The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  You try teaching a class to a guy like that, stuffed to the gills with Lexotan.

  But today, I don’t want to think about Scarano, no.

  If you want to work here in prison, you have to let everything flow over and past you, let it flare and burn the instant after it happens. Shake off mistreatments and pain. The convicts learn it right away, and I’ve learned it from them. From Alfredo Muntula, for example, who just a few days ago kept his cool while the police inspector who had come to serve him with a judicial injunction, which Muntula refused to accept, shouted into his face that he could take that document and “stick it up his a—” “I’ll write to my lawyer,” Muntula had replied, remaining calm, whereupon the inspector blurted: “Well, then, write to your lawyer and tell him that he can take the penal code and stick it up his . . .” etc.

  If you react to these provocations, they’ll file a report on you, and then you can say farewell to various benefits automatically assigned by law: your sentence, virtually shortened for good behavior, suddenly stretches out again as if viewed through the wrong end of a spyglass. Your release recedes into the future. Is it worth it? Nooo. That’s why you learn to put up with things.

  I’ve gone back down to the ground-floor roundhouse, and I stand, swaying, waiting in front of the locked gate. I’m waiting for an officer to come and open it for me. You can wait a long time, there, in front of the bars lined with a sheet of plexiglass. Theoretically, if no one shows up, or if the officer is on the phone, or maybe even has his back turned, pretending he hasn’t seen you, you could use an iron ring hanging from the bars and bang against it, once, twice, three times, until someone comes to open the gate for you, but I personally hate that sound. I hate it. It always depends on who happens to be in the roundhouse, the likable officer or the jerk, the one who will never go out of his way to notice you’re there. My teacher’s badge only partly protects me from their rudeness. The main thing is to remain calm, take deep breaths. I usually hum to myself to take my mind off it, and to ready myself for the fresh air of the outdoors.

  Today, luckily, there’s a kind, solicitous officer, the nicest one, short, quick, smiling, and he has the key in his hand immediately.

  After this, just five more gates, and then I’ll be a free man.

  14

  THAT’S ALL, FOLKS.

  The effect of the publication of this article, a mix of the sentimental and the giddily foolish, with a dollop of candor of which I’m now rather ashamed (if you really wanted to lay it on, with the hyperrealism of the grimmest events of life behind bars . . .), was the beginning of my troubles. I managed to turn everyone against me. The day after its publication, I walked through a black cloud of hostility. I received a threatening letter from the warden. Too bad I didn’t keep it, it might have come in handy, who knows . . . but instead I decided, after reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations and being swayed by its point of view, to discard unpleasant things. Immediately.

  Are there thorns on the path home? Then step around them! A bitter cucumber? Spit it out immediately.

  That’s what the wise emperor suggests.

  But that wasn’t enough: at the MS they’d started to make my life bitter (and I couldn’t just spit it out . . .) in the daily routine, which isn’t that hard to navigate, all you need to do is comply with the regulations, which slows down all procedures: painstaking searches on my way in and out, locked gates with guards who pretended not to see me or who would tell me, “Just wait there,” for no good reason, for a good fifteen minutes. Endless rigmarole before I could bring an ordinary rubber eraser to class so I could correct papers, turned over and over in querulous hands as if trying to theorize some potential criminal use. Certainly, a boycott is the greatest pressure that can be brought to bear on someone like me who, when all is said and done, is a free man and will be going home in just a few hours. But the saddest thing is that the very same officer I’ve described as solicitous had suddenly turned hostile: he was probably embarrassed to have been cast in a positive light in my article, his coworkers must have thrown it in his face: “Nice job! So you treated that piece of shit with kid gloves?” I had written that he was nice to me, and he’d taken it the wrong way. Me, nice?! Forcing himself, he’d transformed his innate personality and done what he could to come off as a tough guy.

  The splash of cold water of my piece of journalism had little if any effects on the students, except for the comic effect caused by the name I’d used to rebaptize the young Sicilian, here referred to as Wilmo: I’d come up with it when I remembered Fred Flintstone’s wife and the phrase he shouted so loudly that it echoed through the cave: “Wilma! Get my club!!”

  In other words, with my edifying little account, I didn’t even win for myself among the inmates the title of their paladin and defender, a title that I don’t even aspire to, nor did I gain the stripes of avenger of the rights trampled underfoot: from that article I gained nothing but headaches, which reinforced my belief in the old adage that it’s better not to write about such things. But we did at least have some laughs about Wilmo, and from then on that became his nickname.

  In the end, I received the message: “Get out.” Got you, loud and clear. I applied the sage precepts of the philosopher-emperor. So I bided my time and bit my tongue and then, in September, I applied to go back to teaching the rank-and-file prisoners, transferring out of maximum security.

  TO CONCLUDE THE EPISODE: I later met the blond girl Jervi slapped around outside the school, first and last name and proper introductions, a dozen years ago, more or less, around 2001. Rosetta Mauri, known to her friends as Rosi. She was no longer pretty, almost all her good looks wasted away, terribly skinny, wrinkles around her mouth, etc., but her eyes were bright and lively and she still wore her hair long, blond, too light colored to be natural, as it once had been. How did I manage to recognize her? Well, you might not believe it, but she was dressed exactly the same way she had been that day, when she had sat sobbing astride her Ducati, and then had roared off down Via Nomentana, leaving the kid who had tried to comfort her in her dust: she wore a stiff white Scottish cable-knit sweater, flared purple pants, and ankle boots. Thirty years in which everything had changed, and yet nothing had changed: it might still be the same sweater, I thought to myself . . . it had withstood all the laundry cycles, which was more than could be said of her complexion, sadly. As ill-tempered as she had been that day in the distant past, that’s how welcoming and compliant Rosi was when I met her again. I knew her by reputation, in the meantime she had become a talented television producer, working in a team with her second husband, and she knew me by name as well, but neither of us had ever put face to name, never shaken hands, never exchanged phone numbers, much less had we ever (I immediately formulated the thought in my mind, accustomed to leaping to conclusions, recklessly, as if the words and corresponding images were hurtling out of a slingshot, in the presence of an attractive woman) brushed lips, sad to say, nor had our bodies ever been joined. I refrained from saying that I had recognized in her the girl on the motorcycle who had had her face slapped by Jervi (R.I.P.), something I was only certain of, one hundred percent, when she burst out laughing at some stupid joke I had made—thus proving, since Rosi was by no means a stupid woman, that she was doing it to butter me up—and she hid her face in her hands. That’s right, just before she started laughing she put her hands up to hide her face. As if it were instinctive to conceal it when she laughed or while she cried or when she was faking it: feelings, ideas, cheerfulness or sadness, unconfessable thoughts, to be revealed only behind a scrim of fingers. Her fingers were skinny and long and she plunged their tips into her bleached hair. I very much liked this gesture of what might be either shyness or cunning, but in any case it was seductive. At that point I could no longer resist and I asked her: “So, do you still have the Ducati?”

  I TOOK ROSI MAURI TO BED THREE TIMES. The first time, a month after we’d met, was in Milan, where I happened to be for meetings with my publisher, while she was
working on a television show. It was no particular challenge to arrange to meet, and clear to both of us what the purpose of that meeting was to be. I was a guest in the studio of an artist I knew indirectly, a messy place crisscrossed with cables, multiple electric outlets, clamp lights, paintings turned around to face the wall, metal shelves, stacks of CDs and DVDs, and a powerful-looking double-screen video-editing device; and in the middle of the big room, a bed with a very hard mattress and a double headboard, which I had covered with clean but unironed linen sheets. Fifteen minutes before she arrived, having finished all her meetings, around six in the evening, it started to snow, at first lightly and intermittently and then in increasing gusts, so hard and violent that you could hear the loud thumps of the flakes hitting the panes of the old, ramshackle windows, slapping resoundingly. Luckily, the heaters in the studio were purring along famously, so that the minute Rosi entered the studio, bundled up and covered with a dusting of fresh snow, on her scarf, her chest, her woolen cap, she felt the immediate, stunning blast of heat, and her face went from dull, leaden, chilled, bewildered, all at once to tomato red, bright as a rose burning in the winter fire. One yard into the studio, that is, just far enough to be able to shut the door behind her, and I had wrapped my arms around her, freeing her at least of the cap and scarf, letting her hair, blonder than the last time, fall around her shoulders and onto my chest, tips drenched with snow, and then indifferent to the fact that frozen crusts of snow were raining onto me, I undid the bottom two buttons of her long woolen overcoat, spread open the two sides and thrust in a hand, lifted her skirt and discovered that, underneath, she was wearing those stockings we call Parisians, or over-the-knee socks, with elastic at mid-thigh, which have the effect of keeping deliciously cool the flesh that is left uncovered, the way a bottle of champagne might be if left in an ice bucket. Instinctively, Rosi bent and lifted one leg and laid it against me, with her knee above my hip, baring the stocking and the portion of thigh, nude to the crotch, which was white, no, really, colorless, as if there could be something in nature that was paler than snow or ice, and then she hopped along backward toward the wall in the front entrance, and leaned back against it, clutching me even tighter and searching confusedly for my mouth with hers.

  THE NEXT DAY, in a chilly-looking Japanese restaurant, where I ate little or nothing, or at least nothing that I considered edible, paying no serious attention to those little rounds of cold, raw fish, I met with my publisher, jollier and more cynical than ever, who made use of the expression “Non c’è trippa per gatti,” literally, “there’s no tripe even for cats,” reasonably appropriate to the type of restaurant, to make it clear to me in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t dreaming even for a second that he’d be able to sell a single copy above initial sales projections of my wonderful new book, no more than the tiny print run, in other words, nor did he intend to lift a finger to push it, to bring up sales, because in the meantime (“You hadn’t heard? That’s on you. You live out of touch with the real world, caro . . .”) another book had come out, with almost the same plotline, far worse written but with much greater commercial potential than mine, a book that—the week after its author appeared on TV—had sold no fewer than ten thousand copies a day and promised to go on selling at that clip, actually, even better than that, much better, better and better. But I was still half dazed from my encounter with Rosi, steeped in a blurred sensuality, my mind too dulled to cultivate any specific wishes or claim my rights, and I couldn’t bring myself to take it personally, or at least if I did I didn’t show it—though deep down inside I was truly miffed, because of my dulled senses mixed with my usual foolish pride, I didn’t let so much as a hint of dissatisfaction seep through, indeed, I acted superior and detached—and that was wrong, terribly wrong, because the minute the publisher realized that I was willing to stop short when presented with a fait accompli, when he saw that I wasn’t protesting, wasn’t demanding, that I didn’t seem determined to fight for something, something more, something better, he seized the opportunity and changed the subject, and arrivederci Roma, it was straight to anecdotes, which took up the rest of the forty-five minutes allotted to my audience with him.

  The “sporting” attitude that I’ve always adopted in these situations, playing the gentleman “qui se pique de rien,” is unsuccessful. All things (including money, success, and love) come to those who really want them and fight to get them, with all means necessary, get it?

  THE ELECTRIC HEATERS had raised the temperature in the studio to the threshold of the intolerable, while outside, in the darkness, a blizzard was battening down all of Milan under a blanket of snow. I’ve never gotten used to it, nor will I. In Rome, the apartments are always left on the verge of being chilly, and that’s how I prefer it: in the tropically heated apartments of Milan, I’d prefer to throw open the windows and let the snow come in, but with that snow, at least, a breath of cool air . . .

  Thanks to the overheating, though, Rosi was lying naked on top of the sheets, on her tummy, dangling one leg bent in the air, and her face buried in the pillow, swamped by the highlights of her hair. Which I liked. Then she rolled onto her back, displaying her front to me, her breasts and her belly relaxed by her pregnancies. I could now look at her as I pleased and finally get to know her. I thirstily admired at some length the devastation that time had worked on her body and face, in spite of which she remained an attractive woman, actually, a very attractive woman, as if that lost beauty were especially alluring precisely because it was no longer there, and was present only as a preliminary sketch or a ruin in the aftermath, forcing the observer to make an intense, inspired, melancholy effort of the imagination that was also exciting, sharpening one’s sensual faculties in the reconstruction of what must once have existed: the magnificent beauty that Rosi must have been as a girl. Think of her breasts, at age twenty . . . wonderful, superb . . . think of those long legs, now broken down at the knees, and what they must have looked like at twenty . . . think of her beautiful mouth, whose upper lip, thinned out now and riven with tiny vertical clefts, think of what that mouth must have been like when those lips were full and prominent, in fact, don’t think of it, remember, O mind of mine, remember clearly, O eyes, because you’ve seen those lips yourself, swollen and puffy after Jervi’s fist had smashed into them.

  “IT WASN’T MY MOTORCYCLE, it belonged to my brother . . . I’d taken it without asking . . . I wanted to impress that asshole . . . (curious, isn’t it? that Rosi, too, just like the Prince, should have used that word to describe Jervi, my former classmate, subsequently disgraced) . . . and I didn’t have the registration, much less a driver’s license, I’ve never gotten one . . . I still don’t have one now . . . later on the police stopped me while I was racing around Rome like a lunatic, I wanted to go jump off the bridge over Corso Francia . . . can you imagine a Roman policeman saying anything to a sixteen-year-old girl, blond, and in hysteria . . .? Before you knew it, he might just as well have gotten down on his knees and proposed to me. When you’re pretty and you’re in love, you can make everyone fall in love with you, with just a snap of the fingers, everyone . . . except for the guy you really love. And I was head over heels in love with that friend of yours . . . No, there’s no need to tell me that he wasn’t your friend, I already know that, Stefano didn’t have friends, male, much less female . . . he had women, women who were older than him. He had gone to bed with the mother of one of your classmates, he told me so to get me jealous, as if there was any need for that . . . what an asshole . . . and I was so in love with that asshole, you wouldn’t believe how much . . .! Two or three years must have gone by and I still loved him, I was out my mind with love for him, but he didn’t even have my phone number anymore, it was as if I was dead to him . . . and I would wait for him outside his building, I’d look up to see if the light was on in his bedroom, and if it was on but turned down low, I’d imagine that there was a girl up there with him, that he’d put her colorful bra over the lamp on the night table, just think w
hat an idiot . . . I felt sick at the thought . . . and then if there was no light on at all, I’d wring my hands in anguish, trying to imagine where he could be . . .

  “. . . so one time I followed him, on the Ducati bike, which had a broken headlight at that point, in order to see who he was going to visit, and I staked out the building where he had parked, and waited for him . . . and then I got the idea of wrecking his car, and taking my revenge in that way, even though the car didn’t belong to him, it was his father’s, an armor-plated Mercedes-Benz, but what difference does that make, I told myself, now I’ll go and break all the side mirrors, I’ll key the hood . . . my signature, R-O-S-I . . . and just for a change, I was crying.

  “Time passed, and I still hadn’t made up my mind to take my revenge, when I saw a car pull up, and a young woman got out, tall, made up, and dressed as if she was going to a party. She had a bucket in one hand, and she strode briskly toward that asshole’s Mercedes . . . I couldn’t believe my own eyes . . . it was a can of paint that she was carrying, and she started pouring it over the roof of the car, over the windshield and windows, onto the hood, but not angrily, just methodically, taking care not to get any on her dress and shoes, until she had covered almost the whole car. The cream-colored Mercedes was now black. I sat there open-mouthed watching that woman take her vengeance, a vengeance that she had planned much better and more dispassionately than I had—what’s more, she had implemented her plan against Stefano before I had a chance to lift a finger. She threw away the empty paint can, giving it a kick so that it rolled all the way to the sidewalk, and that was her last angry gesture. Then she climbed back into her compact car, started it up, and tore out of there.