Even though they were dangerous times, even though in terms of physical appearance (hair shoes and bag and girlfriend of a certain type, herself likewise wearing shoes and bag and skirt of a certain type, etc.) I might be a plausible target like so many others for the political violence of the opposite persuasion, I never once was afraid, not even for an instant, in the QT. I never had, over ten years’ time, as much fear as I had in Brooklyn at night, in the ten minutes’ walk from the subway station to where I lived.
IN ITS MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY NEUTRALITY, the QT became the ideal territory for murderous rampages. Among its nondescript apartment houses, violence could be unleashed with an untethered crudeness that tended to steer clear of other quarters endowed with a more distinct urban and social personality. Sprawled like a demilitarized zone, a no-man’s-land between what back then constituted the outskirts of town (Tufello, Talenti) and the buen retiro of the historic Roman bourgeoisie (Pinciano, Parioli), the Quartiere Trieste was used as a buffer zone or a hunting reserve, divvied up every night like a little Poland between its invaders. Still today, when we think of the prototype of the fascistello, the petty Fascist, the word we use is “pariolino,” which back then rang more or less as the Roman equivalent of the Milanese “sanbabilino,” a term for the denizens of Piazza San Babila. The very perpetrators of the rape/murder this book talks about have always been classified as “pariolini,” in spite of the fact that none of them actually lived in or came from the Quartiere Parioli; odd, isn’t it? because they actually lived in the QT and fit perfectly into the identikit of that quarter. As Giorgio Montefoschi, the historic bard of that quarter, has pointed out, Parioli, well-to-do and therefore by and large conservative by persuasion, was certainly never a particularly Fascist neighborhood, either in its roots or its local customs; in fact, it was precisely its solidly bourgeois characteristics that inoculated it against the nihilism of the watchword ¡viva la muerte! Proof of the fact is that the Fascist picchiatori, or hitters, had given up their effort to garrison the neighborhood’s true center, its historic heart, Piazza Ungheria, and instead deployed to the outlying margins of the quarter, far less distinctly branded by the mark of respectability and bourgeois self-control: that is, instead, as is well known, in the very grim and drab Piazza Euclide, an outpost on the edge of nowhere, and in the partial wilderness of Piazza delle Muse, which was a gravel-lined park overlooking the flat expanse of the playing fields, the Campi Sportivi, over near the Acqua Acetosa and the river. And it still stands there, commemorating the outlying position of Parioli, for those who might have got it into their heads that living there might authorize you to think you’re the king of Rome. The Fascist hitters happily garrisoned these areas surrounded by or bordering on nothingness, on these platforms without qualities, and launched their attacks from there, whereas they would never have dared to bivouac on the civil Piazza Ungheria. Far too civil.
It is an interesting characteristic of the twentieth century, this insistence on places devoid of history, the nondescript, the anonymous, the interchangeable, moral indifference, the grayness of the shaven skull, the void, the mistrust of culture, the aphasia, in short, the century’s chilly passion for nothingness. The penitential character of the twentieth century, from the Cubists to Samuel Beckett, by way of the concentration camp, always needs to operate on a tabula rasa. More than the outcome of any process, inhumanity is its point of departure: the stranger, the indifferent one, the man without qualities, the monochrome, the subhuman, the de-evolved, the arbeiter, the muselman, the man-machine, the cyborg, pieces of body art, the replicant, the corpse, the fossil, the excrement, the cockroach, the murderer without a motive and the rebel without a cause . . . behold the perfect protagonist, the hero forged in the foundry of the last century. Any residue of humanity only hinders the course of the racing mind and slows down all action, to be rid of that human burden only makes us faster, lighter, more automatic. The pressure of a finger on a trigger comes more easily if you avoid getting tangled up in the back roads of feelings and consideration. I was convinced, as was everybody, that it was hatred that dictated these acts, but hatred acts only as an initial driving force, and should never be set aside from reason, which can temper it, bringing together and mingling causes that are frequently theoretical and effects that are concrete. However strong the hatred, it’s never enough all by itself to get you all the way there. As long as it’s a matter of trading punches, adrenaline helps, but if you’re setting out to kill, then indifference, neutrality is much more effective. The impersonal approach that has nothing to do with the inhibitory brakes of character. True professional killers are cold, just as a seducer, a womanizer has to be cold. Hatred would get in the way of the killers, just as love would be an impediment to the lotharios. Perhaps that is why the QT was the favorite gymnasium for political violence, the chosen playground: because, exactly like a gymnasium, it was empty, devoid of memories. It offered no cultural or historical resistance, it possessed no traditions of any kind, nor did it claim any. Discreet, quiet, neither beautiful nor ugly, devoid of the aesthetic enchantment of central Rome, devoid of the incandescent rhetoric of its borgate, the outlying working-class suburbs. Nothing but a residential grid of tree-lined, sleepy streets. A square, in other words, a boxing ring, a tatami, a chessboard for chases and ambushes. I would even venture to say that the unfortunate murdered victims of Via del Giuba and Via Montebuono and Piazza Trento and Piazza Dalmazia and Piazza Gondar would never have died, never like that, at the foot of the Colosseum or on Piazza Navona, nor even in the Mandrione or in Torlupara.
Behold, the explosive form of life
peaceful, monotonous, the void that draws
and sucks into itself the flame . . .
GLEAMING IN ITS WHITENESS along Corso Trieste, there stands an immense square building, unmistakably Fascist in style, weighed down by an expansion in the postwar years that sealed off its entry court, adding above the colonnade a new three-story wing: the giveaway is the shift in spacing between the windows on the façade, the clear break where the new wing attaches to the previously existing building. They needed new classrooms, there had been a demographic surge in the student population. This is the Giulio Cesare State High School.
AT GIULIO CESARE HIGH SCHOOL, when I got there, in 1974, the legend of Signor Razzitti was still circulating. He was a much-feared math teacher. To my great misfortune, he was also my teacher, and I can safely say that he fully lived up to his reputation. That year he mistreated us in every way imaginable, using his twin subjects, math and physics, which by the way he taught very well indeed, as the tools of a very painful initiation. His students had to suffer through a continuous and gratuitous mortification, and learn to withstand it without surrendering or mutinying, like Richard Harris when he is hung in midair by straps that pierce his shoulders in A Man Called Horse, a mediocre film that went down in history on the strength of that sadistic scene alone. A hundred yards of film made up for six reels of boredom.
Just think, Razzitti had assigned each of us students of class 3M a playing card from the Neapolitan deck, and when it was time for a classroom quiz, instead of running his finger down the classroom ledger, he’d shuffle the deck and have one of the girls choose a card, he’d very slowly reveal it, then he’d slap it down on his desk.
I was the Ace of Clubs.
The card that was called upon had to go to the blackboard. His or her surname, their identity, no longer existed. They never really had. Just like in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, we really were playing cards, unfortunate playing cards who were about to have their heads cut off at the first mistake, indeed, there was no need to even make a mistake, since we ourselves were mistakes from the outset. The arbitrary way in which we were questioned was a prerogative of an irresistible power, which answers to no logic or right. It’s that way just because it is, period.
Perhaps the mental association of Razzitti with the movie about a white man who becomes an Indian came to mind from the episode that
made him a legend forever when, I’ve been told, in 1968, the students in revolt grabbed him by the ankles and actually hung him out a window. The only thing is, as they were in the midst of playing this game of intimidation, which was supposed to mark the abolition, once and for all, of the odious authority personified by the most desperately feared teacher in the school, the bell had rung, marking the end of that period’s class and the start of the next one, which as it happened was one of Razzitti’s classes, and that exact class had long since been scheduled for the written physics test, whereupon the students hastened to retrieve their teacher from his uncomfortable position, hanging head down, and set him, safe and sound with his feet on the ground, and he, straightening his tie and adjusting his clothing with a few brisk moves, and pulling out his pack of cigarettes, which luckily hadn’t fallen out of his pocket during his defenestration, had immediately set about dictating the text of the classroom physics exercise, from memory, with his raucous voice, in a cutting tone, as if excluding categorically the mere possibility that a single student in that classroom might be capable of getting it right. He had jammed a cigarette in his mouth, state monopoly brand, MS, the cheapest and harshest, and had started his nervous pacing back and forth across the classroom. And in the meantime the very same students who had half-defenestrated him were sitting there, good as gold, once again terrified of him, of his authority, his charisma, bowed over their desks, intently writing away.
Razzitti smoked uninterruptedly, burning his cigarettes all the way down to the filter, sucking on them with an angry, neurotic lust. If you want to get a physical image of him, I can say that when I saw The Shining, I was astonished at the amazing resemblance between the bartender at the Overlook Hotel—the one who pours Jack Nicholson a drink in the midst of his hallucinations, and is of course a hallucination himself—and the math teacher at Giulio Cesare. The same smile, the same haggard cheeks beneath the Altaic cheekbones and the slicked-back hair.
The episode of Razzitti’s defenestration + physics exercise had been recounted to me on the first day of school by my new classmates to give me an idea of just what kind of teacher I’d lucked into.
THIS, IN OTHER WORDS, was the level of connivance, of coexistence in the QT between conventional decorum, on the one hand, and sheer anarchy on the other. Incredible yet entirely possible. The students ready and willing to throw their teachers out the window are afraid of getting a bad grade. However hard it is to imagine it as a unified movement, the same kids who had gotten their hands dirty beating their political opponents would go home at night and wash those same hands before sitting down to dinner, eating the vegetable puree their mothers had made and quietly paying mind to her scoldings, “Don’t make that noise when you eat,” “We don’t slurp our soup in this house.” The general etiquette and routines remained largely unchanged, modest, slightly parochial, prudent, all of them mirroring a style that can be summarized in the single word “dignified.” To live, speak, earn, and dress in a “dignified” manner. What does dignified mean? How deep can this concept penetrate and permeate a person’s character, whether preserving it or ruining it? When I was boy, and my mother bought herself a pair of nice shoes, too nice, too expensive, and most of all, too shoey, in a shop on Via Bellinzona that by no accident was named Follies, I expressed my disapproval of these superfluous outlays and told her, judiciously, that when I got married I’d only let my wife dress in a “dignified” style, nothing more—meaning, no shoes from Follies, or at the very most, a single pair, for important occasions, not the kind of collection my mother had: to my eyes, she was a sort of Imelda Marcos. My father, on the other hand, still madly in love with Mamma, was happy to shower her with gifts.
For that matter, it was always my mother who warned us against squandering money: “It’s not as if your father just finds it lying around in the street.”
We also made fun of my mother for her preaching:
“Honesty is the first thing.”
“Cleanliness is the first thing.”
“Courtesy is the first thing.”
“Education is the first thing.”
O Mamma, just how many of these first things are there?
But maybe that’s a story I’ve told before.
THE QT WAS AN AQUARIUM. The apparent placidity of its little traditions, the muffled resistance to any changes that filtered through the families and the schools, the tendency to reproduce the same ineluctable gestures, such as the Sunday pastries from Marinari or Romoli, and the weekly permanent at the beauty shop. All of a sudden, that smooth surface had been ruffled by a gust of gratuitous violence. Only an instant before, we would all have sworn that such a thing could never have happened, nothing in particular could ever have happened. Among the most mysterious episodes, I remember a proletarian expropriation—as we called what amounted to a loosely organized raid on a shop, a sort of gang shoplifting—that was carried out to the detriment of the casual clothing shop near Piazza Verbano. The owner’s last name was Paris and he introduced jeans to Rome and pioneered the jeans store in the process, just like Bartocci on Via Castellini; he had begun in the years after the war with a market stand, and had then opened a shop near Piazza Vescovio, then expanding further with a second shop, called Paris 2, on Via di Villa Ada.
A proletarian expropriation was a form of ideological looting widespread in the seventies, marking the most spectacular high point of other struggles, more serious and systematic, such as the occupation of public housing, the auto-discounting of rents and utility bills. It consisted of entering en masse into a shop and simply ripping off everything you could get your hands on and fill your arms with, without any particular method, whereupon everyone just ran out of the shop with everything they could carry, usually stuff grabbed at random, occasionally carefully selected on counters and shelves. Only rarely did the militants need to avail themselves of violence, both because of their overwhelming numbers and because of the astonishment of the sales clerks, who weren’t fast enough to organize any kind of resistance (and in many cases, they wouldn’t have done it anyway because, whether explicitly or implicitly, they generally felt a certain solidarity with the expropriators), and because of how quickly it was all over, usually within one to three minutes, at the very most. I’m not going to belabor the doctrine according to which this did not constitute theft or robbery but was instead expropriation, and therefore a legitimate act, albeit brusque. Proletarian legality with a view to the redistribution of wealth. As effective as it was symbolic. Already, by the advent of the following decade, there was no more talk of proletarian expropriations, indeed, the very use of the phrase was lost, save perhaps in an ironic acceptance, thefts had gone back to being the work of thieves, and private property became once again an inviolable concept. So it remained until episodes of proletarian expropriation sporadically began to present themselves again, at the behest of Italian social centers and antiglobalization groups, targeting shopping centers and malls. In those impersonal settings the feeling that there is a legitimate owner of the merchandise, a flesh-and-blood individual, from whom you might be stealing or expropriating, is already null and void, since for the most part the stores are part of anonymous multinational chains. From what I read in the press, the favorite targets of the expropriators have lately been plasma-screen TVs. The bread the poor are stealing for their tables, in other words, was baked by Sony. Back in my day, the owner of the shops existed, and how. His name was Paris, and he had scraped together his little fortune by the sweat of his brow. One day I’d like to meet him, at his shop, and hear his account of the way things went.
AT GIULIO CESARE HIGH SCHOOL, I became a member of the anarchist-Communist Collective M, after my class section, 3M, where I had been sent in durance vile. That section of the class was the last in alphabetical order, and was considered the high school’s Devil’s Island, a motley crew whose ranks had been decimated by flunkees and failures. That’s the main reason I had ended up there myself, as a discard from the school run by p
riests, and therefore looked down upon as a genuine piece of human garbage. But for us members of the collective, instead, that letter was a badge of honor, or dishonor, reminiscent of M, the monster of Düsseldorf, who was our negative hero, especially because of two scenes in Fritz Lang’s masterpiece: the one with the balloon as it flies out of the little girl’s hand, only to be tangled in the electric lines, and then the other in which Peter Lorre looks at himself in the mirror, or else in the plate glass window of a shop, I don’t remember exactly, and notices that he has the damning letter written on his back. M, for Mörder. We felt like monsters ourselves. The unsettling capital letter of “Collective M” was a logo that made us different not only from the Fascists and the tepid young men of the moderate and Catholic center (one in particular, distinguished by an Abraham Lincoln beard, future cabinet minister of the Italian Republic and European commissioner Franco Frattini), who took punches from all sides in their stubborn efforts to intervene and reconcile the warring factions, but in general different from the other classmates who gravitated around the usual political formations: the radical group Lotta Continua, the Italian Communist Youth Federation, FGCI, il manifesto, written in all lowercase letters, and a scattering of Socialists who often found themselves to the left of everyone else—an interesting phenomenon if you stop to think where the Italian Socialists ultimately wound up. We members of Collective M were just a minority sect of pains in the ass. Intransigent and sarcastic. Obtusely faithful to the banner of negativity. Like abstract painters, we sought out the purest forms, untethered to issues of utility. Therefore, ours were genuine provocations. When elections were called for members of the student council, the first in the history of Italian schools, our campaign slogan was “Let’s defecate in the ballot boxes” (note the use of the latinate verb, rather than just “Let’s shit in the ballot boxes”): unredeemable in our disagreeability, refined in our vulgarity. We were determined that an inexplicably demented spirit must distinguish all our initiatives, leaving those who witnessed or were subjected to them in doubt as to whether they were a prank or something deadly serious: like when we took the headmaster’s office by storm to protest against a custodian.
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