IN REALITY, in the male, uneasiness is caused by procreation, more than solved; indeed, it induces a genuine state of panic. Conception is always intentional, even if that intention remains buried in the subconscious. One wants something powerfully without knowing that one wants it. That is why we once contrasted conjugal eroticism, as a profoundly bound form, with homosexual eroticism, rather than the eroticism of the single or the libertine. Because it would be pure eros, happily (or unhappily) unproductive. Though even that seems now to be a thing of the past . . .
There was a time, long ago, when love was banished from the family, and considered its most dangerous enemy, its natural adversary (the most classic love story of them all: Lancelot and Guinevere). Then everything was turned upside down and love was chosen as the necessary condition and foundation of family ties.
While love originates in sentiments and sex, the family rests upon a singular intertwining of blood and duties. Two fickle elements against two permanent ones. You can get a new wife but you can’t get new children. That is why there are those who insist that once the marriage is over, the family must go on, indeed, it goes on in any case. Extended families are the confirmation of the institution’s elasticity, capable of adapting and rebuilding themselves from their own ashes, grinding up marriages and kneading the old materials into new shapes . . .
And (extraordinary fact!) someone has calculated that the percentage of dissolved marriages isn’t as high nowadays as it was a couple of centuries ago. Nowadays divorce takes care of it, back then it was the premature death of the spouse. Divorce, in other words, has reestablished by legal means what once took place naturally, and the figure of the divorced man has taken the place of the widower.
(How often have I mused, though I have always regretted the thought—whether or not it is true—that my ex-wife would have been less upset if, instead of leaving her, I had simply died.)
MARRIAGE HAS BEEN put at grave risk by love. After Romanticism it became inevitable to unite in holy matrimony out of love, and to dissolve that matrimony once the love was no longer there. When there had never been any love in the first place, then matrimony lost nothing along the way, if anything it acquired something by way of familiarity and habit. Love is a necessary but destabilizing force, capricious and uncontrollable, and the conviction that we have a right to happiness, if not to possess it, at least to yearn for it and lay claim to it (therefore a hypothetical right, the right to obtain something that you almost never actually have, rather than to hold on to what you actually do have), only leads to frustration. Marriage is the grave wherein love is laid only in the case that something is there to be killed: otherwise what prevails is a functional, practical, social, protective, procreative aspect. That is exactly why it is so exemplary of the bourgeois model of life: the aspiration to recognition is very hard at work in it. And so we might fairly reverse the saying: love is the grave wherein marriage is laid.
THE PAGANS HAD A GOD FOR LOVE, the Christian God is for matrimony; the former has a transgressive character, the latter a legalistic one. Both gods command imperiously and are quick to wrath if their dictates are not obeyed. They are both equally violent in their demands that you either make love or not make love. One obliges his worshippers to that which the other forbids, and therefore, no matter what you do, the same action will constitute both obedience and disobedience. Consequently, punishment guaranteed. There exists, in fact, as it were, a twofold hell, just as the great writers about love have described it, with an abundance of details: one is where those who have given into the temptations of lust wind up, the other is where those who refused those temptations are sent. So nobody gets away with it in the end. Much like love, matrimony is a potent but primitive magic, an elementary formula, and in order to function it has to be believed by those who practice it, right down to the bitter end, and this happens from the beginning of both the amorous frenzy and the desire to take a wife (or husband), blindly and with a variable duration. Frighteningly demanding at the moment that vows are taken, as soon as they are deprived of devotion, the conjugal rites wane so far into languidity as to lose track of even the memory of why they were entered into in the first place. The weapons that the two deities use to fight each other are sexual pleasure and children: opposing phenomena that are nevertheless descended from the same vitality, one the cause of the other. In the obscure depths of each and every act of intercourse lurks conception. And this is why, however contradictory and symmetrical they may be to each other, the Christian God enjoys a fundamental advantage over His pagan counterpart, because He includes that Other within Himself or at least tends to do so, just as Christianity has always swallowed up preceding religions, taking possession of their temples, rites, customs, symbols, feasts, and superstitions, stealing their priestly crosiers and tiaras. Thus, matrimony claims to absorb love, indeed, it is actually founded on it. Sexual pleasure is not denied, if anything it is exalted and celebrated, while being ushered toward its family outcome, which, even as it denies it, nonetheless, paradoxically, embodies it, incarnates it. And behold, children, duration . . .
WHAT ARE AT WORK in marriage are forces, conveniences, and intentions that are unequal for the spouses, and which can only be made approximately equitable with a considerable effort at conversion. They must be summed up and then translated one into the other, assigning arbitrary values to ensure that the numbers add up, at least at first, whereupon the couple should take hasty advantage of that provisional point of equilibrium (hurry, hurry!) to get married. When they both seem, for reasons that are often quite different, to ardently desire the same thing. The desire for children, protection, love, friendship, continuity, and new things, for a different life, quiet or adventurous, to get away from home or to start a new one, fear of loneliness, hunger for social advancement, self-destruction, resignation, imitation of one’s own mother or father or of some girlfriend. Intelligence, wisdom, or recklessness. Enchantment, seduction, fraud. Faith in the future. One is running away from something, the other is running toward it. Not only do the requirements have different weights, but they speak different languages, they don’t even use the same alphabet. Like any other form of encounter between the sexes (starting with coitus), but in an infinitely more complex manner, since it includes them all, marriage is a form of asymmetrical warfare.
OR PERHAPS IT WAS, and in part still is, an exchange. Reciprocity is assured even if the object being exchanged is not the same, the important thing is that it should have equal value for those who receive it. Normally the husband offered stability, first and foremost economic stability, while the wife offered the gratifications available within the family circle: love, care, and sex, the sex that lies at the origin of progeny, and that comes after it as well. The first, the husband, operates from without, the second, the bride, from within.
Put in the simplest possible terms: a man secures the right to fuck at the end of the day, and in exchange, he provides food and lodging.
Protection in exchange for sex: when reduced to its bare-bones essence, the matrimonial barter consisted of these primary and irreplaceable services. Let’s grant that it’s not necessarily the man who provides the former and the woman the latter, but in any case the outcome remains the same: at the moment that one spouse ceases to provide the other spouse with the expected service (or provides it in an inadequate or discontinuous manner), the other spouse might well consider themselves freed of the bond. The courts say it’s so. Matrimony: to always have a man (or a woman) beside you to fuck. If however they don’t want to fuck, if they no longer feel like fucking, then the basic foundation of the marriage threatens to collapse. There’s no two ways about it, it’s in the basic code of the bond, which precisely with its clause of exclusivity becomes hypersexualized, seeing that it demands that sexuality be exercised only within the confines of marriage. How then can it oblige you to something that it cannot itself ensure? Inasmuch as it is the exclusive venue of the exercise of eroticism, which by its very nature would be
the exact opposite of exclusivity, it becomes a trap with no exit. This incurable contradiction ensures that, in real life, at least from a certain point onward, the extraconjugal exercise of sex can be deliberately tolerated by both spouses—or by one of them if it’s only the other spouse that practices it—if not actually approved and encouraged. How long does it take for this to happen? How many months or years or decades after the wedding does this become normal?
It would appear that only in recent centuries have conjugal eroticism and maternal love appeared. Both are now considered unrenounceable elements for a happy marriage. While the family sees its functions decline, many of them delegated to the state or the community (such as education, health, or the search for a job), the expectations on the part of its members increase to a dizzying extent, as do the reciprocal obligations and commitments, whereby a husband now not only expects his wife to give him children and look after the house, but also that she be attractive and active, that she advise him and show solidarity in his work-related decisions, that she develop her own personal interests, and that she perhaps be capable of earning a salary of her own. He expects, then, love, friendship, sex, child care, domestic virtues, personal initiative, and finally money. You’d have to be a perfect individual to satisfy all these demands, in order to play all these roles.
The fathers of my time certainly loved their children, but they couldn’t openly express that feeling, the manifestation of which was instead the prerogative of the mothers. It would have undermined their authority, it would have been seen as a sign of weakness. It was up to the mothers to be understanding and indulgent, to forgive, caress, be stirred to pity, clutch their children to their breast.
NOTHING COULD BE MORE MISTAKEN than the Marxist affirmation that the bourgeoisie had stripped family relations of their deeply moving sentimental veil by reducing them to a “pure monetary relationship.” Actually, emotions and the accumulation of money are by no means mutually exclusive, in fact, a morbid and sticky characteristic of the bourgeois family is that love and money are constantly being mixed together, as are bonds of affection and economic ties, strengthening each other reciprocally. If only it were possible to distinguish between them! The bourgeois family would run like a clock if nothing but naked self-interest were at play within it, pure calculation, “open, shameless, direct, arid” exploitation. The most savage resentments have their dark origins in the matter of money, just as demands of an economic nature are almost always compensation for some emotional harm, and people labor under the illusion that that money can heal wounds of the heart. Two kinds of balance sheet face off, as in a double-entry accounting ledger: on one page are the records of family love, given and received, and on the other page are the records of money, income and outlay. The income and outlay entries cannot be deleted. The debts are unpayable. At the very most, a transaction might be accepted, money in exchange for love. Mama always loved you best, she couldn’t stand me, that’s why she left you the apartment and left me the garage. The reading of a will is an Oresteia, a board meeting, or both things.
What exactly is patrimony?
And what is matrimony?
A bourgeois life exists between these two poles.
(PLEASE BEAR WITH ME as I continue for the next few pages to talk about family. If I didn’t write a few more words about the subject, if I didn’t take the time to reason about it in some depth, the young men in this book would just be pasted like trading cards to large blank sheets. The house, the parents, the routines, the rules, the silences, love, money: I need to fill in those blank spaces. It’s the family, a certain type of family, a type of family that’s by no means special, in fact, quite common, the place that gave origin to what I’m going to describe altogether in the tenth chapter, that is, in fifty pages or so. As if vomiting it all out.)
THE FAMILY IS THE VENUE of embarrassment. Everyone knows or thinks they know, and they wonder how much others know about them, and whether they know the right things. Over the years, we can hide a great many things from our families, but still less than we manage to hide from others. We are eyewitnesses, in a family, of a myriad of indicative events, we have heard countless statements, witnessed and taken part in a significant number of revelatory scenes. Quarrels, lies, secrets that are not secret at all. We know our family members like the back of our hands and they know that, but they know us, too, they have proof in hand, a memory of things that if they wrote them down would fill thousands of pages, like the documentation in a trial, and especially among siblings, it’s hard to escape each other’s judgment, the years and years spent together constitute an unbroken period of observation. And once you are adults, this can create a veil of embarrassment, skepticism, sarcastic incredulity, because when an adult claims this or that, we can see behind her words and actions the child that did and said the exact opposite, or we think that we know the real reason for this or that behavior. “That’s a hell of a thing to hear from you of all people . . .”
In the same way that we can pick out inconsistencies in other people, we can also call attention to the continuity of certain annoying attitudes. “That’s you all over!” “You never change!” “There you go, you’re always the same. You just want to be the center of attention, you want it all for yourself, like when you grabbed the baby bottle . . .”
It’s not necessary for the objections to be put into explicit form, indeed, most of the time this doesn’t happen. They float in midair, like something implicit and unstated, they serve as subtitles to official speeches, during family reunions, the major holidays, the assemblies during which it’s necessary to argue, when it’s finally time to face up to “a problem that’s been festering for far too long,” when we “all have to make a decision together,” when those unspoken considerations hover overhead like fat clouds, swollen and black.
And yet these testimonies are, in the end, tainted, falsified by their own overabundance. Familiarity distorts the meaning of each individual act, when it is repeated on a daily basis for years and years. A perfectly normal amount of attention can become persecutory or, contrariwise, a morbid attitude mistaken for love. Every word threatens to transform itself into an accusation and we put our hands over our ears to make sure we can’t hear it, discretion and silence taken for indifference. Parents cannot be anything other than spectators of the malaise of their children, something they can do nothing about, just as the children are helpless to slow the physical decline of the parents and the chill or the crisis afflicting them, between them, the kind of thing that, when it happens, is unmistakable to everyone in the house. Many young people (I myself was one) in the presence of any family problem withdraw to their space, which might just as easily be their bedroom or their mind.
It’s up to you, take your pick.
EMBARRASSMENT AS AN ATTRIBUTE and reflection of sexuality, both the parents’ sexuality—the deployment of which is authorized yet limited—and the more or less secret, pioneering, and so to speak amateurish sexuality of the children. The blessed conjugal sex (almost always reduced to a pale flicker) and the barbaric explosions of youthful sex (which in my day we used to describe, hypocritically, as “premarital,” defining it by the one quality it lacked—like saying prehistoric, extraparliamentary, subnormal). Shame and embarrassment of the children because the parents fornicate, embarrassment of the parents because the children do the same, and that fact either annoys them or worries them or makes them proud or scandalizes them—but in any case, it’s highly unlikely that they aren’t going to take at least some position on the matter. The children generally limit themselves to pretending not to know about their parents’ erotic activity, and yet they’re curious or disgusted or else, at the very least, consider it amusing, in part because young people always find their parents to be elderly if not ancient, far older than they actually are, and the image of the two of them engaging in carnal union, their half-naked bodies writhing in copulation, the idea of the two little old people going at it with Mamma shrilling and Papà snorting
, and the puffing and panting and sweating and the hair in disarray and the rush to the bathroom to get washed after they’re done, they find all this fairly ridiculous. The distaste takes the form of grimaces and hysterical laughter. A father’s hard cock or a mother’s wet pussy . . . well, these are unlikely images, even just in verbal terms. Parents are always far too old to have sex and when, by chance, a baby brother is born, the joy and the jealousy are accompanied by the realization that those two are still making love, they still like each other, they still touch each other.
EVEN THE MOST FERVENT IDEALIST must acknowledge the fact that there is no marriage in which, at least subconsciously, there is not a certain aspiration to prosperity, to an improvement in one’s living conditions, necessary prerequisites to satisfactions of a higher order: emotional, erotic, moral. The latter, which are unquestionably more serious, more profound, ultimately overshadow the former, which may be instrumental but remain, so to speak, even more fundamental—as is almost always the case with the unconfessable as compared with the openly declared. Marriage, then, has an open, manifest objective and another, subterranean one, and it is fairly rare that anyone attains the former independently of the latter. There is no happiness without money, in other words. Personal assets, in fact, are the unspoken aspect of every respectable couple who have placed far different values at the official foundation of their pact of cohabitation, first and foremost love (the true fetish of contemporary ideology, at once worshipped and reviled, and paradoxically the last barricade of the Catholic conception of matrimony . . . a conception that thus finds itself clutching for its edifying purposes at the most unpredictable and volatile of all human sentiments, clinging to that which for centuries was its most implacable adversary—love!!), but this certainly doesn’t mean that it disappears from the horizon, and we’re not merely talking about the bourgeois family, quite the contrary, it’s always ready to reemerge, especially at the most difficult moments, in the decisions to be made without delay, in the bottlenecks, when things are tight, there it is, the subject of money. The longer it is buried, the more pungent the stench of rot released upon its sudden emergence in thoughts and conversations, indeed, it’s like a corpse being exhumed, a cadaver, which every patrimony resembles, in effect, even physically, lying there in the dark, in its safe-deposit box, in the depths of land registries, like in so many deep-dug graves. It’s not a Marxist sin, these aren’t the last spores wafting out of the untilled, abandoned fields of the Communist mind-set sowing their seeds in me, when I state that the family serves the purpose of “fixing” patrimonial structures, reproducing the social relationships that made it possible to pursue those structures as if they were untouchable schemes—now whether or not that effort is successful is a horse of a different color, the family aspires to achieve this exact thing, and perhaps it’s unsuccessful, it can no longer achieve it, it’s a retrograde and incompetent agent, which is however not to say that it has changed its nature. What has done a great deal to undermine its solidity is no doubt love: that very same sentiment whose disappearance from the cynical world of today is so frequently lamented, has actually contributed more than anything else to triggering this crisis.
The Catholic School Page 52