“Give me a day’s notice.”
AND HE SHOWED UP. We shook hands. I led him into the living room and offered him a seat. He was still skinny, slightly bowed, his hair long, a pair of eyeglasses. Jacket, tie, and black trousers. Shapeless shoes with thick rubber soles. I asked if he wanted something to drink but he said no. If it weren’t for the myth that trailed behind Arbus, the beginning of our first meeting in all these years wouldn’t have been all that different from when a door-to-door salesman comes in with an attractive offer for a new contract for electricity or natural gas or the Internet. Or maybe there was something different, because I never feel so awkward with a Folletto vacuum cleaner salesman. My heart doesn’t race like this. I don’t expect my life to rewind.
Arbus noticed my discomfort and with a smile decided to accept my offer of a drink.
“No, wait, I changed my mind, yes . . . I’d gladly drink a chinotto, if you have one.”
A chinotto?
He bared teeth and gums in a broader smile, narrowing his eyes, and there I recognized my old classmate more clearly, oh yes, Arbus, skinny old fishbone, Arbus the disbeliever, despair and pride of our baffled priests, disposable genius, sinister and useless relic of those effervescent years, the least sentimental young man who ever knelt down before a religious relic.
“You don’t have chinotto, do you?” He added, in English, “Never mind.”
The marks of his long-ago acne had remained, but I can say that they almost looked good on him, like on certain actors who play the tough guy. His haggard pockmarked face peeked out through his long hair, almost entirely white, and it had taken on a strong, decisive character. And his gaze had, so to speak, hardened with a hint of viciousness; the peculiar and lively intelligence that emanated from it no longer seemed to wander through abstract spaces, but instead seemed finally to have landed in this world, where it had encountered obstacles, frustrations, defeats; and it gave the sensation that it had managed to survive, thanks to the resources of stark wickedness each of us possesses, even without imagining it. A naïve intelligence that offers itself naked to the aims of others is quickly devoured. Already, at school, Arbus’s intelligence had clashed with petty cruelty. The cruelty of us, his classmates, not up to his level, the typical cruelty of the priests, small-minded, lurking, slithering, conciliatory—the master of ceremonies of it all was the headmaster, and then there was the petty cruelty of the school in and of itself, Catholic or non-Catholic, a place of watered-down knowledge and intermittent discipline and boredom that remained instead in the purest state: you might say that only the woman who sold pizzas at recess, on some occasions Cosmo and just possibly Brother Curzio himself, who in the gym treated him without any false pity for the graceless awkward being that he was—only these few individuals had confronted Arbus in a direct, frank manner, had either appreciated him or else had clashed openly with him. I myself, on some occasions, had concealed our friendship from the others, in order to avoid being associated in the mockery and criticism that they reserved for him. I was glad to see him so manly and calm, now that he was well along in years. I was only partly aware of the bulldozing that life had lavished on him, running over him again and again, crushing him under red-hot weights. Certainly, the burning of the apartment, the painful story of his father . . .
“I READ SOMEWHERE THAT YOU WORK in prison . . . that you teach writing classes.”
“No, I don’t teach writing classes . . . nothing creative, believe me. I’m just a standard Italian teacher. Grammar, object complements, subject complements, The Canticle of the Creatures . . . the Hundred Years’ War . . . the same things people study out in the civilian world.”
“It must be interesting, though.”
“Reasonably. But why do you ask about prison?”
“Because I was in prison myself.”
PRISON. An unexpectedly commonplace topic. It ought to be unusual, in this social class. All right, let’s see: I’ve been working in a prison for twenty years, fine, Arbus tells me that he served time, even if not a very long sentence, fine, Stefano Jervi would have ended up behind bars sooner or later, if he hadn’t blown himself or been blown up, and Subdued and Cubbone spent long periods in prison, other classmates of ours and theirs, shorter periods. Fine, fine. And Angelo will be in prison till the day he dies. What an absurd connection between prison and the school we attended.
4
ALL DAY AND EVERY DAY we are in intimate contact with air and water; a little less so with earth, unless we live in the countryside; practically not at all with fire, if we leave aside lighters and gas burners. Have you ever turned up the gas on your stove and observed the flame, without a pan or a pot on the burner?
The ardent crown of tiny light-blue flames, alive . . .
Fire is the great absent presence in our lives and it causes agitation when it appears—the way it darts, dances, caresses things . . . destroys them . . .
From an ordinary fireplace, blazing like a devastating house fire, the sensation that you obtain is of an extraordinary event. A portent.
“THE FIRST TIME, I burned Leda’s dollhouse. Do you want me to tell you about it? It was a little house built by our father, when he had an obsession with the coping saw and balsa wood, for a couple of years, an obsession that of course he got over. Considering the developments that ensued, you might insinuate that he had built it for himself to play with. It is said that fathers, in general, buy electric train sets for their children for utterly selfish reasons.
“I recently had a revelation, when I read somewhere that, when we were boys, we all loved building model kits for a reason that never would have occurred to me: namely that we got high off the airplane glue. The glue we’d brush onto the wings of a Spitfire or a Stuka, before attaching them to the fuselage. We were junkies, in other words.
“So that’s the explanation for the feelings of euphoria we got from that hobby.
“Dad had made the little house for Leda with almost no glue, and using interlocking slots and tabs, on a modern model. It looked like the apartment building where we lived in Montesacro, you remember? Four stories tall with little terraces on the front. The wire railings gave it a touch of sinister realism. In order to help Leda put in and take out her dolls, the entire façade with windows and terraces swung open and lifted up like a lid, but once it was put back into place, the dolls really did seem to live in there, in the various furnished rooms, kitchen, living room, bedroom, so that in order to see what they were doing, you had to get close and peer in the windows like a nosy neighbor. And just who was that nosy neighbor? It was me. When Leda wasn’t there, I’d go into her room and, throwing open the shutters that Papà had carefully attached to each window, with tiny hinges, as if to protect the dolls’ privacy, I would witness the little scenes of domestic tranquillity that unfolded inside that apartment house.
“Leda had not only put all her dolls in there, but she had also let all her plush toys and puppets and marionettes live there too, of different sizes and materials, as were the dolls for that matter, and the fairies, and the resulting mishmash was unsettling. In one dining room, for instance, sitting around the table was a little family consisting of a Barbie dressed lavishly, and then a nondescript little baby doll whose hair, however, had been chopped off with a pair of scissors while on her face a beard and mustache had been drawn with a ballpoint pen. What’s more, this shaven-headed, bearded doll had no clothes on, and her rosy nudity contrasted with the regal attire of the Barbie next to her. I felt a strange heat on my face at the sight of that nude baby doll. Completing that family meal was a man in a suit of medieval armor and a squirrel with an acorn in its paws. In the kitchen of the same apartment a small teddy bear was cooking a meal. The rest of the house was inhabited by dolls dressed to the nines and other dolls that were naked. Also, there was Baby Jesus and Little Red Riding Hood having tea from a tiny set of cups, saucers, and spoons, and in front of them, in the living room where real paintings hung on the walls (my father had
constructed them, using matchboxes with Italian landscapes on them), in a rocking chair, sat resting what was perhaps Leda’s favorite plush toy, a porcupine dressed in Tyrolean attire.
“On the third floor, on the king-size bed in the master bedroom, lying next to each other and staring at the ceiling with their little painted eyes, were a wooden Pinocchio with movable limbs and a naked baby doll, her round mouth open wide. I knew that doll: more than a baby girl, she looked like a Neanderthal, her hair hanging messily over her apelike shoulders, her legs short and bowed, her feet oversized. Like Polyphemus in the cavern, when he tries to seize Ulysses’s comrades, I reached a hand through the window in the plywood wall and pressed on her belly, and out of the obscene orifice in the middle of her face there extended a long red tongue, more obscene still, only to retract, vanishing, the minute I released my thumb from her belly. Pinocchio, motionless, showed no signs of caring that I was groping his wife.
“Well, in spite of all the inappropriate canoodling, it was clean and tidy. Leda liked things to be tidy.
“I liked that tidiness and cleanliness myself, I was almost jealous of it. Just for fun, I moved a few dolls around.
“Since there was no one in the bathroom, I put Little Red Riding Hood in there and, hiking up her cape, I sat her down on the toilet.
“I felt like laughing at the thought that Leda would find her like that, with her underpants pulled down. Once again I felt a burning heat rising from my neck to my cheeks. Then I felt ashamed at this thought of mine, and I felt a burst of rage. At age fifteen, the idea of wasting time fooling around with my little sister’s plush toys! I was seized with a terrible fury and I put the blame, deep inside me, on that stupid dollhouse with all its various idiotic characters inside, it was their stupidity that had passed into me. They were so . . . so immobilized, lying there abandoned in their little rooms, living their dreary lives (by now Leda had stopped playing with them, and limited herself to tidying up the dollhouse and keeping it clean . . .) and then my own life was pretty dreary, seeing that I was spending it studying and rummaging around in my sister’s dolls and teddy bears. I got the idea in my head of grabbing Leda’s dollhouse and shattering it to bits. Until a short while before, everything about that dollhouse had expressed love and satisfaction: everyone in there loved one another. But now, instead . . . so I went into the kitchen and got the butane stove lighter.”
Arbus’s face had contracted into a grimace as he told his story. He continued more or less mechanically to sweep his hair behind his ears as he described in minute detail how he had set fire to his sister’s dollhouse, with such intense concentration that he gave the impression that he still had that scene before his eyes, the flickering flames reflected in the lenses of his eyeglasses. His account went on, lurching, fragmented and intense, and he focused on certain details that were apparently secondary: to name just one, the way that the hands and feet of the dolls melted in the heat. While those tiny fingers and toes melted, drip-drip-dripping, until their gauzy little outfits caught fire, I could have sworn that I’d seen a sparkling tear emerge from under the heavy oversized glasses frames and run down my friend’s cheek, but maybe it was nothing but a drop of sweat.
“I burned my eyebrows and the tips of my hair. I got too close to the fire. But I wanted to see, see it all . . . and warm up, by that merry, crackling little fire.”
“And then?”
“And then . . . I tried to study, to understand what was happening to me. It was incredible and hard to explain the tension that I felt. Every nerve in my body was quivering. My senses became extremely acute, as I imagine an animal’s senses must be, until they hurt, until I was being tortured by the sensations: my eyes were burning, and so were my ears, hands, nostrils, and tongue; I could hear a hiss, a buzz on the surface of my organs as if my body were electric . . . and some interference were passing through it. Then suddenly the tension slackened all at once . . . transforming itself into intense pleasure, as soon as the flames began to burn brightly.”
“Arbus, do you know that poem by Walt Whitman?”
(There, another cultural reference . . . could it be that I have anything—that I think nothing—of my own . . .?)
“Which poem?”
“‘I Sing the Body Electric.’”
“No, I don’t know it. Is it nice?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t really . . . never mind. Go on.”
“An electric body . . . interesting, though, and you ought to . . .”
“Go on, don’t stop.”
“If you like. Yes. The flames . . . When the flames leaped up I felt happy and strong. I was big . . . I was whole. But while I was watching things being destroyed in the fire, I felt the sensation of dissolving myself, and in that way, of being able to rejoin that from which I’ve always been separated. I couldn’t say what that was, but I knew that I was returning to the forgotten, hidden source, from which I originally come. From which, perhaps, we all come. At least, all those who have my same blood. No, it’s not my mother, but something or someone who was there even before . . .”
“Before what?”
“I don’t know, before her, behind her, even deeper . . .”
“Maybe I understand you,” I said, and I meant it.
“Let’s say this: that, illuminated by the fire, I finally felt that I understood everything. That was . . . it was the light of truth. Excuse me, it may seem obvious, but to me that light is irreplaceable. It purified everything that it made glow.”
“And in the meantime it went on burning . . .”
“Yes, but that wasn’t why, that’s not why I was doing it. That was a secondary effect. Fire, instead of destroying, helps me to penetrate, to insinuate myself into that reality of life from which I’ve always been excluded. It sounds bizarre, but I never thought I was destroying anything by burning, but rather that I was making it live. Or bringing it back to life. And feeling alive while I was doing it, while I was in the process, and that I was performing an act of great joy. After they arrested me, I had to submit to a series of sessions with psychologists: there was no other way to regain my freedom. Interesting people, these psychologists . . . and like many well-meaning people, rather stupid. They were convinced, and consequently, they wanted to convince me, that I had set the fire out of frustration, as revenge, because I’m a misfit . . . in order to compensate for who knows what sexual privation, which might be true, I don’t deny it, sure, I’m a miserable wretch, even if I’m certainly not the only one: but the point that these people missed completely, that they couldn’t even begin to imagine, was the joy, the light . . . the purity, the intelligence, the truth . . . the simplicity. All things that in fact I succeeded in touching in the presence of a fire. Started by me.”
“Did they believe you?”
“Believe . . .” Arbus shook his head and sighed. “‘Believe’ is a burdensome word, don’t you think? They believed me the same way I believed them, not a jot more, not an iota less. It’s a preliminary pact. After all, the things you think don’t change a bit from what you believed before. No one really listens to anyone: maybe you’re not even listening to me right now. Forgive me . . . I know that’s not true. They were convinced that I was using fire as a weapon, while for me it was just a show. That’s all. I didn’t want to prove anything or obtain anything, by setting fire to things, except that there are various different ways of taking care of things, and that was how I did it: and it was magnificent. I’ve never done anything spectacular in my life, except for that. From my background, from what little I had told them about myself and my family, the psychologists deduced that I was a solitary individual, easily offended, with resentments against the world and against everybody . . . True, all quite true . . . but also false. A person could size up my criminal profile just from the fact that I wet the bed at night.”
“What do you mean? You were peeing your pants . . .? That’s normal, in boys . . . until how old?”
“Oh, I don’t know, fourteen, fifteen. So
metimes even later.”
Arbus burst into a loud laugh. I can’t remember the last time I saw and heard him laugh, and I had forgotten what his laugh was like.
It was bloodcurdling. But contagious. And in fact, I too started chuckling along.
“They assured me that wetting my pants was my way of manifesting my repressed emotions . . . of giving voice to my malaise . . .”
As he laughed, he revealed his long teeth, which had grown blackened and jumbled, tossing his head back, until his noisy prolonged neighing was suffocated by a series of almost mute hiccups, his throat spasming.
“So anyway, I did eight months behind bars for arson.”
RIGHT AFTER ARBUS LEFT MY APARTMENT, I went online to find the psychological profile of the pyromaniac: and I found a number of clear-cut definitions, some of which corresponded with great precision to my friend. The extreme isolation, the immaturity, the search for a clamorous affirmation of an identity they had always sought to keep hidden, misunderstood, suffering but perhaps to some extent delighting in the lack of understanding from others . . . Yes, I recognized my old schoolmate in these traits. I remembered the profanities with which he had covered his desk the day before leaving the school for good: Hadn’t that been the act of an incendiary, albeit in figurative terms? Weren’t those eight banner-headline letters, after all, the opposite of what the divine flame had carved into the stone tablets, in the movie that the priests had projected for us roughly half a million times, The Ten Commandments? (And then there was Miracle of Marcelino, King of Kings, Ben-Hur and Quo Vadis? and even Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew.) Our Christian education, in other words. The redemption from our own personal misery, in those demented images . . .
Yes. That’s the way Arbus was, it was him, that’s our man. In the flesh. I thought I could see him now, sculpted, ragged and tattered, his long hair plastered to his cheeks, as he dragged the cross in one of the stations of the Via Dolorosa.
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