The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  What had he done that was so terrible?

  Nothing, he’d just been rude.

  “We can’t go on like this! Enough is enough! This is too much! Something must be done! Cestra (that was the custodian’s name), Cestra . . . is discourteous!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We’re saying that Cestra basically spits in our faces!!”

  There, the only reason for our occupation of the headmaster’s office was so we could shout, eyes wide open, that senseless phrase: CESTRA . . . SPITS IN OUR FACES!

  The actual Italian phrase, ci prende a pesci in faccia, conjured up a surreal image, of someone using a fish to slap someone in the face.

  Our obsession with fish, in this particular case, eels, had also led us to reject the idea of the end-of-year field trip unless we were allowed our preferred destination, the valleys of Comacchio. Why? Why, of all the places there were to go in Italy, necessarily Comacchio? What was there in Comacchio that appealed to us with such utter exclusivity? Nothing. Except for the idea that no one ever went there. Florence, Pompeii, of course . . . the royal palace of Caserta, the Piazza del Palio in Siena . . . but not for us: either the valleys of Comacchio, or no field trip. And in fact, there was no field trip. No teacher was willing to accept our diktat, and we stayed home, the only class in the school that didn’t go somewhere. Comacchio was an abstract name, a scholastic notion, like the borax-rich geysers of Larderello, the steel mills of Cogne, the Liri River, and bauxite mines in general. Every country on earth has bauxite deposits. In the country files in our geography textbook, under the country’s resources, whether it was in Africa or South America, you could bet your life, there would be bauxite. Or guano. During quizzes you always knew what to say, and there was no teacher who would dare to contradict you. Nations such as Suriname, or Rhodesia, which later changed its name to Zimbabwe, or New Guinea, or the island of Bali, were primarily rich in bauxite and exported tons of guano. The world economy rested on these twin pillars, guano and bauxite.

  ONE TIME, my father tried to prove to me that communism and anarchy are irreconcilable. It’s one of the few political arguments that I ever had with him, one of the very few arguments in absolute terms. Communism and anarchy cannot coexist, in fact, they’re historical enemies, and he brought up the example of the Spanish Civil War, during which the Communists liquidated thousands of anarchists. Communism is an iron state, it’s the state that controls the lives of the individuals, their ideas, my father said, forget about the libertarian spirit . . .

  Not me, though, I refused to listen and I clung to my pride in being a militant in Collective M, in part because, deep down inside me, I maintained, and I maintain still, a certain margin of detachment, a sort of mental and emotional reserve which by no means keeps me from taking part in group initiatives, but nevertheless pushes me out toward the edges, in a marginal role, where instead of being a protagonist, you tend to become an observer. I don’t know how to explain it: it’s like playing a dual role, at once inside and out, believing and at the same time disbelieving. That is the story of my life. It meant that I could call myself both an anarchist and a Communist but still keep a substantial chunk of myself empty, ready for use. Rather than between two ideologies, the contradiction was inside me but, instead of resolving it, I cherished it. I dwelt in that space, in that hesitation. It’s always been that way, even at the times when I was most fully, wholly involved, I always sensed that something was carrying me away. My gaze would turn glassy, remote. Total and unconditional adherence sends you straight to heaven, or to hell. I’ve always been and remain a purgatorial spirit. I can’t seem to reason without ifs, ands, or buts—and especially buts, lots and lots of them. Communism and anarchy appealed to me (who has never, at least at one point in their life, been attracted to them? who possesses such clear-eyed, hardheaded realism?) but I was never able to make them wholeheartedly my own, and if I stood up for them, defending them against my father’s critique, it was entirely out of a love of argument, not because I was really so sure that he was in the wrong. You wind up taking one side to resist the other, not merely in imitation. And so, if I was contentedly passive as I joined the herd of my classmates and their left-wing ideals, in spite of the doubts I felt, I also gained a fair amount of independence and courage in the act of defending those ideals (taking them entirely as my own at that moment alone) from my father’s corrosive criticism. I soon realized that the education the priests had given me served the purpose admirably; and that the very articulation of my thoughts in demolishing or defending a concept is religious in nature. It tends to take the form of a sermon or a confutation. I tried it out at political assemblies, during occupations of high schools and universities, when I held a megaphone up to my mouth: when you speak in public your voice becomes external, as if someone else were modulating it. Before you, you have a community asking to be inspired and, in a certain sense, redeemed. All the same, that community sets up a great number of obstacles, some of which must be ground to dust, others sidestepped, yet others still flatly ignored. You need to bring home a result, whatever the cost, moving among the arguments with your eyes shut. And just what is that result? Persuasion. At that point, the rhetoric works on its own and you must simply let it flow. It really can take you far, so far as to state things you’re not entirely convinced of, that would never come to mind if your mouth were shut. I wonder whether extremism feeds more off the maniacal and vindictive thoughts of the solitary man or the speeches prodded by the excitement of the crowd.

  THAT WHICH CANNOT arouse faith can arouse curiosity.

  AND AFTER ALL, how could we members of Collective M not declare ourselves to be Communist and anarchist? Deep down, two things that are equally absurd cannot by their very nature conflict with each other. One set of dreams cannot contradict another set of dreams. In fact, they often encapsulate each other. To dismiss as a dream a political doctrine with hundreds of millions of followers seems reductive or else rings out as a romantic justification of its failure. The crimes committed in its name are passed over in silence or dismissed in a few words, or even avowed openly to celebrate the courage of those who did not hesitate to commit them in order to give shape to their ideals—and in comparison with ideals, facts are always relegated to the level of disagreeable incidents. Idealism certainly isn’t going to stop in the face of information and numbers, the accounting of those incarcerated, those deported. But it was a beautiful dream! We believed in it and we believe in it still, in spite of everything! Faith shatters all arguments. Dreams possess a miraculous continuity that bridges all contradictions. And pairs of opposites reveal their intimate bond far more than their difference.

  THE FAIRY TALE is defended by treating every objection and critique more or less like a fairy tale. Since the cruelty and violence perpetrated were truly incredible, well, that means in fact that they are not credible, they’re clearly an invention. The survivors of the concentration camps were often met with the objection that what happened was too much, an exaggeration, as if the excess of inhumanity was somehow their fault. “If you don’t believe it, take it as a fairy tale,” runs a wry proverb of Russian criminals, quoted by Varlam Shalamov. While I take your last piece of bread or I strip you naked in the snow, just take it as a bad dream, from which you’re sure to awaken sooner or later.

  THE YEAR I WAS BORN, 1956, the year of Miguel Bosé’s birth and of the uprising in Hungary, those who attended Giulio Cesare were offered few opportunities to express their rebellious spirit. I’ll describe here—exactly as it was described to me by an eyewitness, who took his final high school exams that same year—an episode that represents the most daring transgression of school discipline that could be tolerated in the Italy of the 1950s.

  While the philosophy teacher was reading aloud from the book resting on his desk, his eyeglasses perched on the tip of his nose and his head bowed, the students lifted their desks and moved them forward, without producing the slightest sound, and then did the s
ame with their chairs, taking care not to drag the legs on the floor, then another half-inch forward, followed by another tiny movement. The entire class thus moved steadily forward toward the desk in practically imperceptible increments, so that when the teacher finally looked up when he was done with his reading, he found himself completely hemmed in by desks, suddenly intimidatingly close, with the students all staring at him. At that point there was a sort of tacit understanding that he would say nothing and that the students would pretend everything was normal, whereby the teacher, after a few brief explanations, resumed his reading of the passage from Hegel or Benedetto Croce, and then, like a wave subsiding, the students would beat their slow retreat, moving backwards with their desks in tiny steps, or hops, if you will, until they had returned to their initial position. The teacher was able to monitor their progress with a rapid glance and then go quickly back to his explanation. The tide of desks rose and fell three or four times during the course of the class. All without the lesson being disturbed even minimally, nor was its efficacy undermined, as the students emerged perfectly well prepared.

  The boys were thrilled by their audacity and by the amusement they’d enjoyed in this harmless game. A miserable burst of laughter.

  FOR YEARS I’VE HAD the sensation that this was an experiment, or a sort of board game. A number of superpowers, whose catastrophic force could simply never be unleashed in direct, frontal conflict, at the risk of the total destruction of both parties to the conflict and of the whole world (as will happen at the end of times in Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods in Nordic mythology), agree to reproduce their clash on a smaller scale, on a neutral field of battle and with simplified rules, manipulating actors who are partly or entirely, blithely unaware, individuals convinced that they are living their own lives, in the first person, making decisions of their own free will, and therefore they struggle, they suffer, they weep real tears, and in the end they go down, they die or they succumb, with no idea that they were ever pawns played, or trading cards swapped, by others. In international politics this conflict is called a “dogfight”: instead of you and me fighting, we let our dogs fight in our place. The political battle between the US and the USSR. This kind of an accord between the superpowers has something laughable and yet starkly dramatic, because within the perimeter where the clash actually takes place, the battle is authentic, war is still war: a narrow field, but all-out war. Maybe it’s limited to a single quarter of Rome, but it’s still “war with no quarter given.” Among Ferenc Molnár’s Paul Street Boys, a rock thrown was tantamount to the launch of a nuclear missile. Frequently, the savagery of the combatants is inversely proportional to the scale of the conflict. People will kill each other, for real, over nothing, a line drawn in chalk on the street, to defend a ghost, over a single word. The way it is in certain minor literary prizes: little if any prestige, no cachet to speak of, and yet the nominees strive their hearts out, and they’re certainly not fighting for a kingdom. I swear that I have witnessed in those settings some of the most wretched acts of which humankind is capable, precisely because they were absolutely gratuitous, incomprehensible in the light of the ante that was at stake. A real reward somehow blunts the eagerness, domesticates the impulses, while a paltry nothing only whips them up. If there is nothing concrete to be hoped for, then the challenge gets bloody. People who go on TV these days, stubbornly reciting the mantra that “violence has nothing to do with sports,” really seem to know nothing about either violence or sports. In a hand of cards played in a tavern, there are those who can pick out the entire spectrum of political acts, the trickery, the ambushes, with a clarity you might not hope to find in a royal court or a parliament, as well as the authentic reasons that men run to oafishness. The whole affair turns even more ridiculous if you imagine that, after all, there’s actually no player moving the pawns, in other words, there are no higher powers in the struggle, as if there were an international soccer tournament among teams that belong to no nation. No homeland, no national anthem to fight for. The colors of the jerseys assigned at random. Then there wouldn’t even be the excuse of having been manipulated. The marionettes will just go on moving with their wooden gestures not because there’s someone up above, invisible, pulling their strings, but because that’s their intrinsic nature—they’re made of wood. It was an experiment, but one that had become an end in itself, with no scientist monitoring and studying the results. Devoid of real-world applications. There are no masters standing outside the corral where the dogs are battling to the last drop of blood, no one is laying wagers on you or on me, we’ve been put to the test, in the final analysis, we have won or we have lost, but nothing more than that is going to happen. It seemed like a scale depiction, done in miniature, of a heroic life: the loves and the bouts of madness and hand-to-hand combats and duels and the crossing of rivers in spate on our mighty steeds, which were, in reality, Ciao mopeds and Vespa 50cc scooters, the ruthlessness and the random chance by which the fallen met their fates, and now the survivors are doctors and lawyers, the betrayals and the trickery and the surprises and the excursions seemed like so many defiant challenges of fate, witnessed by the very gods on high, looking down from the clouds, as in ancient times. They amused themselves with our follies, but our follies mirrored theirs, that was the hidden meaning. As if we boys of the QT had been assigned to act out The Last Days of the History of Mankind, an accelerated film of a course on ideology, Napoleonic battles to be fought on the pavement between Via Panaro and Via Topino, forced marches and retreats, Doctor Zhivagos on Piazza Istria, a theatrical troupe made up of schoolboys, in other words, who find themselves acting out the Meaning of Life without yet having lived: with vivid enthusiasm and vertical plunges of tone, lavishing on it all the tremendously serious force of immaturity. This is how I’ve attempted to explain to myself how so much sound and fury could have been unleashed in such a narrow space and time, in the thoroughly nondescript place that is the quarter I grew up in: with the idea, that is, that it was somehow a miniature theater or a laboratory, a workshop.

  A guinea pig dies, really and truly dies, even though the disease they injected it with had been administered on a strictly experimental basis.

  Instead, it was life, with its pat and meaningless outcomes.

  16

  THERE IS A PIAZZA IN THE QT, or really, I should say, a traffic circle, which was once overlooked by the Cinema Triomphe, now a McDonald’s, and which serves as gateway into the so-called Quartiere Africano. Some consider the Quartiere Africano to be an integral part of the QT, at least from the administrative point of view, seeing that the offices of the II Municipio, where you go to get your ID issued, is right there, on Piazza Gimma, in the midst of the grid of streets with exotic names, Giarabub, Galla e Sidama, Migiurtinia, Amba Alagi, Gadames, all names of places in Italian East Africa, and also because it is a basically commercial section of the quarter, where you can buy a Swatch or a book or a pair of pants; the purists or, if I can use the term, the fundamentalists of the QT reject this latitudinarian territorial interpretation and are convinced that the Quartiere Trieste is one thing and that the Quartiere Africano is quite another. These same fundamentalists, though, ought to consider a further geopolitical paradox that might give them pause. While it is true that the main thoroughfares conveying automobile traffic through the paradoxical Quartiere Africano on their way out to the periphery of the city, thoroughfares along which stand the large intensive apartment blocks which, in fact, have very little to do with villas and palazzine, the more genteel apartment houses, have names such as Viale Eritrea, Viale Libia, Via Asmara, and Viale Somalia, that is, the names of colonies to which we bade farewell a long, long time ago, it is also true that the QT itself was once known as the Quartiere Italia (if I’m not misremembering, that’s what it’s called in the magnificent scene in La Dolce Vita in which Marcello’s father, passing through Rome, flirts with his son’s girlfriend and comes close to having a fling with her, but then falls ill . . . ah, the geniuses! the
unequaled geniuses! a genius dreamed that scene up and imagined it from start to finish, a genius wrote it, a genius shot it and edited it, geniuses performed it and dubbed it!), and the history of the twentieth century has seen to it that the names of the streets and the main piazza in this blessed quarter, named Italia and synonymous with Italianness, should refer to places, regions, mountains, and lakes many of which are no longer part of Italy or in Italy, no longer Italian, after being Italian for barely a quarter of a century, just the interval between a world war won and a world war lost.