The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  THE OBSESSION, even in the QT, was with security. Everyone had done all they could to ensure a quiet, untroubled life, even at the cost of renouncing any new and exciting opportunities. Existence had been sanded to a smooth finish, stripping it of any irregularity that might constitute either a worry or a joy—be done with it, plane it smooth. Their prayers had been answered. When I was born, the war had been over for eleven years. No one would ever have wanted to slip back for so much as an instant into the privations and discouragement of the old days of danger and poverty. The quarter had stabilized its image, and it had been sprinkled with prosperity, in the little apartment houses around the Parco Nemorense, in the detached villas of Via Arno and Via Reno, in the large intensive farming tracts along Viale Eritrea there was no mistaking the flow of fresh money, pumping into that dignified shell the one element truly necessary to achieve respectability. Yes, because honesty, decorum, courtesy, and hard work count up to a certain point, but after that, what you need is money. And at last, there was no shortage of money, there was plenty of ham on the table and crystal-drop chandeliers and a TV in front of the Naugahyde armchairs, impatiently champing at the bit to be replaced by a color set, in fact, there were a few people who already owned one, and they delighted in the incomparable “prove tecniche di trasmissione,” morning and afternoon—color test patterns and random snippets of film. I would go over especially to see them at the home of a friend, Riccardo Modiano, now my CPA, and Lodoli, Barnetta, Pilu, Puca, and Rummo would come, too; we’d all gather at three o’clock in front of the big black Philco set . . .

  IN 1975, RAI television started its regular technical test broadcasts in color, with a special programming broadcast twice a day, in the time slots from 10 to 11 a.m. and 3 to 4 p.m. It went on for years. Almost without meaning to, the “prove tecniche di trasmissione” became a part of the history of our television network; in fact, it seems unbelievable that such a program, conceived for purely experimental purposes, and with that disquieting woman’s voice-over, repeating at regular intervals, “Prove tecniche di trasmissione”—“Technical test broadcasts”—could ever have become so popular, especially among those who were kids at the time. This is how these test broadcasts were organized: after a few minutes of video of colored stripes and audio with a shrill, constant frequency, the first part would begin, consisting of a sequence of motionless images. To the warm notes of the Sonata for Strings in C major by Gioacchino Rossini, the following images would appear:

  elegantly dressed young woman in a sixties-style kitchen;

  child surrounded by toys, wearing an Indian headdress;

  anthurium flowers, one red, the other green;

  a matron with dark hair, intently applying makeup, with lipstick and perfume atomizer in plain view;

  young woman with tennis racket and ball, glimpsed through the net on a tennis court.

  Having completed the first part of the broadcast, there followed several minutes of the new color monoscope, then began the second part, consisting of a sequence of film clips:

  matron who comes home from doing her grocery shopping and starts making dinner, in a pleasant household atmosphere accompanied by refined and relaxing music;

  studio of painters working in various mediums: watercolor, oil, collage, charcoal. The musical commentary is the Adagio from the Concerto for Oboe and String Orchestra in D minor, op. 9, no. 2, by Albinoni;

  fabric salesmen who shows a rich sampling of satin scraps to two very beautiful young women, one with long blond hair, the other with Asian features and a pageboy hairstyle. Here, too, a musical commentary of great beauty: the Nocturne in E-flat major, op. 9, no. 2, by Fryderyk Chopin;

  the same young Asian woman strolling in a garden in Rome, admiring the colorful flowers. Soundtrack, the stirring dialogue between English horn and transverse flute, taken from the William Tell Overture by Gioacchino Rossini;

  scene at the Rome Zoo, to the tune of the Overture to La Gazza Ladra, by Gioacchino Rossini.

  After another brief intermission with the Philips monoscope, the third part brought to an end the technical test, repeating the same images as the first, but with a background of music from the Baroque period. There were a considerable number of people at the time who watched the technical test broadcasts every day, going so far in certain cases as to watch them twice a day and even record the soundtrack. The increasingly powerful desire for color, the sense of an imminent future of high technology, the beauty of the music, the delicacy of the scenes aired, the details with the most powerful chromatic effect, cunningly highlighted by the way they were photographed or filmed, the continuous exercise of the imagination on the part of the many viewers who still owned a black-and-white television set, can all explain why these tests met with such approval.

  IT WOULD BE A LOW BLOW, the kind of thing a manipulative screenwriter might come up with, running two scenes in parallel, to say that we were sitting there filling our eyes with brightly colored flowers, while a few hundred yards away rapes were committed and murders planned by people we’d seen that very morning at school, pushing past one another in line to buy a slice of pizza.

  THE OBSESSION WITH SAFETY. Just now that we’d finally emerged from the hardships and the horrors (because it’s the feeling of narrowly averted economic danger that dominates the QT in those years, leave aside the notion of wealthy and pitiless, for the most part the place was inhabited by people who just a few years ago had started to let their belts out a few notches, set aside a nest egg, finally feel as if they might have reached safety), here we were, tumbling right back into the abyss, or actually, not back into it, because this kind of threat had never existed before.

  7

  WHAT GIVES AN EXCLUSIVE VALUE to the bourgeois universe is nothing but a piece of verbal magic, whose effects can vanish, in a flash, like a potion whose antidote you drink, whereupon the gaze becomes lucid, pitiless. Let us take, for instance, Via Archimede, or Vigna Clara, or Vigna Stelluti: an enfilade of “fine” apartments that have nothing fine about them, save for the quality that is conferred upon them by the classification into zones by the real estate agencies; buildings defined as “prestigious” that actually emanate no prestige whatsoever, luxury residences that have nothing luxurious about them, except for the amplification of the spaces . . . And so, all of a sudden, once the veil of verbal decorum is rent asunder, the universe of the middle class may appear thus to the disconsolate eyes of those who want nothing so much as to flee; and the bourgeois even goes so far as to dream of making a trade with those who envy him, to take a few steps down, provided he . . . provided he . . . but he lacks the strength, has neither the courage nor any authentic desire to do so.

  No! Not even in jest can we play at being poor.

  Back then, nothing could drive a father and head of household into a rage quite as much as the ostentatious sight of a son dressed like a bum, the masquerade of fake poverty is in ab-so-lute-ly the worst sort of taste, and it even tempts fate, jinxes the present by alluding to the possibility of a potential ruinous expulsion from the Garden of Eden, which is hardly something that can ever be ruled out confidently, since the family business could face a downturn at any moment. Even Eve, the nude sinner, forced to abandon the Earthly Paradise, weeps in disappointment like a matron forced to say farewell forever to her lovely apartment, caress the leaves of her plants and flowers for the last time, look out from the spacious terraces with fine views, the penthouse apartment sold off to pay a mountain of debts.

  In the context of social ascent, we find clear confirmation of just how easy it is to get used to wealth and comfort, and how intolerable it is, to the verge of the monstrous, to be forced to give it up. Invincible forces act on our senses, modifying them by force of habit: all you need is a few months sleeping on a memory foam mattress or driving a Mercedes to make it seem as if any other surface you lay your back on is bare rock. While the increase of prosperity is perceived as natural, and people almost stop noticing it as it occurs, the dimi
nishment of prosperity is experienced as a punitive event, literally degrading.

  Those who have been indigent, and fortunately no longer are, spend the rest of their lives in the sheer terror of becoming indigent once again. It’s a sort of recurring nightmare, and even when we’re not talking about full-blown terror, it still takes on the nature of a dull implicit threat wielded by a variety of different agents: the state, the government, the stock market, the banks, thieves, con artists, the Chinese, relatives who squander and children who are layabouts . . .

  Although in the period during which this story unfolds, poverty had been eradicated in the QT, like smallpox or polio, there still persisted a sort of genetic legacy, latent but ready to spring back to life and sow the fear that it might return, more horrible and frightening than ever. To have to turn suit jackets inside out, to live in an unheated apartment, or to be entirely homeless . . .

  It happened only rarely in the QT that you would cross paths with people who had fallen so low, but if you wanted to find examples aplenty, you needed only to take a walk, for instance, down to Via di Pietralata (less than a kilometer from my house), which was then lined with hovels and shacks. If not in the time span of the individual, in the collective space, at least, poverty was still disagreeably close at hand. The inhabitants of the QT had three ways of dealing with it: by pitying and assisting the poor, holding them in contempt, or ignoring them entirely. Which means charity (for the most part, through Catholic institutions), arrogance, or else indifference. I’ll let you guess which was the option most widely adopted.

  THE REAL, overpowering danger, then, wasn’t dishonor, but poverty, which is in and of itself dishonorable; not the loss of decorum, but the loss of one’s status of affluence. The true horror: to be poor, to go back to being poor for those who once had been poor, to become poor for the first time for those who never had. But during the years in which this story unfolds, in spite of the oil crisis and the state of the world economy and the political struggle in Italy, which was growing bloodier, that was a fairly remote eventuality, and indeed it rarely happened that a bourgeois family was sent back to “Go” in the social game of Monopoly, a fate that instead, today, looms over the European middle class taken as a whole. The image of the hellish descent below the threshold of prosperity, or even that of subsistence, was a nightmare from which one awoke in the middle of the night, a bizarre phantom—while it is instead taking shape day by day for the present generation. A quarter century before the end of the millennium, Italy and Europe and the West, though ravaged by cyclical crises of a scale that would later prove to be relatively modest, was still buoyed up on the wave of expansion that had been triggered in the postwar years, the “social escalator,” or consumer price index, was still conveying the average family upward, and there would still be a good twenty years of prosperity and lavish spending, of reckless wealth, sure, with speculative bubbles that burst every now and then, making loud noises . . . but not the general decline we’re experiencing now.

  THE MIDDLE CLASS, eager to be admired for its reasonableness and the maturity of the way it understands life, placid, modest, a stranger to excess, actually preserves a childish or possibly adolescent trait, brusque, irritable, and naïve—a tendency to defy the rules that it is forced to observe by none other than itself. It is by no means true that it always and invariably obeys. On the one hand, certainly, it feels a spasmodic need for security. On the other hand, it does all it can to escape from the order that reassures it. The unconditional adherence to the model requires, like some sort of test of the validity of the schema adhered to, that it be repeatedly stressed, the way you rap your knuckles on an object to test its soundness before buying it. If the object withstands our experimental violence, we find that reassuring; the same way that adolescents sometimes feel reassured if adults react firmly in the face of their provocations. Whatever the case, the order called into question must be abolished and then rebuilt in a different manner, in order to affirm one’s personality and prove one is capable of independence. Often, at the end of that process, this reconstruction will prove to be almost identical to the order that was found to be so objectionable, but the important thing is to have transformed it for at least a certain period into a state of disarray. To conform and to disobey, to conform and to distinguish oneself, to join and to protest, to obey and to rebel, the movement is as incessant as a pumping heart, until the blood stops and the contradiction ceases. “A violent order is a disorder,” says the poet, and, “A great disorder is an order,” in any case. An incessant reforming is reminiscent of artistic processes, much the same as with style, an original intertwining of tradition and departure from tradition. It can’t be one thing or the other, it must necessarily be both.

  It’s a well-known fact, for that matter, that any man reputed to be civil and inoffensive can prove to be capable of actions that are nothing more nor less than replicas of the deeds of his ancestors, full of ill will and cruelty.

  TO ABANDON THE LAZY RITUALITY and the lengthy time periods of study and work and domestic life, to seek shortcuts in order to grasp “at a single stroke” the results of those normally slow procedures: in order to possess, that is, money, sex, a pleasant life, and recognition. Whatever respectable citizens may say about it, however much they may turn up their noses, crime is a very powerful promoter of social recognition, and it is in fact practiced to that end: in order to win respect. Power and wealth generate respect, force generates respect, violence, whether it is acted out or merely threatened, imposes respect, which is a feeling in the end not that different from reverential fear, and which in any case marks a distance imposed upon the gaze. To strike: thrust in, impress, shake, batter, hammer, drive in forcefully . . .

  THE MOST FEROCIOUS ENEMIES of the family are: first and foremost, plaque (a threat looming like the barbarians pressing in upon the borders of the empire), and after that, tooth decay and halitosis, body odor, smelly feet and teenagers’ gym shoes, dandruff, excessive body hair—in other words, the by-products, the wood shavings of our intimate parts, the wastage from the incessant processing of the body, details concerning whose repugnance advertisers hammer relentlessly to alarm all the members of the family the minute they stick their noses out their front door.

  Woe betide them if they aren’t immediately halted by the correctives offered by the market.

  8

  DO YOU FEEL like an ice cream?

  An ice cream?

  Yes, an ice cream cone.

  No, I don’t feel like one.

  How about a cup?

  Come on, you want one.

  Even if I don’t much want one, okay, let’s get some ice cream. Whatever you guys want.

  It’s all the same to me.

  But where?

  The usual place.

  And where would that be?

  The usual. The usual place. The one where we get ice cream.

  Okay, I get that, but which one?

  The one on the piazza.

  On the piazza, no?

  Ah, that place.

  But do you still feel like ice cream?

  Me? I didn’t want any in the first place. I told you that, didn’t I?

  Oh, in that case . . .

  Let’s go anyway.

  I feel full . . . And when I feel full, I have to explode.

  9

  FAMILIES, I hate you. Yes, I know, dear readers, if you’re sick of this topic, just skip to the next, decisive chapter. I’d understand you, I’d forgive you, and I only hope that you’ll forgive me. It’s just too bad because a couple of lines of reasoning (which aren’t flour from my bag, as we say in Italian, not original with me: in this book of mine, I’ve only contributed the yeast to make the dough rise) might perhaps be worth the time it takes to read them. But you can always just set these pages aside and come back to them at some later date, if you choose, after you’ve finished the book, retrace your steps, or else go forward, continue reading, if you find them dull, if you don’t enjoy, a
t least a little, letting yourselves be tortured.

  IT’S A PROBLEM that has no voice. That has no shape, no visage. There is something unspeakable at the heart of family life, a secret that doesn’t necessarily conceal unseemly or repugnant details (child abuse, mistreatment of the mother, dubious paternity, pilfered inheritances, terrible lies . . .), since it is everyday domestic life itself, even when that life is wonderfully peaceful and unruffled, that constitutes the enigma. Peace and quiet is no less indecipherable than horror, perhaps even more so. Horror can burst to the surface and explode, leading to a confession or an accusation, a vendetta, but peace and quiet is itself the unruffled surface, with barely a ripple . . . How could it erupt out of itself?

  You can’t escape peace.

  The victims of peace and quiet manifest very distinctive symptoms. Lassitude, apathy, lack of lust for life, a frenzy devoid of any object, moods of dreariness that are unlikely to rise to the level of a full-fledged breakdown, but then again, beatific happiness, unalloyed satisfaction, and sheer serenity, what is it that you expect them to have to say, and to whom? Who would even be interested in listening to such an elusive story, who’d understand anything about it, and who, even if they do grasp something, wouldn’t feel an envy so deep that it would rapidly transmute into hatred or contempt (as if those who are contented feel that way just because they’re willing to settle, because they were willing to take peace at a discount)? Or else, on the other hand, if the people listening happen to be experiencing that same joy and delight in their own lives, why would they bother to pay attention to something they already possess?

  It’s by no means true that the happiness in every happy family is alike, as the opening words of the famous novel declare: perhaps the sensation of uniformity is due to the disinterest that such situations, in truth each very different from the other, eventually cause, boring observers until they all begin to look alike.