The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  But was it the right place for the editors of L’Encefalo? You bet it was.

  I saw them arrive, right on time, at last, as the clocks struck three in the morning, on the dot. They were walking down Via Scirè, in single file, dark, silent, like the Thugs in Salgari’s I misteri della giungla nera (The Mystery of the Black Jungle), in fact, more than walking down the street, they seemed to slither down it. There were ten or so of them, and leading the line I recognized Maldonado, wrapped in a cloak. I identified him by the glitter of his small wire-rim glasses. Each of them had a bag over their shoulder, so they descended Via Scirè bent over with the weight. Bringing up the rear was a slight, slender figure. I felt how out of place I really was when they crept, one after the other, into the Devil’s Chair and set down their bags. Except for the minute, warmly bundled figure I had noticed a short while before, in fact, I was the only one who had brought nothing.

  And yet it was to me, of all people, me, the outsider, that Maldonado spoke.

  “Are you ready?”

  I nodded, though I had no idea what I was ready for.

  Of the others, there were three I knew: one had been my schoolmate at SLM, though in another class, I’d played soccer with the second one, and in fact it struck me as curious to see him again not in shorts but rather in garb for officiating at the ceremony, and the third was Numa Palmieri, who had published an essay in L’Encefalo of which I still remember the opening sentence, lapidary and enigmatic: “The scream disorients the act of listening.”

  I WAS READY. I was trembling with curiosity, though it was riddled through with veins of skepticism. Deep down, skepticism always aspires to be given the lie by some miracle, and therefore it does nothing to undermine one’s expectations, indeed, if anything, it enhances them. It creates fertile terrain for a stunning revelation.

  Once my initial bewilderment subsided, I felt like a privileged attendee. The staff of L’Encefalo considered me to be a sort of valuable hostage, like the princes raised at the court of an enemy king, so that they might learn and thereafter be well aware of that king’s splendor, remaining for the rest of their lives intimidated by his great power. Perhaps that was why Maldonado had summoned me to the ceremony: in order to impress upon me once and for all the depth of the research they had done, their spiritual superiority with respect to the trivial topics we in the QT might be wrapped up in, however relatively cultured we might be: politics, novels, movies, or even perhaps motorcycles or tennis, or even love, and then, inevitably, politics, in other words, a futile clash among ideologized little factions, while they instead devoted themselves to the interpretation of millenarian phenomena, metaphysical currents that bestrode the centuries, persisting like flimsy sheets of onionskin paper: the epochal movements, the great traditions. Yes, I was ready. I always had been. Like a sprinter who lives on the starting block. Maldonado gestured to his companions, and they began to empty their bags. I was careful to refrain from offering to help, well aware I might contaminate the ritual. Indeed, they didn’t simply spill the contents wholesale out onto the stone floor of the Devil’s Chair, but instead pulled items one at a time out of the mouths of their bags.

  They were pieces of wood. They were branches and sticks, about ten or twenty inches in length, and they pulled them out and laid them on a broad cloth that Maldonado had unrolled on the floor. So that was the bulge I had glimpsed under his cloak.

  Noticing my curiosity about those sticks, Prezzemolo handed me one: evidently my hands were not so impure that I was forbidden to touch them. So I, too, was ready, yes, I was ready. I grabbed it: it was white and featherlight, and it smelled good. I’m not capable of distinguishing odors, except to classify them as good and bad. But the scent of that wood was sweet and penetrating, and once the officiants had covered the cloth with a pile of light, dry branches that glinted white in the darkness, their perfume spread, really overwhelming and inebriating and exotic. Only many years later did I remember and recognize it for the classic essence of perfumery that it was: sandalwood, where on earth could they have found it? And how could those branches be so dry and light?

  After delicately laying out those branches on the red carpet, the others took a step back, leaving Maldonado to sort through the pile. The impression was that they all held their breath while my high school classmate arranged the wood. I have to admit that I, too, instinctively breathed more slowly, as if I were afraid that the chilly, bracing air passing through my nostrils might make noise and disturb the ceremony. Kneeling on the edge of the carpet, Maldonado placed the perfumed wood, one stick at a time, composing a very particular shape on the floor of the Devil’s Chair.

  On a square base, he erected four walls made of branches, intertwined in such a way that they supported one another, meeting at the corners. On this fairly solid base, which stood about a yard high, he laid a number of longer branches horizontally, as if to close off at the top the cube formed by the floor and the walls of intertwined branches. I could not say how this game of patience—which had required at least half an hour of work, during which no one present spoke a word—managed to stay up without collapsing, but not even a twig of sandalwood tumbled to the ground. Maldonado arranged the wood with a delicacy that I had never detected in his customary acts or speech, which were invariably brusque and arrogant: as he assembled that singular pyre that released a sweet and insistent odor, my classmate was displaying hidden qualities. Watching him, and remembering subsequently what I had learned by watching him, I realized that in each of us there lies, somewhere, the exact opposite of the character that normally guides us and with which others identify us—not wrongly, for that matter, since that personality is what governs 99 percent of our thoughts and actions. I mean to say that we are also what we are not, that is, the spiritual whole of which we are composed includes, like a chemical formula, an imperceptible quantity of elements that have the opposite polarity to the dominant components, which means that a lazy person will contain a minimal dose (for the most part unutilized or practically unknown) of boundless activism, in the sensual soul there lies hidden a secret behavior, frosty and chaste, and even the most disinterested and altruistic character maybe suddenly reveal itself to be greedy and grasping, while the coward may behave with courage, perhaps out of a simple reaction . . . but a reaction to what? A reaction to himself, as if to contradict himself, to astonish those who expected the usual behavior from him. Countless resources lie hidden, deep within us, completing our essence as human beings with a touch of the opposite, different from all the other elements with which our essence had been originally painted.

  Now Maldonado appeared to me to be very distant from the sarcastic know-it-all I had once frequented. His hands continued to transfer the pale-white branches from the cloth to that curious construction, with an unprecedented grace and skill. Had he done it other times before this? From what experience did that ceremonial precision derive? Actually, I knew very little about the business activity of L’Encefalo, except to be quite certain that those twelve or sixteen small-format pages, double-stapled together at the center, were the product of endless discussions, volitions, and evocations. On that cheap, porous paper, the dreams and the frustrations, the intuitions, the hopes, and especially the megalomania of anyone who at age twenty aspired to belong to the realm of literature were deposited in a sediment, as they pursued literature, invading, acting out its rituals, attempting to dominate it. The automatism of conceit generates powerful monsters, and these monsters turn the blades of the sort of gratuitous and arrogant enterprise that founding a literary magazine, and then going on to run it, really is.

  A FEW MORE CEREMONIOUS and deft turns of Maldonado’s hands and I was capable of glimpsing the shape that the pyre he had assembled now held. It was a chair, a throne. Its outline closely resembled, as a scale model, the very same Devil’s Chair that now housed us . . . A high-backed chair almost six feet tall, with long, broad armrests, which gave it a sense of solemnity and solidity. The impression was of a piece o
f work so well made and stout that you felt the urge to sit on it. Who was the king destined to occupy that throne, constructed with such patience and fanaticism? We’d find out soon.

  It took only a single match.

  I swear, I saw it with my own eyes, it took only a single match.

  Maldonado set fire to one of the branches that formed the base of the throne, and the match hadn’t yet burned out between his fingers before the flame had already climbed the side of the throne and extended horizontally to its base.

  It was a clear, bright flame, pure, as if it were made of nothing but light, and the sound that accompanied it was not the usual crackling of burning firewood, but rather a hush, a breath of air that added—I wouldn’t know any other way of putting it—an impression of coolness to that flaming pyre, to those flames so bright that, if you had only been able to touch them, would have felt cold, freezing.

  I had never before seen and never would again see a fire spread with such speed: no more than twenty seconds had passed from when Maldonado had lit his match, and the entire throne was burning. Just then a figure joined the scene, with a rope in hand. The figure tied several knots in it, yanked them tight, then tossed the rope into the fire.

  In the hooded figure who had been the last to enter the Devil’s Chair, when it was momentarily illuminated by the glare, I recognized the clear and delicate shape of the face of Arbus’s sister, Leda.

  FROM NUMA PALMIERI I later came to learn that the cloaks worn by the adepts of L’Encefalo were made of a single bolt of cloth, cut and knotted in a particular fashion. This was in order to ensure that an ancient ritual condition, a symbol of integrity, should be respected: “That there should be no stitching on their clothing.”

  If words are like fire

  Every word uttered is a promise.

  THAT WAS THE ONLY TIME I took part in the initiatives of L’Encefalo. The following month four of them set off on foot to visit Ezra Pound’s wife, or his daughter, in Venice, or maybe it was actually in a castle in Trentino. I never received the definitive version of this pilgrimage. The director Werner Herzog had done and recounted something of the sort in a memorable book (Of Walking in Ice), going on foot from Munich to Paris to save a sick friend. It took Herzog twenty-one days; it took Maldonado and his comrades from L’Encefalo, I believe, less time. The reports on the matter are hazy because there are no written accounts of the trek or, if there are, I’ve never managed to get my hands on them. L’Encefalo ceased publication after just six issues, which came out at irregular intervals. I owned them all, but then I lost five of them during a move, and there is no record of them at the Italian National Library, perhaps because the magazine was never properly registered as a periodical. All I have left is the first issue. I met a couple of the old editors by chance on my way through life. I met one of them while going to pick up my scholarship, which at the time was being deposited in a bank in Montesacro: he was a consultant for the branch office’s after-hours trading desk, he recognized me, he was very polite, he asked me if I wanted to open an account there, so that my scholarship could be wired to me without any further inconvenience, and added that he’d be happy to advise me personally on the purchase of a number of interesting financial products. Perhaps because he assumed that I was astonished to find him working in a bank (nothing wrong with that, as far as I was concerned), he told me that he still played the piano, as if music was some sort of redemption, a kind of absolution.

  I met another member of L’Encefalo, the same Numa whom everyone had always called Prezzemolo, at a reception for the teachers at the high school where my daughter studies. I was the one who recognized him, he hadn’t changed in the slightest in more than thirty years—in fact, by now, nearly forty years. Skinny, beardless, a captivating smile, a shock of hair, only slightly gray, hanging down almost over his eyes, a piercing voice with a Roman accent, which he had under control but was still unmistakable, the same as plenty of intellectuals, including some very refined ones.

  “Numa . . .?”

  “Yes? Excuse me, sir, do you know me? Your face does strike me as familiar, but . . .”

  “There’s been a fair amount of water under the bridge.”

  I don’t know why I used that pat phrase. I was delving into the linguistic resources of embarrassment.

  “I’m . . . it’s me, Edoardo . . . do you remember?”

  Before I could utter my whole last name, Palmieri threw wide his arms and we clutched each other tight in a hug that was far warmer and more powerful than had been the ties binding us back in the day. But that’s what the old Prezzemolo from Giulio Cesare High School was like: cordial, caring, sincerely affectionate with one and all, and that explained why the omnipresence that had earned him his nickname of Parsley was widely appreciated, instead of being a source of irritation, and he was basically well accepted, even in Maldonado’s coterie, the narrow circle of those forever young high schoolers who turned up their noses at the rest of the world. The truth is that Palmieri had read more widely and deeply than all his contemporaries put together, in part because he was easily influenced by one and all and obeyed as wish and command every suggestion to study certain books that were “absolutely fundamental,” authors and topics that were “crucial.” The day after any informal chat he was already in the bookstore or the library picking up books that had been mentioned causally, in passing, with an offhand reference to the title. As a result, his culture rested, so to speak, on a summation and mean of everyone else’s, and what with his tireless climbing of bookshelves, he had formed an enormous mental library. Palmieri therefore was the only one at L’Encefalo to remain open-minded, full of doubts, willing to question, and in short uncertain about what to think and believe. It was his curiosity and his confusion that made him a friend to one and all.

  He congratulated me on the books I had published.

  “Ah! I’m glad to hear it. So you read them . . .?”

  Prezzemolo showed no sign of embarrassment or the slightest hint of resentment at my doubt. And he immediately moved to prove his sincerity by bringing up a series of reader’s notes that were very accurate, citing passages that he seemed to recall with greater clarity even than the author of those works. “Yeah, really interesting when you write that . . . hold on . . . that ‘it’s not easy to transform a story that’s true into a true story’ . . . that really made an impression on me!”

  Oh, really? I’m always surprised when my writings are the subject of attention: not because I think they’re undeserving of it, but because when I hear others report back the ideas and stories of which I ought to claim paternity, they ring commonplace to my ears, not especially attributable to me, interesting perhaps, but written or spoken by someone else.

  “Well, thank you,” is the best answer that I could come up with.

  “Don’t thank me. It was a pleasure . . . and an honor.” From the very name he had been given, the name of an ancient king of Rome, Numa could well afford to use such a solemn term. If he deigned to use it with me, then that made this an honor within the honor. “Well, yes: you held our honor high.” Our honor, who are we? We students who had attended Giulio Cesare High School together for just one year? Of the generation that came into the world in the second half of the 1950s? Or was Palmieri including me, admittedly as one of the more peripheral celestial spheres in the system that revolved around L’Encefalo? In that case, let’s say a meteor more than any planet with a fixed orbit.

  Then, however, once he had run through his compliments, he insisted on emphasizing the age-old difference. The gap that still persisted between the literature that I produced, like so many others, however laudable its quality might be, and the variety set forth by Maldonado and his partners at L’Encefalo, which elevated itself “beyond literature,” as an “overcoming” of it. But he said all this with an understanding, affectionate smile. “Certainly, it’s not the genre I generally read, or that I’d ever write myself, but it’s still valid . . . and courageous.” I know from
experience that when someone tells you that something you’ve written is “courageous,” that “you’ve been courageous,” it usually means you’ve screwed up royally, you’ve missed the target completely: courage, in fact, is a euphemism, and it stands for an admirable failure. But I maintained my composure and took the punch, smiling, as yet another compliment.

  “What about you, are you still doing it?” I replied. I meant to ask: writing. In terms of his affiliation and erudition, Prezzemolo was well versed in any literary form, ranging from poetry to philosophical essays, from aphorisms to critical prose, but as a young man he had exercised his talents in a middle ground among all these: in a mode that certain sarcastic detractors of L’Encefalo liked to describe as “oracular.” For instance, “The scream disorients the act of listening.”

  “Oh no, of course not,” replied Numa, lowering his voice and smiling mysteriously. He no longer wrote, of course. This might mean that the literary experiment had come to an end for him, without regrets, the same way you finish school or university or playing a sport, things that belong to a certain time of your life that you cannot just extend as you please; or else he might be alluding to the “overcoming” of literature itself proclaimed by L’Encefalo, the momentous turning point, in the aftermath of which to persist in dictating poetry or dreaming up stories was puerile, arrogant, illusory, as so many thinkers had claimed in the wake of Auschwitz and the atomic bomb. Of course Prezzemolo had given up writing. But he still bought other people’s books and read them and, from the acuity of the observations that he had made, I’d say that he understood them, as well. His intelligence and his curiosity hadn’t waned and twinkled out, of course.

  “I’m in the field of agriculture and food. I work in seeds. Maybe you don’t know or you can’t remember, but that’s what I studied in university.”