The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  WE FEW STUDENTS, who distinguished ourselves at SLM because we were leftists, were proud of our scanty numbers, we made a religion of it, and saw it as yet another reason that our positions were right, few of us but the best, few but outstanding, so few that we could all fit into the living room of my home, where we gathered to discuss the age-old question: what is to be done?

  Even more than the question posed by revolutionaries, it is in fact the question asked by any adolescent.

  I’D LIKE TO NAME, one by one, these young Communists of SLM, in the early seventies, but I’ll limit myself to mentioning just four of them:

  Folinea

  Falà

  Marco Lodoli

  Angelo Pettirossi

  Folinea and Falà weren’t in the same class as me; they were in the scientific high school.

  I’ve forgotten their first names, specifically because we always called them by their last names.

  Folinea was skinny but athletic, with broad shoulders and taut, bowed legs, student champion in the specialty event of the 110-meter hurdles, though he’d given that up because “there was too much of a whiff of competitiveness about it,” and when he let his beard grow out, to our collective amazement, it was thick and dark veined with red like on an Oregon lumberjack or one of those hippies you can see dancing under the stage at Woodstock. He didn’t talk much and he’d nod peaceably at the things other people said, or else he’d shake his head, digging at his chin under the thickets of his beard, and that’s the one way we were able to tell what he was thinking.

  When he finished school, he wanted to be a truck driver.

  I don’t know if his family went along with that.

  FALÀ WAS MORE OF AN INTELLECTUAL, with round eyeglasses over a pair of chilly light blue eyes in which you could read no other emotions than a certain impatience to see the rapid attainment of his political projects on a grand scale, projects that were bound to revolutionize the structure of society around the world. On narrower, more specific topics he had some difficulty and so he’d put on a resigned, bored demeanor.

  While Folinea was likable as a person, Falà was objectively obnoxious, but they were both serious young men. Very serious. One time, when I asked him what his favorite novel was, just to break the ice before wading into our political discussions, Falà replied:

  “Novels? Never read one in my life.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t have time to waste.”

  “So then what do you read?”

  “Nonfiction.”

  So what nonfiction did Falà read? It’s a strange thing that I should remember those titles, have them at my fingertips now, or at least some of them, perhaps because I borrowed them, one after another—and Falà was terribly worried the whole time, inquiring on a daily basis, practically, about when I’d be returning them—and read them myself.

  Georgi Plekhanov, The Materialist Conception of History

  Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity

  Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question

  Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence

  Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, Terror and Liberty

  Ivan Pavlov, Conditioned Reflexes

  (Only after finishing it did I bother to wonder what the last title in the list had to do with the others and whether it had wound up on my friend’s bookshelves only because the author was Russian.)

  With these topics Falà trained his mind and secured it from the lazy temptations of the novel.

  “When all is said and done, though, what do these novels even talk about?” he asked me once. In fact, you can say what a nonfiction book is about, it has a subject, which may or may not interest you, whereas it’s hard to say whether a novel is interesting or not, whether it’s worth reading, you can add that it’s well or poorly written, good or bad, but its story and its plot can never be presented as subjects worthy of being delved into, as such. The social conditions of Sicilian fishermen? The life of the bourgeoisie in Trieste during the first quarter of the twentieth century or the life of the proletariat in Rome in the years after the Second World War? Presented in these terms, there would be nothing particularly attractive about the novels. And in fact, tucked inside Falà’s naïve question there was another one, far more profound and even harder to answer, “Why even bother reading a novel in the first place?” a question that glints in the eyes of middle school students when their Italian teacher, male but more often female, unfurls the customary list of titles and characters, Zeno, Mattia Pascal, the Baron in the Trees, perhaps seeded with a few other names rounded up from the current listings of bestsellers or the various other thematic subsectors—novels on temp workers, on the Camorra, on Auschwitz, and so on—in the context of some noble project designed to encourage students to read: but after all, what’s the point of reading novels, to learn? for fun? to experience indirectly other people’s adventures? or is it actually to gain a better understanding of things that have happened to us? Because we’re too shy to tell or confess the same things? In order to be able to spend time alone?

  I was unable to give Falà an answer, at least not an answer that rose to the level of objective seriousness with which he had asked me the question in the first place, and today, if I were forced to choose among the canonical replies, perhaps I’d say: “To pass the time of day.” Perhaps that’s the main reason we read novels, or why I read them, at least. Passing the time of day has always struck me as a difficult undertaking, noble in its way precisely because it’s difficult. And God bless those who invented arts and tools to do so, who were capable of devising texts and practices, games and disciplines, calculations and stratagems, deceits and seductions and exercises, meditations and contraptions, spectacles and amusements capable of making the time go by, of using it up. If it hadn’t been for their inventions, time would have been stuck in one place, jammed, and it would swell up until it exploded. But my friend Falà wasn’t interested in the slightest in “passing the time of day.” Letting it flow like the water in a river. Instead he wanted to gaff it on a hook, he wanted to bend time and hammer it until it took on a useful shape, turning time into a weapon, in other words, like a blacksmith tempering a harpoon destined to catch and reel in a whale.

  His readings formed part of a five-year plan where there was no room for entertainment. No Sabbath, no Day of the Lord, consciousness raising doesn’t go on vacation or take holidays. More than a sin, to Falà’s way of thinking, amusement was simply an incomprehensible state of mind, by no means desirable. I mean, really, with all the forms of reality still to be measured and understood, with vast prairies of reality that practically twist before our eyes with the desire to be possessed by our analyses, what need was there to seek escapism with made-up stories like the ones found in novels? Since we knew almost nothing of the real world, why dream already of running away from it? The kind of thing we didn’t know about firsthand, such as the condition of factory workers, for example, could be acquired through study, but real study, not the kind you get at school, which was nothing but a waste of time and served only to fog and blur our consciences—which was why Falà didn’t love school, and in fact held it in contempt: more than a repressive institution, an astute delaying tactic that served to convey young people, blithely unaware of what was being done, from the moist darkness of family ignorance into the black box of work, into the unfree and unchosen condition of either exploiter or exploited. Free time was the cross of those days. An obsessive topic of reflection that could even condition the choices you made of how to spend your Saturday evenings: go out with your friends or stay at home reading, studying, inquiring? Could you inquire about reality by studiously avoiding it?

  An ideological cross. When I took my final exams at Giulio Cesare High School, the first question in the philosophy exam was: “Talk to me about the conception of leisure time in Karl Marx.” If asked that question today, I wouldn’t know how to answer, but back then I did. Nowadays, we couldn’t even conceive of a question like
that, but in those days we could. Many of the things I knew or was capable of at age eighteen have been lost. I found an old book of quizzes to help you calculate your IQ. It dated from those years, and on the last page I found notations in pencil of the scores of those who had taken that test, including my father’s score—he was a man of great intelligence—and my own. I tried taking the test again. This time my score was twenty points lower than the score I’d achieved back then. At the apex of his mental brilliance, when a young man is about to leave school, he finds himself on the highest point of the curve, and it is from there that he looks out upon the world: perhaps he doesn’t understand it, but he sees it, clear-eyed, all the way out to its far-flung borders, and his gaze has a sharpness it will never get back. (NB: among the scores in the booklet, I noticed Arbus’s . . .)

  In other words, Falà, though he was still only a high school student, and what’s more, a student attending a school run by priests, sidestepped the exploitation by reading Plekhanov instead of Hemingway, using his free time to ready the overthrow of the system that allowed him that leisure time strictly to keep him under control, administering carefully controlled doses of soccer matches, Giro d’Italia bike races, discos, and short skirts.

  I have always admired, from a distance, those who react to suffering by adding further suffering, rejecting all and any consolation. I admire them, though I fail to understand them. And I admired Folinea and Falà, but I failed to understand them. They struck me as so serious. That meant that I, reading my novels, wasn’t serious. Now I read fewer novels than I did back then, and yet I still haven’t been able to be entirely serious. Clearly, a lifetime isn’t enough. And putting on a gloomy face isn’t, either.

  We were few but good, we Communists at SLM. Or maybe we were few and not particularly good.

  THE CASE OF ANOTHER LEFTY STUDENT FROM SLM, Marco Lodoli, was even more intriguing than those of Folinea and Falà, because his father, Renzo, was a genuine Fascist, and until age fourteen so was his son, under the paternal influence that fed him a romantic veteran’s syndrome. As a young man, Lodoli was convinced that his beliefs would lead him sooner or later to a firing squad, back against the wall, eyes blindfolded, and a bullet between the eyes, executed like those collaborationist writers that were being rediscovered and reappraised in those years, in part thanks to Louis Malle’s morbid and beautiful film The Fire Within. But then this blind innocence came to an end, and political disagreements began to proliferate between the old man and his son, culminating the evening that the elder Lodoli theatrically ripped to pieces and threw into the trash a copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which Marco and I had bought (or shoplifted, I can’t be sure) at the Feltrinelli bookshop on Via del Babuino. An unaccustomed thing for the old veteran to do: he was normally a mild-mannered, civil person, but he can’t have found it easy to accept the presence of that book in his home, a book that marked the advent of his son’s ideological emancipation. The exemplary punishment, however, wasn’t very effective: if anything, destroying a book only reinforces the faith of its owner, the conviction that he is in the right, as well as his instinct to resist. The funny thing was that from then on, Lodoli (who was lanky and shambling, wore glasses, and had his kinky hair up in a sort of afro) also physically became the paragon of the nonconformist, leftist student, at SLM, highly noticeable for his ragtag clothing, practically a flashing signpost, a bull’s-eye in the crosshairs, in case it occurred to anyone to give him a lesson meant to make it clear that there was no oxygen in the atmosphere for communism at SLM. He became the ideal target.

  ANGELO PETTIROSSI was a great drummer and record collector. He introduced me to Soft Machine. Now he’s a cardiologist.

  THE HAIRSTYLE COUNTED, the clothing was decisive, and how. A pair of pointy-toed shoes or a shoulder-strap bag were part of the destiny of many of the young men in the quarter, in the seventies. Fashion had nothing to do with it, there was no such thing as fashion, those were uniforms and that is how and why they were donned. Among the best-loved scenes of the time is the opening sequence of the movie Electra Glide in Blue, the motorcyclist’s vestition: leather details, chrome-plated buckles that fasten the suit of armor; then Taxi Driver, when De Niro sets his shoe polish on fire before applying it to his boots. When you put on a pair of camperos boots, you entered a different world. “Murdered for a pair of boots” sounds like pulp journalism, but it describes a fate that is by no means random. The quarter in which SLM was located was a hinge between opposing worlds, contested ground, an ideal battlefield because the Fascists were a full-fledged presence there, and their shadow loomed over the tree-lined boulevard of Corso Trieste.

  ONE EVENING I WENT to Villa Torlonia to see an Alan Stivell concert, and half of the audience was ready to start a brawl with the other half because those Celtic plaints could be claimed by equal rights by both Commies and Fascists.

  Back then it was called folk music, today we call it ethnic music, but it amounts to the same thing.

  I witnessed a comparable phenomenon during the showing of Lindsay Anderson’s film If: toward the end, when the students huddled on the boarding school roof are firing down at their headmaster, who is meanwhile inviting them to come down, in the friendliest manner, “Boys! Boys! I understand you! Listen to reason and trust me! Trust me!” and he catches a bullet in the forehead, in the film forum the exultation of the Fascists and the comrades, right and left, was the same. We all leapt to our feet.

  The willingness to engage in violence was palpable, fluid, violence was the glue that held all ideas together, it was the backdrop against which the figures moved, like the landscape with trees and mountains in paintings from the Renaissance. In a meeting held in a bar, during an afternoon of school-days boredom, you might decide to murder someone, without having to be hardened criminals. And there was no shortage of good motivations, there was always a vendetta that needed carrying out, a lesson to be imparted, a reckoning that had been waiting for years to be settled, a debit sheet of offenses and wrongs that needed to be rectified. There was always justice to be served on an express basis. It’s incredible how words are able to support, to give shape to any plan, someone once said that words weigh as much as stones or lead, but that’s not true, words are featherlight and elusive, if they had shape and weight they would be unable to treat subjects like life and death with such nonchalance, and instead they flutter and dance and dart around the most extreme subjects. Words are fast, perhaps faster than ideas, and in fact, sooner or later, they leave ideas behind. They’re launched into orbit by the flame tongues of reason, but then they’re perfectly capable of proceeding all by themselves into the stellar void. From one paradox to the next, you ought to reach a point beyond which you will not venture, it ought to be enough to stop and listen to the words you’re saying to be unable to dare to venture any farther, and at that point even the most daring or threatening ideas freeze to a halt . . . but by then the words have built up too much momentum, and they drag the ideas along behind them, crashing through all limitations. They come out of our mouths by themselves and venture where reason is ashamed or afraid to tread. They say the unspeakable. It’s an almost poetic internal mechanism, verbal virulence is a particular form of eloquence. Many discourses or articles of political sloganeering are more drunken than the maddest poetry could hope to be, more taboo-shattering than any literary avant garde, more visionary than a mystical trance. If you read them years later, they’re quite horrifying, but then and there they simply slip away. Once anointed with the oil of words, they gather headway and there is no act—however barbaric or criminal or bloodthirsty or simply idiotic—that they are incapable of, not merely justifying, but even exalting. The true automatism preached by the Surrealists is there, not in the innocuous poetry of Éluard or Desnos. Murder becomes an elevated act of humanity, extermination a hygienic operation, beatings and clubbings cheerful and good for your health, massacres an instance of perfect geometry, and enemies become rats, insects, worms, and filthy carrion. />
  I WROTE IT about a hundred pages back: novels live on what no longer exists, has vanished or will soon vanish. Ways of speaking, loving, dressing, and fighting, ways of kissing, buildings, fortunes, witticisms, streets, ribbons and waistcoats, pistols, hairstyles—all sealed in transparent amber to be held up against the light. Even if it unfolds in the contemporary world or the world yet to come, every novel comes into existence already half-buried, the minute it’s built it’s already a heartbreaking ruin, an enigmatic legacy, a ghost city that will return to life for the brief time—as exclusive as it is illusory—that it takes to read it: everything that appears in it is in any case destined to perish. Everything. Its materials deteriorate rapidly, crumbling like fabrics, unlike the eternal, immortal materials that make up lyric and epic poetry, tragedy and philosophy.

  The reader experiences the tragic struggle of an organism as it prepares to enter the domain of nothingness. As its sun sets, as it fades and loses color, after having been alive and pulsating before our very eyes. The wonderful things offered by a novel are therefore always on the verge of cessation.

  Whereas there are other artistic forms that treat things that are destined to endure, that which has a future, and which can withstand the onslaught of time.

  I HAD NO DIRECT EXPERIENCE with Fascists except for a single case, that of my grandfather, whose tempestuous personality I prefer not to discuss here and now.

  Let me just say that for many years my grandfather came by our home every single afternoon.

  He and my beloved grandmother would drop by around five, and stay until Papà came home from the office, before dinner.

  While my mother and my grandmother would chat or have tea or play cards, my grandfather would get on the phone and begin a series of lengthy, mysterious, and often agitated calls, the angry echoes of which would reach us through the glass door he’d shut behind him.