies and backs dotted with moles, the thighs and the nipples purplish.
Nearly all of them lacked heads, that is, the photographs were framed from the necks down to the knees.
Salvatore would pull one Polaroid off the top of the stack, hand it to me, wait for me to examine it thoroughly while he observed my reactions with a somewhat stupid-looking smile, then he’d give me another.
He gave the impression that he knew them all by heart and was interested to know what I thought of them.
I gulped down my saliva in silence and put the photo I’d just viewed at the bottom of my stack, the way you might do with a hand of cards.
The stack in Salvatore’s hands was dwindling while the one in mine was thickening.
I was tempted to ask Salvatore some questions, but I was throttled by my heart as it pounded in my throat.
The girls were different, yes, I’d have to guess that they were all different, lying down with their long hair draped along their backs or else bent over, both hands pulling their buttocks wide open.
The one characteristic they all had in common was that none of them was very well developed and by no means attractive.
One in particular made a very strong impression on me. The only girl to have been photographed more than once, in various positions. She was bronzed and had white bikini marks on her skin, a nonexistent bosom, and very skinny hips. Completely naked. From behind, you might have taken her for a little boy if it weren’t for the pale line left by the elastic strap of her brassiere, which ran horizontally beneath her protruding shoulder blades. She was posed in a standing position, squatting on the floor, curled up on the bed, lying belly down and spread-eagled. Only in one shot could her face be glimpsed, and that might have been an accident. Her face looked scared.
I DON’T THINK Salvatore really liked girls.
At that age it was hard to say which of us students at SLM liked girls and which didn’t, we had no way of making it evident, either to ourselves or to others.
Puberty is a crystal inferno.
Salvatore had a short, stout deskmate named Marco d’Avenia, childish to the verge of retardation, the kind of young boy who remains beardless and asexual until he becomes an adult.
In class, the two of them sat at the first desk on the right, next to the hallway door, clearly visible both from the teacher’s desk and podium and from all the rest of our desks. They were also therefore most vulnerable to the unannounced arrivals of the headmaster, who was fond of making visits as sudden as they were contrived, on flimsy pretexts, not so much for the purpose of checking on the student as on the teachers, who in fact feared these intrusions much more than we did and were very visibly ashamed and mortified if there was uproar or disorder.
The door would open without anyone knocking first and we’d all freeze, paralyzed in our various and grotesque poses: one might have a hand raised as he prepared to throw a crumpled ball of paper, another might be pretending to push his desk as if it were a bobsled about to take off, and then leap onto it to mimic the swerving and jolting of the track, others might be strangling each other, their hands around each other’s throat, and the teacher would be standing there, both arms high in the air like the conductor of a demented orchestra.
The silence that followed was broken only by his embarrassed small coughs and by the last metallic twangs of the hooks for our book bags being played as a sort of jew’s harp.
THE LESSONS seemed endless.
I would spend them almost entirely immobile, my hands perched on either side of my face, my elbows braced on my desktop.
I would do my very best to pay attention because I’ve always hated studying at home in the afternoon, but it was hard to maintain concentration for anything more than ten or fifteen minutes, after which I no longer changed position, but instead of looking toward the teacher’s desk or the podium or the blackboard, my eyes would lift a few degrees, toward the classroom ceiling, and after that I slipped into a trance.
I would be filled with an irresistible lassitude.
It happens to me still, and in the least advisable situations, I still drop off to sleep . . . not long ago it happened to me during a conference in Padua, seated at a table next to several important speakers.
Luckily, I happened to be wearing sunglasses and I hope and trust that nobody saw my little catnap.
Instead my classmates were in a constant frenzy, agitated as they tirelessly invented new ways of interrupting the lesson, some of them, I have to admit, decidedly brilliant.
There was one method in particular, and I occasionally took part in it myself, as it didn’t require you to move a muscle to participate, and most important of all, it was impossible to identify the culprit.
In Rome, every day at noon, aside from the famous cannon shot fired from the top of the Janiculum Hill, which was however too far away from SLM for us to be able to hear it, a siren sounded. It signaled lunchtime in the factories, which back then were still operative and working.
Yes, back then there were factories in Rome, though we’ve long since forgotten them, not just in Milan and Turin.
It came from over near Tiburtina Station, from the Pietralata quarter.
It lasted a minute.
Theoretically.
Because nearly everyone in the class would hum along to the note of the siren, mouths closed, an almost imperceptible moan, which went on after the sound of the siren had ceased.
Mmmmmmmmm . . . Mmmmmmmm . . .
We’d continue a while longer and eventually the teacher necessarily realized that the sound was going on too long, he’d stop teaching and shake his head in amazement.
Stupefied by such idiocy.
He would look at us disconsolately and probably mused sorrowfully on the failure of his calling as a teacher, one he’d embraced so many years, in a terrible error.
So these were the results?
These were the crea
tions, these the men?
Inside our mouths, lips compressed, and in our noses, the siren would continue to resonate like a Buddhist om, and then, little by little it would start to dwindle, dying out bit by bit as each of my classmates stopped their moaning, first one, then another, then a third, and then all the others would fall silent with one last exhalation, except for one solitary voice holding out until the end of that last breath, tremulous, and silence would return to the classroom.
By then, it was three minutes after noon, or perhaps five minutes after noon.
A small, unpunishable collective crime.
Idiocy gives you a giddy dizziness of pleasure.
We were practically of legal age, almost men, and yet we still howled at high noon, like a pack of stray dogs, rendered giddy by the joy of staring our teacher right in the eye with a glint of defiance, leaving him powerless against us.
The most frustrated teacher was always De Laurentiis, who taught ancient literature and so dearly cherished Greek music, and who would let himself go into ritual, endless soliloquies, the targets of countless imitations.
All you needed to do was put on something of a Neapolitan accent, and imitate the grim, false curve of his bulbous blue eyes, his hands clasped in a prayer to San Gennaro to put an end to all the “con-few-shun.”
“Alas! Alack! And to think that the lot of you are zitting here warming your zeats inshtead of out shoveling coal . . . and all because your mishguided parents can afford to pay a little money . . .”
The cold hard truth that he couldn’t avoid—so that after a little while he’d fall silent and start back up with the Aeneid—was that the very same money paid his salary.
It was our well-to-do parents who paid that miserable wretch.
He made a living off our ignorance, and I almost felt as if he owed us a debt of gratitude.
Even those of us who were blithely unaware of this relationship still loved to exercise with great cruelty this social prerogative, whereby a teacher is nothing more than a salaryman at the service of his students, less respectable in that way than a housecleaner whom you pay by the hour—because she at least cleaned your house and you could see the results, while the lessons of ancient Greek had virtually no perceptible results at all.
The teacher-as-office-clerk, the teacher-as-supplier, the teacher-as-butler, the teacher-as-nanny.
The phantom of his authority created on the basis of grades, threats of flunking, notes on the classroom ledger—it was all merely a scarecrow, a boogeyman.
Eliminate that, and what you have left is a day worker.
Although it was once found exclusively in private schools, that attitude can now be found in schools everywhere.
BUT THE TWO BOYS in the front row didn’t care about being so visible, they just didn’t notice or else they simply didn’t care about all the eyes focused on them.
And often they touched each other.
Actually, it was Marco who touched Salvatore.
He’d do it at moments when his classmate was closely attending to the lesson: he’d stealthily extend a hand under the desk and lay it flat on the crotch of his pants.
Almost before Salvatore even had a chance to notice it, Marco would already have withdrawn his hand and was once again sitting with both arms crossed in front of him on the desk, in the impeccable position of the good student, obedient to the injunction to “sit up properly.”
Ten or fifteen minutes would pass.
He’d reach out his hand again.
As if he were indifferent or insensitive to it, Salvatore would say nothing.
Only a couple of times could you notice him lurching slightly, perhaps because his classmate had lowered his paw a little too vigorously into his lap and had hurt him.
When the class began to notice this peculiar behavior, it became the subject of interest and study.
We’d all sit there, raptly watching, waiting for the moment that Marco would reach out his hand.
It was strange that he should have acted so hastily but, at the same time, so explicitly, as if he cared nothing whether he was seen by one and all as he rummaged around between his neighbor’s thighs.
He seemed to be too caught up in the game.
And the very rapidity of his gesture, the way he touched and then withdrew, palpating his classmate and then sitting up straight and proper at his desk, had something of the compulsive and unconscious about it, as if, by doing it, not only Salvatore but even he himself would not have enough time to realize what had just happened.
And, in fact, nothing at all had happened.
Crossing his arms again, it was as if he were saying: “What did I do? Nothing. I have my hands on the desk, as you can see. I’m listening to the teacher . . .”
Soon, though, he’d be seized by the desire to try it again.
We’d see him practically shaking in his good-boy posture.
It was obvious that the hand was about to go back there.
In the meantime, Salvatore continued placidly to listen to the lesson, like a large grazing ruminant.
He had the same clueless slowness that he had displayed when he’d shown me the Polaroids that his brother had taken.
NEVER ONCE must Marco have sensed the fervor behind him with which his filthy move was awaited by his classmates, to their great and mocking amusement.
In fact, what he did didn’t scandalize a soul, it just left us flat on the floor with laughter.
In school, what with all the repressing of laughter, it is eventually transformed into a sort of asthmatic death rattle.
6
LET ME MAKE ONE THING CLEAR: before anything else, before being Caucasian, Italian, baptized as a Roman Catholic, middle-class, left-wing, and a Lazio fan, I am a male. This is my most evident identity, my salient feature, my most distinctive characteristic, something I was called to account for the minute I emerged from my mother’s belly. I therefore have much more in common with a poor black Muslim born in Sudan than I do with a female lawyer born in the Parioli neighborhood, or with the female Ukrainian caregiver who makes broth for that lawyer’s mother. Though great gulfs may well separate me from the sub-Saharan Muslim, I still bear the same physiological stigmata as he does, fraternally because involuntarily, the same faults and perhaps a comparable and equally unjustified sense of pride, I cherish similar desires, I cultivate twin frustrations. My body functions the same way his does, and to a roughly 90 percent correspondence, so does my mind, that enormous submerged part of the mind that the environments in which he and I grew up can’t even begin to touch.
I FEEL an authentic veneration for Sigmund Freud: and yet I couldn’t say whether his work is more misbegotten for the fact that he stitched together a demented theory about femininity based on the discovery of not having a penis, or for the fact that he roundly ignored the fact that, if we think that not having a penis is tragic, having one can often be far worse. The misunderstanding comes from a worldview that was still quite common in his day, dating back to the Bible, of the man as the original figure, and of the woman as somehow derived from the man, or a poor imitation of him, as a mutilated, incomplete, and therefore uncomfortable male: a woman, then, is a sort of Fisher King, who sadly contemplates the wound between her legs.
As a result, Freud formulated the doctrine of “penis envy,” but not the corresponding theory of “penis embarrassment” or “penis inconvenience,” which would have had a much more solid foundation: in part because in the development of any scientific theory, you’d expect to obtain better results by studying the consequences of something that exists rather than those, purely hypothetical, of something that doesn’t. The theory of penis envy may well be intermittently valid, but the other one is incontrovertibly evident, as engraved in the experience of any male alive. While women’s problems may be ascribed, with a breathtakingly daring form of reasoning, on something women lack, men’s problems can be clearly and easily attributed to something that men very evidently have. The problematic and mys
terious fact of being male is taken for granted, as if it were an obvious point of departure, something there a priori, Adam, the subject, the little figure inscribed by Leonardo da Vinci in that circle as a measure of all things.
At a rough guess, however, you’d have to say that it’s more harmful to have a penis than not to have one.
It is in fact male sexual identity that is awkwardly overabundant, rather than its female counterpart being in any way deficient. The penis is not something of which women have been mutilated, but rather something extra that men have found themselves possessing, something that will accompany them for the rest of their lives, like a saprophyte, a sharer who is by no means secret, and who behaves extravagantly, living a parasitic existence parallel to that of its host. Even more than it is threatening to others, or to other women in particular, the erect penis is threatening to those who see it poke out from beneath their bellies, at once haughty, quizzical, and ridiculous. It does not answer to any command, neither mental nor even, often, manual. Its sheer independence is the source of pride, depression, and horror. Its power is felt as an alien, almost enemy presence, so capable of dragging the rest of the person after it that it can make you think and say and commit any atrocity, and to an equal degree, its laziness and weakness can be deeply demoralizing: and the entire delicate mechanism of self-esteem dangles absurdly from this oscillation. I believe that it was St. Augustine who said that God had intentionally endowed man with such a fickle sex, so independent of his will, precisely in order to limit his pride, to deprive him of any illusion that he was capable of becoming the master of the earth, seeing that he cannot even master an anatomical appendage. God created sexual impotence, not only chronic impotence but more evocatively, episodic impotence, which strikes precisely when you least expect it, in order to strip man of all confidence, to diminish him, and to keep him from nurturing dreams of corporeal perfection. Thus, only spiritual perfection should be his goal.
The Catholic School Page 37