The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  She was embarrassed to spread them wide, all I had to do was glance over at her profile, falsely attentive to the Olympic endeavors, the blush that colored the only cheek I could see. I can say that I spent an entire summer looking only at her profile, as if she were an ancient Egyptian, which by the way is more or less what she looked like, her eyes elongated, rimmed in black, her sharp straight nose, her pouty red lips, or perhaps a Babylonian, the Semiramis of the Monti Parioli district.

  Was she ashamed of me? For me? Was she afraid of the other kids?

  But the others paid us no mind and kept their eyes focused undistractedly on the pole jump competitions, where for the first time we could see the competitors, or perhaps just one of them, the pioneer of the new technique, trying to ride the pole backwards, racing down the path and taking the last few steps before twisting around and launching into the decisive last backward leap.

  It was a somehow unnatural act, as was ours.

  What was the reward for that effort, what medal could we hope to receive?

  This was research, these were blind attempts.

  Neither she nor I really knew what we were trying to achieve, but we darkly understood that there were, there must be, passages, progressive steps forward, we certainly couldn’t just stand pat on the level of kissing, and even the kisses themselves could be graded on a scale, depending on how deep one of us slid their tongue into the other one’s mouth, but since there is a physiological boundary past which a tongue cannot reach, both because the tongue has its limitation in length, and because whoever is taking in the other’s tongue runs the risk of suffocating at a certain point, after the oral exploration, one sets off to discover new parts of the body.

  For males, the hierarchy and the resulting series of quests is relatively simple, after a girl’s lips there’s her breasts, her breasts to be touched, squeezed, hefted, from outside a blouse or a sweater and then (one step up) with your hands tucked under them, then (next step up) the final barrier, the bra, as you shove the cups upward, letting them ride over their contents, or else blindly unhooking them in back (an operation that, as we all know, can be complicated, and which is therefore accompanied by awkward embarrassment or hysterical giggling from both parties, or else snorts of impatience, “Here, let me do it”), or simply slipping a hand between fabric and flesh.

  There cannot be, perhaps, a newer and yet more familiar sensation, at once remote, ancestral, that a boy can experience in his explorations than to stumble across the shape of the female breast; and I have always wondered, and more than once I have asked, filled with curiosity, those directly involved, many years after the first time they had them touched, exactly what their symmetrical sensation was in feeling hands make their way toward their breasts and, finally, palpate them. The word “palpate” is midway between the neutrality of a medical examination and a blandly lubricious use, instead, straight out of dirty joke, a piece of high school gossip, which reduces the act to a crude groping, as many women have confirmed they underwent in the years when they were young or extremely young, when their inexperienced lovers think they need to get busy on their counterpart’s body in order to manifest excitement, interest, appreciation, and to prove to themselves that they know what they’re doing, that it’s worth doing, that the time has finally come to do it, and so they do it. Which means that those breasts need to be crushed, twisted, yanked up or out, massaged and manipulated more or less like a material you’re trying to give a shape, as if it didn’t already have one.

  Awkwardness mixed with presumptuousness!

  For that matter, if everyone knew everything from the very beginning, we’d avoid a lot of misunderstandings, no doubt, but at the same time, we’d never experience what has to be the only, true, sublime pleasure in life: namely, learning, the transition from the beatific state of ignorance to the impure state of consciousness.

  It seems like a step down, a demotion, and in effect, it is, but in the very instant that it takes place, it releases an incomparable pleasure, even if a second later you might plunge into the depths of disappointment and dismay.

  To touch a breast or feel your own breast being touched, not just the first time, but the second, and the third, and the hundredth, and even the thousandth time that you touch a breast or feel a breast being touched that has never been touched for the first time, or the same breast but being touched by different hands, or by the same hands and still the same breast but which over the years has changed shape, well, it’s always a unique, unrepeatable experience.

  When they confided in me, the women never told me about anything other than a sensation that could be broken down into terms of pleasure or annoyance.

  “I’ve always liked having my tits fondled.” “He didn’t know what he was doing, he kept squeezing them, and it hurt.” “It’s nice to feel a pair of hands there, lifting them, holding them . . .”

  Or else women gave me instructions, made specific requests.

  “Tug on my nipples. Hard. Harder!”

  “Please, no, not the nipples.” “Why not?” “They’re so sensitive.”

  “There, not like that, like this.”

  Often, contrasting instructions came from the same person, at different times.

  As far as I was concerned, pleasure consisted of doing it, simply doing it, simply being able to do it, in realizing that you were doing it, that a path was open, a ceremony had begun and I was part of it, I was initiated into it, I could tell myself, “You see? you’re touching a girl’s tits. It happens,” or even better, “A girl is letting you touch her tits, you, not someone else, those are your hands.”

  That’s right, because, according to the mentality of the time, girls never did anything, but only let it be done to them.

  The good girls, at least, the so-called good girls, and it is my impression that they constituted the vast majority of Italian girls, of all walks of life, classes, and levels of education (including, for example, the two victims of the CR/M, my classmates at Giulio Cesare High School, the daughters of my parents’ friends, my female cousins . . . and so on). There was talk, but in fact, these were mythical exceptions, of incredibly uninhibited and enterprising girls who “did it all on their own,” girls who took the initiative, who touched, manipulated, licked, and sucked.

  . . . back in those days, there were still girls

  who wouldn’t let you go any further than the thighs

  and the tips of their nipples . . .

  (AFTER MANY YEARS, I saw this girl again, at a wedding, a grown woman now. There is an age at which your contemporaries all start to get married. In the meantime, I had had my experiences and she, I imagine, her own. Maybe she had even gotten married, and was there with her husband, I don’t remember clearly. At wedding parties, toward the end of the dinner, people start getting up and switching places, sitting down here or there to chat with different people, and she and I wound up next to each other for ten minutes or so. Our legs chanced to brush against each other. Maybe because I was already pretty drunk, I couldn’t help but reach a hand out under the table and slip it between her thighs, lifting her skirt, pushing her panties aside, and sliding a pair of fingers into her pussy, which was, just like ten years earlier, the last time I had touched it, very wet. Her eyes opened wide, then she turned her head and started talking to the person sitting on the other side of her; meanwhile, under the table, she spread her legs, rotated her pelvis forward, sitting in a way that allowed me to slide my fingers in deeper, then she grabbed my hand, making sure I couldn’t pull away. She must have had at least as much to drink as I had.)

  3

  THE FOLLOWING SUMMER, there was a monthlong trip to Greece. Upon my return, exhausted, sun-charred, out of cash, in a city oppressed by beastly heat, which back then was an empty ghost town in mid-August, like any spoiled young man I went to the beach to stay with my parents. For several days, I did nothing but eat and sleep, with the occasional plunge into the waves. I slept twelve hours a day. It was the second half of Aug
ust by now, the period when the summer turns and begins, all of a sudden, to wane, not because the heat subsides, but because a certain vibration in the light and in people’s eyes, especially people younger than twenty, tells you that things, everything is accelerating toward a conclusion, and that was when I remembered Max. Of course, Max. The Milanese Fascist. The dark and smoldering Max. The classical guitarist. The champion practitioner of martial arts. Strange that I hadn’t yet thought of my gorgeous friend, with whom the previous summer I had spent moments of closeness and intimacy sufficiently intense to convince me, to borrow the jargon of scandal sheets, that there might be “something more than just friendship” between us. I tried to describe some of those moments in the preceding chapter, and I hope that I was successful in conveying the idea that, at least for my part, we were close to an infatuation. During the winter, however, each in his city, it was as if we lived in two different nations, we hadn’t spoken, we hadn’t written to each other: I had almost immediately lost the scrap of paper with his address and phone numbers, both in Punta Ala and in Milan, and he had never reached out to me either, which I had never expected him to do, for that matter.

  The summer back then was a free zone, an open domain that it seemed impossible or imprudent to reproduce at different times of the year, like a rite that must be restricted to its own specific time and place, otherwise it would be blasphemous. The distance wasn’t then, as it is today, crowded, pullulating with contacts, contacts that no one felt the need for: we accepted distance as necessary, unbridgeable, and there, in its fashion, a beautiful thing.

  And for that matter, even if I hadn’t lost his phone number and address, what could I have told him by phone or by letter? What could I have told him about myself and asked about him? “Is the karate going well?” (Or was it tae kwon do?) “Have you been training properly?” “Are you still convinced that fascism is your singular destiny rather than our common past?” Or else: “Have you had any fistfights with anyone? Did you send them to the hospital?” I’d never have had the nerve to ask questions of the sort, or I wouldn’t have been interested to read the responses. Not as written by Max, anyway. I have no evidence for what I’m saying, but still I’m convinced that he had no gift as a writer, or that he considered it to be a despicable activity, something for layabouts or little girls: by which I mean the correspondence, the “Hi, how are you?” the petty chitchat. And perhaps writing taken as a whole, the accumulation of words, compared with action, of course, with music—blessed music, superior to all else. In the packet of letters from the years that range from my teenagehood to my young adulthood, I find sentimental messages and confessions, or else discourses on topics such as literature, ideations, and polemics. Aside from a couple of letters from my mother, asking me how I was doing during my military service, the rest of them are about love or books, after all, those were the things I cared about . . . and how could I have shared such things with Max? That pure and contemptuous concentrate of physical acts, noble in his fashion, because utterly useless when it came to communication?

  And so I decided to go to Punta Ala and try to find him.

  I ALWAYS RODE my moped down the long, almost straight road that runs from the state highway to Follonica and cuts through the pine forest to Punta Ala, singing as I went. In my head, that is, with my mouth closed, to keep from getting a mouthful of mosquitoes.

  AT FIRST, I got the wrong house. Villas surrounded by trees all look the same to me. The fact that I could not recognize, just a year later, the place where I had spent so many afternoons and evenings sent a chill down my back. It seemed to be telling me that stories and memories have no foundation: if even a house lacks a foundation, and appears and disappears at different spots in the pine grove, then what are feelings—such as friendship, for instance—even based on? And the pleasure that comes of them? Confused, I went up and down the road I thought Max’s villa overlooked a number of times. The road was deserted, and so were the houses, in part because at that time of day, six in the evening, everyone must have headed back down to the beach. I decided to go there myself to look for Max, guessing that he and his mother still went to the same beach club, and even that they were renting the same slot and the same beach umbrella. I had to believe, I had to have faith that things continued to repeat themselves, unvarying.

  I WALKED ON THE BEACH, filling my shoes with sand. I made my way down to the water’s edge and walked it in one direction and then the other. The impression I mentioned above, that the summer was over, gone now, even though it was still a fair number of days till the end of August, struck me, as it were, right in the face. Perhaps it was because of the sun, low in the sky, enormous, red, warm, and yet melancholy and vulnerable, as if it were about to vanish, leaving no guarantee it would ever rise again: but as it left, it wished to delete the beach with a wave of light. Like the bathers crowding it, and those lounging in the water as slick as oil, remarkably still, motionless, no one swimming, no one diving, I was blinded by the glare. There wasn’t a breath of wind and everything appeared definitive and yet precarious in its surreal fixity. Already over. It’s strange that that image, overexposed and devoid of a soundtrack, is far and away the most vivid recollection I still have of that summer: the entire, wonderful trip with my girlfriend to Greece, all those columns, the oracles, the ruins, the sea a thousand times more unforgettable, left nothing like the same enduring mark on me. That moment lasted far too long. I can’t say why, but it seemed unbearable; so much so that I was forced to stop, panting and out of breath for no reason, my arms hanging at my sides, unable to go on hunting for the beach umbrella beneath which I thought I’d find Massimiliano and his mother. Things were never going to be the same again, I was certain of it in a pungent manner, and I was filled with a pain that would have made me bend over, folding in half, if I had understood more clearly where it was coming from.

  Now I understand, I understand all too clearly, and in fact, I’m bent over in the middle.

  I WENT BACK TO THE PINE GROVE AND, at an intersection, I realized that I had taken a wrong turn earlier. Max’s villa was on the inner road, parallel to the frontage road, and almost identical. Imagination was not the strong suit of whoever built that renowned vacation spot, just as a sense of direction isn’t mine. And in fact, there it was, my friend’s house, right where it always had been. A long, low building, enlivened by barely perceptible angulations on the façade, with large sliding glass windows, a retractable awning, wooden chairs lacquered white on the lawn where I had listened to Max play his guitar or tell me stories of his fights, with a few surviving pine trees standing there in commemoration of the fact that, until just a few years earlier, there had been nothing but trees. The idea had been to merge with nature, to hide in it: and yet never had an effort at camouflage succeeded so well by making use of elements so diametrically opposed to those it meant to imitate.

  It was not uncommon to find holes in the garden that a wild boar had dug with its tusks.

  MELVILLE, the gray cat whose tail Max had pretended to cut off one day, comes prancing across the grass toward me. He looks fatter than he did last year, and somehow slightly desperate. He rubs against and between my legs, but the minute I lean down to pet him, he takes off for the woods. Instead of cheering me up, the sight of the cat fills me with anxiety. Nothing is the way it used to be, I tell myself again. The green trees and the sky are mirrored in the plate glass windows, but one sliding window is open, you can see the interior of the house, I want to go find Max, give him a hug. “Is anyone home?” I call. “Can I come in?” It would be disagreeable to enter the house and find Max’s mother in her bikini, with the usual wide-eyed stare. But then I notice that a different car from theirs is parked on the driveway, with a Florence license plate. “Max, are you here?” I call out again. I hear music coming from inside. Not the usual classical guitar compositions, but a whining voice from the radio.

  Sylvia’s mother says . . . Sylvia’s happy . . .

  So why don’t you
leave her alone?

  A song that I know, though I’ve never known who sings it. Instead of my friend’s mother, the person who comes to the door is a skinny, composed matron, with an inquisitive smile on her face. She’s drying her hands on an apron that she immediately unties from her waist, as if excusing herself for having been caught in the middle of household chores, and she slides it over her neck. “I was in the kitchen, I didn’t hear you . . .”

  “I was looking for Massimiliano . . . Massimiliano, uh, yeah . . .” and it dawns on me that I can’t remember my friend’s last name. No, that can’t be. I’ve forgotten it. Nothing is the way it used to be. “I’m a friend of his . . .” And it’s only been a year. “A friend from Rome,” as if specifying the city I come from would assure me the reception people reserve for a wayfarer, a pilgrim tried by the hardships of the road after making a very long trek to reach this place. “Oh, listen, I’m sorry to tell you, but they left at the beginning of the month,” the woman tells me in a kind tone of voice, “anyway, you’re welcome to sit down for a moment, if you’d like . . .” and she points me to the folding chairs on the lawn. Someone must have repainted them recently, because the white enamel paint gleams against the bright green of the grass. Seeing how stunned I am, the woman is increasingly hospitable and, as if we were in an American made-for-TV movie, she asks me whether I’d like a glass of lemonade. In the meantime, the voice in the song becomes increasingly despairing, almost breaking into sobs.

  And the operator says, “Forty cents more . . . for the next three minutes . . .”

  The woman goes in and turns off the radio.

  “THEY HAD TO LEAVE IN A HURRY. They didn’t say why, or at least, if they did, I don’t know myself. Maybe my husband does, when he comes back . . . They’d rented for July and August, like they do every year, and they’d even paid in advance! But we’ll certainly find a way to give them back the rent for August, at least, which they had no chance to enjoy . . .”