THE TRUE AND PERFECT RELIGIOUS SCHOOL could not be anything other than a boarding school. A total institution, which covers every aspect of one’s biological and mental existence. The fact that students are returned to their families and the outside world, as is the case in a normal school, only hours after entering the institution, interrupts the work of education, which is far more complex and delicate than a mere cycle of lessons from eight in the morning until one in the afternoon. Every evening, the web is unwoven, rendering pointless everything that was created in the morning. I’m not referring to the topics studied in class—no, those would be forgotten in any case, and they only count at the moment in which the child’s intellect sniffs at them, seizes them or rejects them; in the final analysis one is as good as another and mathematics carries the same weight as chemistry or drawing, in other words, these are pretexts, stimuli, prods, there’s no point in trying to make sure that a thorn remains buried in the flesh if its only purpose was to awaken you from the coma of indifference. Puncture the skin and you’re done, all finished, run along home now. Instead I’m talking about that process of slow persuasion, that imperceptible metamorphosis which only lengthy, empty stretches of time can encourage, actual imprisonment, a lack of practicable or dreamed-of alternatives, the abolition of the very concept of expectation, and therefore of hope, that is to say, in the end, pure despair.
The expression “brainwashing” doesn’t mean that the brain is dunked in water for a quick rinse and then taken out and drained. The mind, the human mind must be ground down, marinated at length in the brine of religious education, left there and forgotten, day and night, many many nights and just as many days, until it is thoroughly steeped, after which it will never again lose that distinctive odor, medicinal, astringent, a mixture of sweat, wet wool, aftershave, and at the same time passionately infantile, which emanates from priests of all ages, and from popes, from Paul VI to Ratzinger, including the archbishop of Kraków, I feel certain—though, even after getting in line at four in the morning, I was unable to reach his corpse to find out. Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps, repeated twelve hundred times. Perhaps the essence of the religious man lies in the stark wait and expectation, in the empty lulls, perhaps it happens while nothing happens, and it’s there that you learn something, in the interval, perhaps you learn or perhaps you forget, the perhaps is mandatory, nothing that exists could be more dubious and uncertain than one’s approach to God, Who might in fact manifest Himself in the form of a distancing, and trick you one more time.
The novelties that come out of bewilderment, finding something by chance, which is always a rediscovery, a recognition, a retracing of one’s footsteps, a contradiction, turning one’s head around, first 180 degrees and then 360 degrees, waiting to see if anything emerges from these blind stabs in the dark.
If someone is making even the slightest effort, then he is immediately released, refreshed, given shelter, if someone is free, the minute the bell rings, to spit out the holy water that had filled his mouth, then what is the point of even giving it to him? If you interrupt a ritual, then you remain only half immortal, and it is the fear of eternity that makes us say, “Let’s stop here for today.” School, in fact, consists of “that will do,” “let’s go home now.” Let’s go home, let’s go home. Which is the reason for boarding school.
WHEN THERE ARE TWO OF YOU, who decides which is to be Batman and which is to be Robin?
THE FOLLOWING ARE STATEMENTS by my old classmate. The first time I heard them I didn’t understand what they meant. They’ve stuck in memory, word for word.
“Everyone has some wit, some spirit. I have none. To make up for it, I can tell the truth, I can do, that is, what no one else does.”
“It’s pointless for me to reveal to my classmates what I think, since they are accustomed to laughing at everything.”
Often, instead of responding to the witticisms of his classmates, Arbus would grind his teeth, his lips clamped shut, like the dwarf Hop-Frog in one of Poe’s most terrifying short stories; you’d have said that he was sharpening them in preparation for sinking them into the throats of those mocking him, but at the same time his eyes, behind his perennially smudged lenses, were gleaming, because he was anything but angry, instead, as was his wont, he was thinking quickly and had already imagined, using what is called in chess “depth of play,” the next five or six wisecracks that might well follow the first if he were to choose not to keep his mouth shut and, in fact, grind his teeth.
It should be said that Arbus, actually, wasn’t a very likable young man, at least in the usual understanding of the word. Whenever he veered close to being likable in word or deed, you could be sure that he’d add an unpleasant or awkward touch, with the effect of shattering that positive impression.
With his behavior, wholly free of affectation, Arbus never made the burden of his superior intellectual gifts felt by others; but if it happened anyway, since there was no need to point out his disproportionate mental prowess, Arbus would simply cease setting forth his ideas and would just alternate them with a wisecrack or two, adhering to the general line of jokes young men his age tended to favor: about his teachers, soccer, the boredom of school . . .
Hello, is this the Beethoven residence?
No-no-no-nooo! (to the opening notes of the Fifth Symphony)
Hello, is this the Mozart residence?
Do me a favor and don’t bust my balls / you might find the number on the bathroom walls . . . (to the tune of the first movement of the Fortieth Symphony)
Ergazomai ton filon dendron! (in ancient Greek, I care for the friendly tree, but in Italian, sounding very much like: I stick it up your ass)
WHAT DOMINATED in his face was uncertainty. He was inscrutable, either because he himself lacked a sense of certainty about the things he felt, whether he was in a good mood or a bad one, or else because other people didn’t understand him. Something ineffable hovered around his face, a face that I cannot say I ever saw genuinely angry, or contented, or frightened. The only overbearing manifestation of himself was his laugh. Arbus’s laugh was resounding and chilling, an explosion, and when he laughed (often for a reason that eluded others), my friend would open his mouth as wide as it would go, tossing his head back to display the upper arch of his teeth, white and strong, which he normally limited himself to grinding; when he laughed like that, instead of seeming like the fragile four-eyed nerd that he actually was, he made me think of a Cossack, a savage horseman from the Asian steppes.
CONVERSATION, between Arbus and me, was a more tangible way of thinking. He would express himself with a few laconic phrases, often impossible to share precisely because they were so terse, while I needed a great flow of words to get close to a concept, even the most elementary sort, as if useless words helped me to walk in a certain direction without even knowing whether it was the right way, but just to get out of my stalled paralysis. And so it remains, for me. I confess that I have never known what I think unless I could write it or say it first, and even afterward I still have the impression that my true thought must have been another one, all right, but which? Or that it needed clarification, development, or that I was making that statement only because I had read it in a book or heard someone say it, and all I was doing was repeating it, the way you might do when you’re being tested in class, relying exclusively, out of all your mental faculties, on memory.
That dissatisfaction drove me to pursue a line of thought, after remaining silent, trying inwardly to determine what I actually believed, in other words, what I could swear to. Concerning life, school, my classmates, politics, music, soccer, in fact, even on topics like soccer, I never sensed that the things I said matched up with what, theoretically, I thought. Because an unexpressed thought too closely resembles a mere sentiment, a desire. What sort of an idea would it be to state that I hate this thing and I admire that thing, while this third thing just bores me? And so, when it comes to priests, capitalism, literature, the law, education, or the right soccer formation
to field against Juventus in order to keep from getting pounded, I’ve never had any clear ideas, just a wavering between roughly held positions, which I buttressed with any number of arguments, none of which were decisive. Arbus, in contrast, gave the impression that he had already formed his ideas clearly in his mind before expressing them, and that he would change them not on a whim or an uncertainty or in the vain pursuit of something personal, the way I often did, but only when confronted with worthier arguments. Ideas didn’t remain glued to his person, quite the opposite, they broke off effortlessly.
IN THE ARBUS FAMILY, strange things would happen. When we first became classmates, in fifth grade, those things were still invisible. It was a period of truce that lasted a few years, when children are still too young to either imitate or judge their fathers.
On certain gloomy afternoons, when the rain came down steady and cold, as if to give the lie to those who say that in Rome, whatever the season, “fa bello”—the weather is fine—it seemed impossible to start work on anything serious, positive, or even slightly amusing, so our sole ambition was to get through the afternoon, get it out of the way as painlessly as possible and make it to dinnertime. The truth is that it gets cold in Rome and the heating plant in apartments is underpowered, just a few old radiators with elements that provide half the warmth required. Winter Saturdays that ended at five with a curtain of dark and icy rain. It was during one of those afternoons that Arbus told me about his father.
WHAT DID PROFESSOR LODOVICO ARBUS, my classmate’s father, study, what did he teach? A subject that stood midway among grammar, logic, mathematics, and philosophy. It seems that he was admired and respected at the university, and that his students venerated him. But often the professions of the fathers remained hovering, hidden behind a veil of indeterminacy, tucked away behind a term of professional respect such as professor or counselor or engineer, which told you little enough about what they really did all day, far away from home . . .
With our fathers, nearly all of us had a remote, detached relationship, or one fed by nervous excitement, fed by fear and admiration, since a father was someone who brought home a salary, inquired about your future, gave you affection provided you showed you deserved it by doing something meritorious—whereas our mothers gave us that affection always, no matter what. But in that phase of life, having passed through a more-or-less-golden childhood, it was obvious that we now had more interactions with them, the great males, our fathers. The period of unconditional affection, of cuddling and snacks (Eleonora Rummo would feed us fresh rosetta rolls filled with butter just taken cold from the fridge, not spread, because it would soften as we warmed the roll in our hands), that time dominated by benevolent feminine figures was coming to an end and on the horizon there loomed an imposing silhouette that was, at the same time, disagreeably exemplary, that was going to force us to reason, to strive, to achieve, to size one another up and challenge one another—and no longer merely in play. Almost none of us had ever seen our father at work. We knew that he worked hard and was strong, the best in his field, without a doubt, and yet practically none of us had ever seen him work with our own eyes, if anything we might have witnessed him leaving home in the morning to go to an office, a study, a construction site, a clinic, and again upon his return home in the evening. Never to have had a direct eyewitness experience of their father at work led some (me, for example) to fantasize about the things he did there, others to take no interest in him, others still to hate him for his remoteness or to idolize him for his success, of which we perceive only a shimmering gleam of flattering words and money. My father might have spoken to me five minutes a day, give or take, and, unless he was really very angry (about something at work) or very cheerful (for what reason I couldn’t guess), in those five minutes he never expressed any particular emotion. But that was fine by me.
(IT IS SAID THAT EVERY EXPERIENCE left uncompleted leaves a hole, and that this hole then fills up with demons.)
ASIDE FROM THE OCCASIONAL CASE of a mythical or mythologized father, or a particularly strict and stern one, the source of incurable conflicts, I’m afraid that those of my generation have relatively little to say about their sire. We have understood very little about him, and we know just as little. Even the ones who mythologized him know very little, even if what little they know is good. Many of us seem to have had the same father; a standard-format father, an interchangeable father, a fusion of all the fathers available, but one that still remained a shadow, a stranger. In part, still a tyrant, and therefore greatly feared, but by and large a failed tyrant, and therefore at once the object of resentment and commiseration; viewed by us as already old, at age forty; a man ill at ease or out of place in his own home, dominated by his wife without concessions, and required to stay as far as possible from that home for his duties at work, at the office; a man perennially tense and incapable of managing his emotions, though he must have tried, but only to repress them; remembered for certain outbursts of blind rage, infrequent, and for the resentful tenderness of which he occasionally, in an entirely unexpected manner, proved himself capable.
Later on, the men would split up into three categories: the ones who hurt women; the second kind, who console women for the pain caused by the first kind; and last of all, the ones women do their best to have as little to do with as possible.
Lodovico Arbus belonged simultaneously to the first and the third category.
While looking for paste, or a pair of scissors, Arbus had found in his father’s bottom desk drawer a collection of pornographic photos. These, however, weren’t the usual naked women; these were boys.
And so he went hunting for more, and he found them in his father’s books.
6
DID I READ? Did I read? I didn’t read books, I devoured them, I sliced diced and chopped them. I gobbled them all down without leaving so much as a crumb on the table, a line of text that hadn’t had all the juice squeezed out of it. Often I didn’t understand much, or I didn’t understand a thing at all, but only churned through the incomprehensible, done, finished, on to the next book. Only Arbus was as fanatical as I, but, in this like all else, more methodical. We spent one weekend (it might have been the tail end of the Easter vacation, or the long weekend of the Day of the Dead: if you just lock yourself indoors, the seasons start to become the same) in his father’s country cottage. Calling it a cottage may be overstating the matter. It reared up in the middle of a completely sere patch of flat dirt broken only by a fruit tree here and there. You couldn’t even stroll around the place if you wanted to, the grass was covered with excrement, variously dry and fresh, the sheep devoured and befouled everything, they grazed and defecated endlessly. But in the cabin where Arbus’s father had written his fundamental works on linguistic recursivity (and, as we’d only learn later, where he used to bring his occasional male lovers), without TV, without heating, if you wanted water to wash you had to draw it from the well—but we liked it fine, because we’d brought a dozen books and in less than seventy-two hours we’d read them all. All of them. In fact, we read so quickly that on the last day we had nothing left to read, and so we left. I would finish one and put it on top of the stack, and there Arbus would grab it, after doing the same with the book he’d just finished reading. No commentary, we’d just read and nothing more. I think a faint buzzing could be detected, like the sound an electric transformer emits. Two young men stretched out on cots, in sleeping bags, demolishing one book after another. The sole diversion from this marathon reading session was to go outside for half an hour and take turns fielding penalty kicks, treading sheep shit underfoot, one of us kicking, the other one keeping goal, or rather, failing almost uniformly to keep goal, and Arbus practically never, between the goalposts formed by two saplings loaded down with still unripe persimmons, and either because the kick went wide of the goalposts or else because it sailed through the goalkeeper’s hands, so the goalie would have to go and retrieve the ball, hopping to and fro amid the manure. We finished reading an h
our before the bus left for Rome. The last two books were slender volumes, from the Einaudi Theater collection: Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, and they each took us half an hour to read through, tops, forty-five minutes. Cosmo, our teacher Cosmo, had given them to us to read. It was like drinking fresh-squeezed orange juice without sugar.
I REMEMBER ONCE, perhaps in seventh grade, when Arbus sprained his right wrist. The only time I heard him complain and, if I’m not mistaken, I even saw him cry, holding his wrist as if it were broken. His mother massaged it with an ointment that released heat, bandaged it carefully, and hung his arm from his neck in a sling. For two weeks, my classmate was treated with every consideration, at home and at school. “Does it still hurt?” “Do you want me to cut your steak for you?” “Here, give me those books, I’ll carry them for you.” Actually, Arbus hadn’t hurt himself at all, he just wanted to bask in his mother’s attention and tender care. He confessed as much to me a year later; and it was one of the few times that he confided to me when we were still kids. Another time was his detailed account of a dream. That happened during the period when it was discovered that dreams have hidden meanings, and he searched for those meanings himself, stubbornly, or else asked me what they could be.
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