The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  consummated in the midst of the bloody bodies

  of their brothers and father, murdered,

  in a final attempt to defend them.

  THIS WAS THE SOURCE (and still is in traditionalist communities) of the oppression of women within the nuclear family, on the part of father or husband or brothers. “If you want me to protect you, you must obey me. If you don’t obey me, I’ll leave you to the tender mercies of other men.”

  ONCE, when I was studying with his brother, Angelo came in and asked me, in fact, ordered me:

  “Hey, you!”

  “Yes?”

  “What do you like about girls, hmmm?”

  Right then and there, I didn’t know what to answer. What a ridiculous question.

  “All right then, if this is easier for you: what is it about guys that you don’t like?”

  I turned to look at my classmate, hoping that he might help me out in that strange interrogation.

  Angelo went on without waiting for me to answer.

  “Is what you don’t like the body hair? The whiskers?”

  “Well, no . . . that’s true . . . the body hair . . .”

  “Now, tell me loud and clear: what you don’t like is the cock. Say it. Say it! Say: I don’t like cocks. Because if you do, you’re a queer.”

  I hastened to say I didn’t.

  23

  FEAR AND PAIN, in deeds and words.

  Violence is always accompanied by words. Yes, words again, still more words . . . There’s a very close link between words and violence. Mocking the enemy or a prisoner, insulting him, deriding him, threatening him, terrorizing him—all these things give meaning to brutality: you might say that the entire spectrum of truculence is experienced only to create the occasion suitable for the occasional derisory or cruel word, even crueler than the accompanying actions. Violence and eloquence are made for one another. Publicly insulting the enemy, from “Vae victis!” to “Drink, Rosamund!” and “Let us allow the young prince to go first . . .” which echoes in the Nibelungenlied, before the son of Attila is seized and has his throat cut by Hagen, the mockery that echoes in the ears of the tortured man . . . all these things are integral parts of torture. Did you know that Italy, the birthplace of rhetoric, is the only country in Europe to insist on refusing to acknowledge the fact in legislative terms? Fear and suffering can be experienced as well from words alone, that is, the words that threaten to inflict fear and suffering. You suffer just from hearing them. A prisoner can go mad before his captors touch so much as a hair on his head. With macabre comic humor, the torture chamber was called the “Fun House.”

  SUFFERING IS MANIFESTED FOR SOMEONE, before the eyes of someone, either on their behalf or to bring them relief.

  It has been said that the suffering of the torture victim undoes the reality around him. I read those words somewhere, that pain “unmakes the real.”

  In the case of the CR/M, the reverse happened: for the two young women, something unreal took shape, became tangible (“It made real the unreal”): their suffering constructed around them a world that would once have been unthinkable. The nightmare materialized. Perhaps in order to be able to understand what it means to be tortured, you need to try imagining undergoing an operation without anesthesia.

  The victims, then, reduced to being their miserable bodies and nothing more, just tortured bodies, a mass of pain-racked limbs.

  And the pain propagates in various ways: through violent physical acts and in words, in the circuit of the mind. Imagining the suffering and expecting the worst aren’t just anticipations or prefigurings, but rather direct experiences of suffering. You suffer while waiting for suffering just as much as you do while experiencing it, and then while reliving it in your memory. The punches you receive hurt in the same way as those threatened or recollected.

  Rapists use doubled fists and flat-hand slaps or wrap their hands around the necks of their victims both to overcome their resistance and because it’s part of the pleasure of tormenting them. The best way to put an end to a struggle is by strangulation. The lack of ability to breathe induces an indescribable panic in the victim and paralyzes her.

  The screams of one girl terrorized the other

  making her feel the same physical pain

  inflicting upon both of them the same wounds

  even when it was just one of them being tortured.

  The terror of waiting to be hit can hurt

  more than the blows themselves when they come.

  The fear of being killed was enough to kill them.

  In your imagination is already contained every torture

  and it is there, and it is then, that we become inhuman, we descend

  below the threshold of humiliation and dishonor:

  suffering in advance the terror of suffering . . .

  PEOPLE WHO ARE SUFFERING get on other people’s nerves. The ones who were bothered most of all by the screams and begging of the young women were their kidnappers: the girls were crying and shrieking, and that just made them even more unbearable. It has been shown that many killings take place when the murderer simply can’t take the sound of the whining anymore, as if he himself wasn’t the cause of those cries of pain, and was just bored or disgusted at the victim’s lack of self-control.

  NOW, TO GET BACK TO SEX: in the sixties, it was liberatory, in the seventies, punitive. You can detect this in the pornography of the respective decades. This is not a contradiction, it’s a natural development, or rather an evolutionary leap. The step from liberation to punishment is far more logical than you might imagine: you punish those who have liberated themselves, doing it with the same weapon they used to attain that liberation, sex, and you chastise those who were emancipated—namely, women—by showing them the dark side of that very same emancipation. Each and every conquest of territory by freedom is paid for with exposure to a recoil, a backlash, that is usually inflicted with the same tool that had been used to advance, to progress. Liberty, technology, money, prosperity, oil, airplanes, plastic, TV, computers—they all turn against their discoverers and inventors, like HAL 9000 in Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The cock, celebrated as a fungible pleasure-giving device for young women, finally liberated, in the course of just a few years was transformed into an instrument of anger and punishment.

  I REMEMBER how some of my female classmates at Giulio Cesare High School imagined, speaking aloud, the sexual dimensions and performance of a classmate of ours (now a television journalist): “He must have a cock like a Stalin.”

  A typical piece of demonstration equipment, the Stalin was a pick handle around which a banner was wrapped: of the two components that made up the object, the banner served a symbolic purpose, to be waved and displayed, and the pick handle was to be used in case of a street fight. One thing was light and impalpable, the other was stiff and good and solid and heavy.

  It wasn’t just in their left-wing bird brains that a cock was associated with a blunt, heavy object. Oh, yes, hardness, the quintessence of masculinity. Books have been written on the subject. The stiff as opposed to the soft, etc.

  WHO CAN IDENTIFY the source of the feeling that intercourse conceals something dangerous, at the very instant it is undertaken, or later, in a disastrous consequence? Every seduction is fatal: just as the eventuality of pregnancy is implicit in the act, and therefore of a new life, likewise you can sense the danger of death. In mythology, we find countless cases that make the point: a woman avoids her wedding, or refuses to consummate it, or else consummates it with the knowledge that she will thus be killing the man with whom she lies down; the man on his part hesitates, perplexed, afraid that in the depths of that trivial act there may be lurking something murderous, fatal. A trap. Every time a knight strips off his armor to lie with a maiden, he is putting his life in danger. The funny thing is that they’re both in danger, whether it’s the knight who accepts the maiden, or if it’s the maiden who agrees to lie with him, or even if either he or she refuses to lie with t
he other, thus arousing the fury of their wounded pride! In any case, it opens a wound that cannot be healed, either the wound of the virgin who is one no longer, or else by tarnishing the knight’s honor, damage is done in his breast or her womb. Every time that Sir Gawain reaches his hands out to touch the maiden who has ordered him to spend the night with him, swords stab out from the bed to run him through; for having done the same thing, Holofernes loses his head, Samson loses his hair, and so on. A flicker of suspicion had put them on their guard, and yet they went ahead . . . blinded by their libido. If they don’t kill each other, lovers still choose a victim to sacrifice on the altar of their intercourse: my dear man, if you want to go on fucking me, then cut the head off that crazy preacher, Yohanan. Directly or obliquely, sex leads to a beheading. Men fall asleep, never to reawaken, or to find themselves prisoners, helpless, contaminated, sent straight to hell. Sex is the most powerful weapon of all magic and artifice: by threatening her with his sword and taking her by force in her bed, Ulysses strips Circe instantly of all her powers. By entering her, he enters another world. Penetration is the riskiest act you can commit: things will never be the same as before. You might be imprisoned like that necrophile gravedigger of Moscow, trapped in the vagina of a dead woman, or else be greeted the morning after with a message on the bathroom mirror in lipstick, welcome to the world of aids; but even when husband and wife go to bed together, they’re running the risk of contamination, endometriosis, fibroids . . . the penis given a chemically induced erection at the cost of a heart attack . . .

  SEX IS A SINGULAR SORT of prison whose bars keep you from getting in, rather than getting out: what you want, what you desire is inside, it’s a secret, hidden the way that genitalia normally are. I know few people who haven’t been obsessed with this for most of their lives and, without fear of contradiction, I think that I can state that intelligent people, and especially the most intelligent ones, the most curious and creative ones, either were or still are.

  24

  IREMEMBER LISTENING to Angelo’s confessions on TV. Face-to-face with a woman whose brow was furrowed but who was willing to take note of his delirious statements. And then there was the myriad array of spontaneous statements in which he declared that he had been guilty or else a witness to a great number of crimes, a latter-day confirmation of what I had once read in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, and namely that “it is indeed possible to feel an intoxicating pleasure in recounting one’s foul deeds, though one has not even been asked about them,” to which I would add, without even having necessarily committed them. The pleasure of self-accusation.

  “ANGELO, yes, an angel, the angel of evil . . . but still, a well brought-up angel.” He kisses the hands of the ladies who come to confer with him in prison . . . women interested in his crime.

  He has always cultivated the sentiment of friendship, of brotherhood.

  And the family, deeply Catholic, brings up their son in accordance with their values, certainly never dreaming that . . .

  His friends, his peers, his accomplices: the first is a psychopath (editor’s note: the only one currently out on the street, a free man); the other was brought up in the heart of his family in such a stern and strict manner that he went out and started committing armed robberies to be able to put in his wallet the money that his parents, though rich, stingily refused to give him.

  Angelo speaks with a drawling Roman accent.

  He claims credit for himself as a “well-known hitter.”

  In his youth he was avowedly in favor of the Nazi concentration camps.

  The first passion of his adolescence wasn’t love for a specific woman, but hatred for all women.

  And then the idea of dragging someone else into the crime, to make them vulnerable to extortion, get them involved in something grave, serious . . . which means the murder was planned upon, premeditated . . .

  Now he admits it, while back then, at the trial, of course, he didn’t: “Things went the way they went, the way these sort of things go . . . we threatened them . . . we scared them . . . we had sex with them . . .”

  One girl dies, the other one survives by a fluke of pure chance . . . “Good luck from her point of view . . . bad luck from ours . . . certainly not because we took pity!”

  “But now I’ve changed . . . I’ve changed . . .”

  Thirty-five hours of torture . . . the sense of domination . . . “Who knows what was going through their heads? We were prisoners of a role, no one wanted to look weak, we had a pact of blood . . . and it pushed us to become increasingly ferocious . . .”

  And then there’s the lie, which makes such a good impression on delicate souls: “Prison did me a lot of good . . . in prison I was brought into contact with reality . . . I’ve finally become human!”

  At the trial he could sense the hatred that was building up against him.

  “As long as I’ve been behind bars, I’ve been living in a state of complete indifference about my own fate.”

  The girl who survived speaks with a lisp, maybe she always had it, or maybe it’s because of the teeth that she had broken . . . “You hit me in the teess, ’at’th what you did!” “It’s obvious that she’s acting . . . and she’s doing a bad job of it, too!”

  Once in prison, Angelo took part in roughly a hundred trials as a witness (always found to be unreliable, even though some prosecuting magistrates with a thirst for revelations at first believed him).

  After the CR/M, 1975, and before murdering again, and for certain two women this time, in 2005, he’d confessed to seven murders.

  “Yes, I’m ashamed to be the way I am.”

  “To the lawyers, I want to tell you that I never deceived you. I was seriously convinced that I’d brought under control all the negativity that I had inside me . . . I was certain that I would be able to live a happy life close to those I hold dear (editor’s note: what on earth is he talking about?) without causing any more pain to anyone . . . Perhaps I was fooling myself first of all.”

  Why did he do this? What are the real reasons? Well, it’s not easy to say. “Things happened that made these two women drop out of my heart.”

  “At the mere sight of them, my heart and guts froze solid.”

  Once again, he insists on involving someone else in his crime, he wants accomplices, he wants to commit a grave crime together, “something that will bind them to me forever.”

  The accomplices have to be weak, easily influenced; and that is why he loves them and has no bad thoughts about them: because they’re weak and foolish.

  “When I was alone with A***, I fantasized about walling her in, alive, in a corner of the office.”

  “I’d made sandwiches so we could all eat lunch together, the four of us,” but then he ate them alone, while drinking a Coca-Cola.

  BUT THEY COULDN’T TURN their backs on nature, on life itself; after the pain and the weeping, they ate a meal, like men always do.

  “TOO BAD. Before too much longer, we would have been happy. We would have been one big happy family.”

  The TV journalist becomes self-critical and admits it: “Yes, I had believed him.”

  25

  THERE ARE THOSE WHO SAY that the murder in Psycho is the first eroticized one in the history of film (the young woman naked in the shower), or perhaps, that that scene depicts a murder “too erotic not to give the viewer pleasure.” Voyeurism in fact consists of placing in the service of the audience’s pleasure images that they declare, in words, to be horrible and deplorable.

  It is no accident that Alfred Hitchcock thought that an actress’s most important quality was her vulnerability, the sensation that they inspired of being in danger. At any moment, someone might hurt them. The spectator was supposed to fear for them. Looming over their glamour was destruction, their desirability increased the more their beauty was threatened, indeed, you might say that it was precisely that desire that represented the threat: it meant that they would end up becoming the victims of impulses comparable to the ones that the
spectators felt toward them. It was desire that menaced them, and that menace constituted their desirability.

  What we discovered with the CR/M was that the victim of a rape need not be even somewhat attractive. The press, accustomed to spicing the daily bowl of soup (suffice it to scan the right-hand column of the online editions of Italy’s most respected newspapers, nowadays consisting almost entirely of women half-naked, with the excuse that, variously, they are in Miami, they’re presenting a new collection of lingerie, a wardrobe malfunction allowed a nipple to escape from their T-shirt while out shopping—or else, if we return to the period in which this story unfolds, the pretty naked girls on the covers of the two biggest-selling political newsweeklies, girls who were slapped on the covers to illustrate an endless array of in-depth articles, from birth control pills to political corruption, from terrorism to the drain of capital to foreign countries), found itself at a loss for titillating topics and was forced to hit the accelerator of political and moral resentment. Unlike in other news stories where sex served as a magnet (the most notorious of which, when I was a boy, was the Casati murder, in which perverted games were interrupted by shotgun blasts, with a great deal of brain matter spattered on the walls: but then I could also reference the famous Amati kidnapping, in which the kidnapped girl was seduced by her kidnapper and photographs circulated of the two of them having intercourse), the CR/M was less titillating because of the victims’ total lack of sex appeal and the instinctive repulsion inspired by the rapists. The only way to stitch together an appealing story is if there’s at least one attractive character involved, or at least, if not attractive, of some interest, whether the victim or the torturer, even better if they both are: a handsome bandit (cf. either the Marseillais kidnapper of Giovanna Amati, or Renato Vallanzasca, a.k.a. Il bel René), or a fashion model dragged down into perdition (Terry Broome), a female student of great beauty and a teacher who was a bit of a Casanova (Popi Saracino and his pupil), a wealthy and powerful man (here the line stretches out the door and, as we approach the present day, the list of names is endless, knights of industry, political leaders, champion boxers, soccer champions, basketball champions, high prelates, TV hosts . . .), stewardesses, hostesses, and so on. There, the ideal would be a beautiful airline stewardess, non-Italian, found dead, naked, etc.