The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  I’ve never envied Gianni Agnelli or his grandchildren.

  All right, then, whom have I really envied?

  IF WHAT I’VE SAID so far is true, then the literary world is the most bourgeois of them all! The situation, from the outset, is here, too, one of supposed equality and an apparent homogeneity of means and ends. A particle physicist, a financial analyst, the conductor of a symphony orchestra are all unrivaled, unattainable in their specific fields of knowledge, it would take twenty years of study to be able even to have an intelligent conversation with them: but what does it take to write a book? Since we’re all capable of stringing a few words together (there may be those who are better at it, or worse, but that’s a secondary matter), theoretically anyway, we’d all be able to write a bestseller, which may not be true but it’s certainly conceivable, open to infinite conjecture. Another characteristic of resentment: the fact that it hammers relentlessly, obsessively: a “malevolent rumination” that will never give you peace, and while at first it may be directed toward a specific person, in time it spreads and extends to the world at large. Twenty years ago, when Susanna Tamaro published an enormously successful book (and about time: the first bestseller of my g-g-generation!), I remember just how aghast the writers her age were, especially the women. They thought of Susanna as being closer, more similar to them, no different in other words, and so? What are you saying, that I have no sensibility? Don’t I have a grandmother of my own? I must be able to squeeze a few tears out of my readers! That’s what they all seemed to be thinking, between one faint dismissive smile and the next. We were all good enough to write Follow Your Heart, in other words, and a few thought they were better than good enough.

  A society of our peers creates spasmodic and boundless desires. And lots and lots of Schadenfreude, malevolent joy.

  You could say that prosperity creates discontentment, instead of placating it. As it was for the French at the time of the Revolution, according to de Tocqueville, the position of the bourgeois becomes all the more intolerable the more it improves. One’s dissatisfaction with the goods acquired only grows in direct proportion to their number. Along the path of social promotion, the awareness that there is an infinite number of goods still to be acquired becomes intensely painful. Logic might tell you that every search, every quest begins from a state of total privation. Instead, that is not the case: it actually starts from a state of incomplete possession. And every possession, in fact, is incomplete. Thus, the greater the possession, the greater the lack that accompanies it, like a shadow to a body. Who possesses much, lacks much. The little virtues, the sweet ironies of life, the measured and tranquil pleasures, the myth of the family nest, the morality of thrift, of the saying “parva sed apta mihi,” which has been translated as “Small is my humble roof, but well designed”—all these things are nothing more than a modest covering, or perhaps the antidote that the bourgeois Dr. Jekyll frantically produces to sedate the Mr. Hyde who rages frantically in his laboratory. It is this retentive morality that compresses even the most savage resentment beneath its chaste surface.

  What appears to be an unresolvable contradiction is in reality a movement of systole and diastole, absolutely consistent and something that ought to be perceived in a unified manner as it manifests itself through opposing phenomena: on the one hand, an aspiration to anonymity, on the other, the excessive yearning for self-affirmation.

  The fact that prosperity amplifies your sense of malaise is something that can be viewed in the form of a negative in certain archaic societies, where once you’ve satisfied your primary needs, food and shelter, say, there is nothing else you can think of. No particular needs drive competition among individuals or families. People live without any special expectations. Society remains unchanged, if you set aside the resentment that would normally drive the spirit of initiative. Resentment is the worst enemy of laziness. Resentment is almost always what drives men of action: businessmen, travelers, merchants, politicians. Only when introduced from without (by TV, by foreigners, etc.) are reasons felt for dissatisfaction, only then do they desire anything more than a meal and a cot. I remember what people said to me as I went through certain far-flung villages to the south of Kandahar, in Afghanistan: “Here, my friend, if you can manage to survive, life is very relaxing.”

  RESENTMENT IS AN EMOTION but also a form of thought, reactive in nature, and therefore social and political: it develops only in response to the surrounding environment, in contact with one’s neighbor, and it obliges the person who falls victim to it to relive a negative experience or one that, most of the time, actually isn’t negative at all, only experienced as such, as a form of injustice. The closer a person or a situation that causes resentment is to us, the more it is pushed right before our eyes, so to speak (a next-door neighbor, an indignity suffered at your workplace, or a glaring privilege given to a teacher’s pet or a favorite sibling, thereby upsetting the theoretical equality among all children), the more intense the resentment becomes. The families and the offices where people live cheek by jowl, in accordance with hierarchies subtly called into question, are the ideal terrain for this proliferation of ill feeling, which, by the way, let us recall, may originate out of an authentic thirst for justice. After all, the brothers of the prodigal son, just like the laborers in the Gospel who had been toiling in the vineyard since dawn, have every reason to be pissed off when someone comes along, fresh and rested, to sweep up their full reward at the very last minute. The very particular aspect of resentment, however, is that it is not manifested openly. It is repressed or masked or buried deep in one’s soul, where it lurks in silence, becoming rancor. If it manifested itself, it would promptly dissolve into thin air. But it will not or cannot reveal itself. Shyness or decorum prevent that. One is tempted to answer the insult or the outrage with a retort, but that answer is put off, deferred, out of either fear or self-control (and frequently the former is palmed off as the latter), and so you sit there, silent and well behaved, biding your time until the ideal moment comes along, the blade is sharpened and honed ten thousand times, what with your constant mulling over and refining, your plans for revenge are brought to a high sheen, until so much time has passed that a retort is now out of the question, or the recipient would simply not even understand it anymore. In that case, the rancor that has been sitting there, incubating, now breaks away from the individual with whom it originated and spreads out like a patch of oil, a veil of grease, overlaid on people and things. You no longer hate the individual doctor who got the diagnosis wrong, now you hate the entire professional class of doctors: incompetent thieving murderers, self-centered gasbags, full of hot air. You no longer envy the brownnoser who managed to get a promotion at your office, but everyone who manages to climb the ladder in life, by whatever means, so that even legitimate methods start to look dishonest and hypocritical to you. You no longer nurture rancor toward the individual neighbor who has failed to pay his share of the condo heating fees for the building, but now toward all the tenants in the building, or even in the quarter: in fact, toward the whole human race, made up as it is of evildoers who, if there were such a thing as justice, or at least one worthy of the name, would be hauled out and horsewhipped on the public square, subjected to painful and ridiculous punishments. In my mind, I have a fanciful sampling of tortures with which to subject a list of people, whose names I keep to myself, along the lines of those inflicted at the Caudine Forks; otherwise I might emulate the Michael Douglas character in Falling Down, the stressed-out everyman who one day gets out his Uzi and starts settling scores, giving everyone exactly what they deserve; but let’s be clear, here too, the character played by Douglas isn’t just paying back those who did him wrong, he’s taking it out on entire human categories that he runs into during his demented trek across Los Angeles: wealthy golfers, neo-Nazis, policemen, Hispanic gang members, price-gouging shopkeepers, etc.

  His frustration has risen to levels high enough that he’s ready to lash out at anyone: if no one is withou
t sin, then we all still deserve punishment. The executioner’s whip strikes all of society and spares not even the flogger, who may hate himself every bit as much as he hates all others. Indeed, the fact that he considers himself a miserable wretch may help him to cultivate his feelings as honest and straightforward and, in the final analysis, even noble. Perhaps some may have noticed how professional haters (among writers, for example, Thomas Bernhard) obtain consensus and even admiration or a sort of ethical license to exercise their malevolence, given that they turn it first and foremost against themselves: that is to say, by proclaiming themselves to be, from the very outset, vile creatures, vicious, miserable, squalid—but still honest enough to admit it.

  The only good and effective thing about a vendetta, at least in theory, is the way it allows you to vent your negative instincts. At the moment of action, those instincts would ideally be vaporized, burned to a crisp. If instead you are forced by your own weakness or by social conventions to put a good face on things and smile as you gulp down the healthy portions of crow your envy serves you, then the impossibility of revenge is transformed into a form of genuine inner torment. A resentful man no longer lives within himself, he no longer lives his own life, but exists only as a function of other people’s lives. He listens through a stethoscope, he scrutinizes, spies, and registers every slightest variation in the status of others, as sensitive as the needle of a Geiger counter. And then he compares. He compares the results, the successes, the failures, the engine size of the cars parked on the street where he lives. There exists no investigative spirit, no aptitude for espionage, no introspective brooding more attentive than that of the envious bourgeois, who—and it is no accident—first invented the psyche and the relative instruments for penetrating that psyche. Incapable of the aristocrat’s sovereign indifference, the bourgeois is always wide awake and keenly attentive, and he keeps track, he keeps track of everything. He interrogates himself, in an ongoing inquisition. I’ve never understood why the best-known novel about the Italian bourgeoisie, Alberto Moravia’s The Indifferent Ones, should have been given that title. Perhaps to stigmatize, with the moralistic approach that is so typical of every young author, a sin that is considered abominable—that of no longer feeling authentic sentiments and affections? But if only the sin of the bourgeoisie was indifference; if only! If only the bourgeois really did let life slide off his back, as holy men and wild animals are able to do . . . Quite to the contrary, there is no creature on earth more highly alert than he. His existence unfolds under the banner of an incessant comparison and measurement between himself and others. Just the slightest detail is enough to make a difference, for better or for worse. Set inside a Leonardesque circle, arms and legs spread, but in a suit and tie. The comparison with one’s competitors can be glimpsed in a thousand different objects and details, so that if you are or if you feel inferior in one aspect, you can always regain ground in another. In the case that one has, for example, a homely or unfaithful or shrewish wife, or all three things together, you can make up for it, perhaps, with prestigious residences and vacations, successfully landed contracts, children at good universities, sailboats that handle better than others. Furnishings, automobiles, athletic activities, checking accounts, severance agreements and fringe benefits, the thickness and color of the hair on your head, the frequency of sexual relations, highly placed friends, and invitations to dinner, square footage and cubic inches: there are countless types of status symbols. Happiness at this price is impossible; its modest stand-in, satisfaction; while frustration is the almost perennial, virtually universal state of mind of bourgeois life. In many historic periods (including this one), at every turn of the economy, it is the middle class that feels disappointed and punished more than any other: either because it is unable to improve its own conditions or else because it sees them increasingly undermined and threatened. When the chilly bourgeois heart heats up, it is because it feels that it has been cut out of the distribution of wealth in a time of fatted calves, or else because it is in danger of descending or even plunging toward the bottom in a period of lean and haggard cows. The loss of an acquired benefit or else the inability to take full advantage of new opportunities that appear on the horizon terrorizes the bourgeois, tormenting him and humiliating him (“How the fuck can it be that I’m the only one who’s never made a penny on the stock market?” is the scolding that who knows how many people have given themselves after a speculative bubble has popped, to say nothing of those who plunged in too late, for whom the purchase of tech stocks or bonds in developing nations, which instead of skyrocketing have decided to plunge suddenly into a state of anarchy, has turned into a grotesque nightmare that has burned through the savings of twenty years in just a few short weeks . . .). The problem of bourgeois identity is by definition unsolvable. The bourgeois need for differentiation goes beyond the mere biological need for subsistence. In its grimmest moments, it must defend itself tooth and nail, but it will never lower itself to considering survival as its sole objective, it would be demoralizing and indecorous to have to struggle, as the poor must, for a meal and a roof over one’s head.

  Politically the bourgeois will vote for anyone who’ll promise him that the gap between him and inferior social classes will remain unchanged, at the very least; as long as he can ward off the risk of being downgraded on the social chessboard, he’s ready to give his wholehearted and enthusiastic support to adventurism that is anything but peaceful, thereby giving the lie to his own spirit of moderation, thereby unleashing a fanaticism as understated as it is deadly, in comparison with which the populist frenzy of the sansculottes merely pales, feebly; whereas the revolutionary fury of the sansculottes flares up in violent gusts, gusts that are frequently short-lived, the treacherous embers of bourgeois resentment seethe quietly, burning for years, fired by the fuel of deep-seated frustrations; and in the absence of any solid guarantees defending their own status, the bourgeois are willing to settle for a bare minimum of symbolic gratifications. Certainly, a novel can never limit itself to providing a portrait of a social class, even though it may proclaim that to be its intent and narrative horizon, as in the case of Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, and it is surely no accident that both of these novels have women as their protagonists, women who, even more than men, seem to belong body and soul—without reservation, in an almost sacrificial manner, as if they had taken some ironclad vow—to their respective classes: it is in their destiny as victims that they reveal their radical essence. While the men climb, plummet, accumulate fortunes, only to lose them over the course of a night, attempting to forge their destiny with a knife blow, soaring across the social panorama like rockets glaring in the night, illuminating the trenchworks excavated across those landscapes by convention: and those men are all to some extent Barry Lyndons and Bel Amis and Lucien de Rubemprés and Counts of Monte Cristo, come back to take their vengeance, I was saying, at the same time the women remain figées to the torture wheel of a surname and, after marrying the provincial doctor, their escapist fantasies can never be anything more than dreams. It might seem romantic to dream and to wallow in illusions, but there can be nothing more predictable and obvious than dreams. In order to fill the void, people transfer themselves body and soul into another person’s life, or other people’s lives, or into their earlier life, when they’re afraid they might be incapable of living wholeheartedly what remains of that life. Too late, too late . . . In certain cases, the agonizing comparison is with youth, idealized and envied in its dazzling glow, or else spangled with regrets for the missed opportunities, often for the lack of boldness in taking advantage of them when they presented themselves. In other words, regrets for one’s upbringing. The education one received. You slap yourself for having cleaved to a moral code to which, as often as not, you were clinging out of weakness, that is, a lack of the courage required to commit the acts that such morality abhors. I was too reserved, too honest, in a world of profiteers—that is the unfailing regret of the properly brought up individual. I
never let my own self-interest come first, and here is the result: the others got ahead and I didn’t. Who will ever recognize this sacrifice of mine? There can be no more intense and lasting sentiment than the bitterness of the bourgeois who was, remains, and always will be unable to vent his frustrations. His wife and children rarely understand this effort of his, indeed, to tell the truth, they never even notice it. Which only adds insult to injury. How could they be grateful for or admiring of something that by its very definition remains invisible or inexplicable? The secret of a man who does nothing but inhibits and restrains himself really does run the risk of leaving no traces. If only we were capable of turning the other cheek without letting the insult thus swallowed stagnate and putrefy somewhere deep inside us! This sublime and controversial moral precept almost unfailingly turns into: I’ll put up with it now, but one day I’ll make you pay. In fact, I’ll make all of you pay. A postponement, in other words; and the expansion of one’s plans for vengeance until they encompass an entire community of individuals by whom one was done wrong, wrongs that are variously real and imaginary.