The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  Maybe I just wanted to protect her, and I haven’t been able to. And now I feel remorse for not having persisted with my efforts, for example, my quest to steer her clear of the malevolent influence of Gus, which continued even after they broke up.

  He used her the way a knife-thrower or a magician uses the girl he saws in half, but demanding that everyone’s attention converge upon him, upon his hand ready to let fly, on the immense responsibility resting on his shoulders lest something go wrong. None of the things that the two of them did together could be normal, routine: and in his opinion Leda should only be grateful for the fact. Grateful, that is, if during the week of Ferragosto, for example, in the middle of August, when instead of going to the beach like everyone else, they spent those days in the attic organizing the stamp collection that his grandfather left him when he died. “They’re incredibly valuable,” Gustavo would assure her, with a gleam in his eye, “and someday I’ll sell them. That day, I’ll give you a nice gift, since you’ve helped me. Or maybe I won’t, maybe I’ll just keep them here with me . . .” and he patted the side of the dusty stamp albums. “Yes, and I’ll leave them intact, an inheritance for my own son,” he added with a hint of bitter pride, without bothering to wonder or ask her whether she was interested in being the mother of that fortunate heir. Leda in her turn was so alienated that she was incapable of realizing what Herz was offering her as a life, as a tattered rag of a life, as a cerebral surrogate for what two young people can do when they are together. If he called her before dinner, announcing that they wouldn’t see each other that night, in contradiction of what they had planned, he wasn’t honest enough to tell her, “Listen, I just don’t feel like it now, I’m tired,” far from it, he’d tell her that he was very busy, that’s right, he had important things to do, even if in reality those commitments consisted of lying on his bed with his guitar on his belly, staring at the ceiling.

  “So, what did you do last night?” Leda would ask him the next day.

  “I thought,” Herz would have the nerve to reply. And he was utterly serious. He actually believed it. He was seriously convinced that he had done something while lying there sprawled on the bed, wallowing in his frustrations . . .

  Only once did the two of them do anything together, but it was such a singular undertaking, so senseless and dreary, that instead of breaking the siege to the citadel behind the walls of which Gustavo had shut himself up, it confirmed once and for all just how impregnable it had become; and, an even more singular fact, that Leda, too, was now outside its walls.

  A trip. Yes, it’s from the trips taken together that we can better understand the two individuals who make up a couple, and what the sum of the two produces, provided that it’s a sum and not a subtraction. Leda and Gus took a trip to Brazil, but (and here I imagine that it was for a specific request on Herzmutter’s part, I can glimpse in this decision his distinctly self-destructive trait, as well as the way that it was punitive toward the person traveling with him) they chose to go to the unhealthiest and most squalid spot in that whole magnificent nation. Namely, to an immense swamp, extending over thousands of square miles, where people live on stilt houses, doing their best to avoid snakes and diseases, where any living creature that could make it interesting to visit the place lurks unseen beneath the surface of the muddy water, invisible. Leda and Gus spent two weeks there. As was predictable, within three days they had already fallen sick and they spent the rest of their time throwing up and experiencing fulminating diarrhea, emptying their bowels down a hole in the floor of the stilt hut where they were staying. Gus was unwilling to cut short their stay in the villages of that disgusting backwater, in spite of the fact that however badly the fever and the diarrhea might have hit Leda, in him they took a far more worrisome form, often pushing him into bouts of full-blown delirium. Every time he regained lucidity, however, when Leda implored him to leave that place and go to a halfway civilized city, where they could get proper medical care, he replied that “that would ruin everything,” that “you don’t abandon a project just when the challenges are bringing it close to what you were looking for in the first place,” that Leda’s attitude was just “her typical way of setting false stumbling blocks in her own way.”

  “But what are we looking for, here?” she asked, “what is it you’re trying to find?” still laboring under the illusion that there was some logic behind his obstinate childish insistence on staying, and that there really ever could be—in that corner of nature, that patch of Creation shaped especially by the Lord to resemble an urban cloaca, only a thousand times more vast—anything worth discovering, something only Gus knew about, as if he had stored up a surprise finale when he had brought her all the way down there. In fact, there are those who like to conceal the true objective of a journey from their partner, so that the discovery, when it comes, is so much more amazing and delightful. Herz refused to answer that question, simply shaking his head and breaking off all interaction, instead getting up and going over to vomit down the hole.

  There can be no doubt that the couple were risking their lives in that place, or at least were in danger of returning with indelible repercussions from that misadventure. Permanent damage to their health, both physical and mental. Something about Leda never fully recovered, some part of her was never healed. Certainly, her love emerged shaken, though reinforced more than undermined. She could boast that she had saved Gustavo, that she had guided him out of that hellhole when, during the last few days, he was frequently unconscious or delirious from the fever, and if he’d been alone, he never would have made it: she had managed to get him onto one of those unsteady native pirogues, she had nourished him, getting into him what little Gus was able to keep down without spewing it out again immediately, and she had dragged him practically senseless though the obstacle course of the airports and, finally, having arrived by God’s will back in Rome, safe and sound, she had cared for him for a couple of months in a ward of the mysterious tropical diseases wing of the Polyclinic Hospital, and there Gus had gradually regained his health. Even a hasty reader of the works of Ariosto will recall that Angelica falls in love with Medoro, who lies wounded, and will surely remember how in the princess’s heart there opened up a depiction of the wound while, day after day, the wound in the body of the young Saracen warrior healed and scarred over. Let’s just say that something of the sort happened to Leda, or rather: the love that in the heart of anyone else would have been utterly crushed by that misadventure, only to be replaced by resentment and scorn, in her heart instead was revived and warmed, by the daily task of caring for the man who was chiefly responsible for those very same mishaps. In caring for Gus, Leda forgot to care for herself, and this makes me think back on so many qualities of hers that I would learn to know in later years. Was this not, however, exactly what she had been looking for? The perverse and powerful mechanism of love invariably pushes those who love closer to the source of their discomfort, their problems, investing them with the mission of saving the person who will ruin them. I don’t believe for a second that Leda was blind, I think she knew perfectly well what kind of a person Gustavo was, though she did not possess a plumb line long enough (there couldn’t be a sufficiently long one on this earth!) to measure the abyss of his selfishness and egotism. So powerful was her desire to get away from herself that, in the end, Gustavo actually turned out to be her ideal man . . .

  From the fog of a long and serious illness, Herz emerged with a single idea in his mind: the title of his next album. The one that would introduce him to a much broader public: Pantano. Morass.

  THE ALBUM’S SUCCESS, though it was more a matter of critical acclaim than of impressive sales, was a blessing for Leda: as soon as he became even slightly famous, in fact, Herz entirely gave up the already minimal attention he had been paying his girlfriend, concentrating his renewed energy on coordinating radio interviews and concerts, at first in tiny clubs but soon in larger theaters, where Leda almost immediately gave up going to see him, because in publi
c he ignored her as if he didn’t even know her. This attitude, rather than offending or wounding her, only reassured her that Gustavo no longer required her devotion: and together with that new confidence, the love that had been rekindled, in the tropical disease wing, for that gravely dehydrated young man, began to dwindle; meanwhile his innate rudeness was regularly repaid in kind by the nurses, who made a moral point of it. Still, their affair wasn’t quick to die. Herz and Leda, in fact, continued getting back together and breaking up, breaking up and reuniting for close to a year, with a week-on, week-off cadence, month-on, month-off: a seesawing relationship that was so inexplicable and confused, there were times that one of them was convinced they were still dating while the other was certain they weren’t. And the truth is that there wasn’t such a sharp difference between the two states of affairs.

  When I started seeing her in the assiduous and singular manner that I described in the previous chapter, I was by no means certain that she had broken up once and for all with Herz. The two of them went on with their game of Fort-Da, the way Freud describes it: toss it, pick it up, toss it, pick it up, toss it even farther and then wait to see if the object will be picked back up . . . From listening to just a couple of tracks from the album Pantano, on the radio, I should have understood in advance that a girl who had placed her heart and (a chill runs up my spine at the thought) her delicate body in the hands of the composer and lyricist of those songs must certainly have some serious problems: whether they were cause or consequence of the fact that she was in a relationship with a guy like him, I could not say at the time. The most widely listened-to hit of the second album, “Hole in the Sand” (I admit that I liked it, actually, when it first came out, and I found myself humming it under my breath, what could I do about it, it had wormed its way into my head . . .), ran as follows:

  Not a word you say—that I don’t know

  For its basic grimness—slimy and low . . .

  And down on the beach

  Don’t you dare steal my pail!

  Or I’ll bury you under a ton of sand

  There’s really no need—of red fury’s hand

  To lay you out dead with a hammer blow

  That’ll stay in your head

  When the guests—when the guests—when the guests—

  Have all gone to bed . . .

  “To lay you out dead with a hammer blow,” da, da, da . . . had really dug its way into my mind.

  A hole in the sand

  To hide all the problems

  Your old plans, all that boredom

  The emotion, so canned . . .

  IN POP MUSIC, the rule is to put out record after record after record. Produce songs, one after the other, collect tour dates, fill each season with hits before the competition can do it, saturate the airwaves, crowd the playlists. The profession of pop singer, which looks like an endless vacation from outside, actually demands that you work very hard and behave like a solid professional. They’re serious people, the ones who work in pop music, and they can’t miss a trick, or else they’re right out of the business, cast into the outer darkness, dead without having to overdose, after the first burst of flame and shower of sparks, they burn out like a roman candle at a village festival. At least, that was the case in the time when our story unfolds. Now the very word “record” has no meaning and no one is in any danger of being forgotten: there’s no such thing anymore as being forgotten. When the widespread but fleeting popularity of Pantano, like a thin layer of fresh snow, vanished, and Gus had nothing to follow up with because he was struggling to find inspiration for a new raft of songs, and the few lame chords he could paste together understandably disgusted him, his inability to relate with himself, let alone with his fellow human beings, gained once again the upper hand. He immediately put the blame for his crisis on the recording industry, capable only of squeezing the talent of its artists until they gasped out garbage, and even his audience, in spite of the fact that they had shown that they liked his music, indeed, the positive response that Pantano had enjoyed (a record that Gustavo now, a year after its release, considered crude and infantile) became, to his eyes, something like proof that the newly acquired fans of Weed actually couldn’t tell good music from a hole in the ground, and that they were fickle and disloyal seeing that they hadn’t hesitated to abandon his band the minute it hit a dry spell. Actually, no one had abandoned Gustavo Herz at all, and if he’d been capable of writing even a minimally decent song in the first place, they would have sought him out, and listened to him, and applauded, and whistled enthusiastically: but you could hardly expect them to buy the same record twice (especially if it was, according to its own creator, “half baked and poorly performed”). That meant it was the right time for Herz to get back together with Leda, in accordance with the classic pattern. In other words, time for more nausea and hypercritical rants. But this time, she put her foot down. She rejected him. Herz was stunned, breathless. He could not understand how such a thing was possible. Leda was my girlfriend now. Herz’s bitterness and laziness and vacuity pushed him out of circulation. He disappeared, from the city, from the world, from the picturesque and highly remunerative field of pop music. Could it be that a new life was beginning for Leda?

  I dig a hole in the sand

  To hide all the problems

  The old plans, all your boredom . . .

  Da, da, da . . .

  I’LL MAKE USE OF A NOTE found in certain notebooks I’ll talk more about later. The author: Giovanni Vilfredo Cosmo, G. V. Cosmo, that’s right, my old literature teacher from SLM.

  To those who cause us pain, we are immensely grateful if they cease to do so. Our gratitude, then, winds up being turned toward those who have hurt us. That explains why some women remain bound to husbands or lovers who mistreat them: it is the moment of truce that binds them to their men with an even tighter knot, to make them love those men more than ever because they have been so generous as to temporarily stop mistreating them. The alternation of brutality and consolation creates a driving emotional rhythm that’s like a dance, in which one of the two dancers is first clutched by the other in a suffocating embrace, and then thrust away with something approaching brutality, expelled, thrust aside, only to be gathered back up and wrapped once again in his arms.

  8

  THE INCORRIGIBLE NEGLECT by the author of the book you’re reading has deprived it of a chapter that might have been interesting, and instead adds a different one that’s brief and melancholy.

  The neglect consists of having put off and postponed (thinking: “There will always be time, later . . .”) the opportunity to interview Signor Paris, the owner of the clothing shop just above Piazza Verbano, a historic establishment of the QT, even though it actually was a replica of the older, original shop, which was close to Piazza Vescovio, and that was why it was called Paris 2, like a sequel to a movie. I go by the place frequently, Piazza Verbano is an obligatory transit point in any travel around the QT, and each and every time I told myself I ought to go in, but then I never did, until one fine day I made up my mind, I stopped, and I entered the shop.

  The last time I’d set foot in there might have been twenty-five years ago.

  Signor Paris was there, old but in fine fettle, surrounded by display cases of the articles that had been his specialty: the casual apparel that, still, when I was a kid, at least in Rome, was rare, and that few shops carried. The famous brands, Levi’s, Lee, Wrangler, etc., jackets boots leather belts and so on, which, with the passing years—like everything else for that matter—became more refined and costly.

  I introduced myself and asked whether, one day, he might be willing to let me interview him, concerning an episode that had transpired many years before . . . and specifically in 1975, the year of the CR/M. A proletarian expropriation that had been carried out against his store, and which I knew a number of my classmates from Giulio Cesare High School had taken part in. I’d always heard people talking about it, and I asked Signor Paris if he would be willing t
o tell me about it. He burst out laughing. “My wife was running the store that day . . . you ought to get her to tell you what happened.” “But is it true that they mostly took boots?” I asked: boots were very fashionable at the time. Camperos. “Ah, the stuff they took . . . the miserable wretches!” And he laughed with a bitter grimace.

  I promised him that I’d soon come back by to make an appointment.

  Then months went by, perhaps as long as a year.

  In the meantime, I wrote other things and I wrote nothing. The proletarian expropriation could wait. I’ll do it next week, I’ll start working on it on Monday, I told myself. After all, it’s a separate chapter. When I finally go back to the store, a very courteous woman greets me, the proprietor’s daughter. “I’m sorry, Papà isn’t here, he’s at the hospital for some exams, but you’ll find him back here starting next week.” I expressed my best wishes to the woman. “Please give your father my regards and tell him that I came by to see him, if he remembers me.”

  Again an interval of neglect ensued.

  Neglect, neglect . . .

  A couple of months, more or less, had gone by when a young woman who works at the De Paolis Film Studios, on the Via Tiburtina, to whom I had chanced to mention the shop near Piazza Verbano, the story of the proletarian expropriation, and the fact that I was planning to interview the elderly shopkeeper, since she was a close friend of Signor Paris’s family, told me, deeply moved, that he had recently passed away.