The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  I REMEMBER THAT AMONG THE GODDESSES of antiquity there are some who will forever remain virgins, such as Athena or Artemis. They are unwilling to come into contact with males, and we ought to spend a moment considering the reason, certainly no accident, that the first goddess to abhor all sexual contact should be the daughter of Intelligence and the second should reign over the boundary between the civilized world and the world of savagery. Then there are goddesses that, in contrast, seem to know and belong to their spouse, whether that is spouse singular (Hera with Zeus) or spouses plural (Aphrodite), as if they had always been possessed by them. They know what sex is, what a male is, and they seek him out incessantly, either to mate with him or to prevent him from mating with other females. Only one deity, Persephone, changes her condition, from virgin to bride, she alone passes through and personifies the phases of female life, which in the other female deities are alternative, either/or. (How could there be a goddess of love who remains chaste? Or a huntress with offspring?)

  And now we come to the second phase of Bettina’s sex life. As much of it as I know about, of course. I beg you to believe me when I tell you that the further portion of the story I’m about to tell you, like the part I’ve told you thus far, and in general all the stories, with the exception of a few minor details, collected in this book, is true, it really happened, it actually took place . . . somewhere, at some moment in time and someplace on earth, if not to me, to someone, which makes the task of telling it so easy and agreeable to me. This book is so quick to write that not even a god could keep up with the dictation. Am I exaggerating? Perhaps a little, but it’s much easier to write when what you’re writing is the truth. And nothing is invented except for a few passages here and there, transitions that memory has deleted or ignorance has left obscure, or imagination has now taken upon itself the pleasant task of developing as it pleases: not lying, not twisting the tale, but rather magnifying: a detail, a face, a series of exchanges, the place where certain characters met, which might be lifted up and flown from one location to another, just like the house of the Virgin Mary, which from Nazareth was transported by angels to Loreto.

  I ran into Bettina again, by pure chance, in Rome, a year and a half after my futile attempts to work my way into her womb in Salamanca. Her crotch remains one of the most enchanting things I’ve ever seen in my life: and a woman’s pudendum isn’t always so charming. Most of the time, it’s a rather anodyne thing. Those who claim that women are inferior to men always bring up, as a visual example, the insignificance of their sex organ, its virtual invisibility, in other words, the fact that it doesn’t seem to be there. It’s an old argument, so I’m bringing it up again. But Bettina’s was simply wonderful, although also impenetrable. And the opportunity I was afforded to try to enter it again was an extraordinary one.

  I happened to be at Piazza del Popolo—yes, I know, what could be more obvious, a clichéd tourist stop, but that’s exactly where I happened to be, on that large and beautiful piazza, sitting on the steps of the church that’s on your right as you look down Via del Corso, right at the corner of Via di Ripetta, and I was talking to a friend of mine who was a painter, about some artistic topic, focusing on the words being spoken while at the same time distracted by the usual spectacle of the piazza, which is a common characteristic of many intellectual conversations that take place in a setting already fully charged with beauty; you talk, you listen, you try to follow the thread of the reasoning, but in the meantime your eyes are captivated by something that contradicts, cancels, or outdoes what you’re saying. This happens all the time in Rome, it’s part of the constant dialectic between the unparalleled results achieved in the past and the muddled apprenticeship of those who stroll through an artistic creation, knowing that they’ve already lost before they start fighting. Beaten, yes, but not humiliated, indeed, almost consoled, as if the young artist could feel at least a little bit of the force that crushes him, vibrating inside him as he’s borne down to the ground and swept away.

  I was sitting on the steps with a painter friend of mine, talking, I believe, about conceptual art, when I felt someone embrace me from behind, or perhaps merely touch me on the shoulder but in a way that struck me as an embrace, as warm and unsettling as an embrace. And it was Bettina, whose face appeared from above and whose blond hair spilled over my own. She told me that she had stopped to talk with us only to ask a question, to get directions, and not because she had recognized me. In fact, she had a tourist map in her hand and a girlfriend at her side, the classic girlfriend you travel with, the kind you go around visiting monuments with and letting local boys try to pick you up, and they were a pair, as were, in fact, the painter and I. But I didn’t need to try to pick up Bettina, I’d already taken care of that, two summers ago, in Salamanca, I’d already chatted her up, foolishly and seductively, I’d already kissed and undressed her. And we had rolled and tumbled for hours on a single bed. From the moment I saw her she seemed different to me. I don’t know if she was prettier or less pretty, but certainly far from the ethereal maiden I had repeatedly attempted to deflower in the Castilian dorm room, before giving up that quest as too challenging, because in order to achieve it would have demanded either an extra dollop of patience, a specific skill, or perhaps a brutality that I did not appear to possess. Perhaps I only needed to ignore her pleas to desist (“Please, stop . . . It hurts so much!”). Anyway, Bettina was thrilled and excited about our chance meeting. And so was I. But perhaps I can analyze my own excitement better than I can hers. She seemed to be brimming over with joy and astonishment. I felt oddly at fault, as if I owed her an apology of some kind, and also a little worried, worried, I mean to say, about what to do next; unsettled by that beautiful young woman whom fate had brought back in touch with my life for the second time now, at a distant point in Europe. And on that exact spot in Rome. In those days it was common practice to meet with friends to discuss topics you cared about, topics that we seriously thrashed out, studying them, weighing them, delving deep, and in the absence of any real masters, we wound up teaching one another. Those who knew a little more about something would deliver improvised lectures, quite frequently holding forth on a set of steps, seated in the sunshine that in Rome allows these open-air lessons as early as March and as late as the end of November. Our favorite steps were the immense ones, vast and deserted, seemingly built expressly to stimulate discussions on topics of an aesthetic nature, in front of the Gallery of Modern Art, in Valle Giulia, or else the steps in front of some of the less popular churches, such as Santi Pietro e Paolo al Celio, San Gregorio, likewise on the Caelian Hill, or the one on the slopes of Monte Caprino, I don’t remember what it’s called. Out-of-the-way places in the city, in certain cases practically abandoned (the plaza in front of San Gregorio scattered with condoms dumped there by those who come to fuck in their cars after sunset), well, if that day I were to have decided to arrange to meet in one of the usual places with my painter friend, I’d never have seen Bettina again, and the last image I would have cherished of her, enchanting even if it was the fruit of a failure, is that of her naked on the narrow bed of my dorm room in Salamanca, as she lay with one arm flung crosswise over her eyes, a melancholy pose that however perfectly highlighted the silhouette of her proud breasts, spilling together, almost jostling each other, as she wept silently in mourning for having failed to make love with me, because I hadn’t been able to make love with her: a young Italian, healthy, dark-haired, virile, and a magnificent young German woman, blond, lithe, passionate, the two of us together had been incapable of doing something that was, after all, so simple, so ordinary, managing to insert one of us into the other, fitting together two parts of our bodies, complementary in size and shape, one into the other, however willing and even frantic to do so we might have been; and the tears dripped from beneath her arm onto her chin and neck. She was ashamed, and I was ashamed too, my virile obstinacy evidently much weaker than her own desire to put her condition as an as-yet-untouched maiden behind her. My d
etermination only went so far, I was happy enough with Bettina the way she was, a virgin in spite of herself, sad and weeping and beautiful, and I’d be able to handle the fact that I hadn’t fucked her, that we hadn’t fucked, that our fucking hadn’t happened (three ways of teasing out the exact same verb, indicating three actions, each different from the others—and which in any case had not been accomplished), I was still happy with the way things had gone, because of her beauty, which made up for everything. Yes, it may ring contrary to all logic, but I might be happy to give a very beautiful woman a kiss or just touch her breast, or to see her naked, naked just for me, even without being able to have sex with her, maybe because I’m a fucking aesthete, some might say a half–ass wanker, or half-a-queer; while a less beautiful woman, or a woman who is not beautiful at all, not even pretty, or even ugly, well, with that woman it’s practically a duty to fuck her, I mean, you are duty-bound to fuck her once you’ve started the procedure involved in doing so, it’s not acceptable, there is no way you can settle for failing to achieve that result, once you’ve put it on your agenda, however incautiously you may have done so. The luminous beauty of Bettina’s naked body was, on the one hand, an abundantly rich reward for my eyes, almost too lavish in a sense; and on the other hand, it induced a state of serenity in me, a delicacy, something verging on a melancholy languor, in other words, an array of sensations by no means ideal for someone running up against challenges in the quest to deflower a young woman.

  BUT THERE, on Piazza del Popolo, we couldn’t immediately state in explicit terms the most obvious thing. And what would that be? That we were going to give it another try. That we had to try again. There was no other way to interpret that extraordinary coincidence than as an obligation, a clear and precise commandment to go to bed together once again, and this time to enter one into the other. It is upon this idea, and upon this physical, mechanical detail, upon penetration, that the very concept of sexual intercourse is based, from a point of view that may be, varying from one case to another, symbolic, juridical, emotional, as is shown by dozens of illustrious instances; I don’t know why but I know that’s the way it is, that’s the way it works, that’s how we talk about it, and until we had completed the story with the penetration of my sex into hers (oops! by mistake I just wrote: of her sex into mine), it was as if none of this had ever happened, that it had merely been a dream or a trumped-up claim. Anyway, we immediately made a date to meet that evening, but since we had to conceal the real reason for our meeting, and since she couldn’t ignore the duties of friendship, the date was with her and her friend, whom Bettina could hardly leave all alone on that first evening, which, as far as I was able to determine, was also the only night they’d be spending in Rome, since the very next day they were planning to leave the city. To depart. Heading for some other fucking city brimming over with art. Which meant I was going to have to procure a partner, a date for her girlfriend. That was demanded by the protocols of the time: libertine our customs may have been, but not excessively so, libertine but still drawn on the foundations of the old and well-established schema of a mirror image: a couple of girls + a couple of boys. So I invited the painter to join us, though at first he was reluctant to come . . .

  In a flash, as I was saying goodbye to her, a number of images from our incomplete sexual relations flashed through my mind. I’ll spare the reader, given their sheer awkwardness, the efforts I made with my fingers to open a passage into Bettina.

  THE EVENING WAS PRACTICALLY A DISASTER. The dinner, with me as the half-hearted chef: pasta, salami, and salad. The painter was nervous and spoke in a ridiculous manner the various languages in which the conversation unfolded, in dribs and drabs, whereas I could think of nothing but the moment when the others would finally leave and only Bettina would remain, and all the while she smiled at me shyly, and yet, I could have sworn, with a hint of mischief, looking at me in a way that was utterly different from her gaze of two summers earlier. The change that had come over her was as subtle as it was spectacular. In Salamanca she spoke very little, her voice slow and raucous, with that faint accent that made every sentence she uttered sound pure and naïve, at least to my ears, steeped as they were in lessons on German Romanticism, but at the time that had seemed like a sign of shyness if not actually candor. Her lovely appearance was matched by an extreme simplicity of thought and manner, and it was with that simplicity that she spoke to me as, for a while, we abandoned our less and less determined and increasingly sporadic efforts to fuck, instead just lying there, intertwined, kissing and caressing, in spite of the intrusive and persistently bulky presence of my member, which simply would not deflate, prompting a series of “Oh, pardon me,” “No, please pardon me,” and her blushes whenever it slapped against her or was bumped by accident or popped between us like the third that interrupts company and makes a crowd, determined at all costs to get attention, and at that point we tried, as the expression goes, to “get to know each other a little better,” and since we had proved to be unable to do so carnally, at least we could do so in words, and what she did in particular was to ask me a series of very basic questions full of genuine curiosity, about myself, my family, my brother, and my sister, what their names were, the color of their hair, the hue of their complexions, astonished to learn that they were fair-skinned, and about Italy, and Rome, and why I had chosen to study languages other than German, while I, to tell the truth, aside from the story of the twenty-two-year-old fighter pilot enthusiastically tilting his Messerschmitt into a power dive against the British bombers (I can just picture him, his hair buzz-cut high on the nape of his neck, icy-cold eyes, absolute contempt for danger, atavistic, inborn familiarity with death), could sincerely not care less about everything concerning Bettina’s place of origin and the schools she attended or the plans she was nurturing for her future, about all that I cared nothing, or really, less than nothing: I was interested in her, that’s right, her and her alone, at that moment, in my bed, and if anything I thrilled to the extravagant idea that I was holding in my arms the last-born daughter, brought into the world by mistake, sired by a weary, fanatical hero, old and defeated but covered from head to toe with medals, while she lay there, defenseless and white as snow in my arms, eager to allow herself to be run through by a strapping young southerner who seemed not to be up to the task: how stupid I was, how I liked this contrast, I even luxuriated in the objectively frustrating fact that I had been unable to complete my task, so that I richly deserved a bit of scorn, like a knight unhorsed, his lance shattered along with his pride. This impotence, in fact, struck me as romantic, the absolute obstacle laid between our union, as if a razor-sharp sword had been placed between us to halt our lust, a fact that had united us more than any mere act of intercourse could have. Her adamantine sex had emerged intact from the ordeal of reciprocal desire. The maiden’s frenzy added to the youth’s lust had produced a neoclassical statue in the mold of Cupid and Psyche.

  At age twenty-three, your every thought gallops recklessly off in all directions, toward the horizon and beyond, all manner of senseless pursuits offer a fascinating, adventurous side, which only later will appear for what it truly is, complete crap, by the cruel light of adulthood.

  BUT NOW BETTINA WAS CALMER, more direct and, at the same time, more complicated, grown up in a sort of awareness that even made her look physically bigger, taller, perhaps even prettier. The delicacy that I had come to know and touch in Spain had evaporated from her, and what had been then a vague albeit intense desire had been transformed into a very precise will. We glanced at and watched each other frequently, in silence, our smiles abounding in tacit messages, while the two other guests labored to carry on the evening’s socializing, in bits and pieces, a get-together that need never have taken place, a pointless picture frame that we had insisted on placing for the sake of convention around an image that could so easily have done without it, radiant and promising as it was, a picture of our miraculous new Roman encounter; and especially her friend, Heidi, who on
any other occasion I would have considered really likable, and in her way, attractive, though she was very skinny and ridiculously tall and freckly and a little bit mannish, the redheaded Heidi talked and told stories, waving her arms and laughing, a vast array of amusing anecdotes and adventures she’d had as she traveled the world, and she made it clear that she knew lots of things, had traveled to various countries, had tried nearly all the drugs there were and dabbled in a wide variety of sexual experiences, or perhaps I should say, experiments, to which she unfailingly referred in an ironic tone, as so many minor accidents or mishaps along the way that still had been worth living (this more or less summed up the dominant philosophy of the time: anything I might do or get up to, I will own up to it later, I won’t deny it: whether good or bad, it was in any case an experience. Recklessness, therefore, elevated to a cognitive method. Those who survived all that can, in fact, boast precisely of the fact that they survived it and can recount the stories in a memorable manner: that time they injected who knows what shit into their veins, that other time they fucked eight people in a single night, or how they tailed a stranger to give a report on their habits to whoever would later shoot them. All of them liminal adventures, the kind of thing that leaves a mark on whoever experiences them, that become human and inhuman personal baggage, so that if someone manages to surface, of course, not to drown in it, be overwhelmed by it, if they don’t lose their mind or get sick or die or end their days in prison, and even if they do, then one day I’ll tell the story . . .), and from the anecdotes that she told, in just twenty-one years of life Heidi really must have gotten up to just about everything imaginable, and all the while my friend the painter tried to keep up with her, to come up with retorts that showed how incredulous and ironic he was in response, though he was hindered in that attempt by his school-taught English and his jury-rigged French, both languages that Heidi spoke fluently and comfortably. Up to a certain point, the painter kept pace with the young German woman, trying in fact to come off as even more extremist, more nihilistic, and more world-weary than she was, jamming his foot down on the accelerator, answering everything she said with expressions that were even more virulent and radical, or more comical, and overlaying the laughter she produced as accompaniment to her stories with loud sarcastic bursts of hilarity, then all at once there seemed to be a shift in his mood, or rather, in his direction, as if he’d suddenly veered around and headed the opposite way, as if, having failed to outdo her in the field of her choice, he had decided to veer around on the opposite bearing.