The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  First there is the myth of sexual liberation: a party where everybody makes love with everybody else. It’s a ballet danced in the nude, all the bodies twisting in slow motion, as if they were underwater. The libido oozes and seeps into the most rigid postures, the severe hairdos or tightly wound buns relax into gentle ringlets bouncing on shoulders and backs. Like the smears of color in psychedelic film clips, everything oozes, pulsates, flows, and spreads. Then the image of sexuality curdles, darkens, with the pretext of taking it back to some savage and predatory origin, unmasking the most unconfessable desires of both male and female. Violence comes into play, but at this point the roles are found to be inverted: it’s not sex that has become more vicious, it’s the violence that has come to take on a sexual coloration. The criminal enterprises of the young men of the CR/M couldn’t have as their sole objective personal enrichment or political reprisal, no, they had to express themselves in a more gratuitous, capricious fashion, which paid profit no mind, and was therefore all the more exciting. In rape, truth be told, there are no profits to be earned, or hardly any. It’s an easy crime that yields almost no benefits: you obtain in a frantic, largely unsatisfying manner—at least, speaking in erotic terms—the same thing that for ten thousand lire you could obtain from a professional, with no fuss no muss and no bother, in, say, Tor di Quinto. So that’s not the thing they’re looking for. The thing isn’t pleasure. The thing is death.

  The pornographic vision accepts the new stimulus. And it, too, is invaded by death. Instead of the classic Rubenesque sluts, who enjoyed their husky lovers on spring mattresses, there are petite young women who are tortured next to rural irrigation ditches. Not only raped, but penetrated with blades and rifle barrels, burned, their throats cut. Rape itself is a secondary consideration by now, it has become clear that the sexual aspect is entirely subordinated to the venting of ferocity. It is the ferocity that attracts, that excites. The submission of the weak, the punishment of the weak. The punishment that awaits any woman, for whatever reason, be she beautiful or homely, young or old. When you have full and total disposal of someone else’s body, then you can’t limit yourself to exploiting it with petty erotic byplay. You can’t just trifle with the genitalia, like mere adolescent beginners. The sexual impulse has a limited range and duration, and that is why it must be supplemented by further proof of domination. To lose your drive can take seconds, after which the seriousness of the situation emerges, and if you want to give it meaning, you have to take it to its logical conclusion. The only frenzy at this point becomes the frenzy to be done with it. During a rape, if it hadn’t been planned from the outset, there always and inevitably emerges the hypothesis that it may become necessary to eliminate the victim.

  IT WASN’T AT ALL uncommon for an eighteen-year-old youth in those days to have witnessed many scenes in which women were kidnapped and raped, tortured, and then killed. Where? At the movies.

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  IN THOSE YEARS, there was a steadily growing demand for death. Actually carried out, or as entertainment. At the movies, audiences sat as hypnotized by the spectacle of death. We watched women being killed in all imaginable ways: with an oxyacetylene torch, red-hot metal, meat hammers, electric drills, dildos, boiling water, lobster claws, poisoned sperm, and naturally with razors, the good old-fashioned barber’s straight razor, ironically referred to as a “safety razor”—that is, because the straight razor’s blade folds away into the handle—broken bottles, falling plate glass windows, telephone cords and violin strings, shovels, pickaxes, hammers, chisels, saws, meat hooks, spits, shears, scissors, spears . . .

  Girls’ throats are cut, they are drowned in an aquarium, devoured by cannibals or sharks or piranhas, hacked apart with an ax, impaled, throttled, eviscerated, decapitated . . . bitten, chopped up and put into a refrigerator . . . a scalpel slices their faces open or dissects them, reduced to human guinea pigs, laboratory specimens . . .

  They are always before the eyes of their murderer.

  And the contagion spared no corner of society, it touched the exposed tips of Italy: in one movie, an actress’s arm is hacked off with hatchet blows—and then that actress went on to marry our prime minister; in another (actually, in a long and bestial series of films), the wife of the most affable anchor on the TV news broadcast most closely allied with the leading Catholic political party in Italy actually has intercourse with a horse. Practically no one is spared the contamination.

  The sweet German girl who brings you a stein of beer offers herself to the murderer in an erotic thriller, her legs spread wide on a sofa: sure enough, she, the pastoral nymph, turns out to be a seething naked body.

  It is this ambiguity, this lack of clarity of roles that insinuates the doubt that there may be no safe zones, no people with their integrity intact, no individuals immune to perversion, no events that can be ruled out in advance, no one concerning whom “you can put your hand into the flames,” swear to their character with utter confidence. “He would never have done such a thing.” “He’s always only thought about his family and his work.” “He’s an outstanding person, a first-rate intellectual, he could never have been the mastermind behind a murder . . .” Every young girl, even the most shy and modest, conceals a dark and infamous dream. The innocuous, the innocent, the mild mannered, the reserved, the decorous, or quite simply the nondescript, can turn out to be, in the blink of an eye, the obscene, the criminal, the abominable. There is no need for any reversal, indeed, you might even say that it is the blushing candor itself that is perverse. Potentially, all children are demonically possessed, all virgins are rutting wild animals in heat, all coeds are nymphomaniacs, all young men in V-neck sweaters are murderers on the prowl, to say nothing of well-to-do matrons, whose lascivious cruelty is simply unimaginable, or their salt-and-pepper-haired husbands, who are corrupt and impotent satyrs.

  Precisely because at first glance beyond reproach, the bourgeois, more than anyone else, hypocritically cultivates his own bottomless unworthiness, which almost invariably springs from a sexual neurosis. He controls it and he indulges it, he diverts it or keeps it at bay as long as he is able. Inside every untroubled individual, an out-of-control, obsessive identity may lie concealed. We never know ahead of time. We can’t rule it out in advance. No one is safe. All it takes is a slightly stronger stimulus, and the social mask drops. The fever can infect anyone, in fact, the fever is already deep inside, incubating. Ordinary people have no idea of what their genuine desires are: they want to loot and burn, they lust for violent pleasure and their enemy’s head on a pike. “A man’s greatest pleasure is to defeat his enemies, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms, as the flames rise high from what was once his home . . .” Every young man from the industrial outskirts is ready to hunt down defenseless teenage girls in filthy, garbage-ridden fields, and those girls will secretly thrill to their rapes. By the light of this revelatory principle, there’s not an individual or a social role that saves itself. Every high school teacher might be a Peeping Tom who gets aroused by spying on the derrieres of his female students, or the male ones, as they return to their desks after being quizzed in front of the class. The more their role in society is respectable—teachers, prelates, doctors, senators—the greater the likelihood that behind that façade there lurks and acts, undisturbed, a maniac of some kind.

  Or else, no, heavens no, none of all this! It can’t be true, and it never happens. Or almost never. God forfend that the distinction between good and evil should ever vanish. But by now the seeds of doubt have been planted and the boundaries are hopelessly scrambled.

  The decade is marked by contamination. Insecurity penetrates under everyone’s front door, impregnating the fibers, like some indelible stain. Sexual and political and gangster violence, kidnappings, torture, coldblooded elimination of witnesses.

  And yet statistics tell us that, aside from peaks for certain specific crimes, the crime rate was high but not all that different from other periods. The unsettling aspect is that t
he ones committing these crimes weren’t Lombrosian criminals. They were unsuspectables.

  After the CR/M, every apprehensive mother would scrutinize her son to try to understand whether there was a “monster” deep inside him, too. How can you tell if your son will rape and murder? When he comes back home at night, how does he say hello to his parents, does he display a good appetite, does he eat his bowl of soup, does he stink of tobacco smoke, are there circles under his eyes, are his pupils dilated, are his hands shaking? Does he laugh for no good reason, is he intractable? Mothers spent lots of time deciphering tiny clues. It’s easy to get it wrong, to exaggerate or underestimate the importance of clues. Only a glimmer of adolescents’ real lives filters through their gestures and their words. Direct questions, if you are angry or desperate enough to ask them, are almost never met with a response, the young people simply close up like hedgehogs. The level of dishonesty rises. Are you taking drugs, are you having sexual relations, if so, who with, what are you hiding from me, what’s on your mind, what sort of people are you seeing, how are you spending your evenings, why are you coming home so late?

  I recently read a slender volume about the erotic lives of Italian adolescents nowadays, based on “real” interviews, though the names of the interviewees were invented: I doubt that the parents could glimpse their loving daughters and sons in those pornographic thumbnail portraits.

  Mass, low-intensity pornography, pictures and videos on their cell phones, the collective imagination on the Internet, it seems today that a general sexual clog has stopped up all the pores of everyone everywhere. And yet it was precisely in the time of the CR/M that we attained, according to some observers, “peak eroticization of the system.” No longer the single individual, but society as a whole was “seeing nude.”

  VIOLENCE OF THE WELL-TO-DO CLASSES and plebeian violence: who likes to rape more, the rich or the poor? The question hovers over the surreal debates that followed the CR/M. In reality, everyone, let me say it again, everyone is potentially an audience for and protagonist of violence, both as victim and agent of it. And everyone in any case pursues and claims for themselves broader margins of liberty, sovereign power over their own lives and, frequently, those of others, either because they’re accustomed to exercising that power, or else because they’ve always been excluded from it. In the well-to-do classes, familiarity with power pushes people to appropriate what they desire with a spontaneous arrogance; in the poor classes, brutality is viewed as the only way to obtain the sources of satisfaction: a risky but effective shortcut. Money and sex must be taken at gunpoint, otherwise they would remain out of reach. The power that you don’t possess or inherit from your class must be constructed with fists and handguns.

  All this sex, all this violence could always be legitimized as a reaction against bourgeois hypocrisy, conformism, the stupidity of the world of television and consumerism. The directors of hard-core and horror films unmask this respectability, forcing the audience to look into their own abyss, where what teems and pullulates is the same filth and violence, barely repressed, as is shown on the screen. Priggish moralism was met with an even more rigid countermoralism. It all formed part of the syndrome of the “exposé.” You can’t hide from the spotlight of the exposé. If you refuse to see the atrocities or the array of filth, then it just means that you’re a hypocrite, or that in turn you have a little something to hide that’s every bit as dirty or atrocious. I think I read somewhere that the hooks inserted in a woman’s breasts in a cannibalism movie were meant as a form of intellectual resistance against Mike Bongiorno (for those of my readers who may not know the name, a popular television game show host). Okay, maybe so. Certainly, we’re all wedged between monsters, monsters over here and monsters over there, and not only do all these monsters frighten us, they also want to give us a lesson in how to live. Any act of gratuitous violence, even the most revolting one, can be rebaptized as a courageous act of rebellion against conformism, every shocking act of cruelty can become a shout of protest, a j’accuse against that same act of cruelty and yet others, even greater, that society struggles to conceal, but which the intrepid cineaste instead has the courage to unearth. If logic is the tool of the polemicist by definition, then paradoxical logic works even better, because it has a sharper edge: whereby the profane swearer is actually the man with the most unshakable faith, the adulterous fornicator the purest woman, the coward courageous, since he at least has the guts to confess that he’s afraid. A film full of Nazi orgies is actually an anti-Nazi exposé. That way you catch two birds with one stone: that way you stimulate inconfessable appetites by showing a naked blonde being raped, and at the same time you condemn the wickedness of the rapists, etc., etc. Educational intent can be claimed to frame any disgusting image. After all, any depraved act is an open confession that the man is depraved and must beat his chest in repentance every time that he takes a breath. Therefore, the man who admits his dishonesty is an honest man. I’ve been hearing people turn common sense inside out like a glove ever since I was a boy, and I myself have learned the technique, and how it can always come in useful; and where did I learn it? At the school run by priests.

  SURE, I GET IT, I’m as aware as anybody that “evil lives in each of us.” And for all the time I’ve worked in a prison (for the past twenty years, that is), I’ve had a chance to understand just how slippery the distinction between good and evil can be, or perhaps I should say, not the distinction per se, which to my mind remains bright-line clear, but the definitive and irrevocable assignment of a given individual to one of the two camps that that boundary divides and, at the same time, unites. How easy, that is, to step across that border. By chance, weakness, impulse, curiosity, ignorance, fear, or brashness, imitation, defiance, and for a thousand other reasons that, in their turn, might just as easily be judged good or bad. Since, according to our legal codes, there is provision for the possibility that in certain cases a bad deed might be committed for perfectly just reasons. And that, just as you can cross the border in one direction, so can you cross it going the opposite way. From good to evil, from evil to good. Back and forth. But I find cloying the mind-set, of Catholic derivation, according to which in the face of wicked deeds, committed by others, the observer is obliged to pound his chest and accuse himself. “Yes! Yes! I would be just as capable . . . I’m every bit as guilty!” It’s a sterile self-indulgent admission, really. We’re all guilty, my rosy ass! I hate to contradict the Master, but it is by no means true that he who sees a mote in his brother’s eye necessarily has a beam in his own. Let us further consider that we are in Italy, and just how well has the morality of “we’re all guilty” worked out, with its corollary, “and therefore we are all innocent”? In this country, the splendid slogan “Let he who is without sin, etc., etc.,” allows the guilty to feel perfectly entitled to preach sermons. Among the hundreds of criminals that I have known in prison, nearly all of them admitted that they were guilty, if not of the exact crime for which they were convicted, of something else, and yet they were all convinced that “those who are out on the street are worse than us.” As if to say that the whole world is criminal, and we’re the only ones paying for it. That punishment is meted out at random, dealt to anyone who draws the short straw, and that chance falls on one head rather than another. Only rarely does it befall a truly innocent person since, according to this way of seeing things, there is no such thing as an innocent person.

  BUT LET’S GET BACK to the sadistic images. In a treacherous, subtle manner, they condemn what, in the meantime, they show. They hypnotize an audience wavering between fear and desire, fascism, religion, lust for vendetta and orgy and contrition. Those things go arm-in-arm. Inextricably.

  I remember an old gentleman who took me by the hand in church, and he kneeled, taking his face in his hands and pressing his fingers against his eyes as if he could only pray by hiding himself, and blinding himself, in the throes of a sort of horror, and he remained there, motionless like that, for an hour, waiting to b
e incinerated or saved. From the pocket of his jacket protruded a roll of pornographic magazines. I must have been ten years old. My cold, gleaming child’s eye was scandalized and fascinated by that gentleman who was asking for forgiveness while wearing a jacket stuffed with nude women. It’s a lifetime that nude women have been chasing me. Just as they chased my grandfather.

  I AM CURIOUS, a Swedish film from 1967. The author of this book was ten years old in that year . . . and he never recovered from the sight of the poster for the film, his imagination is stuck, rooted there, like an arrow quivering in the trunk of a tree, arrested at that point, never to develop past it—or perhaps the poster was for the film Il primo premio si chiama Ulla?

  It’s interesting to scroll through the titles of movies that came out the same year as the CR/M.

  Let’s take Fango bollente (The Savage Three), for example. Plot: “Three apparently well-behaved young men, oppressed by their alienating jobs and their disappointing personal lives, are transformed into sadistic criminals.”

  Or else Mario Mercier’s I riti erotici della papessa Jesial (original French title, La papesse, English title, A Woman Possessed), which also came out in the red-letter year 1975. The following misadventures befall the unfortunate female protagonist: during the course of a black Sabbath, she is raped by a man dressed as a gladiator, she is locked up in a stable, she is seared with a red-hot cattle brand, sprinkled with the blood of a rooster, raped again by another adept of the cult, whose sperm, collected in a goblet, is later drunk by the priestess, and then “walled up alive in a cave [from which she will emerge raving mad, after having dreamed she was being raped by a repugnant vulture-man], and in the end, ripped limb from limb by a dog.” In comparison, not a hair on the heads of the CR/M’s girl victims was harmed. The following year, a film came out in which “first a guy extracts all of a poor girl’s teeth so she can perform fellatio upon him, then he shaves her bald, drills a hole in her cranium with a Black & Decker drill, and samples her brain through a straw” (I’m quoting from the thoroughly documented volume Sex and Violence by Roberto Curti and Tommaso La Selva). The seventies would go on to build a filmography whose most reassuring title was Violenza a una vergine nella terra dei morti viventi (literally, Rape of a Virgin in the Land of the Living Dead, original French title, Le Frisson des vampires, English title, The Shiver of the Vampires, Jean Rollin, 1971).