The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  The sadistic act, then, is imperative and iterative.

  By tormenting her, he wants to induce three sensations in his victim: terror, dependency, degradation. And it is fundamental that there never, and I mean never, be any element of reciprocity. Reciprocity would be an indicator of something normal, something healthy in the relationship, which is a notion he abhors to the greatest degree.

  As much as he delights in the sufferings of his victim while she suffers from his torture, that is exactly how indifferent he is to her death. The suffering gives him shivers of pleasure, the death merely bores him. (That is what happened in the CR/M, dictating its hasty conclusion.)

  If he is impotent, he will still take pleasure from whipping or stabbing his victim, or subjecting her, often in an incredibly stupid and ridiculous way, to all sorts of abuse and torture, degrading and humiliating her. His scanty erotic prowess is made up for by an even greater savagery. The more he seems to be out of gas sexually, the more brutal he becomes. Instead of thrusting with his pelvis, he batters with his fists or sticks: surrogates for the physiological act he is incapable of performing.

  The victim interests him solely as a temporary extension of himself. The girls of the CR/M could have been replaced by any other girl. The future victim is almost always deceived by nonsensical or paradoxical lines of patter, with fanciful promises, where the words—affectionate, enthusiastic, jovial, alluring—make a strong impression with their sparkling brilliance, but what matters is what’s left unsaid, held back (which, for that matter, is true of any discourse).

  (“They seemed like such nice guys . . . unpretentious.”)

  There is nothing different from any other process of seduction about it, only that it’s more concentrated, so to speak, tightened up: in order to approach people, you don’t need to overwhelm them with attention, but you don’t need to starve them of it, either: the ideal is to offer intermittent compliments, which get the hook into the recipient while at the same time inducing a continuous and anxious expectation of receiving more. Another technique is that of self-pity, a confession with an implicit request for help. The victims, in that case, fly to the rescue of someone who is going to be their executioner, they console him, they cuddle him. Any potential latent aggressivity on the murderer’s part may be viewed naïvely by his victims as something they’ll be able to cure him of . . .

  A VIOLENT IMAGE and sensation hover over the sex act from the very outset, due to the spilling of blood in the first act of coitus, and throughout the whole arc of time that leads a woman through the entire span of sexual initiation, from deflowering to childbearing, marked therefore by suffering at the beginning of the process every bit as much as at the end. All of these pains are unknown to the male. Men are tempted to experience through the female body the suffering they know nothing about, and thus feel it by proxy. They never forget the inaugural mark of their virile activity: the spilling of blood. In tradition, that fact safeguarded the honor of the male, a worthy man, and confirmed the honor of his bride, unviolated. It is unlikely that the traces of spilled blood ever disappear entirely.

  INTERCOURSE LEAVES A MAN UNCHANGED. Which makes him either envious or concerned about the spectacular changes that the same act can instead produce in a woman. If he wishes to gain any understanding of those phenomena, those emotions, those feelings, including hope sorrow and terror, he necessarily has to pass by way of a woman’s body. Full enjoyment is the woman’s prerogative, if we are to rely on the famous declaration of Tiresias. The sadist acts on a woman, therefore, because a woman is reality, and only by so doing can he feel every bit as real, alive, and active as she is. If a man were capable of remaining chaste, women would cease to exist, they’d vanish on the spot. In order to make a woman alive and concrete, and deserving of existence, she must be brutalized; in order to make her alive, then, it is necessary to kill her; and in that fashion, by killing her, feel alive oneself.

  THERE IS ANOTHER KIND OF BLOOD that no one seems to have any hesitations about shedding. Not in rivulets, but in gushing gobbets, in waterfalls. A torrent of blood. In the archaic world, it happened a few times a month, when the hunters caught some large animal that was destined to feed an entire village. In the present-day world, every five seconds, in automated slaughterhouses. From the moment that man becomes a carnivore and starts systematically slaughtering animals for food, the pleasure bound up with the slaking of our hunger is indissolubly tied to the pain caused in the killing, or to be more precise, the pain experienced while being killed, a pain that contaminates both parties, killer and killed. That infernal passageway of pain and suffering becomes incorporated into the person who caused it, until it is part of his or her way of being. Which forms the conviction, eventually by subtle degrees transformed into an uncontestable law, that the only way you can assure your own survival, gain your own living, is to take the lives of others. Mors tua, vita mea: Your death is my life. That same point of view creeps obliquely into the sexual realm: you can take pleasure only by inflicting pain upon those giving you pleasure. For that matter, as with food, the union can take place by incorporating, ingesting the body with which that union takes place. Let’s turn once again to mythology: it’s what Zeus does with Metis. In order to mate with her, he eats her.

  FAMILIARITY WITH THE SPILLING OF BLOOD undermines the sense of a relationship with the divine, it overturns it. You are no longer giving up a precious good in order to sacrifice it as an offering to a cruel and demanding god, thus winning his favor; on the contrary, the sacrifices constitute an attempt to make the gods complicit in killing and devouring animals, by offering them a part of the plunder. The gods would soften their wrath if they were invited to the banquet that is supposedly the reason for their fury in the first place. If that were the case, the gods’ resentment at the slaughtering of beasts would only be caused by the eventuality of being excluded from the feast.

  IN ITALY, roughly three thousand people are murdered every year, which means fewer than ten a day. And in spite of the sensation of spreading violence, the number is actually in continuous decline. On that same given day, along with the human beings—and without there being any corresponding police investigations or newspaper headlines—it is estimated that a million other living beings are killed, an assortment of cattle lambs calves horses pigs birds and fish: killed chopped up and quickly devoured. There are so many killings that they cannot be counted with any precision: they take place by suffocation, throat-cutting, boiling, freezing, electric shocks, decapitation, or with a bolt fired into the brain. How can we think that a society will abstain from spilling human blood and be able to keep from being contaminated by it, when it wallows in animal blood like this? The slaughter is so pervasive and uninterrupted that we don’t even notice it, in part because it is kept carefully concealed from our eyes, which wouldn’t be able to withstand so much as a minute of the mayhem. Far from our eyes, but not from our mouths! This is the true assembly line, forget about Ford, forget about Fiat . . . The assembly line of killing and disassembly of animals to be eaten. And then a person is supposed to be shocked and aghast if for every hundred thousand animals murdered, one man dies at the hand of another man? How is that an exception to the rule?

  LOVE AND VIOLENCE ARE INSTINCTS quite similar in terms of intensity, they both set out in pursuit of the object of their desire, of the prey, seeking, whatever the cost, to take mastery of it, to possess it, and they culminate in the feverish physical action turned against that object. Their specific form is excitement, which can attain peaks of frenzy. An unrestrainable impulse to react against the object that causes the stimulus, in the most astonishing manners and with the greatest intensity. By virtue of this hybrid, lust can drive us to acts that are usually an expression of hatred, anger, and brutality. In our handling of the bodies of others, if it isn’t love that guides our actions, it’s possible that what will be manifested is ferocity. Unless affection, attraction, and desire are awakened toward that body, it is quite likely that the imp
ulse will arise to destroy it, as if to punish it for failing to arouse positive feelings. Just for the sake of feeling something, out of the yearning emotional desire for warmth at whatever cost, there springs a bestial instinct, hatred gushes—it’s still an emotion, a sentiment, after all. Hatred is a perfect antidote to nothingness. It is capable of establishing an alternative relationship to love, and an even more effective one. A person can reject love, but can’t reject hatred, it always hits its mark, it invariably strikes the target. There are men who, if they do not love a woman, have no alternative but to murder her. In any case, they feel obligated to make a strong statement to her. Otherwise her body becomes intolerable, her breasts and her thighs a derisive provocation, her very existence an insult.

  IT’S NOT JUST A CURSED, Romantic cliché: there is a bond, as powerful as it is mysterious, between lust and death, between sex and murder, but also between sex and suicide, especially during adolescence, when it’s by no means an easy matter to tell one impulse from another and every emotion sweeps over us like a crashing wave.

  The desire to make others suffer often springs from the desire to suffer, projected outward. By exchanging our own sensations with those of others, and taking those of others for our own, we live and experience in the first person what they live and experience, and we attribute to them what are in fact our own thoughts and sensations.

  TO PRODUCE IN ORDER TO DESTROY: an incessant activity to which we tend laboriously, like a spider spinning its web, that tiny scale model, that miracle of engineering suspended in midair, to capture and cocoon and kill. The act of self-affirmation is a violent one. The desire to live, to reproduce, to acquire space and time and strength, is steeped in violence. Mating is not something of which all are assured: it’s something you must win for yourself. In nature, most males never copulate even once in their lives. The degree of aggressiveness necessary to win a female isn’t directed against her alone, but first and foremost against the other males competing for the chance. In any case, the spectacle of violence is for the benefit of one and all: if it is directed against the woman, it sends a clear message to all the other women, to make sure they understand who’s in charge; if it is directed against the men, it serves to ensure that the woman realizes she’s dealing with a dominant male, and will give in. (Instead of physical violence, we can just substitute power or money, that is, more sophisticated and complex forms, sublimated through many successive stages, which give the impression of shifting away from their predatory origins until they are forgotten.)

  A MALE MIGHT HAVE IMAGINED that his sex organ was the most natural thing in the world, that animals spent their days copulating with whoever happened along; while it’s only men and women who make things difficult, invent rules and obstacles and interdictions, from courtship to marriage to the prohibition of obscene acts in public places, from “Not tonight, dear, I have a headache” to the taboo against incest, and to religious, moral, and legal prohibitions. Nothing could be further from the truth. The sex life of the poor beasts varies from the grim to the nonexistent.

  22

  NOTA BENE: it is not only the female who is subjugated to the cult of the phallus. In fact, the first who must bow down to the phallus are the very ones who wear a phallus themselves: the small phalluses must submit to the Great Phallus. Does the Great Phallus exist?

  Yes. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the object of this cult materialize when, squatting in a latrine, I was abruptly called upon to bow my head at the passage of a wooden pole, like the ones that surveyors hold up for their measurements, known as the “pool cue,” carried in procession by senior soldiers (that is, soldiers who had been in the service longer than me, even if they were a few years younger than me), and then to kiss it.

  “Kiss the pool cue, insect!”

  And I kissed it. I kissed the Great Phallus, during my naja, or mandatory military service, in a gesture of submission.

  Who can say if this ritual still exists in the barracks of Italy. One thing is certain: the term “naja” no longer does.

  THE MEMBER OF A MALE COMMUNITY, who lives in it for a long time or even for his entire life, is generally sadistic, narcissistic, obsessed with the power that he exercises and submits to on a daily basis, and homosexual, either practicing or latent. Otherwise, he won’t be able to hold out. Even those who spend only limited periods in these communities (for example, obligatory military service) are subjected to the ethos in question: hierarchical and homosexual in tendency. They adjust to it, they submit to it, passively or with great discomfort, they incorporate it with enthusiasm or genuine wickedness, they rebel against it: these are all possible attitudes that, however, do not so much as scratch the structure of an exclusively male society, where the addition of the countless differences among individuals only tends to add up to a sum that never varies. Indeed, all the contrasts that may crisscross it only end up strengthening the structure, since it inevitably wins over the singularities, transforming the exceptions into exemplary cases. Whether you accept it or reject it, the dominant morality remains the same. The eccentrics exist precisely to confirm the law of virility.

  IN ORDER TO ENJOY THE RIGHT TO MATE, you have to get the better of someone, in a competition that can unfold at levels of extreme violence or else where the violence is reduced to a minimum, left masked, stylized, silenced, transformed into a skirmish, both verbal and ritual, until it is transformed into its opposite, that is, courtesy. What we call chivalry encompasses and fuses together the entire range of possible attitudes, from the most sadistic to the most delicate. Your adversary, in this duel, as imaginary as it is real, is not only the object of your desire, to be won both in the sense of defeat and of gain, that is, the woman; but you also have other adversaries, namely all the men near that woman, close either in terms of kinship or social group, or else because they enlisted in the competition that features her as first prize. To rape a woman not only means bringing aggression to bear against her, violating both her and her body, but also breaking the general rules governing the competition among males for the possession of females. This competition is already tilted unfairly in favor of the handsome and the rich, and it allows for the use of forms of psychological domination that go by the generic name of seduction: but it rules out the use of full-fledged coercion. Anyone who takes a woman by force must therefore be met with sanctions, not only in the name of that woman and all women, inasmuch as they are potential victims of the same crime, but also on behalf of the men whose right to attempt to possess that woman by legitimate means has thus been violated. And that’s not to mention the men from whom that woman has been, so to speak, or in some cases literally, stolen, abducted, because she formed part of a nuclear family or relationship: that is to say, the fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons. In the exemplary instances of rape that occur especially in wartime, or in those scale models of wars that are gang wars, rape is perpetrated intentionally before their eyes, and the men look on, helpless, bound, and beaten, to make it obvious just how incapable they had been of protecting their women. The schema unfolds, never changing. Armed men burst into a home, they separate the woman from her family members, who are then chained or clubbed senseless or held prisoner at gunpoint, they tie her to a radiator so that she is forced to bend over or kneel or else they lay her down, holding her by the arms and ankles, legs spread-eagled, and they rape her in front of her people, taking turns. She will suffer, her mother will suffer, her small children will never be able to forget this scene; but for the adult males present, who can glimpse it through the red of the blood oozing down from their forehead, from the blows they received, the grief and pain will be slightly different, no greater certainly, but more significant, more eloquent, because the real message of that violence is directed first and foremost at them. They are, to some extent, at least symbolically, jointly responsible, accomplices. They must come to an understanding that what is happening to their wife, or daughter, or mother, or sister is really their fault.

  Feminine s
ociety reacts by identification with the victims. Masculine society, on the other hand, reacts as if it had been challenged, menaced at the very core of its existence, the heart of its authority. Rape affirms the criminal authority of some males, thus defiling and disenfranchising the authority, considered legitimate, of all the others. One day a prostitute managed to escape from Sade, who was whipping her bloody, by lowering herself out a window, stark naked. The Marquis pursued her across the fields, but soon his pursuit was transformed into headlong flight, because a howling mob of furious peasants was hot on his heels, determined to avenge the mistreated whore, who was a member in good standing of their community.

  THE MAN WHOSE WOMEN (wives, mothers, daughters, sisters) are raped is forced to confess his helplessness. Instead, a man is worthy of being considered a real man if he proves capable, at the same time, of protecting his own women and ravishing with impunity the women of other men. The body of raped women is nothing more than the physical medium used to send a message to their men: clear, brutal, and mocking. That is the reason it’s often the husband or father or boyfriend, bound and gagged, who’s forced to witness the rape to which she’s subjected: it’s not just an excess of sadism, it’s the genuine meaning of the act. A quintessential affirmation of supremacy.

  . . . in the profound experience that belongs

  to the collective memory, every penetration

  reproduces the rapes that women suffered

  when enemies invaded the village,