The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  In any case, whether or not it forms part of it, Piazza Annibaliano is one of the symbolic places in the QT, and it is no accident that it is precisely on that piazza that there now stands the unsightly new metro station that you’ll soon run into in the course of this story.

  AND IT WAS THERE, on Piazza Annibaliano, on the sixth floor of the apartment house in whose bowels Big Macs and Crispy McBacons are now cooked and devoured all the livelong day, that Maldonado lived, and in the drawing room of his family’s apartment an interesting, peculiar cultural project had taken shape. There were those who called it a cult, or a sect.

  The leader of the sect was called, in fact, Maldonado, George Ares Maldonado. I couldn’t say why he had an English name and a Greek one, followed by a Spanish surname: but they made a perfect series, so perfect that they made you think he might have made up two of them to go with the only one that was authentic. He was a diminutive young man, extremely nervous, with round wire-rim glasses, prominent cheekbones and lips, and a broad forehead already creased with wrinkles. Mongolian eyes, a little like Lenin’s, and in any case, typical of the revolutionary. And just like a revolutionary, he spoke in a cutting, peremptory fashion. He’d cut other people off, with a contemptuous chuckle, when they were talking, looking down on them from the heights of a knowledge that he took great care not to expose and which was, as it were, taken for granted, assumed once and for all, at some point in the past as vague as it was concentrated, seeing that he was only twenty years old and, however many of those years he might have spent poring over books, it still seemed impossible that he could have accumulated so much learning in such a brief time, and stored it away behind his pale white forehead, in his bulbous electric eyes that flickered behind the metal-rimmed lenses.

  He was in the last year of high school at Giulio Cesare, which he scorned however as an inferior school, when he founded a philosophical-scientific-literary journal that also treated theology and politics, or theological politics (don’t ask me exactly what that term is supposed to mean, but Maldonado sometimes claimed that theological politics was the publication’s chief point of interest), and which he named L’Encefalo. On the cover, under the masthead, ran the mysterious and polemical slogan: “If I smile, it means I’m angry.” The cover with title and subtitle was in its turn inscribed within a fine line drawing of a cranium. This approach, so closely bound up with physiology and neurology, was willfully provocative.

  For that matter, everything that Maldonado did, said, or wrote was provocative. His artistic proclamations were provocative, his black boots with twelve eyelets for the laces, rising above his ankles, resembling orthopedic footwear and yet, after a fashion, quite elegant, were provocative, and always gleaming, since Maldonado rubbed and buffed them every day with extremely expensive English shoe polishes, and he would brush and shine them for hours at a time. That was one of the few subjects that Maldonado would discuss willingly and explore at length: shoe polish—Meltonian, Kiwi, Lincoln, cream polishes, stains, and leather waxes.

  To what sort of provocation did this notion of the high, tightly laced boots buffed to a high sheen belong, who was it aimed at? We didn’t know, we didn’t understand: but we found it striking. Or at least, I found it striking, I who am unable to venture far on pure imagination alone, who feel as if I’ve had very little direct experience of things and people, and even now am regularly astonished by a bunch of situations and objects and events that strike others as nothing special and instead seem to be stunning new developments, sensational discoveries, stuff whose existence I never even remotely suspected; that is why, when I was between sixteen and nineteen years old, I was the ideal subject for the influence of someone like Maldonado, perfectly suited to fall under the sway of his charisma and disconcerted by his whims and eccentricities. It was what I didn’t understand that fascinated me and won me over, and only now do I realize that anyone who wishes to wield the power of attraction over others must never make himself entirely understandable, never stoop to the level of clarity, never, in short, reveal himself. Maldonado relied on this technique, tossing out obscure allusions. In his rare speeches, he would mix banal, everyday considerations with others that, enigmatic and sibylline, lent themselves eminently well to be taken for prophecies. In that which eludes our understanding, we are obliged to seek a secret significance, and the more stubbornly we seek it out, the deeper it hides, the more precious and captivating it becomes.

  There, that’s more or less the way it worked, L’Encefalo. In at least half of the articles, poems, and essays published, Maldonado (who under various pseudonyms was the regular author of all the columns), with diabolical patience, would encode meanings until they had been rendered virtually incomprehensible, and it was readers like me who were then faced with the task of deciphering them. I must say that this school of interpretation and translation proved useful to me, if for no other reason than that it accustomed me to the idea that comprehension entails an almost physical effort, a persistent, repeated effort, to be undertaken especially when the results seem to be lacking: sooner or later the coffer will spring open, the lid will lift, and the hidden meaning will glitter like a treasure trove, or it will produce the delicate music of a carillon. Every single article in L’Encefalo, even if it was barely a couple of pages in length, cost an unspeakable effort to read, two or three read-throughs weren’t enough to make sense of it. Only those who had willingly run that gauntlet could truly claim to be intelligent.

  The first issue, dated January 1975, is right here before me as I write. Sixteen pages obtained by folding and stapling eight normal sheets of copy paper.

  The table of contents features:

  an editorial in which Maldonado (that is, assuming it was he who wrote behind the pseudonym of Arimane, but there’s no real doubt that it was him) announced an imminent break in time, an epochal turning point of such scope that there is no human language capable of describing it;

  an account in verse of a pilgrimage by six of the magazine’s editors to Mount Fumone, where Pope Celestine V had been confined;

  a number of translations of Lucretius and Gottfried Benn;

  a study of Chinese ideograms that have to do with the concepts of exchange, earning, and usury;

  an artistic composition in the form of a collage, with overlapping and intermingling sheets of a score by the musician Buxtehude, images of carafes, anvils, animals bedecked in garlands for a sacrificial ceremony, and a number of words handwritten in a tremulous calligraphy, perhaps the original handwriting of Hölderlin himself, after he lost his mind: Aus Höhen glänzt der Tag, des Abends Leben / Ist der Betrachtung auch des innern Sinns gegeben;

  an essay whose main themes were: the battle of the dry against the moist, of fire against water; how fire tends upward; how water rushes downward.

  I WASN’T INVITED to the ceremony. But I wasn’t forbidden to participate, either. I was an outsider, but not the kind they’d shut out if he tried to enter or who is sent away when they find out he’s a nonbeliever, like an infidel ushered out of a mosque. It’s the usual story, which I’ve mentioned before: I hovered between detachment and participation around groups, events, situations, circles, teams, factions, ceremonies, initiatives, and parties, and my role was never at all clear. Member? observer? sympathizer? witness? spy? party crasher? intruder? guest of honor? Never quite close enough to the heart of the matter, and yet not a stranger, or not entirely a stranger, inside but still an outsider, in other words, outside but practically an insider . . .

  Politics, work, literary universe, family/families, social settings, vacations: in no place have I ever truly been at home—and yet, how many settings I have brushed past, sniffed at, sampled, circumnavigated, how many I have courted, maybe for no more than a day or a month, and by how many I have been courted, in my turn!

  Tai chi chuan, vegetarians, the Russian language and Castilian Spanish, humanitarian agencies, monarchic circles, left-wing terrorism, literary salons, kidnappers, yachtsmen, psych
iatrists, priests, philosophers, neoclassical poets, refugees, newspaper newsrooms, film sets, recording studios, urbanism, the borgate, the ecological brigades, high luxury . . . I skimmed past all these places and categories and activities without ever fully forming part of them, like a guest, with my bags already packed to head out, or rather, never actually unpacked since my arrival. What was to other people a value, a faith, a discipline, a duty, a damnation, a job, a way of getting rich or getting poor, was nothing more to me than a curiosity. I never belonged to an inner circle, no one was ever able to say of me with certainty, “He’s one of ours!” and if they did, they were wrong, though possibly that was my fault, because I had given them reason to believe otherwise. In no place, no schoolroom, no hallway of any publishing house, no backdrop on any theater stage, not even at my dining table at home, did I ever venture to say, “This is my home.” But at the same time, and without a doubt, I was there, and it was me, not someone else, and I was involved, I had to do with it, I spoke and acted in some cases in an even more intimate and appropriate manner than those who really lived there, and always had, a more intimate and appropriate manner than those who could truly claim to practice those professions, to do those jobs, in fact, those who truly know how to be there. I have been welcomed far more than I have been rejected in my life, but I’ve always in the end disappointed a little bit those who opened the door to me, hoping for my adherence, my inscription, or my conversion, fooling themselves that I would stay forever. I’ve never had colleagues, or comrades, or classmates, except for those back at school. And maybe that’s why, in the end, school is what I talk about.

  AND SO—EVEN THOUGH I was not a member of the editorial staff of L’Encefalo, and indeed, truth be told, I deemed many of the ideas propagated by the magazine to be ridiculous, puerile, or just flat-out wrong, and as for the poetry, nearly entirely ugly, some verging on the pathetic, the articles incomprehensible, and the illustrations bizarre, albeit, occasionally, evocative (while verbal incomprehensibility annoys me and nothing more, when it is images that produce incomprehensibility, now that at times can be fascinating)—I was still invited in a backhanded fashion to take part in the ceremony. It was Numa Palmieri, also known as Prezzemolo (“Parsley”), a student at Giulio Cesare High School—as was for that matter Maldonado—the youngest and perhaps least intolerant and fanatical of all the editors of L’Encefalo, who summoned me with a phone call that was nonetheless brusque and sibylline: “It’s going to be tonight, at three a.m., at the Sedia del Diavolo.”

  THE SEDIA DEL DIAVOLO. Literally, the Devil’s Chair. The reader should not be misled by the name of this place, which has nothing satanic about it, or actually, yes, it does, because in bygone times, when it stood, isolated, in the midst of the countryside, the Roman Campagna, and the wayfarer spotted it from a distance as he traveled the Via Nomentana, it really could strike one as sinister. In the dark of night, you could glimpse the flickering light of fires set by those who had taken shelter within; hence the origin of its infernal nickname. Now, though, it is enclosed in a little piazza lined with ugly apartment houses dating from the fifties. It is an ancient Roman ruin, a two-story building, an entire façade of which has collapsed, while all that remains standing on the upper story is a single wall, so that the entire gnawed-away hulking brick structure (rising perhaps twenty-five feet? or even more) has indeed come to resemble a chair, yes, a gigantic chair: fashioned by a titanic carpenter for an enormous creature. It is the most incongruous, dirtiest, and most desolate monument in the QT, a quarter that has grown up around it, practically suffocating it: when you emerge onto the little piazza, your first sensation is one of bafflement as you try to figure out just what that heap of rubble might be, which looks like nothing so much as a house that’s been bombarded and burned, with its narrow blackened windows and its missing walls. The Devil’s Chair is its apt popular name. I’ve never known what the structure was originally, nor do I believe that anyone who lives nearby it knows. Back then it wasn’t enclosed, but now it has a gated metal fence around it.

  I’d set my alarm clock. It’s a strange thing, when it goes off in the middle of the night and you’ve only slept for a couple of hours. I arrived at a quarter to three. It was cold out, there was no one in sight. Not even the officiants. I hunkered down as completely wrapped up as I could in the duffle coat I bought at the Paris jean store the year before. I lifted the hood, and its rough wool tickled my ears. After waiting for a while at the corner of Via Homs, I headed for the Devil’s Chair. It was completely dark out . . .

  BACK THEN, as I mentioned, it wasn’t surrounded by a fence and not just stray cats, but people, too, could enter it freely. The interior was pitch dark. Once, when I was a boy, I had noticed that there spread inside it a dense and damp growth of grass, and something that looked like tropical ferns: but now I noticed, to my astonishment, all the vegetation had been uprooted, and even the crumbly soil that had been formed by the slow rotting of the plants had been swept off the floor, which now appeared clean and dry, by the faint light of the streetlamps outside that poured in through the three high windows. Who had done this? Who had tended to the Devil’s Chair? Unlikely that it had been city groundskeepers or attendants assigned to the upkeep of archaeological structures, so numerous and widespread in Rome that, aside from the usual grand tourist attractions—the Colosseum, the Forums, the Pantheon (and not even all of the major ones, suffice it to think of the semi-abandoned Mausoleum of Augustus)—they generally lie in a state of complete desolation, beneath the shelter of the occasional corrugated sheet-metal lean-to, with a flaking informational sign posted out front.

  I also ruled out, with equal certainty, the idea of a neighborhood committee or other association of do-gooders. The idea of a community of people acting altruistically for the collective good, even if that good is a small, narrowly circumscribed one, was practically unknown in Rome, and in this the QT, which claims to be a clean and spruced-up district, was no exception. Acting for the common good, the so-called good deed, the associative impulse—these things are virtually unknown in this city. When they do exist, they frequently conceal ulterior motives. Everyone, where they are able, has always taken care to look after their own interests, and so it has been for centuries. The only ones who promoted communitarian initiatives have been the priests. The priests, and maybe a few sports clubs and soccer teams with their entourage of fans, are the chief or sole possessors of any community spirit.

  YES, of course, for some time there existed political movements, but their culminating initiatives always tended toward a demonstrative statement of some kind, circuslike, spectacular, and brutal, designed to intimidate or exalt, with the clamorous excitement of the assemblies, the demonstrations, the processions, the mass events; ten thousand or a hundred thousand or a million people, gathered together to protest, mourn, brawl, sing songs and shout slogans—certainly, yes, the “oceanic mobs,” those certainly—in the name of grand ideals. Instead, what is rare are groups of a dozen people held together by a limited objective: to clean up a neglected, outlying park or distribute food close to its sell-by date to the hungry. Not that there have never been or are not now Romans who have done so or still do, or are willing to do so (if only someone would ask them), but in that case we are talking about, one might say, an imported, exotic custom that has little to do with the spirit of the city itself, a place where no one does anything for others, but then neither do they expect anyone else to lift a finger on their behalf; and actually where people do little even for themselves. The shortcomings of the political powers that be and the public administration are so wide-ranging and deep-rooted that in other cities they would cause a popular uprising, but not so in Rome, because the Romans neither expect nor demand anything much from the administrations that govern them, and they in return expect virtually nothing from the citizenry. To cite one example: when it snows (something that happens every twenty years or so), it is surprising to see how no one lifts a finger, witnessing the white mi
racle first with astonishment, then with joy, then with boredom, and ultimately with resentment (the entire rainbow of emotions spanning a period of eight to twelve hours, at the very most, a single day), once inconveniences and accidents put the city on its knees. You see no one, literally no one out shoveling snow, at least in front of private residences or to ensure some traffic can circulate on the streets: the citizens passively expect the authorities to take care of it, and the authorities demand, with haughty arrogance, that the citizens see to it themselves. Those few who actually make a stab, after a few desultory shovelfuls, take shelter in the warmth of their home or office. They hunker down, in other words, waiting for the trouble to subside and, sooner or later, for the snow to melt, at the first gust of a southern wind . . .

  INSIDE THE DEVIL’S CHAIR I felt comfortably at home. Nothing could feel more right to me than that noble and ramshackle ruin surrounded by drab and dreary apartment houses. There was, in that down-at-the-heels monument, a sense of coexistence and contrast, a blend of the sublime and the laughable, a dense aura of mystery destined to prove to be, in the final analysis, a total absence of mystery, in short, there were all the things that attracted me back then and that would continue to attract me for the rest of my life, things that still inspire joy, discomfort, and a glittering pinwheel of largely unserviceable meditations in me. The power of that useless and menacing agglomeration of stone set down in the midst of a nondescript open space in the QT put me at my ease. That was my time, yes, and these were my spaces.