The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  ANOTHER DOCTRINE PROPOSED is that of the sowers of chaos. Accelerate evil, unveiling it, bringing to light the dark side of everything: that is the task to be accomplished, as far as these missionaries are concerned. It is with prophetic punctiliousness that they rape and strangle, to ensure that the violent nature they harbor in their hearts is not hidden from the eyes of men or inadvertently forgotten. Murderers, then, are the midwives of evil; their task is to bring to the surface nightmares that lie on the seabed of consciousness.

  Buried in the heart of the universe, almost forgotten, is its underlying principle, namely chaos. At least as a faint trace or glimmer, it still persists in every living thing, diluted in each individual particle, to such a degree that it remains unrecognizable, invisible. And yet it’s there. Its being and its nonbeing amount to the same thing. The nonbeing of chaos is always present, lurking in ambush, in that which exists. All order hangs together practically by a miracle, teetering on the brink of an abyss of disorder, on the verge of collapse. The body of each individual, each destiny, whether a personal destiny or the destiny of an entire society, is a grandiose and precarious construction in which chaos lies dormant, a cold cell. But once it reawakens, the entire organism is infected in short order and begins to crumble. Whether or not they realize it, the agents of chaos are those individuals who, through their crimes, put the process in motion, they bring it to light, they restore chaos to its sovereign role. Following their passage, the lines have been twisted, the design has vanished, the house has collapsed, the wells are dry. “Chaos reigns.” By killing a child or a defenseless young woman, they are tapping on the vein to make it swell and come to the surface. That vein is chaos.

  . . . the summer will be full of fury

  men with two faces will come

  the plowed fields will not be mown

  the women will have horns . . .

  FOR THAT MATTER, if destruction is the first and most obvious law of nature, murder isn’t a crime, but rather an article of that law.

  10

  IN THE ROAD TO OXIANA, Robert Byron writes, concerning several immense monuments: “But while the mountains last, the rock-maniacs who commanded these things must be remembered—and they knew it. They were indifferent to the gratitude of posterity. No perishable aestheticism or legal benevolence for them! All they ask is attention, and they get it, like a child or Hitler, by brute insistence.”

  That’s right, attention. To get attention. Not to chase after psychologisms (even if that were the right approach, it would already be a well-trodden one . . .), but unless you grip in your fist both the murderers’ ferocity and their recklessness, you’ll never be able to understand the disjointed sequence of their actions, which led them to be caught immediately, while the body was still warm, the blood still fresh. Brashness? Imbecility? Indifference to the consequences of their actions? Such a misbegotten murder cannot have a motive that entirely excludes the secret desire on the part of those who committed it to be found out. Otherwise there’s no explaining it. No one is stupid enough to behave like that. So stupidity isn’t the explanation, or at least not the only one, it’s not enough, it’s necessary but not sufficient. You need to hypothesize that anyone who undertakes such a senseless enterprise (let’s leave aside the morality and the feelings, let’s just talk about logistics) is doing it with the objective of attracting the attention of the police, their families, the press, the world. Instead of concealing the evidence, they scatter it and exhibit it, or perhaps we should say, they put it where anyone can see it. Attention: perhaps this is the keyword. The young men of the CR/M, when they were boys back at school, were already trying to get attention, with their continual provocations—provocations the priests had decided not to react to, taking no disciplinary measures against them, practically pretending to ignore them, convinced that if they took them seriously, they’d just be playing along with the provocateurs. The priests believed that by acting in this manner, they’d let them fall flat, they’d take the wind out of their sails, little by little, depriving them, in fact, of the oxygen of attention. It’s the school of thought behind mitigation, the approach of farsighted passivity, according to which the best way of getting someone who’s acting like a lunatic or stirring up trouble to stop is to pay them no mind, ignore them, turn your back or shrug your shoulders, making it clear that you are by no means impressed: that is to say, no reaction. Wisdom of this kind, widespread in the Catholic world but elsewhere as well, may perhaps allow you to win a “war of position” as defined by Gramsci, but rarely does it work if the attackers are launching their assaults in sudden episodic bursts. I don’t believe people when they say that if you’re swimming and you encounter a shark, all you need to do is remain motionless and you’ll be perfectly safe. (Though I, too, far too many times, have chosen not to react, in order to avoid giving satisfaction to whoever had provoked or insulted me . . .)

  The method didn’t prove to be particularly effective. If given little or no consideration, when considered unworthy even of punishment, those people simply resumed their demand for attention, aiming higher this time. Those who aren’t met with firm opposition take it personally, as an offense. Hey, you, I’m not a ghost, you know, I’m not a scarecrow, take me seriously, or I’ll show you what I’m capable of, and I’m not talking about schoolboy pranks! You’ll see. They used what a hardened traveler and explorer like Robert Byron attributes to the Achaemenid emperors, that is, insistence, brute insistence. They demand attention and they obtain it, “like a child or Hitler,” that is, by sheer bullying. Brutality becomes noteworthy and memorable: you can’t just take it in stride. Nothing makes a stronger impression than sheer savagery. It is true, however, that when an impression is made in the soft wax of public opinion, it tends to melt and turn indistinct as soon as it is heated and reshaped by some new excitement, by subsequent scandals or horrors or vile deeds, things that are described as inconceivable but, it soon becomes clear, are anything but, given that they continue to happen, day after day, year after year they recur, they replicate, they present themselves over and over, and behold, the inconceivable is something we ought to conceive once and for all, instead of remaining astonished and scandalized each time, and then again, and then yet again, starting over from scratch each blessed time. Exceptions, when multiplied by a thousand, cease to constitute exceptions: they form a substantial chunk of reality. The state of exception presents itself, in effect, in every single instant and in every convergence of events, it constitutes the ordinary, the everyday, you might even say the familiar, the domestic. If horror exists, it is routine, everyday. Madness is the order of the day in the life of any individual. Madness lies within us, in our brothers and sisters, in our parents and our children and our acquaintances, in even clearer form in our spouses, to say nothing of that gang of misfits we call friends, it’s just that it manifests itself variously, in a more or less ostentatious manner, sometimes it lurks, nesting, other times it explodes into view, it can be paralyzing or violent, and in its turn the violence may be directed toward others or it might ricochet, like a curved arrow, back on whoever first released it. Are those who cruelly ravage themselves any less deplorable than those who do it to others?

  Just yesterday I learned that a fellow who was to all appearances entirely ordinary, a jovial and nondescript person, succeeded in obtaining the management of his wife’s money, and then ran through the entire fortune before she was able to notice a thing, and just as he was on the verge of being found out, on the eve of a cruise with his wife, who was convinced that he had actually reserved and paid for the tickets, well, rather than confessing to his own lies, admitting that there were no tickets for the cruise in question, and that he had in fact promised another woman that the two of them, also the following day, would set sail aboard a two-masted sailboat on a different cruise, a vessel he had hired with his wife’s last remaining money, the boat and crew and enough provisions for fifteen days and iced champagne, all ready to depart, instead what he did
is he locked himself in the bathroom while his wife was in the next room packing their bags, and he cut his throat. That’s right, he cut his throat. Just writing this phrase, between “cut” and “throat,” I can’t help but take my fingers off the keyboard and lift them to my own throat. And gulp.

  The unpredictable, therefore, is eminently predictable: we don’t know to whom it will happen, but it will surely happen. It is impossible to rule out any outcome. Nothing can ever be taken for granted. The future might be written in n different ways. Three young men born to good families (or else four or six, it makes no difference, if their friends didn’t get dragged into this mess, it was by sheer happenstance) proceed to kidnap and torture to death two young women, and two others might just as easily have been in their place.

  AND YET IN THE END, Xerxes or Genghis Khan or Hitler will be remembered down through the centuries—while the perpetrators of the CR/M will not. This book of mine, unfortunately, is no equivalent for the monumental tombs that maniacal emperors built for themselves, carving them into living rock to ensure they would be remembered. But I’ll do my best. In order to be listened to, I too will have to employ some of that all-too-deplorable “brute insistence.”

  YOU GET CAUGHT, often, due to a mistake made upstream of or in the aftermath of the crime.

  One day, many years ago, in the cell in Rebibbia Prison where I teach school, during a cigarette break (the prison equivalent of recess), two or three students are leaning against the bars, looking outside, toward the internal courtyard where prison visits take place; then they turn around and gesture to me, they want to point someone out to me. I walk over to the window.

  “You see that guy?”

  Yes, I see him.

  “He’s the worst,” and they smirk.

  Since I’m at the beginning of my career as a prison teacher (if we can call it a career, since twenty years later I’m at the exact same point I started from), I imagine that the guy the inmates are talking about must have stained his reputation with some infamous crime, and in fact, as it happens, that is exactly what he did, since, in spite of his inoffensive appearance, he is a kidnapper. Among all the crimes that can be committed, this strikes me as one of the most revolting. Especially vile when people try to doll it up with a veil of social conscience (it’s a way of striking the rich, etc.). Even before taking on connotations of rape and murder, wasn’t the CR/M first and foremost a kidnapping?

  In any case, it wasn’t for moral or juridical reasons that my students were stigmatizing that prisoner. I was still too naïve to appreciate that their negative judgment (“He’s the worst”) was exquisitely technical in character. In discussions of crimes and the meaning of punishment, people often misuse the term “error” to describe the crime they committed, as if it were exclusively moral in nature, a slip, a wandering from the straight and narrow: however faded it might be, our Catholic education tends to fudge, loading that word with a meaning very similar to the traditional significance of sin. People forget that the reason most criminals wind up in prison is an error of a practical, logistical nature, technical—in fact, in other words, because they left evidence behind them, didn’t notice that they were being followed, because they forgot to keep their mouths shut, because during their getaway they took one street instead of another, as that spirit says so sadly in Dante’s Purgatorio: Ah, if I had gone that way, I’d still be among the living! So the error is something many criminals intend first and foremost in a concrete sense: that phone call, the reasonable precautions overlooked, strutting around with the money from the caper, going to see a woman afterward, misjudging the situation, scattering clues and evidence, choosing the wrong place or time for a meet, or letting it slip out . . . so that in the end, when you get there, the Carabinieri are waiting for you, submachine guns leveled.

  That was the case with the convict my students were discussing. They told me the story, or really, the decisive anecdote, at once repugnant and ridiculous.

  HE’D KIDNAPPED a businessman and held him prisoner in the countryside, handcuffed to a tree. I don’t remember the reason, whether it was out of necessity, because he was forced to leave him untended frequently, or out of inhumane cruelty, but the kidnapper gave his prisoner very little to eat. And so the man began wasting away, so rapidly that it was visible to the naked eye.

  “So guess what happened, why don’t you?” I shake my head. The fate of the starving hostage fills me with anxiety.

  “Well, after all that time he decided not to give him anything to eat . . . the guy gets skinnier . . . losing weight, wasting away . . .” and all of a sudden the narrator snickers, shaking his head, disappointed at the foolish, reckless management of this kidnapping, while the other prisoner does nothing more than to gesticulate: he curls two fingers around his wrist and then slides his hand out from between them . . .

  “In the end, he got so skinny that he slipped out of his handcuffs, and just like that, he got away!”

  At that point, even I couldn’t help but laugh at the misfortune of the hapless kidnapper. Foolish or inhumane, or both?

  The moral of the story is that you have to feed your hostages, if for no reason other than to keep them from starving to skeletal skinniness and escaping when you least expect it.

  ASIDE FROM BEING the struggle of males eager to camouflage their uncertain identity by inflicting brutal acts on defenseless women; aside from being the venting of frustrated wealthy young men upon poor people, forced to pay for the sin of their social inferiority, the CR/M is a punishment of weakness, both physical and psychic. Even before being poor and female, the young women caught up in the CR/M are weak, weak of course inasmuch as they are women and of working-class extraction. Torturing them means concealing the torturers’ own weakness, nailing it to a cross that you relegate to others to carry. The impotent man is the greatest bully of them all, when he finds himself face-to-face with people even weaker than him, whom he selects, in fact, identifying them from the outset as disadvantaged categories: naïve virgins, of modest economic conditions, perhaps the only creatures even weaker than the murderers—murderers whom the press never seemed to tire of presenting from the beginning as so many powerful Bluebeards, almost invincible personalities, diabolically brilliant, whereas in reality these were just neurotic defectives, who in a school any different from SLM would never have had a chance.

  Ah, yes, what did the priests of SLM think of these singular individuals? What did our modern and liberal priests think of their openly displayed fascism, and what did the young Fascists think of the priests? Forget about it. A priest, to a Fascist, is the ideal man to scorn and mistreat, he’s not even a man, he’s less than a man, an untermensch, a faggot in a tunic, a skirtwearing lunatic who wears pinned to his chest the image of the famous crucified acrobat, that ragtag preacher in the desert, hypocritically good or, even worse, really and truly good.

  (In order to construct that last sentence, I made use of expressions that I heard out of the mouths of the young men of the CR/M, their classmates, and used, with intentions more playful than blasphemous, by other students at SLM. I myself thought and used similar statements. Even though I could never really laugh at the men in skirts, and in fact, a little bit, they always fascinated me, they aroused my curiosity; and not just once, more than once—especially in elementary school, while the young teachers would play with us in the courtyard, kicking up those skirts and hiding the soccer ball beneath them, so that we crowded around their legs, kicking like lunatics to make the ball come back out—I found myself imagining that one day I, too, would wear it, that tunic. And that thought filled me with a warm wave of pleasure.)

  IN DEFIANCE OF IDLE CHATTER and the time-wasting—murders are an exceedingly effective argument. They brusquely cut off all the chitchat. They are often a form of ultracompliance. Those who kill, as I’ve already pointed out, are convinced that they’re carrying out an order, which might have been framed generically or was simply a verbal conjecture, a resolution: “That guy is
giving us a real pain in the neck,” the boss happens to say—and off they go to kill him. Thus they are demonstrating their zeal, showing they won’t shrink in the face of extreme solutions. Once you’ve pulled the trigger, there’s no going back. That’s the only time you can really talk about a fait accompli, a truly “done deal,” an accomplished fact: the others are never entirely complete, but death is.