The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  THE OTHERS COME BEFORE US: in families the imperative reigns of doing things “for others” and not “for yourself.”

  It is necessary to respect, to honor others, not to offend, listen to them when they speak, be courteous, if possible satisfy their demands. In reality, what is requested is often strictly an exterior tribute: a minimum of etiquette to facilitate the normal flow of everyday actions. Perhaps the least foolish aspect of bourgeois morality is in fact its pronounced formalism, which never demands the complete adherence to what one says and does, and indeed always safeguards a certain quota of inner freedom, even though in the final analysis this margin is reduced to being able to say one thing while thinking another. To being, in short, the first not to believe in your own words. Liberty, therefore, coincides with the shadow beneath which hypocrisy protects true feeling, it is specifically that dimly lit space, devoid of faith, ambiguous. The cool shade of disbelief. The virtual identity of bourgeois morality and Christian morality breaks at this point. Bourgeois morality seemed to be nothing more than a double for Christian morality, but it proves to be autonomous where it defends in a punctilious manner superficial choices, latter-day Phariseeism, as opposed to the total adhesion of the soul that Christ demands. Its underlying principle is based on a practical order: let’s say that I am well behaved, or pretend to be, in the end what matters is whether my behavior is or is not good, independent of whether or not it is heartfelt, if it’s the fruit of conviction or deceit. You may even feel proud of yourself when you go along with standard opinion even though you don’t share it a bit. If any correct behavior is artificial, the bourgeois can rightly expect it from anyone: if you’re not good, you still have to behave as if you were. And that’s the point, as if. The child who yawns while having dinner with his grandparents, though no one can demand that he not be bored (impossible!), one may rightly demand that he “politely” place his hand over his mouth when he yawns. That is the only reasonable demand that can be made . . . Act as if . . .

  How much hatred the truth produces! While secrecy renders light and free not only those who conceal it, but especially those who overlook it, who do not know. “No, please, I don’t want to know anything about it” is the formula of those who wish to remain free.

  THE REAL PROBLEM with the truth is whether or not to speak it.

  12

  CICERO: “Is there anything more sacred, anything more surrounded by all kinds of inviolability than the individual citizen’s home?” “His haven is inviolable.” I think it was Ernst Jünger, in less lofty terms, who reminded us that the inviolability of the domicile isn’t some abstract right elaborated in the archives of generations of jurists, but rather that this principle springs from a concrete and archaic image: that of the father of the family who, accompanied by his sons, appears with the ax on the threshold of his dwelling. Just try and get into that home. That is real inviolability: if you cross that threshold without their permission, they’ll cut you into pieces. The Vikings don’t quibble over fine points. Well, the present-day bourgeois may not stand guard at night at the front door to his apartment, but when he locks that door behind him, armor-plated or not, he can sit around in his boxer shorts watching TV and not even the king or the pope have the right to enter.

  That is how the concept of privacy was born.

  The cult of separation: from the succession of rooms, the enfilade of the aristocratic palazzo, devoid of any and all privacy since you must walk through one room after another to get from one place in the building to another, and where everything unfolds, from morning awakening to donning one’s clothes, to meals and business and conversations, beneath the eyes of a crowd of people, for the most part household staff (which is the reason for the invention of the so-called cabinets, where one can be alone or keep secret company), to the bourgeois hallways along which side rooms open up.

  The myth of the locked door.

  The only thing that could penetrate the barrier of the locked door was noise.

  Records, hair dryers, laughter.

  Musical instruments.

  And then the sounds of sex: sex between parents; sex among children, solitary or in couples.

  A young woman I met at Giulio Cesare High School gave me a memorable account of her first sexual experiences, around the age of sixteen. Back then, it was normal to have a couple of boyfriends you’d let feel you up and kiss you in a more or less adventuresome fashion, and then the right boy would come along and you’d take him to bed. And if he wasn’t the right boy then it was the right time to do it, in fact, around that age, sixteen or seventeen, a little earlier or a little later, depending on lots of different factors. The girls of my generation were the first female Italians to have all lost their virginity before marriage. They did it because they felt like it, out of desire, at the insistence of their boyfriends or in emulation of their girlfriends. The distinction had vanished between easy girls and respectable girls, as the males of the preceding generations had designated them, the males who, like Alberto Sordi, had to travel to Sweden to meet available young women (back then the adjective used was “uninhibited”), or else pay for sex. Boys my age only had to show some patience or have some luck in finding a girlfriend who was already emancipated or ready to become emancipated. There was a line dividing the high school girls between those who “had already done it” and those who “hadn’t done it yet,” but that was just a matter of time. We already knew everything about some girls, about others we could only guess. In any case, I didn’t know about the subject as long as I stayed at SLM.

  The first time that Linda had sex with her boyfriend was in her own bed; her father was at work and her older sister was in her bedroom with the door shut. After they’d had sex, confident that no one was spying on them, Linda smoked a cigarette, stretched out naked with her legs propped up against the wall, in a pose that was very cinematic, perfect for the poster of a movie about the sexual revolution, maybe to let her boyfriend get a better look at her, or else just because space was limited for the two of them in her single bed. Without knocking or in any other way alerting her, her father, who had just come home from work, strode into the bedroom and was greeted by that scene: on his face was the struggle to contain his poorly disguised astonishment.

  The two kids in the bed, paralyzed, didn’t even think of trying to cover themselves.

  Then her father, in a high-pitched, angry voice: “What is this, Linda . . . since when do you smoke?”

  And he slammed the door behind him.

  In my family, when presented with a closed door, the rule was clear: you never enter a room without knocking. You always knock first. And not only the door to the parents’ bedroom: the children had the same right to that respect. Even among brothers and sisters, the same discretion was expected. You weren’t allowed to lock your door, that was true, because privacy couldn’t stand as an obstacle to first aid if, say, someone fell ill in the bathroom, for example. Over the bathtub in the old days there hung a bell pull you could yank on if you felt unwell. That same sense of alarm was transmitted to me. The bathtub becomes a place of drowning or electrocution. The ceramic tiles, damp with steam, glisten insidiously. In the overheated bath water, it’s as if the veins on my wrists had already been slashed.

  THE PRESTIGE OF THE BOURGEOIS RESIDENCE was associated with the diversification of the various rooms: front hall, antechamber, living room, parlor, dining room, study, library, “office” (the English word, or was it French?), laundry room . . . the partition walls distinguished among the various functions and multiplied the privacy of each act of domestic life, reading, eating, talking on the phone, receiving visitors, resting, making food and storing it, preparing clothing and putting it away—and in fact these days when people renovate old apartments, it seems like all they do is knock down partition walls.

  Concealing and displaying are the two poles between which bourgeois domestic life oscillates, tucking away the unpleasant aspects and illustrating the prestigious ones. Then there are
precious things that are hidden, only to trot them out on special occasions—jewelry, for instance. Though they were conceived to be shown off, they spend most of their time enclosed in cases, inside safes or hiding places, where burglars can’t find them, only to burst into the light on grand occasions.

  IN ITS MOST TYPICAL EXPRESSION, by now virtually extinct, bourgeois life emitted more light than heat. It was supposed to be buffed to a high gleam in every single detail. That is the reason for the obsession with keeping the marble, the enamel, and the metal clean; the constant polishing of fine silver that was almost never used in everyday life, and only enjoying its sparkle when you opened that drawer by accident; the full-blown cult of parquet floors, brushed and polished until it assumed that dark glow.

  The service sets of silverware and porcelain for important occasions were stored in cubbyholes, hidey-holes, cabinets large and small, cupboards, and sideboards under lock and key. In the homes of respectable folk, you couldn’t count the rooms that were off-limits, the corners protected by latches you needed a key to open . . .

  (I’ve never understood what people meant by the non-Italian term “office” . . . why that term is used . . .)

  THE BOURGEOISIE, unfailingly unsure whether to conceal or exhibit its prosperity, often does both things at the same time.

  No one in Italy is eager to reveal their income, they conceal it from other people and, if possible, from the state, while scattering in all directions unmistakable markers of wealth.

  Only property prevents the bourgeoisie from aspiring to communism, which would be the natural outcome of social envy. Bourgeois joy consists of the sentiment of contrast: possessing what others do not and what they therefore envy. Apartments, suits, automobiles, and women, wives or lovers selected like pieces of fine silver or paintings or tapestries or rare furniture.

  THE EFFECT OF DISTINCTION is obtained through elements of decoration: furniture, drapery, carpets, memorabilia from travel, precious or extravagant objects. A handsome credenza placed in just the right place can redeem an otherwise dreary living room. Entire homes rotate around the totem of an antique hutch. There’s a kind of home whose walls are dotted with African masks or in whose corners, as deep and shadowy as jungles, there are lush stands of ferns and ficus with cloying scents. The owners are often attractive matrons filled with yearning for the exotic landscapes from which those objects were taken, in homage to the aesthetic law of dislocation. Life seems too cramped for them, and their eyes are almost always blue or green, glittering luminous against their suntans even in the depths of winter, they look out, beyond Italy, soaring above mountain ranges and broad oceans. Real life would appear to be elsewhere, and those lovely homes, luxuriant with begonias, are to some extent compensation for having given it up. There is not a more ascetic creature in existence than the well-to-do housewife. The alternate hypotheses to the lives that they actually do lead, luxurious but so very dull, radiate around their faces like an aura, sometimes conferring upon them a magical splendor. If the men of the same class routinely compare the relative degrees of success they’ve obtained, their wives instead live their lives in a constant comparison of their respective sacrifices. There are those who sacrificed a professional career to help their husband’s career, or to make sure he wasn’t jealous, others who gave up having children or sacrificed having more or fewer than they actually did have, there are women who gave up the true love of their lives, and this effort to bury alive the emotion that still stirs deep in their hearts gives them a sad loveliness.

  Pleasure and wealth cannot coexist, since pleasure in fact consists of the transition from a state of malaise to a state of well-being.

  AND THEN THERE’S COLLECTING: paintings, books, pipes, antique weapons, porcelain, or those who collect their own past, a wake of vases, bottles, musical instruments, hats, photographs . . . each one dating back to a specific episode or period . . . or a trip, hanging there on the wall like an icon.

  The home is the place where you lay down the traces of a permanent way of life, the signs of the continuity of existence. The habitation—both as place and activity—gives the sense of having something and continuing to have it over time. Yesterday, today, tomorrow, I was, I am, and I will be here. In the precipitation of dramatic events, just as in the slow accumulation of everyday acts, there is nothing like a house to confer a glimmer of significance and hold together one’s identity. Especially nowadays when the elements of recognizability have grown muddled, there’s almost nothing left but your house to tell others (and yourself) who you are, in some cases, who you once were, what you want, what you like or don’t like. And how much money you earn. That’s the way it is, the class war never ends: and unless it’s in the form of a clash between opposing social giants, like in a Mayakovsky poster—the factory worker in overalls against the capitalist fat cat in a tailcoat—it shatters into a myriad of intermediate and local conflicts, at low intensity, often between social groups that are close to each other, neighboring each other, in income or in physical proximity—so close that they seem identical. It’s the logic of the dogfight. Which in forms less sadistic or spectacular than attacks on Roma camps also take place within the variegated bourgeois social structure. The class struggle becomes a struggle for classification. On the ever-shifting horizon of social relations where the positions attained are continuously undermined, the home stands there, firm, solidly rooted, as evidence of stability, continuity, certainty—things that in reality last no more than a couple of generations. Already, children who grew up in spacious bourgeois apartments, once they’re grown up and married, have had to migrate to smaller homes, or to less prestigious quarters.

  From Parioli to Talenti, from Prati to Torpignattara.

  It is a mathematical law governed by the division sign.

  For some people, the veins of gold ore began to run out as early as the seventies and the eighties. The children of prominent professionals who lived lives cushioned by cotton wool, shielded from sharp edges by their wealth, fooled themselves into thinking that that golden mean constituted an unchanging horizon, but one fine day they reawakened to the sound of retrenchment under way.

  EVEN THE BOURGEOIS VISION of the home is magical. Its symbols are no less sacred for the fact that they belong to an everyday universe. Certain objects or spaces are charged with power. Others are forbidden, like the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Certain thresholds must never be crossed, on pain of perdition, certain keys must never be turned in certain locks except by the shaman who is entitled to do so. In the film Il marito Alberto Sordi takes his newlywed wife to a new apartment, on the outskirts of town, in fact, practically in the countryside, true, but a very nice place, and proudly shows her a little terrace, which will be their private nest, the setting for their carefree days, but before you know it the mother-in-law draws with a piece of chalk the floor plan of the room she wants built there, for her to live in. On the floor, she writes, “Mamma’s bedroom.” And what does Sordi do, when he learns of this project? He takes the hose used to water the flowers and he sprays it away. “Anvedi ’sta mandrucona . . .! Ush! e che t’eri messa in testa, eh? Mo’ te sistemo io . . .” In his inimitable Roman accent, he derides her, as he washes off the chalk.

  There are two forms of magic, one involving chalk, the other involving water, the first one evocative, the second a genuine, full-fledged exorcism.

  To build a house, to buy it or even just rent it, is a foundational act. Nowadays, when renting your home is less common, as is building a new home, and buying one is a titanic enterprise, the activity in which the average bourgeois homeowner invests money and spare time, her expectations and his taste is, rather, the renovation of a home: the renovation of stables, barns, farmhouses—the masseria, the trullo, the dammuso, ruins outside the city to be used as vacation homes.

  THERE ARE BARDS OF THE QT: often they grew up there as children or young people and then were obliged to move away, and they dream of coming back one day, in spite of the fac
t that in the meantime real estate prices have skyrocketed to prohibitive levels. Just as the Latin poets inveighed against the chaotic and corrupt way of life in Rome, celebrating in contrast the tranquillity of a small plot of land in the countryside, likewise the bards of the QT exalt it in contrast with the city’s historic center—which is no doubt a very pretty place, stupendous, unrivaled on earth, etc., but also noisy, filthy, overrun by traffic and sidewalk tables of bars and restaurants and tourists and the various night owls who fill the piazzas with broken-bottle brawls or pillow fights that the aficionados of the QT, who so love the narrow streets already deserted at nine in the evening, detest.