The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  Heidi had spoken of her father, in a grotesque manner, as a megalomaniac Sixty-Eighter, a child of the revolutionary year of 1968, a stunningly handsome man but an utter failure.

  “Hey, listen, 1968 wasn’t such a failure,” my friend retorted.

  “Oh, it wasn’t? You ought to take a look at my father. That would change your mind. Or maybe not, seeing that you kind of resemble each other.”

  Bettina nodded with a grin, and the painter clearly didn’t care for the comparison.

  “That’s who you reminded me of, now that I stop to think . . .” Heidi went on, “mein Papa . . . and you’re pretty easy on the eyes yourself, as men go, and you will be for another four or five years, but after that . . .”

  “Why, how old is he now?”

  “Thirty-nine.”

  “So he was just a kid when he . . .”

  “When he had the misbegotten idea of bringing me into this world, with that misbegotten wretch of a mother of mine!”

  “Listen, if he hadn’t believed in certain ideas, you wouldn’t have been able to lead the life you have,” said the painter, suddenly serious, in an almost grave tone.

  “Why, what kind of life have I lived?” Heidi asked, and then laughed.

  Bettina laughed, too, and looked over at me.

  “Well, a pretty nice life . . .”

  “Are you saying I’m unprincipled?”

  Heidi had used the English word, “unprincipled.” I had to explain it to my friend.

  “The life I lead is a free one,” said Heidi.

  “Sure. Maybe it’s too free. Certain people can’t handle too much freedom.”

  “That’s a nice reactionary thought.”

  “Well, who knows, maybe I’ve become a reactionary . . . but it’s not as if I’m ashamed of it.”

  “Don’t you like freedom anymore?” Bettina asked him.

  “I like the kind of freedom you conquer for yourself.”

  “And you did a lot of fighting, didn’t you?” Heidi prodded him, having the time of her life mocking him. “And now you’re tired.”

  “I’m not tired in the least . . . it’s just that . . .”

  “Isn’t this, after all, the best of all possible worlds?” Heidi asked, clapping her hands.

  “Maybe so . . . well, yes, the least worst, anyway,” the painter said, hesitantly, using an old piece of Italian slang, unexpectedly compliant, in part because he couldn’t be certain what Heidi was driving at with her logical leaps. Bettina looked at me and shook her head. Her glistening eyes told me that she had other things in mind, but that matters would have to follow their course. I, too, thought that it was right, all things considered, to waffle.

  “What I mean to say is, there are certain attitudes that just annoy me, there, I said it. Stop.” The painter ended his sentence in English with the word “stop,” which in the context made little sense. It’s time that I say his name. It was Santo Spatola.

  The two German girls exchanged a glance and put their hands over their mouths. When Heidi took her hand away, she was no longer smiling, her lips were compressed, a stern look on her face.

  “But in that case, excuse me, if you ultimately just think I’m a whore, then why do you defend the morality of those who taught me to be one, that is, my father and mother?”

  “I don’t understand,” he said, confused, and he really hadn’t understood a thing.

  AROUND TWO IN THE MORNING, they left. But Bettina went with them, and I was shocked. I neither made a gesture nor uttered a word to keep her from going, as I accompanied them all to the front door and said good night, that’s how stunned I was. It meant that up till then I really hadn’t understood a single thing: What she wanted that night wasn’t to be with me, so what did she want? What had been the meaning of the looks we had given each other at the dinner table? As soon as they left, it started raining. The windows rattled with thunderclaps. Perplexed, tired, and half drunk, determined not to wallow in doubts and self-interrogations, which I preferred to put off till the following day, I undressed and, after wandering around the apartment in a state of stunned confusion, I got into bed.

  That’s the way it had gone, it was pointless to rack my brains over it, though my overexcited mind refused to obey and, as I lay there in my bed, it continued to spew out hypotheses, images, memories, and fantasies about the German girl. In particular, I would say figures, figures of her, of her hair, her lips, the impalpable golden fuzz that covered her body . . .

  I HAD BEEN ASLEEP for half an hour when I heard someone knocking on the door, and I woke up. Those were definitely knocks on the door, not bolts of thunder, because the thunderstorm had ended and by this point all it was doing was raining, with a light dense buzzing of drops, in that uniform manner that can go on for hours. I got up and went to answer the door. It was Bettina, drenched from head to foot. I let her in, took her to my bedroom, took off her dripping clothing, ushered her into my bed, and then lay down on top of her to warm her up, since she was cold as ice; the minute she opened her legs, I slid right into her. My member had already been hard even before she got there, while I was sleeping. After a while, her body had warmed up and softened. Bettina still had a tight, narrow opening, as she had in Salamanca, but now I could fit inside her completely: still, I felt the need to check and see that this wasn’t just a mistaken sensation on my part, so I reared up, straightening my back until I rose almost vertically above her and looked down at where our two sexes were joined, lifting her thighs and then crushing them down atop her, but not to penetrate her more deeply, which is the usual objective of assuming that position, but only to see whether it was really happening, that I really was all the way inside her.

  “I’VE HAD A BOYFRIEND for the past year, in Bochum, and he is dear to my heart. He’s handsome, too. He’s my same age. I never had any difficulties with him, I mean to say, no difficulties in making love. The first time, it happened immediately, and it didn’t hurt me. Since then I’ve been in love with him, and he loves me. Whereas I had no special connection with you. I liked you, but that was all. I liked you a lot. Maybe that’s why we weren’t able to do it. I’d like to go on loving him in the same way, if I’m able. Now I really care about him, and I’m sorry to betray him. That’s why I left your place, earlier. Heidi was glaring at me and she told me, ‘You’re crazy, completely crazy!’ and I felt like crying. I no longer knew what I wanted, whether to leave or go back . . . We walked toward the bus stop while Heidi went on scolding me, as if I’d committed some terrible mistake, ‘No, but really, I already have a boyfriend!’ I objected, but she didn’t care, she kept scolding me as if I were an idiot, then it started raining, coming down harder and harder. We took shelter in a doorway, right in front of the bus stop. The thunder was terribly loud. It seemed like the bus would never come. I hugged Heidi and she stopped berating me. I don’t know how long we were there before the bus finally came.”

  “And did you board the bus?”

  “Heidi wouldn’t let me. She pushed me away and jumped aboard.”

  “Couldn’t you have boarded too?”

  “Sure I could have . . . I could have done it. But I hesitated. While the door was closing, Heidi shouted, ‘Go to him! Right away! What are you waiting for?’ and even before the bus pulled out I had turned around and was running in the opposite direction, running back to you. Only it was pouring rain and I got lost. I wandered for a long time before finding the apartment building. And when I found it, I didn’t know what buzzer to ring.”

  AT THIS POINT SHE TEARED UP and began to cry, and her lovely eyes welled over with salty tears, and in order to stop I pulled her on top of me, hugged her tight, and kissed her on the neck and ears and, while I was doing it, I slid my erect member inside, my cock which wouldn’t hear of turning flaccid. Then I lay there, motionless, holding her there like that. She began to moan and as she did, she continued to cry, but she wriggled loose of my embrace and sat bolt upright on top of me, spreading her thighs, knees bent, with m
y sex straight up inside her, and as if she didn’t want to let me see her tears, she bowed her head forward so that her hair covered her face, and I saw only that blond curtain waving back and forth.

  Then she started moving, not up and down but rather back and forth, keeping her pelvis pressed tight against me and dragging it so that my sex changed angle inside hers. I could feel the difference when she pulled back and my cock, bent downward, rubbed against her clitoris, and when she came back forward I could feel with the tip of my penis the depth of her tight aperture and with the base the proximity of the other orifice, which must have given her pleasure, seeing that it was precisely in the wake of that movement that she issued a loader moan. I pondered how Bettina had changed in that year. And how I had changed, too. And so, after she had come like that, straddling me, I turned her over on one side, still moaning, and laid her flat on her belly, with me on top, pressing down on her with all my weight, and I fucked her in the ass. A dozen or so deep thrusts, and after I had spurted the final strand of come into her ass, I felt that at last my sex was starting to unstiffen, as if it were liquefying, and without even having to slide it out, I found myself outside of Bettina.

  Her buttocks gleamed white in the darkness, and she seemed dead, she wasn’t moving, she no longer seemed to be breathing.

  if you want to turn this page

  first you have to have read it

  19

  IHAD PLENTY OF FRIENDS who were painters, some of them quite good. More friends who were painters than in any other single category. They were nearly all of them interesting young men. The sculptor Nunzio had a thicket of hair and deep-set fiery eyes. Mariano Rossano was the classic young Neapolitan with fine, melancholy features, measured gestures, doubts, and a hint of laziness. Giuseppe Salvatori’s blue eyes and close-trimmed blond beard made him a late-nineteenth-century Frenchman, like those wearing Zouave knickerbockers and carrying everything they needed to paint in a leather rucksack tied to their back. What caught your attention in all of them were their eyes: the mocking, wide-eyed stare of the very skinny Felice Levini, Spatola’s inquisitorial look, Pizzi Cannella’s light eyes, the eyes of a praetorian guard, and Cecafumo’s eyes, full of terror and tremor, peering into the darkness, scanning an imaginary score, in pursuit of the notes of Charlie Parker’s solos. “I need to detach them,” he’d say, obsessively, “separate them one from the other,” and it was impossible, like trying to separate drops of water in a mountain stream rushing down into the valley. It finally drove Cecafumo mad.

  And then there were Giancarlo Limoni, Marco Tirelli, Beppe Gallo, Gianfranco Notargiacomo, Bianchi, Gianni Dessì, and Mimmo Grillo, Gianni Asdrubali, Vittorio Messina, and others still. It was fun for an outsider as ignorant and curious as I was to go and mingle with this school of painters. They led a life that was similar to and yet, at the same time, completely different from mine: no university, a far less vague, much more concentrated apprenticeship than any writers ever served, and immediately, or almost immediately, they plunged their hands deep into their work, as in fact it ought to be for everyone, into real work: painting, canvases, studies, installations, or performances, videos, shows. The ones I call painters, using an old-fashioned term, knew from their school days on that they wanted to be artists, that they wanted to spend their lives making art: and outside of that material vocation there were the trattorias, the poolrooms, pussy, interminable discussions of art, for some of them, drugs, and nothing else. It was a more severe, practical education, more “focused,” as we might say today, than what we writers did, wasting endless amounts of time chasing after words, immaterial elements. Break down, reassemble, break down, reassemble . . .

  They had to produce objects, figures, corporeal masses, surfaces, applying all their ingenuity and industriousness like so many blacksmiths and carpenters, sawing, nailing, painting, getting smeared with pigments, dust, wood shavings, and varnish. Their work filled them with hunger and thirst, and a lust for distraction, once they’d shut the door of their studio behind them, while the ascetic nourishment of the word has always just confused me, pumped me up with air while at the same time thinning me out. Working with words is never really working, it’s an endless dripping, closer to prayer or a soliloquy than to genuine work, instead of working you think, you fantasize, you form clouds of vapor steaming from the readings you’ve done, you pile up and discard vague ideas. In the end, these vague ideas, thanks to a monotonous, never-changing gesture that you repeat endlessly using just a few fingers and allowing the unutilized rest of your body to grow stiff and waste away, these intuitions, if God is willing, will find a form, which however, even if it comes to life, will never be embodied, and will always, in the end, remain virtual, dormant, locked between pages. A breath dried on paper. For that reason, too, you never get a break from this nonwork, not even when you’re tired, and you can’t take it anymore, when, as Flannery O’Connor writes with great precision, after a few hours spent striking typewriter keys, “I’m sick of talking about people who don’t exist with people who don’t exist.”

  PAINTERS, on the other hand, as in the famous and chilling diary of their illustrious colleague Pontormo, have to have produced that at the end of the day, or to be more precise, have to have fabricated it: that specific thing, an arm, a head, a forearm, a little clay man, a revolving mass of things, a first layer of collage, the repainting or soldering of specific useful objects, or even maybe the canvas of a future canvas, still to be painted.

  AMONG THE PAINTERS THERE WAS A TALL, fair-haired young man, born in Lichtenstein, very wealthy, who had come to Rome especially to be an artist. He looked like Helmut Berger, Luchino Visconti’s actor. Leda Arbus, my old schoolmate’s sister, who also frequented painters as I will recount later on, was quite taken with him, I think. For that matter, so were we all, more or less: with his beauty and with his holy naïveté. His name was Leopoldo van Sigmaryngen, which he had abbreviated in his career as an artist to Sygma, though the rest of us, more familiarly (and with that hint of cutting sarcasm that is inevitable in Rome), only ever called him Poldo, the Italian rendering of Wimpy, the endlessly ravenous, hamburgercrazed office clerk from the Popeye comic strips and cartoons. The crushingly handsome and aristocratic artist smoked a brand of cigarettes that was impossible to find, De Bruine, which came in a red-and-blue pack, holding them poised at the tips of his long fingers, drinking and offering shots of a specially aged twelve-year-old malt whisky, instead of the usual Johnnie Walker, and he schemed to mount luminous signs high atop the city’s pitted monuments, with phrases in English along the lines of: THIS IS FILTHY, ISN’T IT? or else NOT IN SPACE, NOT IN TIME: OPPORTUNITY, though God only knows what they were supposed to mean, what they alluded to, but in the meantime he was just building castles in the sky, no one would ever have let him actually do it, and it was precisely that impossibility that stimulated him. No practical considerations can act to brake ideas that are out of this world. Only once, as far as I can remember, did he even come close to achieving these magniloquent plans of his, or perhaps I should say, he didn’t even come close but at least he made an effort, submitting an application to a competition for an artwork intended to embellish a public swimming pool in Vaduz. He didn’t win. Nor was his project even given an honorable mention or called out as a noteworthy candidate. Once again, his proposal was a phrase spelled out in neon letters, roughly sixty feet long, which said:

  WEH DEM DER AUCH NUR EINEN EINZIGEN TROPFEN ZUM ÜBERLAUFEN BRINGT!

  which means:

  WOE BETIDE ANYONE WHO MAKES SO MUCH AS A DROP OVERFLOW!

  WHILE OLD AND NEW LITERATURE still interests me as much as ever, nowadays visual arts interest me less, every day a little less, absorbed as it is in the language of communications and advertising campaigns and practically indistinguishable from them, all the way down to the very nature of the conception. When I see an exhibition of works by the best-known and most brilliant Italian artists working today, I have a hard time seeing what about them is
fundamentally different from the gags in a joke magazine.

  SANTO SPATOLA WAS ONE OF THE FINEST of those painters, but when it came right down to it, one of the unluckier ones. The time, at least, was a propitious one: he launched himself while the wave of the so-called return to painting was still building, but he was soon swamped by others who were cleverer and more inventive, though less gifted than him, and who were catching the very crest of that wave. He reacted to what he perceived as an injustice, but which was actually a matter of pure chance, making sure his shows were less and less frequent, hoping to make them rare and eagerly awaited events, but the only result was that he slowly drifted out of view of the gallery owners, art collectors, and critics—he fell, as the saying goes in Italian, “out of their hearts,” where for that matter he had never really found a secure place. The art world reached the conclusion that it could easily do without Santo Spatola, but not the other way around, as he had fooled himself into believing in the course of his—truth be told, ever less confident—roller-coaster rides of megalomaniacal hope. In art, in the movies, in the world of books and journalism, there are inexplicable phases in which one person is mentioned continuously, cited, invited to speak here and there, nothing can be done without them, they are sought after until it’s considered a miracle just to be able to speak with them, they become indispensable, unquestionable, selected without a doubt as the first—or if not the first, at least one of the top three or five names to come to mind the minute anyone starts putting together an initiative of any kind, be it an exhibition, a survey, a festival, an anthology, a roundtable; and then before you know it, their name starts plummeting in the rankings until it’s dropped out of the bottom; it’s no longer on anyone’s lips; and even if it came to mind, no one would dare to bring it up, because at the mention of that name the others at the table, or in the room, would react with a grimace, an unconvinced “Huh . . .,” accompanied by the hand-and-wrist gesture of someone discarding a crumpled piece of paper, “Oh, Lord, no, no, for the love of God!”