It had just been the beginning of a long trail of blood that those who are curious can read about separately.
AT THAT MOMENT their mouths and their staring eyes were just asking “Why?” Why me? Otherwise, their gazes were empty. Then came the spurt of water into their faces.
We reloaded Dumbo at a drinking fountain and started over. It was odd that we never encountered people we knew, it seemed as if the QT was populated by cameos and walk-ons who just strolled back and forth on the sidewalks. Immediately after we fired at them, as soon as they recovered from their shock and astonishment, they would be seized by outbursts of rage, they’d shout appalling curse words, two or three even took off running after us, whereupon we poured on the gas and raced away, laughing and displaying the toy with which we’d hit them, but the majority of our victims just stood there, amazed and dripping.
Once, on Via Tolmino, instead of taking them from behind, we crossed paths with a couple out walking arm in arm, enjoying a bracing stroll before retiring for the night, they were well dressed and beaming, an old married couple who realized they were still happy to be together, in spite of everything, this is the life, enjoying a pleasant walk before dinner, arms locked with your husband. I had the water pistol, practically empty, when I spotted those two unhoped-for targets, already close at hand, just a few yards away, I decided to empty the rest of the water right on them, I leaned out with my arm held straight and aimed at them, telling my girlfriend, “Brakes! Put on your brakes!” They spotted us and then a singular thing happened. The man fell to his knees, dragging his wife with him, because he still had her tightly in his grip, while she put her hands together in prayer, begging us: “No, please, don’t! We didn’t do anything!” The man seemed resigned or else on the verge of fainting while his wife was screeching with a voice that stirred pity in us. My girlfriend turned around to look at me with a grimace beneath the lipstick, though I was hard-pressed to say whether it was of amusement or horror. My water pistol was already locked and loaded and I was by now inclined to do the job without thinking twice. My finger pulled back on the trigger, repeatedly. I’d only aimed at the man, who was about to pass out, and I brought him to with three squirts of water, on his forehead and his eyeglasses. The woman was spared.
13
THE CR/M, then, might be to the QT what Nazism was to the quiet and artistic Germany, the land of bannered villages and picnics on meadows, the fabled Bremen town musicians and other fairy tales that turned suddenly dark. It might seem like its polar opposite, but in reality it’s a precipitate of its essence. The technique involved in cutting a hog’s throat can still prove useful even after the animal hanging head-down from a hook has stopped squealing and its blood has all dripped into the bucket; the knife still gleams even after the carcass has been transformed into sausages and slices of cured pork, treats to be enjoyed at Sunday afternoon picnics; there it sits, on the sideboard, glittering, ready, razor sharp, and each time, the scream echoes through the flowering valley. The echo isn’t an amusement for hikers and day-trippers, it’s the heartbreaking last trace of a disappearance. The QT had been built expressly to evoke, at once, tranquillity, somnolence, and scorn. Everything in it appeared “so small and so hidden,” starting with the little villas behind Giulio Cesare High School, dripping with wisteria and geraniums. Little apartment houses, saplings and yearling trees, cunning little gardens, cute balconies, lapdogs and puppies, mopeds, adorable bars, little old pensioners, clerks, handicapped war veterans . . . mini-pizzas, tramezzini sandwiches . . . there was more than enough mediocrity to arouse the final wrath and punishment. The being most resentful of all this false peace is, in the final analysis, God Himself. He doesn’t need Sodom and Gomorrah to wax indignant. The only peace possible in reality and not in dreams comes at this price. Peace is always hypocritical, just like the peace that reigned in the QT. A desirable sham. It is the kind of peace advocated by someone with a boot planted firmly in the face. If they weren’t threatened, they wouldn’t sign up. Only war is sincere. When you no longer accept unworthy compromises. After what happened happened, the entire diplomatic corps of the QT activated itself to hinder excessive reactions and level obstacles once again, but by now it was too late, common sense was no longer enough to put to sleep, negate, dilute, avoid, silence, shut one eye or both, evade, smooth over, skim past . . .
What with all the dust that had been swept under it, a mountain had formed beneath the carpet, and atop it, the table started to wobble, the candlesticks overturned, the cabinets tipped over, and the heap of little misdeeds rumbled to the floor.
A MATURE CIVILIZATION is in an ideal condition to break down. As soon as it is complete, it begins to degenerate. The “tranquillity” of the QT concealed or, perhaps we should really say, fomented the development of a growing aggressivity, it nurtured it, like well-seasoned chestnut wood for a fire, which catches easily, with absolute propriety, one might almost say, joyfully. That fire would char acres and acres of the QT in the few hours that followed the rapes and murder.
The priests, for their part, did everything they could think of to limit the damage. They clenched their teeth and bore their cross, while the press hurled headlines at them that were as defamatory as the spit in the face that Our Lord received on His way up to Golgotha. Come, come! Religious educators grooming young rapists, priests rolling in cash ready to shut an indulgent eye on their sadistic young scholars . . .
After a profound reflection that actually lasted no more than a tenth of a second, like a blink of the eye on the only possible truth, among the various metaphors that emerged as a key in which to read an event that was otherwise devoid of any possible explanation, they chose to go with a reference to bad apples—but apples that had always been rotten, that were rotten from birth, rotten to the core, there was no possibility that they had grown rotten during their stay in the bushel basket of the school. They had to be, those alumni of SLM, psychopaths at the very least. That was the explanation. Instead of teachers, what they really needed were psychiatrists and guards. And sure enough, they got them. Insanity offers a justification for everything.
THAT CRIME WAS OF A RARE and extraordinary type that seemed to require that those who had committed it were not subjected to the rigors of the individual laws that they had violated, but rather, so to speak, must submit to the law itself, the law in all its terrifying entirety, the Law, in other words. A flaming colossus, which once set in motion no longer bothers to weigh the unmistakable facts or the guilt of individuals, but rears up in all its crushing vastness. The backlash spread well beyond the narrow circle of criminals and victims, and beyond the legal machinery that worked tirelessly to stitch up the enormous vulnus that had been produced. But instead of scarring over, the wound festered. Certainly, the punishment of the guilty parties would not be enough to heal it, not even if they had been burned at the stake. The entire community was shaken by what had happened, the maelstrom dragged it down into its core, reawakening a need, indeed, a lust for sacrifice with respect to which life sentences without parole and the indignant verdicts with which they were handed down seemed like too puny, too scanty a thing. At first, you might think that after a crime so vicious that it ought to have used up the whole stock, savagery would lie low for a while. In sheer statistical terms, there ought to have followed at least twenty years of peace and quiet in the QT. Not another burglary or brawl or breach of the peace, not even a slap should have flown within the bounds of that community, chagrined and contrite. Instead this was only the beginning, the start of a series of plagues that slammed down one after another, as if the vase that had contained them were shattered, and it wasn’t clear whether the violence that was unleashed from that moment on in the QT was simply an unprecedented crescendo of delinquency and crime, or on the contrary whether it was part of the punishment for the initial crime, that it was, so to speak, a concurrent penalty. Hard to understand, for those upon whom it is inflicted, whether the suffering is an act of evil or of good. There are in
fact moments when the law and the transgression of the law tend to resemble each other with stunning ferocity. The chain of murders could take on some meaning only if placed within a larger, apocalyptic vision, in a collective ceremony of expiation or in a spectacle offered to heaven. Every death meant a sacrifice, and “every evil is justified in the sight of which a god finds edification.”
There is a law, and it seems to be applied severely, though no one really knows what it means; not even its own executors seem to know. And in fact, when their turn comes before the judges, after having usurped their role, they stammer out vague and flimsy reasons for their murderous actions; we need only quote a few phrases from their testimony at trial: motivations that wouldn’t justify a punch in the face, much less serial murders. More than repentant, they seem astonished at the trivialities that issue from their lips. A little word balloon of nothingness. “Why did you kill him?” “Because . . . the time had come to send a signal.” “We had to make it clear that we were still alive.” “We couldn’t just stand there twiddling our thumbs.” And so they kill the first person to happen by. A policeman, a random person from the other side of the political barricades, or even from the same side who might have gotten some strange ideas into his head. All it takes is a shadow of suspicion—and he’s a dead man. Thus, its rational content reduced to the zero degree, the sheer power of the law that drove them to kill emerges. These phrases are by no means rare, phrases in which laws apply that no one understands, which must nonetheless be obeyed, in which orders are carried out that no one ever issued, and yet they ring out as peremptory: but these are by no means times of anarchy, you might say that never had so much legislation been produced as during those periods, the citizenry were overwhelmed with measures, prohibitions, restrictions, and injunctions, as numerous as they were reciprocally contradictory, so that inevitably one ran afoul of the law whatever one did or didn’t do: the state produced special laws, and in the meantime the murderers administered a power of life and death in their street tribunals, where the trials hadn’t even begun before the jury had already issued its verdict and sentence, always the same, “To death with them!,” so what was the point of going to the trouble of a trial? The oppression could be felt at every instant of the day, and you could feel the transitions between one jurisdiction and the other: in the office, I obey the bureaucratic law, at home I obey the family law. The social space and the environment of the quarter is governed by yet another law, and I’m wrong if I try to ignore it. If I venture behind Giulio Cesare High School at night, I don’t realize that I’ve broken it, by crossing a border.
POWER ALWAYS ESTABLISHES ITSELF as absolute, and it is only later that it is mitigated, moderated by forces that prevent it from putting people to death on a whim: that is, when it is asked to account for its actions. Asked by someone who, in his or her turn, must necessarily have at least a little power, the power to demand—and it’s certainly not enough to just ask a simple question, “Why?” in order to bring reason to bear on power.
The power over a kidnapped girl is exercised even when you’re not exercising it. “I can kill you” is such an exercise at its highest level. “I can kill you whenever I feel like it.” “In a certain sense, I’m killing you now even if I’m not really doing it, because I’m not killing you yet.” The power to kill, being able to kill are tantamount in every sense to killing. Just as we once considered a bandit “already dead,” a corpse waiting to be redeemed, a dead man walking, likewise a kidnap victim is already killed right from the outset. In the cases we’re talking about, what’s more, the solemn expression “power of life or death” loses its meaning: the only actual power that can be exercised is the power of death, life has already been given and can only be taken, torn away. It lies beyond the faculties of the murderer. The power therefore of anyone who isn’t our parent is only that of killing us; and, really, once we’re born, the only power even our parents can exercise is a power of death. After bringing us into the world, they can only send us back out of it. In the first years of our lives, they give us thousands of reprieves.
The only power to which we are always subject, then, is that of being put to death; and the only power worth claiming is that of giving death or revoking it. Perhaps for that reason (especially in the phase when they will be unable to do anything more in political terms, as their grip on reality becomes increasingly evanescent), terrorists affirmed their power by killing. They had no weapons other than their lethal ones. In the infinite and gradual array of initiatives that could be taken, all that remained to them was the supreme act, the regal essence of power; they were moribund creatures forced to feed on their last fleeting drops of nectar and ambrosia, endowed with a power as funereal as it was residual. In their puny parliaments they scrutinized from on high their future victims, but they could touch the lives of other men in no way other than by killing them. They had sunk to the level of having less influence than a tourism commissioner at a beach resort, or a traffic policeman with his pad of blank tickets, or a fence who receives stolen cars, less charisma than a high school principal or a small-time drug dealer, and in terms of their impact on the real lives of people less than the doorman of a large apartment house—but to make up for that, they could sentence to death whoever they chose. The sheer number and gratuitous nature of their murderous operations grew in inverse proportion to their wait. There were never as many murders as when the armed groups no longer counted for anything. The limitless authorization to kill was given to them precisely by their diminished influence and by the endurance of a myth of violence as a potent accelerator of destiny.
THEN THERE’S THE JOY OF GOING (perhaps only briefly) unpunished. In fugitives from the law, in those who have not yet been caught in spite of the manhunt, alongside the anguish, there is also the frenzy of being out and on the loose—a very paradoxical form of liberty.
In democratic nations, people have very little freedom to act, in fact, they are not free to act at all. The ties of rules and regulations constrain every single action, especially in the city, where the authorities have decided where you can walk, how long you can park, how long you can linger to gaze at a painting and at what distance, whether or not you’re allowed to swim in the sea, how much you have to pay to get from one place to another, the number of grams of drugs you can buy, where you can scatter your father’s ashes and where your own ashes can be scattered. Every breath of urban life is regulated by figures on a chart, signs announce prohibitions, broken lines separate, and all the while video cameras record it all, in a hail of fines, deadlines, registration fees, alternate days, schedules, and traffic-free zones.
You’re not free to do a thing without a special permit, a stamp, a coupon, a card, a password, a ticket, a collar, a receipt, a badge, a magnetic strip; which you constantly have to renew because it expires, it’s expiring, there you go, it’s already expired, and now you have to start over from scratch. You’re always an outlaw even though you chase after the law every blessed day in order to make sure you obey it. The envelopes unopened with notifications of infractions and summons and reminders pile higher on the table by your front door. On odd-numbered days only cars with odd-numbered license plates can be driven, but they can only park on the right side of the street, provided they are equipped with catalytic converters, from 1 to 6 p.m. Someone’s keeping an eye on you wherever you turn. Regulations are heaped on other regulations, like posters glued over other posters, and while you sit there doing nothing at all, on a park bench, you’re actually complying with at least a dozen codes of the law, each nesting inside the last like so many Chinese boxes.
There’s only one exception: bums and criminals. As long as they’re not tossed into prison, criminals are the only free men in our society. Or at least they attempt, death-defiantly, frequently getting the worst of it, to impose and exercise their liberty, to the detriment of the freedom of others, as if they were the one law, taken into their own hands, which is never entirely the case, because you cannot ca
ll law something that is valid only for a single individual. A law, if it is to be called a law, must oppress lots and lots of people, but in fact it oppresses only those who respect it, who therefore end up being oppressed twice, crushed between two powers: on the one hand the state, whose frequently ill-advised laws they nonetheless obey, and on the other hand, criminals, petty and grand, who impose their own laws upon them. To say nothing of other nonstate organizations that are by now like Spectre: banks, phone systems, and insurance companies, hunkered down in their glass-front bunkers, defended behind telephone numbers where no one ever answers, structured in layers of secrecy impenetrability and impersonal remoteness borrowed and copied from the machinery of state and, also, from the Mafia and organized crime in general.
The Catholic School Page 84