Adelina!
Oh!
Listen to me, I’m telling you! I’m telling you, and I know. His cousin even went to see him! She went all the way to Spain!
Where did she go?
To Spain!
But who went to Spain?
Oh, you know: a cousin of his.
Not his mother?
No, not his mother. They sent his cousin.
To see him.
To see his grave.
And was he really in Spain?
Yes, in Spain, but it wasn’t his name on the headstone.
Well, of course, he certainly couldn’t have kept his real name.
Obviously not.
But in that case, why don’t they say so?
As long as the mother is alive, they aren’t going to say it.
As long as she’s alive?
That’s right. As long as she’s alive.
But why?
You got me. That’s what they decided.
But it would be better if they said something about it. They’ve been suffering from this thing all their lives.
All their lives, that’s true. What are you going to do about it?
And it would be better for the government, since they’re still looking for him.
The government, look. They should just put their minds at rest.
What are they still looking for?
Don’t ask me, it must be the law.
And now her, poor thing . . .
They’re all crowding around, outside the house, have you seen? With TV cameras, too . . . but she won’t open the door.
I can imagine that.
And she won’t even answer the phone . . .
Of course not.
In other words, a grim time.
Certainly, poor thing. She ought to move away.
Ever since that criminal’s out and about, they’ve started searching for him again.
But isn’t he behind bars?
Sure, but they dragged out the whole case again.
Well, of course they did . . . every time they bring up one of them . . . they’re going to bring up the other.
And out comes the whole sad story.
Maybe so, but as far as I’m concerned, this idea that he’s dead . . . I don’t know . . . anyway, if you tell me that the cousin saw him . . .
Whether or not she saw him, I couldn’t say, he was already buried, but . . . it’s not like I can swear an oath.
Huh . . . it must be like you said, Severi’ . . . I can’t really question it . . . if you heard it . . . right?
I told you: his mother has a mass said for him. The mass for the dead.
That doesn’t prove anything . . .
Then what does it prove, in that case?
No, no, I’m not questioning . . .
First she was having it said here so that the nuns wouldn’t find out about it . . . then she went to see the nuns, “That way I can have them say mass for him, too.” What do you think that means?
Adelina, I’m not questioning your word, it’s just that . . .
My word is no better than your word. And anyway, it’s a secret. They didn’t want anyone to know.
Eh, eh . . . but it would have been better if they had spoken up, with all the problems they have now!
In fact, even the cousin says: Let’s just tell them, that way it’s taken care of. Let’s hope so. But we have to wait. We have to wait for her to die.
If that’s the problem . . .
When the mother dies, maybe they’ll talk.
To stop them from looking for him anymore.
Let them go on all they like . . . they won’t find him.
In fact, why do they care if they’re looking for him?
Well, what I want to know is, are they really looking for him? Really really looking for him? Because if they were really looking for him, they would have found him.
Are you sure of that, Seve’?
If they never found him, it’s because they weren’t looking for him.
But he moved around so much . . .
Eh, he was spotted here and there . . . they saw him in Rome, they saw him in Venezuela . . .
At first he was in Rome, right?
Then they saw him in Africa, in a hundred other places . . . it must mean he didn’t feel safe staying in one place for very long.
But who was giving this boy the money?
No doubt, his mother was sending it to him.
So she knew where her son was staying?
Exactly. But if all this boy did all his life was dress up and preen, then who was sending him the money?
She was.
So she had to know where he was staying.
Certainly. But we didn’t. No one ever knew. Even though, maybe . . .
Maybe what . . .?
Nothing, Ade’, I was just saying.
All right, we’ve talked till it’s late.
All right.
Time to get some sleep, Severi’.
Mamma mia! You’re right, it’s time. Give my regards.
You, too, ciao.
Ciao, eh.
12
LISTEN. Are you listening to me? Maybe it’s pointless to go in search of psychological explanations: it’s pointless to try to narrow down and connect the nonhuman to the pathologies of the human, to its farthest fringes. Here we’re in the presence of behaviors that can’t be explained by childhood, education, or brain damage . . . It’s almost offensive to rummage around in those dresser drawers, offensive. The word “monster” should be taken seriously, and not as a metaphor.
THE ADVANTAGE IN TALKING about someone like Angelo ought to be not having to waste a lot of time explaining who he is and what he did. Certainly, forty years ago there would have been no need, when his name was stamped in letters of fire in the Italian consciousness, and the sword of the archangel who had expelled him from the ranks of humanity still blazed, and even ten years ago, when he returned to occupy the front pages of the press with his wrecked, debauched face, for a crime perhaps even more frightful than the one before it, and yet he already seemed faded, blurred, like an absurd rerun (absurd the context, absurd the return to circulation of Angelo, that was what struck the mind most powerfully), like a ghost coming back to haunt a house whose occupants thought they were rid of it for good; like an old actor treading the boards again with his old routine that’s been seen a thousand times. “Oh, no! Not him again!” So that now I’m not so sure I don’t have to explain it all from scratch, once again. But I’m not going to do it in excruciating detail.
BETWEEN THE CR/M and the 2005 murders, there’s a certain redundancy.
After the first one, everyone was talking about him, his name was everywhere, his name became synonymous with evil, he was famous, on the lips of the people. After the second crime, as the hubbub over his reappearance in the summary at the beginning of the TV news began to subside, among the five lead stories of the night, and in second place among the crime news, by the time of his new conviction, no one came to cover him, there were no more mentions of his name, it fell out of the ready conversational vocabulary that people had (the lexicon that in those years saw expressions such as “tracimare,” “tsunami,” “tesoretto,” “bipartisan,” “quant’altro,” and “rottamare,” rise and fall, etc.), perhaps now people would have a hard time summoning that connection when they heard or read his name in passing, only to add, “Ah, yes, of course . . . that guy . . . the one from Monte Circeo,” but only making reference to his first rape and murder, the one that made him famous, while the second crime instead condemned him to lie buried in the file of forgetfulness—and I, too, in the final analysis, am writing with the same objective, not to make that name live on, but to bury it. Which would be the purpose of all writing: to delete, burn, leave behind, whereas nowadays everyone says the opposite, and namely that we write to preserve, keep, remember . . .
Our capacity for scandal is limited, it cannot replicate itself on the same topic, the first time it’s
morbidly attracted, the second time it records it and files it away, to move on to something else. When faced with the repetition of a monstrosity, a peculiar indifference surfaces in the observer . . .
Which is why no one paid him any more attention, with the exception of a crazy woman who actually wanted to marry him.
. . . of shame or remorse for what he had done
not a trace was ever found . . .
AND THEN THERE WAS Angelo’s act of mockery, when he became a “psychological counselor” (by the way, the famous serial killer Ted Bundy was one also).
This means that there’s a willful delight in putting victims into the hands of the perverted—minors, weak people, people in need of assistance. It’s enough for a person to become an even slightly charismatic figure and others begin to believe that he might be the ideal choice to help others. Let’s consider the case of that guru in Prato, known as the Prophet, who for twenty years was financed by the regional government of Tuscany to house minors in a community where, right from the very outset, it had been determined that they were being abused, and in fact the Prophet was convicted of various criminal violations, and yet the family court continued to assign minors to his community. Where he could abuse them.
I think back to that very strange Christmas, which I spent watching a DVD of the movie I ragazzi della Roma violenta (1976), based on the CR/M. The film begins with a series of man-in-the-street interviews, with passersby calling for the death penalty. That’s pretty plausible, since if you take the sampling of man-in-the-street interviews as representative, 90 percent of Italians are in favor of the death penalty, execution by firing squad, or hanging.
Then the respectable young men are agonizing in the boredom of the bar.
This, too, is realistic, the idea that one progresses from boredom to murder.
Afflicted by tedium vitae, they’ll warm up their lives with brutal acts.
Anyone who has never experienced anything other than safety, peace, and personal comfort will thirst for danger, challenges, and violence.
13
CRIMES SERVE AS A COUNTERBALANCE to the intolerable burden of virtue; the graver the crime, the greater its exemplary usefulness, to keep the world in a state of equilibrium, lest it slip into the abyss of goodness. According to this piece of economics, a misdemeanor, a minor crime, which is therefore not all that different from a virtue, serves no purpose. Pointless to sing its praises, pointless even to bother committing it.
TO WHOM SHOULD we attribute the thought that I have paraphrased here?
Would you like a single episode, just like that, picking at random, letting one of his novels fall open to a given page?
Here you are. They apply a holy wafer to the asshole of the unfortunate protagonist, a monk sticks it in and then sodomizes her, after which, among the numerous profanities, he takes pleasure “upon our Saviour’s very Body,” spurting upon it “the impure floods of his lubricity’s torrents.”
Who invented and wrote this sacrilegious episode? And who, in the opinion of many, actually carried it out? Do you really need to ask?
I READ THE MARQUIS DE SADE for the first time at the military hospital in Taranto, where I was waiting in vain to be declared unfit for service. The mornings and afternoons slipped past, empty and hot.
I knew that the Marquis had been described as “divine” and that the Surrealists adored him, but the books that the student from the DAMS Institute who occupied the bunk next to mine let me read consisted of nothing but exceedingly long and monotonous tirades on natural philosophy, interspersed with journeys through France, and sexual abuses whose mechanics I was honestly unable to fully understand, so minute and acrobatic were they, with straddlings and kneelings, pilings up of bodies in postures that were difficult to picture, like in descriptions from yoga manuals, such as, “He straddles me on all fours, on top of me with his head turned toward my back, and he forces me to spread . . .” etc. Between one abused and another, the learned torturers engaged in disquisitions on Nature, there was a great deal of talk about Nature, natural instincts, natural laws, they spoke of nature and organs, using rigorously rational argumentations, which were therefore completely mad, as reason always is when it is purified and set free of all emotions. Moreover, on every page they glorified the order of things, inscribed, carved, and crystallized, according to which it is written that the weak must give in to the wishes and desires of the strong, as it always has been and always will. So it may be, but if it’s such an obvious statement of fact, why flog it to death, repeating it a thousand times?
IN THE MIDST OF ALL THOSE PAGES of virtuosic perversion, necessarily dull, what struck me was a more subtle and enduring truth. Namely, that pain is sincere, authentic, as impossible to avoid as it is useless to simulate or feign. Acute pain is a powerful and specific sensation. The sensation of pleasure on the other hand is dubious and in any case limited over time: you cannot take more than a certain amount of pleasure, nor can you effectively pretend to do so. Whereas if a person is being subjected to torture, there can be no doubt about them suffering: and there are no limits to their pain, in either intensity or duration, except in the obstinacy of the person inflicting it.
And I understood another thing at that point, which cast a retrospective light on the CR/M: what arouses a pervert is not a woman’s beauty but the crimes that can be committed against her body. As a result, something that no longer has anything to do with sex but rather with domination as such, in every field, at every level: and that is, that the more criminal a power, the more it excites whoever exercises it and takes pleasure from it.
Hence the following Sadean principles:
Cruelty is nothing other than uncontaminated energy.
The man who takes pleasure from a woman kidnapped by force from her husband or her family experiences far greater pleasure than the man who legitimately takes pleasure from his wife.
From an incentive to sexual pleasure, crime little by little reveals itself to be a pleasure in and of itself, even greater than sexual pleasure, from which it breaks away, becoming autonomous.
Kidnapping a young woman, therefore, is a pleasure in and of itself, and not merely in terms of the pleasure that one can expect to enjoy while abusing her.
(I believe that this was the most intense shiver that ran down the backs of the young men of the CR/M: when the two girls accepted their offer and got in the car with them.)
The more respectable the ties, the greater the delight one takes in breaking them.
(Indeed, they believed that they were free men, authorized to break all laws, all conventions, all shame, all pity, all fear of punishment; which are nothing other than the “knots that fools use to bind themselves.” Those who feel themselves constrained by these rules are simply weak and cowardly. Selfishness is the only nonhypocritical form of action. On the planes of both individual pleasure and the general economy that governs the world, the suffering of a single creature is irrelevant. Anyone unwilling to do whatever is required to obtain that which is useful to him or gives him pleasure is fainthearted.)
REMORSE? Nothing more than the murmuring of a soul too weak and sluggish to shut it up.
You can only repent of something that you do exceptionally or rarely: in order to quench your remorse, then, it will be enough to repeat over and over whatever it is that prompts it, as often as possible, until it is transformed into a habit, until one becomes completely habituated to crime and murder. By the third or fourth crime in a row that you commit, the sense of guilt begins to wane, by the fifth or sixth, it will vanish completely.
NOT ONLY IN PRACTICING, but especially in preaching violence, terror, and mistreatment as the highest objectives of man, there is always a powerful pedagogical ambition, which aims to clear the field of the misunderstandings and clichés that hold in their thrall the naïve, the respectable, hypocrites, and those laboring under illusions—all of them deserving of an exemplary lesson. The reader—who if he is of the male gender might or ought to identi
fy with the various monsignors and gentlemen, and take pleasure alongside them in their erotic misdeeds—instead finds himself in a position similar to that of the young girls who have been abused: he undergoes unbroken violence and so he learns. He learns that the pursuit of an individual’s liberty entails the fact of enslaving a second individual: the radical liberty of one takes concrete form only in the radical enslavement of the other, as two complementary facts, two mosaic tiles whose shapes fit together.
It is rare that a rape fails to offer this aspect, a mix of the philosophical and the pedagogic. Edifying, illustrative, in its manner, like a crash course in degradation and corruption. In order to teach you quickly to accept that, in fact, degradation and corruption, and not order and peace, are the rules that govern the world.
ONCE I ASKED MY TEACHER Cosmo what he thought of the Marquis de Sade.
“Sade the apostle of liberty? Only a gang of wankers like the Surrealists could have thought such a thing.”
ONE ASPECT, not new, that struck me for its virulence was the polemic against Christianity. I’d already read such things in the thinkers of the Enlightenment, among whose number Sade, when all is said and done, could be counted, as well as in Nietzsche, who wrote with far greater profundity but also with his typical German heaviness. Sade, on the other hand, moves briskly, with a dismissive, Voltairean flair. Jesus: an impostor. The apostles: frauds and corpse thieves. Their prophet writes nothing, because he is profoundly ignorant; he speaks little, given his stupidity; he does even less, given his sluggishness. When scoundrels of his sort find an audience, however, their success is guaranteed; a lie spreads faster and farther than the truth: that’s the story of errors throughout history.
Last of all, the mediocre and inane story of his life as an impostor, also known as the Gospel.
FROM THE SO-CALLED LUST MURDER, lust disappears, leaving only murder in its place. Homicide no longer becomes the tragic outcome, but rather the substitute for coitus. The sexual phase is skipped entirely because it was a pretext in the first place (unquestionable proof of this are the murders committed by Angelo in 2005). If the purpose isn’t sexual, if the desire is not for physical pleasure, the excitement in violently possessing a woman does not change whether she is young or old, ugly or pretty, seductive or recalcitrant, it’s all the same thing, just as there is no difference between possessing her and murdering her. You can experience greater erotic satisfaction in strangling a woman than in masturbating, or else in masturbating after strangling her than in penetrating her when she is still alive. The sexual enjoyment is situated at unthinkable points along the way and in the body.
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