The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  It is inevitable that, in soccer, the level of play and of the players allows you to change position: as a boy, when I was playing with stronger companions, the best I could hope for was to play the rough-and-ready stopper, with these miserable middle-aged players, I could be a deep-lying playmaker, and thanks to the limited size of the field, I could even dare to kick with my left foot, since I only had to move the ball five yards away, no more.

  “A psychiatrist? No.”

  “Then you’re a psychoanalyst, aren’t you?”

  Truth be told, I wished I could tell Rummo that I was. Perhaps that profession is the only one I would have liked to undertake.

  “Lacanian, I’d bet money on it.”

  I shook my head. “And why Lacanian?”

  “I don’t know, I just would have sworn . . .”

  “No, I teach. Literature.”

  Rummo asked at which university. “No university. Just at school.”

  “Ah. So you’re one of those guys who never really left school at all. You went out the door and climbed back in through the window.”

  “More or less.”

  “That shows a singular attachment.”

  “Very singular, true.” I rummaged deep in my gym bag. “Listen, Rummo, you wouldn’t happen to have an extra pair of gym socks, would you? Otherwise, I’m going to have to play with these,” and I pointed down at the lisle knee-high socks I wore. “I always forget something.”

  “Of course. Here,” and he tossed me a rolled-up pair of terry-cloth socks. “Three pair, five euros. But we’d better get going.”

  I laced up my old track shoes with the cracked toes.

  “Actually, I teach in prison.”

  Rummo looked up. “Really? In prison!”

  “Funny, isn’t it?”

  “Not so funny.”

  “Actually, if you’re a psychiatrist . . . which of us deals with the weirder people on our jobs, you or me?”

  “Do you ever see anyone from our old class?”

  “No, no one.”

  After thirty years, go out for a pizza on Via Alessandria and talk about what? About whom? About De Laurentiis and ancient Greek music? About Mr. Golgotha? About Gas&Svampa?

  (For that matter, what else am I doing right here? I talk and rant about those people: Who will ever be interested?)

  IT’S UNBELIEVABLE how many misfits we had in that class. Out of twenty-four of us, at least five belonged in an insane asylum, and I’m not just saying that—in fact, several of them wound up in one. A wing nut every six boys: but if you were to consider the big and medium-size eccentricities, then you’d have five nuts out of every six students, or even all of them, except for one. Except for me. I think that I’m the one who saves himself temporarily because it’s his job to recount the follies of the others and therefore can’t completely give in to his own madness: once he’s accomplished his mission, in all likelihood, even the last one will go mad, and perhaps that’s why he’s postponing the completion of his work.

  THE MISFITS in our class:

  PIK: autistic (?)

  CHIODI: sadist, with suicidal tendencies

  CRASTA (better known as Kraus or Three-Toed Sloth): mental defective

  D’AVENIA: masochist

  ARBUS: the jury is still out

  “HOW ABOUT YOU, for instance, have you ever seen d’Avenia again? Do you know what became of him?”

  Rummo shook his head.

  “I’ve heard lots of different things. That he became an incredibly wealthy and slightly shady businessman, and that he lives out of the country . . . they say he’s been married two or three times, to beautiful South American women. On account of how rich he is.”

  “And Three-Toed Sloth?”

  “I think he’s the same as ever.”

  “Okay, let’s get moving,” and I left the locker room.

  Rummo broke into a little run, his heels clacking on the cement. A bit of a gut wobbled over the elastic of his shorts.

  Outside it was starting to turn dark and they had turned on the floodlights along the succession of five-a-side soccer fields, enclosed in high nets to make sure the ball didn’t end up in the next field or in the river. It was a long, smeary stain of light. I took a deep breath of the air, which reeked of rot.

  “And Chiodi?” I asked Rummo as we galloped toward the field that we’d been assigned, for the match to be played by psychiatrists, male nurses, a few nut jobs, and me.

  “Oh . . .” Rummo sighed. “Chiodi. Chiodi.”

  “Why?”

  “He was one of my patients for a while. Let’s not talk about it.”

  This exclamation, however, just made me want to talk about it more. But by now we had reached the field. The others were waiting for us with their hands on their hips; one of them was letting off steam by taking penalty kicks into the empty goal.

  “Where the fuck were the two of you?”

  “How the fuck long did you take getting dressed?”

  We were welcomed with these phrases and play began immediately. During the game, when people called to each other to pass the ball or to warn them that they were about to pass to them, I noticed that I didn’t remember Rummo’s given name. At school, he was just called by his surname: Rummo, period. It was only toward the end of the game, after much mulling and casting my mind back, that I remembered: Gioacchino. Gioacchino Rummo.

  “Listen, Rummo, I have to confess . . . I’m writing a book . . .”

  “Really? That’s great. What about?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t say . . . sort of about that school, that period of time . . . our classmates.”

  “What is it, nonfiction . . .?”

  “No, it’s a sort of . . . ehm . . . a novel, even if a lot of things I talk about really happened. That is, they’re based on things that really happened. So . . . this thing with Chiodi. Interesting.”

  “You think? Not really all that interesting, if you ask me.”

  “Well, for my book it would be. I’d like to include it. You wouldn’t have held on to anything about his case . . . a file, some notes?”

  “Sure, of course, I still have the notes. Just like for all my patients.”

  “And his therapy . . .?”

  “For the time I had him as a patient, yes. But why?”

  “It would come in handy for me to have that material and use it.”

  “Use it?”

  “For my book.”

  “You couldn’t. Patient privacy.”

  “Ohhh,” I snorted, in exasperation, “come on now, with this patient privacy . . . If we let the privacy rules guide everything, we wouldn’t know a thing, about anything or anybody. No history, no literature. No jurisprudence. And no psychiatry, for that matter. It’s all always private, but all the most interesting things are private!”

  “It’s a matter of someone’s illness. Professional ethics, you know that better than I do.”

  “What about if I change his name in the book, would that be enough?”

  “No, it wouldn’t be enough. He’d still be recognizable.”

  “But how?”

  “If you write that he was a member of your class at school, then you automatically identify him by age. Roman, born in 1956 or thereabouts, he attended SLM, with that pathology . . . and what happened to him. It wouldn’t take a great lawyer to find a number of good reasons to sue you. And then to sue me, since I was treating him.”

  “All right, I’ll change something else . . . I promise you. And I’ll just use your notes as a rough basis, I’ll rewrite it all so no one will be able to identify the source. That’s what I always do.”

  “But wait, what about me, am I in your book?”

  He looked up at me. It was a question that quivered with a note of emotion. It sounded like “Am I worthy of existing, too?”

  “What kind of a question is that . . . of course you are, Rummo.”

  This page is proof of the fact. And when I talked about Brother Curzio frequenting whores, it was wi
th Rummo that I happened to be passing by Tor di Quinto, that night, on a scooter, remember? Many pages back. Certainly, he isn’t a prominent character in the book . . . I’d have to give him more space, if I wanted to lay my hands on Chiodi’s clinical file.

  “Everyone’s in the book.” A half-truth. “I try to be faithful to what happened, you know?” Complete lie.

  “And what about Arbus, do you talk about him?”

  “Yes, about him, too.”

  “Have you seen or talked to him lately?”

  “No.” I was determined not to add a word.

  “Now I’d like to get a better understanding of this interest of yours for Chiodi. When we were at school together, you didn’t give a damn about him . . .”

  You had a point, Rummo: but when you’re dealing with someone who is right, the only thing to do is to insist stubbornly.

  “So, are you going to give me this file?”

  “Listen, I don’t do that kind of thing.” As he said it, it was clear that he was tempted. Rummo had a trusting nature. “But you’ll let me read it when it’s done, right?”

  CERTAINLY, if then your patient kills himself . . . the way Chiodi did . . .

  TWO DAYS LATER, I had eight closely printed pages, though fairly faint, probably produced by an old-fashioned dot matrix printer on an “economy” setting, the kind that used continuous-feed sheets with the sprocket holes on the side, that come away in one longer perforated strip. I felt a deep surge of embarrassment, but I soon overcame it. Let me try to summarize part of what was in it.

  AS A CHILD, he seemed to feel no emotions, either toward relatives and family, or toward others his age. With his parents he was cold and detached. At school he behaved in an inexplicable manner, concerned only with himself, as if his classmates and teachers didn’t exist. Intellectually gifted, he didn’t know how to make use of those gifts. As a young man, he wavered between mystical impulses and fundamentalist materialism. Now he would pore over books of theology, at other times, textbooks of the natural sciences. When he enrolled at the university, his fellow students considered him to be insane. He would read all day, for instance, for a solid month, nothing but Leopardi, without understanding a word of it. Total lack of interest in the opposite sex. Once he happened to have a sexual relation, by chance, practically by accident, and certainly against his will, with a female student at the university who was at least as crazy as he was but, unlike him, very obsessive about matters erotic. He realized that he had felt absolutely nothing, no desire beforehand, no pleasure during, no satisfaction afterward. He found coitus to be absurd and he had no desire to repeat the experience. For no particular reason, he was often visited by thoughts of suicide, though he didn’t feel driven toward it by any particular despair or anguish. He made suicide the subject of a pseudophilosophical dissertation, in which he maintained that, much like masturbation, it was an act both justifiable and comprehensible. After repeated experiments with various poisons, he attempted suicide by swallowing fifty-seven tranquilizer tablets, but it was an unsuccessful attempt, he was saved and sent to a psychiatric clinic. He had no moral instinct, no sense of decency, no social spirit. In his writings, to all appearances serious and profound, he displayed only coldness and an attention to trifles. He possessed chaotic bodies of knowledge and the logic that would have allowed him to organize them and make use of them was somehow distorted in him. He treated everything and everyone, even the most sublime subjects or the most praiseworthy individuals, with a blend of cynicism and irony. He argued the cause of suicide with lines of reasoning that were patently nonsensical and self-serving, departing from premises that he first and foremost showed no sign of believing, as if he were trying to persuade idiots and therefore chose to make use of equally idiotic argumentation. As if it were a subject that had little if anything to do with him, indeed, as if the matter left him entirely indifferent, he proclaimed nonetheless that as a result of this and such incontrovertible considerations, he intended to take his own life. And indeed, he did in fact make numerous suicide attempts. He complained that his pocketknife had been taken away from him, otherwise he would have used it to cut his wrists in the manner of Seneca, in the bathtub. One time a friend had given him, instead of poison, a powerful laxative. Instead of being transported into the afterlife, he’d spent a whole day on the toilet. Only the Grim Reaper himself, with a swoop of his scythe, would be able to free him of his fatal obsession. From time to time he was seized with an obsessive thought that forced him to occupy his mind with the most pointless and unreasonable problems, employing and exhausting all his energies on interminable and laborious internal disputes, at the end of which, enervated, and unable to settle any single matter to his satisfaction, he was simply incapable of coming to any decision. He had busied himself with problems of a theological nature with the goal of founding a new church, since in his opinion Christ had spread false hopes, fooling people, and had with his miracles deceived the whole world, which was now in desperate need of a truth cure that could be put off no longer. The treatments to which he was subjected conflicted and overlapped in a contradictory manner, and he lost all faith in those who had prescribed them. In spite of that fact, his latest therapies, finally well suited to his difficult-to-diagnose case, had obtained some good results. He had given signs of wanting to start talking about his malaise again, explaining the reasons for it to those who would listen. He took his life at the age of thirty-eight, jumping off a fifth-floor balcony.

  FAREWELL, Chiodi.

  Thank you, Rummo.

  Look, I’m not just throwing you a bone here, by giving you a little more space in the book, the way you have to do with certain actors or actresses who complain that their part is too short and so you pad it, writing them a few more lines; it’s really that I was reminded of an episode that really might be worth telling the readers about, something I’ll do in a few chapters from now. I don’t know whether, in the end, Rummo will be satisfied with it.

  Just to make it clear, though, I can say here and now that I consider him a wonderful person.

  THE ONLY ONE OF THE MISFITS I hadn’t asked about, there, on the soccer field, was Picchiatello, that is, Pik. My memories of him from when we were at school together are more than enough. And, what’s more, I confess, I was afraid that Rummo might tell me he was dead. He, too, dead, like Chiodi and like Jervi. In fact, I felt sure of it. Young men with that kind of pathology aren’t destined to live long.

  I avoided telling him that for years I had cultivated a fantasy about poor Picchiatello’s mother, Coralla Martirolo. I fantasized that my hair was wet either because I had just stepped out of the bathtub or else because I’d been caught out in the rain, and she was drying it with a hair dryer. She was drying my hair and combing it, tugging at the still-wet locks. I could see myself, seated, and her, tall, standing behind me, dressed in black, both of us reflected in the bathroom mirror. I laid the nape of my neck back against her belly.

  “What nice hair you have . . .” Coralla was saying, “what nice hair . . .” and my hair was as long as hers.

  12

  PICCHIATELLO, that is, the one who in his delirium tells the most obvious truths that none of the others are allowed to utter.

  His cranium was oversized, bigger than normal. And the idea of shearing his hair very short and close, reducing it to a sort of blondish fuzz no longer than a tenth of an inch, didn’t make his head look any smaller, in fact if anything it only emphasized how disproportionate it really was. It magnified it . . .

  THERE WERE TIMES that we tried to involve Pik in our nights out with the classmates. There’s no point in specifying whether our invitation was extended to Pik out of pity or so we could laugh at him behind his back. It was probably for both reasons, since there is no one on earth—certainly no adolescent, much less a male adolescent, who is good through and through, who is only good, and there is no goodness that isn’t mixed with its exact opposite, otherwise goodness would be an intolerable, asphyxiating sentimen
t.

  In any case, we invited him to go out with us two or three times, just to eat a pizza . . . but it was clear immediately that it hadn’t been a very good idea. You couldn’t have a normal evening out if he was there. One time, at the pizzeria, he just got up from the table and vanished. Up till that point, he’d been very tense: playing with the utensils, tossing his glass in the air, exasperating everyone else at the table. When he stood up and left, we were all relieved. “If you call him one more time, I swear that I’ll stop coming,” Matteoli threatened, forcing us into a corner, as if his presence were indispensable. “Oh, come on, really, what did he do wrong?” I asked, defending Pik mildly, not because I was any less irritated than Matteoli by Picchiatello’s annoying tics: it annoyed me the way he played with his forks, wedging them together to create a sort of catapult, but that was just part of Pik, it was Pik in all of those balancing acts, Picchiatello, our classmate, crazy as the woodpecker that was his namesake, and if you can’t get over your irritation with a classmate, an unfortunate classmate like him, then you have to explain to me where the difference lies between a friend and someone who isn’t one. Between a friend and an enemy? So that meant we had to take Pik the way he was and like it. Period. My sense of justice only activates like this, in reaction, in this case against Matteoli’s irritated impatience.

  If I had been alone with Picchiatello I’d have choked the life out of him, but with the others I defended him as a foregone conclusion.

  Then, unexpectedly, Pik reappeared. He was wearing a waiter’s jacket, and he had a cloth napkin dangling from his left forearm, possibly imitating some sketch or funny cartoon he’d seen, because in reality no one had ever seen a waiter who looked anything like that. His torso was leaning forward, his chin was raised, ready and at attention to take an order. In fact, he approached us, zigzagging his way through the other tables.