The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  Male desire is viewed as a voracious force, a tireless potency, a need that must at all costs be satiated. Pornography presents vigorous and insatiable males, while the actual experience of real men is, quite to the contrary, for the most part, precarious, contradictory, and insecure. I believe that this happens to men every bit as much as it does to women, indeed, perhaps, even more so: feeling not quite up to the challenge, unsatisfactory in terms of one’s sexual performance, and not just now, in the aftermath of the various revolutions in the way we live our lives, but always, it’s always been like that, that is to say, one’s virility has always dangled by a thread, precarious, fragile, subject to the evaluation of a judgment that is not only that of women, but first and foremost the judgment that the man issues of himself . . .

  Fragility, sense of inadequacy, anxiety, fear of judgment, of being unable to satisfy the expectations of others, fear of failure. The braggadocio and aggressive stances were nothing but poses. We put on a front of confidence that 90 percent of the time we never possessed in the slightest. The things one really does possess in a lasting way, one feels absolutely no need to show off. That confidence was just a form of camouflage, and in fact it was often unmasked, causing shame and ridicule. If the phallus is a symbol of power, as is carved into stone walls in half the known world and as we can read in every corner of every page in anthropology textbooks, well, then it is a very fallacious symbol, we might say, a very poorly chosen one, seeing that it all too often fails to live up to its reputation, proving to be seldom or not at all the master of the situation or of itself, a weapon that often jams and fails to fire and, even if it doesn’t, always still might . . . from one moment to the next. Thus it is the very same powerful and predatory image of men in general that so decisively puts individual men in the permanent condition of risking failure. The possibility of failure is the deep and intimate root of being men, and God planted its symbol right in the middle of the body, clearly visible, in order to ensure that each man is well aware, not of his own power, but rather of his own fallibility: as in fact that long-ago Church Father stated in such a convincing and reasonable manner, God made sure that the erection should be a capricious thing to keep at bay our sense of omnipotence, crushing it, undermining it at its very roots. If we must harbor doubts about our ability to perform even the simplest act, the very act that ensures the existence of our species on the face of the earth, then how are we likely to feel about everything else?

  WHEN WE WANT to change something about ourselves, we almost inevitably begin with our physical being. Muscles are vital and significant. People say that men’s self-respect is proportional to the development of the upper part of their body. I once asked a friend, who spent a lot of time in gyms, why the biceps were so often developed to the exclusion of all else. “Because you can see them,” he replied with disarming simplicity. And with that, he meant to say that, sure other people can see them, especially if you’re wearing a T-shirt, but you—first and foremost—can see the gun show you have on your own arms, you can feel them, you can palpate them, there they are. For that matter, what drives these young men to pump iron is a sense of insecurity: the greater the insecurity and the more iron they will pump. They are engaged in a strenuous struggle to conceal their vulnerability. Stutterers, dyslexics, fat boys, short guys, four-eyes—in the end, they’re the ones who pump iron more than anyone else. It is an original weakness that swells our biceps, thus transforming itself into strength. In this alchemy lies the secret of the male personality. For that matter, our body is always wrong, and I’m not just talking about the bodies of midgets, of homely dogs, of those who want to change their sex . . .

  Let’s delete entirely from the puzzle the word that doesn’t belong: “pleasure.” When we’re young, we have sexual experiences for any reason but that of experiencing pleasure. Perhaps only mature men and women, very experienced, can devote themselves to pleasure with conscious attention; seeking it, earning it, comparing the nuances, the specialties . . . It’s like with food. When we’re kids, we eat because we’re hungry, not to savor who knows what delicacy. From a lengthy observation of myself and my contemporaries, it strikes me that when someone begins to take an interest in fine cuisine, exquisite wines, carefully prepared delicacies, and to enjoy them, for real, it means that they’re getting old. But then, if not for pleasure, why did we quest after sex, why do we seek it now even more than before, and you can find it on any street corner without even having to look for it? Respected scholars and experts claim that we boys cared so much about taking girls to bed only to prove to one another that we weren’t faggots. And the girls? Why did they come to bed with us, then? What were they trying to prove?

  WHEN, after many repeated efforts to obtain a valid exemption, and after various deferrals for my university studies, I was finally drafted, and enough time had passed that I was the oldest one in my barracks in Taranto, there were those who tried to comfort me by hauling out a stupid proverb: “Whoever isn’t good enough for the king, isn’t good enough for the queen.” Its meaning, just in case my readers fail to get the metaphor (and at first I certainly failed to get it) is as follows: if when you go in for your physical, they don’t find you to be man enough to serve the king, then you also won’t be man enough to satisfy his wife, the queen, and by extension, any other woman. Cold comfort for anyone conscripted to serve in the military, to imagine that they had received a certificate of virility, while those who remained home with a nice fat exemption were merely impotent cripples: a formula that hadn’t worked in wartime, much less in peacetime. If anything, I find more interesting a reverse formulation of the same saying: if you’re not good enough for the queen, then you’re not good enough for the king. If you’re not a man in bed, then it’s pointless to try to be one elsewhere. The minimum measure of virility is sexual. In this form, the proverb would still be false, since the impetus that drives many men to fight and to prove themselves in battle, availing themselves of all the aggressivity they possess, is in fact to redeem themselves for their own lack of erotic capacity.

  There’s probably a connection between this insecurity and the number of women raped: as the insecurity increases, the number of rapes rises correspondingly. And the rape isn’t caused by testosterone, if anything, it’s a surrogate for it. Violent behavior stands in for a libido that is frequently lacking, it serves as a sort of supplement. Experts say that if anything, it may be aggressive behavior that produces testosterone—not the other way around.

  It is therefore with rape that one is able to free oneself at a single stroke from this constraint, the forced sex act has entirely different ends, different meanings, physical enjoyment is no longer at stake, neither one’s own nor that of others, which is relegated to second place. It is hard to define exactly what pleasure one enjoys in coitus at all: certainly the pleasure that one procures when raping a woman is completely separate from the sexual realm, and it may have some tiny overlap with a consensual sex act, but the rest must be different, specific, connected rather with the exercise of force per se, with the subjugation of someone else’s will to your own, the humiliation of whoever you subjugate, in other words, the specific pleasure that derives from power, that is, when we are capable of obligating others to do, not what they want to do, but what we want them to do. Which can actually happen in a consensual sex act, too: that is, we can allow the other person to do what they want to us, in order to allow them to taste an intoxicating power.

  MASCULINITY MANIFESTS itself through two contradictory impulses: on the one hand, the rejection or avoidance of the feminine (family and maternal affection, childish or effeminate attitudes), on the other hand, the pursuit of the feminine (courtship, coupling). In order to become a male, you ought to repudiate the beloved feminine part of you, inherited from, literally sucked out of your mother, and at the same time go and get, and touch, and suck other women’s breasts.

  Break away from women—erase your mother—delete the feminine traits within yourself—dev
alue anyone who incarnates them, which means all women—and despite that devaluation, desire them. (Line in a cop movie: “Are you thinking about pussy?” “No, not really . . .” “Then you’re just not concentrating.” Yes, I know, I already used it once, but it’s just such a great line.) Turning your back on women—rejecting your mother—rape as a way to keep from seeing her—rape as a form of sexual relations “with the back turned.”

  A man ought to be judged by what he does, not what he says: but it’s not as if there are all that many occasions to do, to do anything significant and concrete, in the modern world we live in: a person limits himself to performing a certain number of routine actions, and then you’re done.

  But a real male is not so much someone who does certain things, it’s first and foremost someone who doesn’t do certain other things. Like what? Like crying, for example. Like betraying a friend. Putting on effeminate poses. Constantly changing your mind. More than any other form of behavior, so-called manly behavior is transmitted through imitation. Instructions are of little or no value, there is no need for explicit orders or a code of behavior learned by heart. A man has to deduce the commandments from examples offered by flesh-and-blood people or, more often, glimpsed in movies or read in novels: various heroes, warriors, as well as gangsters, bandits, or great seducers—but already these latter figures, the great cocksmen, appeared less all of one piece, more compromised with the feminine, designed to please women rather than us men: the handsome actor with the languid eyes, the living daydream of all girls everywhere, but whom the boys considered insipid or obnoxious . . . in the years when my own uncertain masculinity was being formed, the classical model (which would only last for a few more years) was that of the American western, cowboys, in other words, who shortly thereafter would be extinct as moral and physical figures, in the wake of the onslaught of the anticonformist cinema of the little big men, of the soldiers blue, of the midnight cowboys, figures that all heaved onto the scene at the end of the sixties to chase the all-of-a-piece pistoleros off the sound stage.

  7

  FOR A MALE, to have a sister is a sort of miracle. Inexplicable, in and of itself, and yet it helps to explain a great many things, nearly everything. I would venture to state that men without sisters grow up to have a prejudicial and narrow experience of the world. Their views are limited, and so are the ways they feel and communicate to others what they feel and see. The angle is restricted to the repetition of a landscape that never changes. In that case, better to be an only child, a condition that at least forces you to invent relationships in all directions because no one is handed to you as a natural sibling. A male with one or more brothers is a prisoner in a hall of mirrors, he just sees himself reflected in figures that compete with one another, imitating or avoiding one another, struggling and fighting, making alliances and helping one another and sliding into jealousies and envies, killing each other precisely because they’re similar, all too similar.

  Brotherhood conceals, deep down, a treacherous twist that springs from an excess of affinity that, when it is not limited to the merely physical, can dramatically affect the role and the fate of each. There is always the risk of muddling those roles and fates, stealing them, as Jacob did with Esau. Identity engenders rivalry. Dozens of origin stories tell of the danger of an overabundance of males, which forces you either to eliminate your rival or else hand yourself over to him, bound hand and foot—the Bible alone so overflows with these stories that it might reasonably be described as the tragic book of the absence of sisters, or else the book of murderous brotherhood, of the plethora of virility. Not that brothers necessarily have to deceive and slaughter each other, and yet you always have the impression that there’s one too many, one who turned out badly, one who bosses the other one around, or the other ones, and it is his or their lot to obey. Or else they refuse to do so. The same matrix can produce a series of different individuals (sometimes very different indeed, even polar opposites, the kind of thing that can only happen between brothers) who are subjected to a pitiless comparison, something they cannot flee even if they run away from home or disavow their family, since their very flight will become one of the pieces of evidence that goes into the judgment hanging over them. Murderous brothers fooled themselves into believing that they could avoid that judgment when they killed. In their violent act was the desire to put an end to the natural but unhealthy competition among peers who are supposed to have come into this world in order to love each other and cooperate (ah, brotherhood, so frequently and mistakenly invoked, how many misunderstandings about the actual scope of its appeal! with no realization that it’s a matter of reawakening an original lust for destruction!) but who instead find themselves in conflict on account of their fundamental equality. Rather than subjugating their own double, they wanted to merge with him, eliminating the repetitions that are so often the source of disorder and dismay.

  All brothers are necessarily Karamazov.

  A sister, instead, is a gift beyond compare. If she’s older, you can love her and take her as your shield, if younger, then you dote on her adoringly. If she is a replica of us, or if we are a replica of her, the simple fact of belonging to the opposite sex makes her a unique, extraordinary creature, because at once utterly familiar and entirely alien.

  An enigmatic precept, applicable to a broad array of fields; if a person is searching for something worthwhile, it prescribes: always look for what’s closest in what’s far away, and farthest away in what’s close.

  In a sister, though, you’ve found it. A sister matches the definition in full, she occupies that place, that point. With her you can experience the otherness of which a mother cannot be the owner, even if she comes first. For instance, I could never conceive of the idea that my mother was a woman, a female, that she belonged to the sex opposite to my own, so closely was I fused with her, so greatly did she represent the entirety. A sister, on the other hand, is the very rhetorical figure of contiguity, in some cases a synecdoche, in all cases a metonymy; through a sister, men are able to free themselves of the disheartening constrictions of sexual identity, yet still remain in their own, within the limits of their own flesh and blood. They feel that they can grow, expand, until they can include the figure that they glimpse behind the mirror.

  If I were to draw up a list of my classmates’ interesting sisters, I wouldn’t know where to begin. My own sister was too young and hardly counted. At age nine or ten, you’re necessarily the child of the house, and that’s what you’ll remain until you’re fifty and there no longer is a house. She was a miniature blonde with freckly skin so thin, so fine, that if you brushed against it, the freckles seemed to swim on its surface. Would she become a pretty girl, an attractive woman? We didn’t care. For us elder brothers, she could remain unchanged for all time and I’d continue to admire and ignore her, like a fragile, unusable toy that is therefore always left on the shelf, but my brother instead took delight in torturing her, after all, she never complained and that only drove him to torture her more. He would lure her onto my parents’ bed with some cunning excuse, and there he promised they’d play a wonderful game, come on, it’ll be fun, and instead he’d nail her to the mattress, crucifying her there and subjecting her to all and every form of harassment and abuse, though she’d never protest or cry. She’d never go running to tattle to Mamma. I would walk past my parents’ bedroom and there they would be, frozen in their customary position: him on top, immobilizing her with his weight, she underneath, arms spread, wrists clamped, and face turned aside in a grimace of disgust that contained quivers of terror and amusement, because at that instant my brother was busy letting a streamer of drool drip down toward her from his mouth, so that it dangled almost onto her, without ever breaking from his lips, only to suck it back up and start over, up and down, up and down, the streamer of spit rose and descended from my brother’s mouth like the string of a yo-yo.

  And this was my sister.

  Jervi instead had a sister just one year younger who
was stunning. Beautiful. Skinny with a dark complexion, tall with long black hair and a face that wasn’t just pretty, something more, mysterious, beaming, mischievous, intense, secret, promising. It was clear that that girl had been put on earth expressly to arouse a swell of attraction and then ride it like a surfer on the ocean. That was the image of her that remained stamped in my mind from that very first meeting. No one, seeing her bundled up for warmth on a rainy winter day with her mother, when they would come to stand outside the school together to pick up Jervi, no one could fail to fantasize about how she would look in summer, that is, lithe and slender, her long black hair dangling down her back, tips touching the elastic waist of her skimpy bikini as she ran down to where the sand met the waves, the very embodiment of a television commercial for ice cream, that is to say, in slow motion. Back then the cloth bikinis could be scanty scraps of material, rumpled, basically rags, and we were confidently sure—even though we’d never even glimpsed it under the unflattering bulky winter overcoats—that she had a small, firm, perfect ass, indeed we were mathematically certain, thanks to those media-proffered visions. Her body was a subject for soothsayers and seers. Most important of all, she was by no means shy, and she would joke and call us by name, we her brother’s classmates, as if to provoke and test our reactions, which were invariably mistaken, overblown, in our feigned nonchalance as well as in our shyness.