The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  A theme that really aroused people’s passions at the time: outer space. The conquest of outer space. The most widespread popular epic, which reached its culmination with the moon landing, and its decline precisely in lockstep with the story told in this book. The famous space program, Apollo, carried out eighteen missions in space, and when did it come to an end? In 1975.

  AND THEN, as I was saying, there were the pulps, the dirty little magazines, filthy, in full color, with photographs or illustrations or cartoons. The detailed descriptions of sex acts and sexual torture provided the protein necessary for nerds to grow. The pulps! Do they still exist? Or have they been swept away like everything else by the Internet? But maybe it’s not all that easy to get online from your cot in the barracks, during your time off from guard duty, and maybe there are still people serving in the military, some horny security guard, some night watchman who has plenty of time to kill—I mean, after all, there are still calendars with naked girls hanging in car repair shops everywhere. Back then, there were pulps of all kinds, war pulps, western pulps, erotic pulps, crime pulps, even political pulps, in short, they covered the entire range of topics that might interest a young boy, from superheroes to cars to the naked breasts of German chambermaids to perverted vampiresses to how to make Molotov cocktails, all the same topics that in other formats would continue to interest (or should I say: obsess) the same boys once they grew up, once they became adults. Yes, I know, I’m talking about males as if they were the only kind of people who existed and females as if they were nothing but pictures printed on extremely low-quality paper, as if they came to life on that porous paper in order to be stripped naked and tortured by monsters, zombies, aliens, gangsters, and masked men, as could be seen on their covers. But, for that matter, the asymmetrical buildings of SLM were populated only by males.

  Maybe pulps no longer exist, like so many other things that have lost their functions, like men’s hats, jukeboxes, young people’s encyclopedias, alarm clocks, ocean liners. All of them objects deserving, if not of regret and lamentations, at least a passing mention, especially ocean liners. Heartbreaking and absurd was the fate of the Italian ocean liners, with their unmistakable silhouettes, the Michelangelo and the Raffaello, launched when that style of travel was already starting to decline and the sun was setting on passenger liners. I, as a child, had the privilege to board one of the two ships a few days before it was launched, though I don’t remember which (they were twin ships, the “twins of the sea” . . .), because an adventuresome uncle of mine who lived in Genoa pretended to be a maritime inspector and managed to smuggle me aboard. No doubt about it, certainly one of the finest experiences of my life. I had never seen anything so magnificent, luxurious, modern, and exciting. There seemed to be no end to it. Until, after touring the ocean liner from beam to beam and from stem to stern up and down its countless decks and right up under the extraordinary funnels (I would urge all those who care to learn more to dig up some vintage photographs . . .), some officer happened to notice us and our inexplicable comings and goings: he stopped us, unmasked my uncle, whereupon the seamen marched us to the gangway and ushered us off the ship.

  3

  NOW, IF I WRITE about fascism for the next few pages, it’s because several of the protagonists of this book were Fascists, just as the entire quarter was basically Fascist in those years, and also because the Fascists were, in their way—though in the minority, and with highly contradictory attitudes—exemplary specimens of the period I’m writing about, as were for that matter their left-wing adversaries. Actually, though, it is true of the Fascists in an even more distinctive and interesting way, inasmuch as they were deeply anachronistic. That same feverish reaction to the new era that was being ushered in all over the world by left-wing movements became typical of those same years, and in its determination to oppose the advent of the left, practically a constant attribute of the period. By opposing the left, fascism often and eagerly took on its very semblance, though reversing it, distorting it, and deforming it so that it became even more radical than the left at its most radical. This is due to the intrinsically twofold nature of fascism, present from the start: fascism contains within it both repressive institution and impatient uprising, law and transgression, instinct for preservation and childish delight in dilapidating, dispersing, and wrecking the very sandcastles it so lately built . . . the cult of order united with the apex of anarchy. As pure aspiration, fascism is the virtual locus of unlimited enjoyment, absolute, perverse, and therefore impossible, hence maddening, a source of despair, and logically leading to the most rigid repression of that very same enjoyment. Its secret ideal would be the wildest and most uncontrolled promiscuity, whereas its concrete practice took the form of a coercive control over all and any deviancy. Like an image that is distorted in its reflection, thus unexpectedly bringing out its hidden features, invisible to the ordinary line of sight, it is precisely in fascism—obstinate, residual, but constantly seeking rebirth, tirelessly renewed—that we can best perceive the contradictory character of the era in which this story unfolds.

  The main problem with fascism is that you can never be Fascist enough. You could always be more of a Fascist, you could even be more of a Fascist than Mussolini, more of a Nazi than Hitler. There’s a sort of frenzy that can never be satisfied, a boundary that is always being pushed forward. Like all mystiques, the Fascist mystique is bottomless. There is always someone who can criticize you for being lukewarm, totalitarian but not wholeheartedly totalitarian, loyal and trusting but not blindly so, fervent and daring but only by half, and if that someone is lacking, then the inner Fascist that can be found in every Fascist will interrogate himself.

  ON SOIL ALWAYS READY TO PRODUCE the bitter fruit of derision, fascism did nothing but sharpen the sense of vanity, the sheer vanity of any individual in the face of the potential stature of the hero, and cultivate a contemptuous attitude toward those who did not take part in this faith, those who failed to believe in it or even understand it. Therefore, the die-hard loyalists felt they were condemned from the very outset to a sterile martyrdom, which in the aftermath was bound to go unacknowledged, and in any case, a thousand times degraded with respect to the figures taken as paragons and venerated—ancient Romans, medieval knights, Vikings, patriots . . . while the unfaithful, the infidels, would always be the target of their scorn, because they had been incapable of grasping the depth, the boundless profundity of the Fascist faith, a blind faith, a faith precisely because it was blind, blind inasmuch as it was faith, deep and dark like a bottomless well, into which they let themselves fall, fall, fall.

  The constituent unhappiness of fascism, its spleen, its deep-seated bitterness and negritude, all originate in and derive from this long-standing inadequacy in the face of the models, of the hyperbolic watchwords: and who will ever be so evil? so daring? so brainless? so passionate? so ruthless? Who will ever succeed in being sufficiently Nazi, if you stop to consider that the Nazi himself outstrips all conceivable monstrosity? There is no act sufficiently misguided, rash, cruel, obscene, megalomaniacal, arbitrary, or chivalrous to meet that requirement, to fully answer the call. They are all too petty, and they all burn out almost instantly in their accompanying meanness. They become wretched at having failed to achieve wretchedness on a grandiose scale. The only haven for this unfulfilled tension is madness. Planting bombs, crashing fatally on a motorcycle, liquidating yourself with heroin, murdering, devastating, shooting yourself in the head. They set out to become knights like Percival, and in short order they became common criminals, and for that matter, grimy two-bit criminals. The stature of the hero remains a mirage, a colossal shadow, not even coming close to heroism, and in the meantime taking on, to a caricatural degree, all the vices, the excesses, the brashness, the nefarious deeds. Like fleas on a dead horse.

  THE GRATIFYING CULT OF ANNIHILATION: life gleams at its greatest splendor at the instant in which you suppress another’s existence, or when you accept without trembling the suppression o
f your own. Dying in order to become eternal in the cult of the dead: that is the horizon, the pure Fascist mystique, corroborated by countless historical and literary examples. The sacrifice must be witnessed, illustrated, celebrated with commemorations, to make sure it remains exemplary. In the collective Fascist imagination, the dead heroes are still present, more present than the living. To understand that fact, you need only take a stroll through the QT, still today, and read the graffiti on the walls, read the posters . . .

  Legionaries, labarums, anthems, recitations: the QT is a notepad of fallen soldiers.

  In those posters, the talk is of wolves and slaves, cowards and loyalty, death and noble blood: the language of ancient Nordic poems is borrowed, from Beowulf to the Eddas and the Nibelungenlied.

  What can we acknowledge as an achievement of that culture? A certain graphic style, its extreme stylization, occasionally the ability to choose striking slogans or titles (like the title of the infamous French magazine Je suis partout, “I Am Everywhere,” which is certainly on a level with the finest avant-garde art of the twentieth century).

  THEIR CREDO COULD BE SUMMARIZED in a single brief phrase: “Viva la morte!” Long live death! ¡Viva la muerte! For them, killing at random, a hail of killing, killing for none but the most futile of reasons, with no particular criterion but in an unquestionable fashion, was even more inebriating than to strike well-chosen targets with a specific political objective. Indeed, the political objective was, in fact, to have no objective, always to veer toward the gratuitous, because it is in gratuitous sacrifice (whether meted out or suffered, each amounting to practically the same thing) that fascism expressed its energy: the absence of any need to answer for its deeds, sovereign acts, which were in fact not open to discussion, redeemed from and uncontaminated by the leprosy of reason. Their most typical motive, the vendetta, almost never struck those directly responsible for the misdeeds they meant to retaliate against. Every action, every deed was justified by the mere fact of having been committed, and any action performed was in any case preferable to inaction. To succeed or to fail were seen as equivalent. WHAT PURPOSE DOES A SWORD SERVE IF IT REMAINS IN ITS SHEATH? WHAT USE IS IT UNLESS IT IS STAINED WITH BLOOD? If violence and death exist (and there is no doubt that they do), then why not exercise a preliminary right to inflict them, even if that exposes you to the risk of suffering them?

  THE SPECIFICITY OF FASCISM is that it is, as we say of certain diseases, aspecific, which means that it does not consist of the content of its ideology, but rather in the way it constructs around that ideology an action and an identity. It is not what you believe in that matters, but the fact itself that you believe it, the absolute conviction, not of something in particular, but of the very fact that you’re convinced of it. One is convinced of one’s own conviction, one has faith in one’s faith. The credo of the Fascist is not a doctrine or a specific political program, because a program is for tomorrow while the struggle is for today. You can therefore behave and think or speak like a Fascist without really being one. Exactly because that credo is a forma mentis, a way of thinking devoid of any specific content, or full of any given content in glaring contradiction with all others, it is therefore exceedingly difficult to refute and to abjure. One can, perhaps, abjure a faith per se, but not because its content has been shown to be false, since there never was any content in the first place, or if there was, it was interchangeable, revolution for reaction, defense of the bourgeoisie for overthrow of the bourgeoisie, cult of the past for impetus into the future, and so on (a fundamental difference between communism—which has a doctrine, and a substantial one, however gross and ham-handed and false one may judge it to be—and fascism).

  The fact that fascism stubbornly defies definition can be sensed even in the difficulty any writer encounters in formulating statements about it that are anything other than slogans of exaltation, on the one hand, or insults and vitriol, on the other.

  Fascism in fact constitutes the dilemma of unrepresentability: and perhaps for that very reason, incessantly, it loved to depict itself in whole, healthy forms . . .

  ALSO INTERESTING IS THE IMPUDENCE, the extraordinary insolence that the Fascists show in proclaiming that they act in the name of injustice. It is by no means true that all political regimes claim to act justly, that they strive to reform society in order to obtain better conditions for those who live under them: in any case, here, to the contrary, they are openly fighting to establish a more unjust society, as unjust as is humanly possible, and they take this struggle as a point of honor.

  The kinds of things Fascists used and did in those years:

  They had a passion for snakes: they’d keep a python, or else a caiman, in the bathtub

  Sharp-toed boots

  Thor’s hammer

  Rugby, Tolkien (before they made the movies), the Holy Grail (before The Da Vinci Code).

  (There was a famous incident in which one of them—while the police were arresting him and beating him soundly, so soundly that he died of it—invoked the god Odin.)

  THE RIGHT AND THE LEFT AREN’T SYMMETRICAL. In a society like Italy, in spite of appearances, they were almost always in the minority. It was their spectacular presence in the world of youth culture that made them seem stronger, which in politics, only rarely or only for brief intervals, is the same as actually being strong.

  The political formula of the extreme right in the seventies: the left (that is, political aggression, revolutionary drive) minus humanism equals pure subversion.

  No, there is no symmetry. The extreme right always felt it was superior to the traditional division between right and left (the so-called third position: NEITHER USA NOR USSR was the recurring graffiti on the walls of the QT). Neither right nor left, or else right and left together, as in the very definition of national socialism.

  What drove them? Camaraderie, hatred for democracy, the myth of individual courage, scorn for the enemy, the cult of violence and death, pride and despair at being in the minority.

  IT IS DIFFICULT to keep from considering the enemy to be a criminal. Reptiles, rats, cockroaches, the demented and the possessed, demons, wild animals, chimps: these are the figures that are often mentioned in the same breath as the enemy. “Fascists are not human. A snake is more human,” the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez rapturously declared, receiving vast approval.

  If what reined in the radical thrust of historical fascism was the need for a compromise with the monarchy and the Church in order to govern, neofascism had none of those restraints, allowing its militants to cultivate a purely subversive dream, wild and free. But once again historical reality made sure there was a price to pay. The most extremist political action turned into its exact opposite, in the end. The militants murdered people, convinced that they were medieval knights, whereas at best they were serving as guardians of the established order. A fine paradox!

  Terrorists on the left and terrorists on the right. The former were vying for the dictatorship of the proletariat, and they did everything they could think of to make sure the nightmare became reality. They failed in that effort, okay, but what about the latter, the right-wing terrorists? What was it they wanted? It’s not clear what project or utopia the terrorists on the right had in mind, if they had anything at all—and I’m limiting myself to the ones who weren’t being manipulated like puppets on strings by the intelligence services. Steeped in the myth of the hero, they killed or got themselves killed or wound up serving life sentences without parole in order to defend the future rights of matrons in the exclusive neighborhood of Collina Fleming to double park. They planted bombs in piazzas in order to make sure those bleached blondes could go to water aerobics classes. They spilled their blood to defend the status quo. The Parioli tennis club and the Maurizio Costanzo Show, a popular talk show. To make sure the Communists never got their claws on those precious legacies. They blew up trains and banks—for that.

  HENCE THE RHETORIC of “one day you’ll thank us.” We did time behind bars to sav
e you from the Reds. More than the democratic state (which we hated), we defended the state of things.

  Aside from their own legacy, there’s a great deal of the anarchist school (and further back, Christian rigorism) in the scorn for danger and death flaunted by the neo-Fascists. Their typically funereal tone derived from the very nature of their ideology, but to an even greater extent from their awareness of defeat, which therefore demands a sacrifice, unlike Christian ideology, devoid of hope, an end to itself, sterile.

  A FEW DAYS AGO, I saw one of these killers on television, for the first time after thirty or so years behind bars. In the interview, concerning his past offenses, he spoke of heroism and the quest for a beautiful death. I have no reason to doubt he meant what he said, that is, that he was genuinely convinced of the things he claimed. The whole truth, though, is that the murders committed by those political groups were ambushes, laid for helpless or unprepared people, who were shot in the face and, even before they could understand by who and why, were dead. They called them by name to make them turn around, thus making certain they were shooting the right person. When you shoot someone in the face, you’re killing them, but more important, you’re deleting them. If an encounter with another person consists of the perception of their face, in the reciprocal acknowledgment of a certain humanity, then to devastate their features with a metal-coated projectile while their eyes meet yours deletes in an instant that option. At first, in front of you, you have an anonymous silhouette, and after you’ve pulled the trigger, there is no one: their face, their life has already been sucked into the void, and you can walk away.