The only woman who wasn’t an intruder at SLM was the Virgin Mary.
THE FACT THAT WOMEN, at the trial and afterward, hated them, seems clear and unmistakable to me. But the hatred and scorn that ordinary men declared toward those perverts, I don’t know, there was something about it that doesn’t quite ring true, as if it were a sort of exorcism, an expedient that allowed them to call themselves out of an event into which, without quite realizing how or why, they had found themselves dragged, involved, almost interrogated, by the presence of an unsettling sexual undertone or innuendo, stigmatized with words of fire lest it come to the fore to unmask identities and complicity, even with those who were nattering on about exemplary punishments, death sentences (the refrain of calls for castration had not yet taken center stage). The only thing you’re in a hurry to put at arm’s length is something that is close, uncomfortably close. Certainly, one might reasonably suppose that many of the fieriest speakers feared that the same fate that had befallen the two young women at Monte Circeo might be visited upon their sisters or daughters, but theirs did not seem like a preemptive rage or the furor of an empathetic identification with the suffering of the victims . . . rather, it seemed like a very different and quite dangerous kind of identification, to be discarded with disgust should it ever surface, and namely with the murderers. To be lumped in with them, to share even a single cell of the same tumor . . . as if, among men, the CR/M had a singular power of contamination . . . as if it somehow transmitted from the barbarity of the crime to that of the punishment invoked, preserving, in fact, an identically morbid erotic twist. The venting of instincts is not much more vicious than their repression, especially if that repression is howled for by the mob. The public scourge yawping for the punishment of the sadist may turn out to be a sadist himself, except that the whip his hand is raising high in the air bears the brand of probity and rectitude. Therefore, the hatred served to conceal a substantial complicity, albeit sublimated or experienced backwards, as repugnance. Rape fantasies echoed in the outraged prose of the press: the more they deplored what had happened, the more they celebrated it. The culprits of the CR/M were lifted on high by the choruses of “Down with them!” The sexual murder feeds these paradoxical circuits where, through a twist not unlike that of the Möbius strip, there is no break between the two opposite faces. Along with the universal condemnation, it pumps up a maniacal attention to the details that loom and flash in the journalistic accounts, indignant and aroused to the same degree: “two days of uninterrupted rape and violence on the poor thing . . .” and so on.
Sex maniacs constitute a risk for women and children, but also, indirectly, for respectable men: the risk of revealing their unexpected proclivities. That is why they are obliged to thunder even louder and with greater indignation against deviants: to prove they haven’t been infected by them.
INDIGNATION IS A SENTIMENT that conceals things rather than reveal them. A veil descends over the indignant person’s face, preventing him from seeing clearly and preventing others from seeing clearly into him. He is inclined to consider aberrant things that as often as not are ordinary, and therefore much to be feared. In a heartfelt tone, he hastens to declare alien the sort of things that are often dangerously familiar, and the passion that he puts into decrying scandals reveals his fear that anyone might suspect he’s involved. Instead of venturing closer to the source of the scandal, in order to comprehend it as clearly as possible, he recoils from it, striking a horrified pose. But in fact, what he fears above all else is comprehension, because comprehension entails involvement. His exorcisms are almost never successful in expelling the devil, because they consider him an intruder, rather than an age-old inhabitant of our minds and our homes. Very little can be achieved with indignation, and it does very little good, except to assuage us with the temporary relief, the fleeting complacency of feeling that we are in the right, that is to say, one of the most deceptive and childish satisfactions that can be enjoyed.
THE SAME VIOLENT INSTINCT, then, can be present in attacking women as in protecting them from the violence of others: women find themselves caught in the middle, suffering the abuse of both their assailants and their protectors, in fact, it often happens that the latter are actually the most obstinate ones. Their oppressive guardianship is continuous and real, while the danger that comes from the former is often intermittent at best and hypothetical in any case. It may be that in the end (Machiavellian lesson to be learned) it is the protector who turns into the aggressor.
SOME MEN THINK THAT THEY’RE GODS, with a right to take the women of the earth, leaning down and snatching them up, the way Zeus and his brother Hades did, and as Apollo tried to do, more than once, in vain (the only god I know of who failed to complete a rape: a would-be rapist who may have devoted himself to the arts for this reason, after all—that is, a pursuit in which one learns to make profitable use of one’s frustration); other men instead place themselves on a plane so low that they judge it impossible to imagine that a woman would yield to their courtship voluntarily. Fearing that their sexual advances might be destined to failure no matter what they do, they feel justified in proving them right. In other words, force is used by those men who feel that they are too high above or too far below all women; but in fact, it is the entire history of our culture that places a woman either high above (in some cases) or far below (more frequently) a man, but never on the same plane. A sublime variant of misogyny is, in fact, chivalrous love, which transposes the woman onto a mystical, transcendental plane, rendering her almost as odious as she is in her degraded version of sinner and diabolical temptress, or witch, or object to be possessed. In the courtly literature of the troubadour, in fact, knights would put themselves at the service of ineffable dames san merci with angelical demeanors, who like authentic dominatrixes would force their humble vassal to submit to mortifications of all kinds; but in the meantime, the very same knights in thrall to love would forcibly have their way with young shepherdesses, gooseherders, wayfarers—all of them girls, with an average age of twelve. Chivalry is in fact the presentable face of brutality; it represents an exterior form of reparation for injustices as well as the most elegant way of concealing them. A rich rhetorical indemnity, in other words. It is quite likely that the courtly poets simply invented it all out of whole cloth, and that the much-declaimed enslavement of the knight to the lady of his heart never actually existed. The knight, on the other hand, went his merry way along country paths deflowering peasant girls alone and unaccompanied: a pursuit celebrated by troubadours and court poets in their ballads, in a dreamy, playful tone. Music forgives, it forgives everything, it forgives always. The swollen river of amorous poetry rolled on, flowing free of any relation to reality, and in that freedom resided its loveliness and the lie at its heart.
LET ME SAY IT AGAIN: unlike other crimes, rape isn’t an expression of dissidence, revolt against norms and tradition. If anything, it represents a confirmation of it. A blind, absolute confirmation. In case anyone had forgotten, a norm is illustrated from time to time in the act of imposing it by force. Every time that a rape is committed, a principle is reiterated. Rape, in fact, serves to defend an order, that of the dominion of man over woman, or to reestablish it if woman were ever so ill-advised as to call it into question. By tradition, women are accustomed to being bent to man’s will by an instrumental force: either paid, or violated, or seduced, or wedded against their will, or else they fall in love (that is, vanquished by love). Money, fists, family authority, charm, and last of all passion—these were the forces arrayed in the field to deprive a woman of control over her own body. Even romantic love was invented by a group of writers feverishly trying to justify—by bringing to bear an element that was at least in appearance nobler and irresistible—the idea of a woman setting aside her principles and giving in to a man’s sexual advances. It is no accident that the second part of Romanticism was devoted to a painful and dolorous unmasking of this deception created by the first.
9
What were the girls of the CR/M expiating? Whose crimes, aside from the obvious ones of the actual culprits? It seems unbelievable that the victims should be paying the price of a crime committed not by them, but against them: and yet this, too, is a paradoxical form of guilt. Aside from some venial sin they might have been guilty of, the girls were charged with the supposed crime that can be imputed to all women, plus the actual crime perpetrated by their murderers. It would be much more difficult to do evil if you weren’t convinced, as you commit that evil, that you’re applying at least a crumb, yes, at least a speck of justice . . . Many of those responsible for very serious crimes like to present themselves as victims, as someone “more sinned against than sinning,” who has in other words suffered more wrongdoing than they have committed. Sometimes it’s true, or it is only if you take into account the suffering perceived rather than any real harm suffered. A series of small but continuous humiliations to which one might have been exposed, for example, can be experienced as if it were an interminable process of torture; and one might react to it disproportionately, even by committing murder, which appears as an appropriate measure, a crime that is not all that serious after all, or not even a crime but rather an act of justice, putting an end with a simple pistol shot and a fleeting instant of pain, on the one hand, to an endless calvary of torment, on the other. Some of the wrongs to which these criminals have reacted are real, many are created out of the whole cloth of paranoia. Certain vexations or violent acts that they claim to have suffered, as a justification for their acts, exist only in their heads . . .
This sort of upside-down juridical reasoning covers all kinds of crimes, from theft to kidnapping to swindling to murder; in a rape it often lurks implicitly, and just because it’s tacit doesn’t mean that it’s not present. The idea then that the act of kidnapping, raping, and even murdering somehow serves to right a wrong and restore justice; that these brutal acts are appropriate sanctions, that the guilty parties are judges and the victims defendants, found guilty and sentenced, that the entire process of the trial took place in the blink of an eye, without hearing or summation or lawful appeal, in the very instant the trigger was squeezed or the hands pressed around the throat, throttling out the life. No one in the world can deprive certain criminals of the intuitive conviction that their victims, in no uncertain terms, “deserved it.” Ah, if it were only common criminals who thought like this! The bloodier the crime, the more this twisted logic tends to surface in even the most placid minds (“they deserved it”), as we saw on a vast scale after 9/11 and on a staggeringly vast scale after the Holocaust (“well, if that’s the way it went, they must have deserved it”), perhaps because people refuse to believe that so much blood could be shed and so much suffering unleashed without a good reason of some kind. If it happens, that must mean there was a reason. “They must have been asking for it.” In the case of rape, this logic is even more relentless. The girls and the women had been asking for it, and that is why they were (justly, or at least somewhat justly) punished. “She really was asking for it . . .” It’s important to note that it’s not only rapists who think this way: it’s a common opinion, perhaps expressed under their breath, of a great many observers, and not all of them men. So, what was it that the young women, D.C. and R.L., were expiating, what crimes, and committed by whom? Because this is far less clear, and yet every bit as glaring, as the guilt of those who raped them.
In the approach that newspapers took to sex crimes, it was always implicit that the victims were, to some greater or lesser extent, responsible for what happened, whether that was the rape and violence they had suffered or even their death. Either because they had provoked it, or else because they had failed to take sufficient precautions to prevent it happening, taking excessive risks, failing to take into account that . . . fooling themselves into thinking that . . . Even where the writer hasn’t openly taken a stance against the women, the guilt imperceptibly creeps over and washes down upon them, sliding from the figure of the assailant onto that of the victim. What is taken under close examination and probed and plumbed is the victim’s behavior. How was she dressed? What was she doing there? Why did she listen to them, why did she accept their invitation/ride/offer? Why on earth didn’t she defend herself with greater determination, etc. These arguments—once upon a time adduced explicitly; nowadays, in an era of pseudocorrectness, still filtering through the wrinkles of language like a subtle murmuring instead of an open statement—are the cells of thought that proliferate around the core of rape, connecting all the protagonists, the perpetrators as much as the victims, and if the former are not a matter of chance, then neither can the latter be. The victims, too, are subject to the principle of responsibility: if it hadn’t been for the victims and their behavior, either brash or provocative or naïve or stupid, then the crime wouldn’t have happened, or it would have happened to someone else. Among the array of crimes, rape is the one that seems least willing to remain inexplicable, the one whose causes people are most vociferous about emphasizing and underscoring, in part because they are reasons that appear obvious, the relationship between cause and effect leaps immediately to the eye, and if the effect is the targeted violence perpetrated by the rapist, the cause can’t be anything other than the woman. The reasoning is this: if you leave a steak out unguarded, you can hardly complain when the dog wolfs it down.
A great many women, by education, temperament, intelligence, and experience, outstrip most males: and they’re capable of holding them at bay by virtue of these qualities. But the victims of the CR/M were doubly or triply disadvantaged in comparison with their kidnappers, in terms of physical strength, age, social standing, education, and simply being outnumbered. And let’s throw in malicious innuendo. In veiled terms, as almost always seems to happen, the young women were accused of having delivered themselves into their captors’ and torturers’ hands, having sinned by naïveté, to put it mildly. It’s a textbook objection, and leveled at young women who at first had displayed a friendly willing and compliant attitude toward the rapists, accepting a date with them, taking rides in their cars. It is remarkable how in common opinion the victims are always blamed in hindsight, and with a hint of complacency, for a lack of caution
that winds up making them in some sense accomplices in the trouble they got themselves into. People hasten to rummage through the accounts of their behavior to find faults or shortcomings sufficient to allow an attribution of at least some share of the guilt to the victims. That is because it would be intolerable to accept the idea of their utter innocence. Everyone would find that unbearable. The guilty are always more acceptable than the innocent. But if you consider carefully, all of the protagonists of the CR/M, culprits and victims, display an extraordinary recklessness. Farsightedness really wasn’t one of their gifts. And then, if we consider the behavior of the murderers, once they had committed their misdeeds and were back in the city, then you really have to conclude that they were by no means evil masterminds, but just a trio of pathetic idiots.
THEY THINK THEY’RE SO CLEVER that they’ll never stumble into the hands of the police. Or else they know they will, but they’re not afraid of winding up like that, they just don’t care, who gives a damn, that’s all she wrote.
IF ONLY THEY’D BEEN NOTHING but idiots! Idiots lack sufficient imagination and initiative to conceive what they actually carried out. Instead, they were that exact blend of wickedness and imbecility that makes people truly dangerous. They were stupid enough not to feel fear and repugnance for what they were preparing to do, but clever enough to concoct a plan, however half-baked. They brashly assumed they would never, ever be caught. Their idiocy rendered them unfeeling, their wickedness made them arrogant and cruel. It’s the same blend that we find, on a sublime level, in Satan. The light of the spirit allows itself to be made an instrument of blindness, its gaze twists and then turns sullen. The satanic modus operandi calls for agility of means and weightiness of ends. For that matter, these were decent students, in high school and later at university, with passable grades. They studied for their exams. There were even those who claimed that Angelo had a superior mind, that he was a genius, though an evil one, mistaking the insane gleam in his eye for the light of true intelligence. The obstinate error of those who, observing the enormous bulbous blue eyes of the no-longer-young criminal—not unlike a cartoon character who has seen a ghost or a monster and whose eyes pop out in surprise—mistake that wide-eyed stare for a sign of presence of spirit, while instead it points to a lack of it, because those eyes see nothing in particular, nothing hidden, nothing ulterior, and above all, there is nothing to see inside them, beyond them: as enormous as they are, they have no depth, they have never known second thoughts, which constitute the very essence of thought in the first place. They seem to be nervously wide open, focused on the present, like the eyes an uneasy bird rotates incessantly in search of prey, or intent on not becoming prey itself. A perpetual watchfulness that adds nothing to one’s consciousness, if anything thinning it out, rendering it a pure nervous vibration. Melancholy, sadness, hope, disappointment, happiness—all of which, in order to develop and be expressed, require an emotional space sufficiently broad and deep to allow past and future to coexist—are unknown to this gaze.
The Catholic School Page 112