The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  THAT’S WHY THE TITLE, The Indifferent Ones, formidable though it is, strikes me as somehow disjointed from the book, if its aim was to depict the middle class. Perhaps it should have been called The Dissatisfied Ones.

  20

  AS I’VE MENTIONED BEFORE, my grandmother was furious (in muffled silence, only to explode and throw it in my face many years later . . .) that in my father’s obituary he had been called “Carlo Albinati” and not “Ing. Carlo Albinati”—“Carlo Albinati, Engineer.” That Ing. before the name made all the difference, in her opinion; it was in that Ing. that the meaning of a lifetime could be found (and really, looking back, I can’t disagree with her), and not having added it to the dead man’s name was tantamount to desecrating the corpse.

  I wrote that death notice myself. I chose not to name either of my sons Carlo precisely because, when saying the name, I would have been hard put to avoid adding the unfailing prefix “Ing.”

  IN A SINGLE SPIRIT there can coexist inventive flair—which must necessarily shatter inherited traditions in order to blaze new and profitable trails that frequently verge on the illegal—and caution, honesty, attachment to old habits, the fear of innovation. Often the two souls are phases or generations of a process of development, one following on the heels of the other—first come the adventurers, and then come the accountants, those who found the empires and those who administer and consolidate them. After them come the wastrels, who squander those fortunes.

  In Italy, it requires only three generations for the cycle to be complete; in this country the anthropological malleability is stunning. Even in the physical features, you can see a metamorphosis that recapitulates the economic transformation, or even precedes it.

  ASIDE FROM SUCCEEDING each other chronologically, the two opposing spirits belong in principle to two distinct types of middle class: on the one hand, the entrepreneurs (industrialists, builders, etc.), devoted to risk by definition, and on the other hand, functionaries, to the same extent by definition alien to risk.

  THE AFFIRMATION of a quantitative conception of the world, followed by its technical translation into a virtually infinite production of consumer goods, likewise valued in economic terms, thereby conferring little by little an indisputable dignity to the bourgeois way of thought, convincing the middle class—and along with that class, the members of the upper and lower classes, who were obliged to fall into line with it—of the universal goodness and the practical and moral superiority of the bourgeois model of life. The underlying formula being: everything must be calculated on the basis of functions and objectives. Everything must be placed under control, safely secured, regulated and measured according to economic principles. The earth, the sky, heaven, love, the air, our gestures, the relics of the past, the days of our lives, even our amusements and our leisure time must be profitable, otherwise they make no sense. Land left untilled makes no sense, an apartment left unrented, vacant, makes no sense, an asset poorly allocated, even less. A vacation from which you return untanned, without a portfolio of sexual satisfactions or monuments toured, is scandalous. All of life resembles a membership in a gym or a swimming pool, which must be earned out, made to pay. The costs and benefits of every undertaking must be closely evaluated. You eat one kind of food because “it’s good for you,” you perform a physical activity because it “keeps you fit” or it “relaxes you.” You replace the joy of running or jumping with the maniacal care of the body as if it were a piece of machinery that needs its regular tune-up. Even unrequited love, which in the classical world was a standard figure of eros, a quintessential form of passion, and the fatal consequence of the capricious act of some god or other, becomes a tragic and ridiculous mishap only in the bourgeois world (to which Romanticism, of course, is the winged repercussion), where it is simply intolerable to think that some given investment yields no return. It doesn’t pay off, in other words, or the yield is less than might have been expected. Whether they are short-term returns, with a one-night stand, or long-term returns, with a marriage, the amorous investment must in either case be profitable, it must be successful, otherwise it was a mistake or a folly. Unhappy love will cause dismay, no different than a bad business deal. The sense of loss is accompanied by a bitter realization of one’s own recklessness or ineptitude, the same as when you buy a basket of strawberries only to realize that the ones at the bottom are spoiled, or when you buy stock and it drops in value, or defective merchandise, or a house that turns out to have a lien on it. In other words, you could have gotten a better deal, even in love, by turning a sharper eye, by evaluating more carefully, making a better choice, stopping in time, or to the contrary, by being more daring, throwing yourself into the erotic fray more wholeheartedly, taking greater risks (because if there’s a shortcoming of which the bourgeois loves to accuse himself in a ritual and self-gratified fashion, it’s coldness, or actually, even worse, tepidness, being lukewarm about things; emotional distraction, a heart that beats too slow; disenchantment, in other words, the resigned impotence of those who fail to live life to the utmost, like a hero, or not even to the zero degree, like an ascetic or a hermit, but rather, with the tachometer running right in the middle).

  However he operates, with cold opportunism or overemphatic enthusiasm, the bourgeois often suspects that he’s done something wrong, that he’s failed to consider the alternatives thoroughly enough, that he’s run a needless risk or clipped his own wings foolishly, misplaying his cards, let his finest qualities become his worst shortcomings. “What was I thinking?” “How did I ever get myself into this mess?” are perhaps the most typical phrases in his repertory of discontentment. Incapable of identifying with a specific destiny, he is convinced that he’ll be able to revise it endlessly, correcting it, fine-tuning it, recalibrating it thanks to updated calculations, retouching existence as if it were a hairdo, a financial regulation, the optionals on an automobile, a construction project that flies just under the building code, one of those gifts that “if you don’t like it, you can always return it to the store.” Life as it actually is is always a little too tight for comfort, in any case. Let it be spangled with success or lived under a gray cloud cover of monotonous squalor, it never matches up with what he had planned or expected, in part because the planning, endlessly revised and expanded, has become completely illegible. For example: the plan to get rich. Nothing wrong there, it’s a perfectly clear and legitimate desire. But since there is no limit to wealth, when is it that I can say: There, I’ve achieved my objective? Is this enough, am I satisfied now? Practically never. When you have one million or one billion, you can always get another. No different from a gambler or an armed robber, who tells himself each time: “Just this last caper, and then I retire,” the objectives that the bourgeois sets for himself are perforce partial. In vain does he proclaim that once he’s achieved these, he’ll be contented. He need only take a quick look around: others just like him might have achieved better results or in less time. The spirit of comparison is implacable. Did you buy yourself a nice house? It’s mathematically certain: there will always be some friend or acquaintance who bought a nicer one or paid less.

  Like homosexuals on a public beach or penguins standing erect on Antarctic shoals, the bourgeois look around, constantly, to their right and left, checking out what the others are doing. You never know. There are succulent opportunities you don’t want to miss, there are dangers to flee. Even the office worker with the safe job and the monthly paycheck calculated down to the last penny, with deductions and incentives, might feel he has fallen prey to the slings and arrows of chance, or has become the victim of injustices as gross as they are treacherous, colossal in their apparent insignificance, ranging from a dimly lit desk to not having been invited to the company five-on-five soccer tournament. Likewise, he can exult in victories that are practically imperceptible and relish subliminal mockeries. When a case of alleged workplace mobbing winds up in court, the judge is frequently stunned: he finds himself examining exhibits of evidence that
seem to promise to point to cases of extreme cruelty, only to pop like so many soap bubbles that only the tormented mind-set of jealous comparison was able to conjure up.

  The perpetual suffering of believing himself to be the victim of some injustice (or perhaps, the torment of actually being a victim of it), the perpetrators of which are, variously, the government, one’s superiors or colleagues at work, one’s family members, one’s wife, the competition, the criminal element, is replaced, or mixed up with the pleasure of imagining one’s vendetta. A delicious desire, a fantasy in which you picture yourself paying back twofold the wrongs inflicted upon you, pleasurably warms the life of the bourgeoisie every bit as much as a fire crackling merrily away in the fireplace of the little country house on the weekend, gradually warming them. It can even go so far as to scorch the soul. The bourgeois heart is as deep as a black abyss, and that is why its feelings never rise to the surface. Passions lie concealed in its shadows whose existence you could never begin to imagine, like the sea monsters that live in the depths of the ocean trenches.

  Just because something has never been seen, doesn’t necessarily mean that it doesn’t exist.

  For a long time, he has become accustomed to the idea of putting up with the insolent abuse, the minor mistreatments, the laughable injustices, because that is how he was brought up, and that is how he, in his turn, will bring up his offspring; but deep in his heart, he mulls and plots, he savors and anticipates his vendetta. There need be absolutely no valid justification for the day he finally unleashes it, quite the contrary; bourgeois vengeance almost never bursts into action after some grave wrong is done him, as it would be in the blood feuds that erupt in the lower classes. In fact, by taking revenge, he wants to pay back, at a single blow, all the people and all the things, and not a specific episode against a specific person. The all-encompassing and widespread nature of the bourgeois dream of vengeance has to do with life as a whole and is designed to lay waste to an entire army of adversaries, of whom those who are actually struck by this vendetta are only a minor sampling. The ones he wants to make pay are “them.” The bourgeois vendetta is a demented response to a myriad of provocations that have piled up over time: it might snap on the tenth, or the hundredth, or the thousandth time, or never go off at all, remaining for all time concealed beneath the jacket and tie, never entirely laid to rest. That third person plural, “they, them,” covers any number of sworn enemies: the poor, the rich, the greedy relatives, the city cops, the bureaucracy . . .

  What’s more, it’s not at all true that the bourgeois is a liar. A hypocrite, okay. He’s more likely to conceal the truth than invent a falsehood, and this capacity may, when necessary, be reversed into its positive side, that is, as an instance of good manners, as the construction of a more livable world, tidier, more comfortable, where the unpleasant truths have been pushed into the background, hidden from view. (The objective correlative of this psychological aptitude are the broom closets, nooks, and clothes closets of bourgeois apartments that even now elicit little cries of admiration from the ladies during a tour of the house—convenient spaces in which to stow away, out of sight, all the objects devoid of a permanent and dignified domestic collocation.) Nothing could be more disconcerting than a shame that cannot be placed within a pattern. The unplaceable is the true secret tenant of every house and every life in the middle class. It could be a suit, a rowing machine, a demented cousin, a sloppily sentimental book, the photograph of a dead lover, a piece of jewelry never returned to whoever lent it to you. A bourgeois falls back on a lie only in case of emergency, if obliged to make up a fib then and there, he feels it goes against his nature. He may or may not succeed, but the fact that he might be able to do it doesn’t make him a liar in the conventional sense of the term. The art of fabricating an existential alibi is, rather, a slow process of weaving, something that takes years, rendering increasingly opaque over time certain aspects of his original personality, and at the same time adding glitter and luster to others.

  Though we may feel certain we’re very perspicacious, and capable of unmasking the lies of others, in reality we allow ourselves to be deceived easily and often, since at the base of this deception can be found, more than stupidity, self-interest. We want to persuade, but perhaps even more strongly, we want to be persuaded. Persuaded of that which is good and right, but also of that which is neither: persuaded of an error seems better to us than to be uncertain or convinced of nothing.

  If it is true that a society is based on the presupposition that its members tell one another the truth, but if it’s also true that every other time they open their mouths, they lie—truth, lie, truth, lie—then this means that we prefer in any case, and on general principle, to believe, to believe things that if we had even a smidgen of good judgment we would immediately recognize as false. In other words, it is more painful to unmask those lies than it is to maintain intact a naïve trust in our fellow man.

  As a result, those who persist in denouncing falsehood ultimately win not the gratitude but the irritation of the collective, a general response of dismay. People prefer to assign the features of truth to that which has been determined to be false, as long as it helps to hold a social structure together. That which is false by logic can be true by conscience.

  ANYONE WHO HAS BEEN BROUGHT UP in a rigid manner to take it for granted that everyone tells the truth, that is, not only that everyone ought to tell the truth but that everyone actually does tell the truth, in short, anyone who has been accustomed to trusting other people on principle, in a state of total credulity, the day that they discover that it isn’t true, that it isn’t always true, that in fact it’s almost never true, runs the risk of becoming all at once the most suspicious and skeptical person in the world. Having never before experienced anything of the sort, all of a sudden they have the giddy, dizzying sensation that everyone is lying, and that they actually do nothing but tell lies—do nothing but tell them lies. The revelation can be so pitiless, and at the same time, so mocking (in fact, you feel like an utter fool), that it drives you to the opposite excess. While before this person believed everything and everyone, indiscriminately conceding his trust (which constitutes a fine savings of mental energy: mistrusting others so that you can unmask them is, in fact, an exhausting exercise, a continuous mulling of hypotheses, an effort of interpretation that never leads to any certain outcome), he now believes nothing and no one. EVER. The world has become a carnival of lies.

  In the utter collapse of credulity, the first one to pay the price, the first one I stop trusting is me. I tell myself: okay, you’re not fooling me again. You won’t take me in again with your deceits. You can’t enchant me with your palpitations. Normally people assume that it’s impossible to falsify your feelings, that is, they suppose that feelings are by definition sincere, authentic, how could someone pretend to feel something? Oh, I don’t know what: say, love, regret, gratitude . . .

  On the contrary, I am convinced that there is nothing that can be so easily falsified as feelings, nothing about which people are more likely to fool themselves. In truth, we never know exactly what we’re feeling, certainly, we’re feeling something, it feels as if we’re crossing through a tempest, but not even that, deep down, is all that certain.

  LET US NECESSARILY GO BACK to the subject of money. In response to the question “how much,” the only legitimate answer is “lots.” (The answer “not much” is inconceivable, it would be obscene.) Even when we have stopped wanting to purchase the objects we needed money to buy, money still remains desirable in and of itself.

  Money has the unsettling characteristic of being a pure and infinite possibility, an equivalent through which everything in the world intersects and becomes one with all the others. In that abstract place, a multiplicity of heterogeneous and unattainable objects and stimuli converge. At the same time, money enhances the possibility of contact with different persons and things (travel, hotels, automobiles, art, technological accessories, clothing, wine, styles . . .)
but spares you the need to explore that contact in depth. While it seems to bring the immediacy of life and the world within reach, it also erects itself as a protection against it. Money serves as a trailer hitch but also as a shock absorber, as a hook but also a buffer with respect to reality. At a certain point, you can always break loose. Those who have a great deal of money know both more and less than those who have very little. They may have been to the Laccadive Islands, but they have no idea where Tor Tre Teste or Casalotti are, on the outskirts of Rome. They may know how to fly a jet plane, but they wouldn’t know how to find their way through a bus station.

  (TRUTH BE TOLD, though, the wealthy people I’ve met knew more than I did about everything, from fine food to economics, from antiques to horseback riding, from painting to fine tailors to mountain climbing to sex. Perhaps only in literature could I have held my own: but it’s not by talking about Kierkegaard that you impress someone else and intimidate them . . . And I have to confess that, at least lately, they had read more novels and seen far more movies than I had, they were better informed even about those things! They knew more people, they had more friends, and they cultivated a vast and detailed array of interests and hobbies, they owned collections, they had traveled everywhere, they knew about wines and vineyards, horses and dogs, automobiles, fabrics, helicopters, silk ties, fine cheeses, magazines, cocktails, restaurants in New York, boats, and women, they knew a hundred times as much as I did, and in comparison with them I felt like a provincial, a pathetic little booger. They knew how to cook, ski, play squash, backgammon, Yahtzee, and mahjong.)