The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  I LATER WONDERED just which classmate’s mother Jervi claimed to have taken to bed. I gave no consideration to the idea that he might just have been boasting: it had happened as he said, perhaps just once, or else it had gone on for who knows how long. I modestly ruled out my own mother and, gradually, all the other mothers, except for two. Actually, though, I didn’t really have to do all that much work to exclude the candidates, because it was clear to me from the start that it could only be either Ilaria Arbus or else Pik’s mother, Coralla Martirolo.

  THE GIRLS OF MY GENERATION and Rosi’s who had abortions at age sixteen, right after their first experiences of intercourse, or in some cases right after the first and only one, are numerous. Abortion was illegal in Italy, but you could always find a way. Well-to-do families, simultaneously disapproving what was being done but every bit as much considering it necessary, would either convey their daughters out of the country or turn to doctors who were as costly as they were discreet. Poorer families just made do, one way or another.

  (THE MONEYBAGS WHO USED to squire Romina Jervi around every summer, taking her to his island by helicopter, and whom Rosetta never called anything other than “the asshole” in her account, well, I’m afraid I know who he is. Once again, blood ties, family ties, and school ties. He is, in fact, the big brother of another classmate of mine, the umpteenth SLM alum, the perfect prototype of the rich young idler upon whom the Catholic school conferred a gilded patina that, with the passing years, flaked off, what with all the incessant rubbing . . .

  I’ve talked before about this thing with brothers at SLM.

  Romina and Denis Barnetta, Gedeone’s brother, were together for four long years; she was sixteen when they met, twenty when they broke up once and for all, just before their relationship could culminate with a trip to the altar, then children, then divorce. One of those classic cases of the alternative: “Either we get married or we break up.” So they broke up.

  Further consequences of that senseless kiss between Rosi and Romina at the discotheque, a precursor of the lesbian vogue of these past few years: Denis Barnetta reacted to Romina Jervi’s slap with a hail of punches that made her cry and left their marks, then her brother Stefano found out about it and, like James Caan in The Godfather with his brother-in-law, tracked Barnetta down and, once he had found him, managed to drag him out of the car where he had locked himself in, in a frenzy of terror, and beat him silly, shouting threats, after which he threw a terrifyingly jealous scene with Romina, over both the asshole she was dating and the kiss with Rosi, a single occurrence but passionate and deep, a full French kiss, and with his own old girlfriend, for that matter; last of all, he pestered Rosi with a succession of phone calls asking to see her, with the obsessive idea of fucking her one last time, years after he had dumped her, but Rosi turned him down, told him to get that thought out of his head once and for all. And that is the last event in the life of Stefano Maria Jervi that I know anything about, until the night he lost that life in the explosion on the roof of the insane asylum.)

  ONLY NOW, as I reread what I have written in the preceding pages and at the end of the previous chapter, do I realize that, for the lovely Rosetta as well, it must have been Jervi, young Jervi, Stefano Maria Jervi the way he was back in his golden years at SLM, the true point of contact with me, the phantom that led her to seek me out, that made her call me in a playful but explicit tone of voice, convinced her to come visit me, let herself be fucked, standing up, in the front hall of that chaotic studio of a Milanese artist. There was the stunningly handsome olive-skinned prince, seventeen years old, between us, while we rolled and tumbled on that uncomfortable bed, a bed that would leave our backs broken and aching the following day, and she must have thought intensely about his hands, his eyes, his always-erect sex, his arms, while we were making love and my arms were wrapped around her, embracing her in the same way that so many years before on a dusty soccer field those same arms of mine had embraced Stefano after he had scored a goal, with the exact same thrilled jubilation, a sort of enthusiasm mixed with joy of which I am capable nowadays only because in that enthusiasm youth is eternally revived, not my youth, but youth itself, the youth of the world, of the whole world when it is still young, like water gushing up out of the earth in the dark depths of a cavern, in powerful spurts.

  Upon that bed, as hard as rock, lay the naked bodies of three attractive adolescents, strong, dazzling, unconscious, with three wonderful gradations of skin tone and hair color, from honey blond, mixed with ash blond, to corvine hair with bluish highlights, fixed in the light of a perfect age, sealed in upon itself like a translucent shell, vanished now, dead, dead, dead even to those of us who were, thank heaven, still alive—and not a graying man and a no-longer beautiful woman, both accustomed to adultery.

  15

  YOU MIGHT JUST AS EASILY SAY that this story is of no interest to anybody as that this story is of crucial interest to all of us: both things are true. Take me, for instance: I don’t give a damn about it anymore, and I never really did give a damn about it, not even at the time when it first unfolded. So why am I writing about it? one of you might justifiably object. Maybe because I know a fair bit about it, that’s an answer that could be permitted me as sufficient, does it satisfy you? Because I know a fair bit about it and I think that I know even the things that I don’t (and that’s what writing is good for, after all . . .). Or else, perhaps, contrariwise, because I don’t know about it, or else because I don’t yet know enough? Or else because the time has come to write about it—now or never? If not now, when? Come on, forty years is long enough to tie it up in a bundle and forget about it. I write about it, in fact, not to commemorate it, but in order to ensure that it’s sealed and forgotten once and for all. By me, at least. I’m enclosing it in this book as if I were burying it. Amen.

  16

  I’M SORRY, Edoardo, am I bothering you?”

  “No, I . . . wait, who is this?”

  “Were you asleep?”

  “Well, actually . . . what time is it?”

  “A quarter to seven.”

  “A quarter to seven . . .!”

  “Too early?”

  “No, the alarm clock was just about to go off . . . but you, excuse me . . .”

  “It’s me, Rummo. Gioacchino Rummo.”

  “Oh, Rummo! Ciao . . . what . . . did something happen?”

  “I thought you ought to know. At least you. About Cosmo.”

  “Cosmo . . .”

  “Our Italian teacher at SLM.”

  “Right, of course, I understand, Cosmo.”

  “Because, you know, Cosmo . . .”

  “He’s dead. Is he dead?”

  “I wanted to tell you that Cosmo . . .”

  “No, please, don’t tell me that he’s dead. Rummo, please, don’t start my day like that. Not like that. Otherwise, I’ll hang up, I’m telling you, I’ll just hang up immediately.”

  “No, he’s not dead. But he’s sick, he’s very sick.”

  ONE THING ABOUT PSYCHOPHARMACEUTICALS is that they take the sting out of waking up. Reality struggles to break through. And I say that’s a good thing. Especially the one I’m taking now, which has a long half-life, too long to work merely as a nighttime sleeping pill, which is why the doctor wanted to prescribe me another one, and also why I said, no, thanks, I’ll just keep taking this one and processing it in my own sweet time. The fact that it overlapped, also covering a piece of the following day under the cloak of indifference, was something I didn’t mind one bit.

  But as soon as I was sufficiently lucid to understand what Rummo had told me and why, I was glad he had called me. Glad that he had chosen to call me, even if it wasn’t to deliver a particularly good piece of news.

  Rummo told me he had encountered our old teacher again, this time as a patient, because he was treating him for a serious case of depression. Reduced to a state of something approaching poverty, Cosmo had withdrawn into isolation from everyone. When Rummo had gone to pay a ho
use call on him, he had been stunned at the wreckage, the desuetude.

  “He sold off his legendary record collection . . .”

  Rummo assured me that he had seen plenty of similar cases. A couple of times a week he volunteers, providing medical and psychological care to the poor, the forgotten and abandoned elderly, the homeless. Ah, good old Rummo! A stout, unadorned pillar of our Catholic school. Tirelessly faithful to his calling. Admirable. But Cosmo’s case was different, and it had struck him, not merely because this was our beloved teacher.

  “Do you remember? He seemed old to us already!”

  “Wrinkly as an elephant!”

  “With that cough!”

  “Always scratching his neck . . .”

  Cosmo had fallen so far that he was living in a miserable little hovel on the Roman beachfront. Two rooms, with books stacked high along the walls, floor to ceiling, a sofa with the springs sticking out, a single mattress on a swaybacked iron bedstead, no TV, no radio. A velvet armchair of some indescribable, nondescript color. Empty wine bottles lined up under a low coffee table heaped with newspapers, in a space that could be described as a kitchen only because of the presence of food-based grime: rice stuck to the bottoms of pans, eggshells, that sort of thing. But aside from the filth surrounding him, and his black mood, according to Rummo our old teacher was still the same man we’d known at SLM. Devastated but lucid, the last man on earth, a figure straight out of Giacometti, his eyes gleaming in his haggard face. He had recognized his old student almost immediately. Not from the name, Dr. Rummo, mmm, Rummo, Rummo, yes, that rings a bell . . . but rather from Rummo’s face, the face of a boy who’d grown old. “But had he been treated?”

  “Yes. With electroshock.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “No, really.”

  “Who told you this?”

  “My colleague, who saw him before me and then referred him to me.”

  “I didn’t think they used electroshock anymore.”

  “No, believe me, there are still people who administer electroshock therapy. And those who are subjected to it.”

  “I know my grandfather got electroshock treatment lots of times. But that was many years ago, and I was just a kid.”

  “And did it work on your grandfather?”

  “I don’t think so. He just kept going, up and down, up and down. And one time, when he was pretty down, he threw himself over the railing and down the stairwell.”

  “Good God. I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Pretty horrifying, yeah. I only learned about it years later, when they gave me his watch.”

  “Wait, what happened?”

  “Well, it’s a story that . . . I wrote a poem about it once.”

  “Would you let me read it?”

  “You really want to read it?”

  “Certainly. I’d really like that.”

  “I’ll send it to you by e-mail . . .”

  “Please do. Don’t forget.”

  RUMMO HADN’T MANAGED to pull Cosmo out of his state of depression, only to keep him suspended in that dark state of lucidity, like the bubble of mercury in a thermometer, preventing him from dropping any lower, from plunging into the depths. Sometimes when he made his calls, our old teacher would receive him with a grimace of disinterest and refuse to say a word to him. Other times he’d flash a grin, thanking him for his devotion. “I don’t deserve it,” he’d say, then add: “Though no one deserves it, probably, so I don’t think I’m depriving anyone with a greater right.” In effect, my old SLM classmate had started visiting him more often than was strictly necessary, and someone at the charitable association who had sent him to see Cosmo pointed out to him that he couldn’t devote his few, precious hours of volunteering to a single patient who, all things considered, wasn’t even in such critical shape.

  “So I took a few days off, to go see him.”

  “That was nice of you.”

  “I just wanted to spend time with him, be near him. I had the impression that, in spite of his brusque manners, his indifferent act, deep down he was glad that someone might look after him. Me in particular.”

  I didn’t remember Rummo being especially fond of Cosmo, back in our school days. I was, though: all the same, once I left SLM, I forgot all about him. He exited my life, no different than Gas&Svampa and Brother Gildo and the disgraced Mr. Golgotha, or the ancient literature teacher, the ineffable De Laurentiis, with his little concerts of ancient Greek music played with a single finger. And what should I say about Impero Baj, the custodian, dubbed Ottetti after the quantity of pasta, roughly a pound, that he ate every day? Ottetti, whom we loved so well, whatever became of him?

  A door that opens in one direction only.

  And the same goes for many of my classmates from school. Vanished into the breeze. Incinerated. And yet I can safely say that those were my friends and that Cosmo was my first and most important teacher. What does this mean?

  “He said that he didn’t want any treatment, that it was a waste of time.”

  It’s as if life had reduced the past to ruins, pushing them up and forward only to ride roughshod over them, crushing them beneath the pressure of the moving present, continuing forward. Onward, straight ahead.

  I’ve always gone blindly forward.

  “He had a perfectly respectable attitude, even if stubborn and wrongheaded: but then he proved, in the end, willing to yield, to let me do what I thought best, because obstinate attachment to a negative conviction would have been every bit as foolish as optimism. And believe me, Cosmo is still an intelligent man . . .”

  “Wait, Rummo, are you telling me that you persuaded him to accept treatment?”

  “To do the minimum indispensable to suffer less.”

  There, I recognize my old teacher in this attitude. And—in the way he respected it—my old classmate.

  “After all, his intelligence will never be snuffed out. Even when all the rest will have rotted away.”

  Even if I abandoned Cosmo unceremoniously, even if I betrayed him by leaving for another school and then forgetting him, till today I’ve never done anything other than respect his intentions. For himself and for us, we who were his favorite students. I’m talking about Marco Lodoli and Arbus, of course, and the others he’d encountered during his years at SLM, all of them pierced by his method of teaching: a continual spray of stimuli, an incessant poking in the ribs. It was he who had set us off down the road that way: lunging, lurching forward, as if we were young calves being buffaloed out of a corral, and who need to be sent on their way speedily, and if they feel a little pain in their hindquarters, they’re unlikely to turn around toward the source of that prodding jolt. I believe, in other words, that Cosmo meant to be abandoned, that he preferred it, in fact, that he had planned it. He was putting a great deal of distance between himself and us, in effect, already during our time at school, he was never agreeable or cordial or indulgent with us students the way teachers are who love only because they want to be loved in return. There was no special warmth in his lessons. He was the exact opposite of Golgotha, in other words, and of poor De Laurentiis, both of whom attempted desperately to “involve us.” Abandonment was his objective as a teacher.

  Perhaps that was why Rummo’s assiduous but neutral presence didn’t really bother him. With Rummo there was never a narrowing of the margin of safety that someone like, let’s say, Marco Lodoli, or me—one of the disciples, in other words, that he, too, had done everything in his power to avoid assembling around him, one of the illegitimate children that he had in any case brought into the world—would have done their best to cross. Especially now that the maestro might be about to impart his last lessons.

  “But a month ago we got a nasty surprise from the routine tests we ran on him. Cosmo isn’t just depressed: he has a tumor.”

  “Oh, fuck, no.”

  “I’m almost tempted to say that the depression concealed the more critical illness. Or even that it staved it off, reined it in . . .
slowing its development.”

  “What are you saying? Could that really be?”

  “I’m just speculating, it’s nothing but a hypothesis. Or maybe it’s just a wisecrack. We have no idea how long he’s had it. It’s at an advanced stage, but it might progress slowly, given his age . . .”

  17

  LISTEN . . . would you come see him, with me?”

  “I’m . . . oh, sorry, Rummo . . . I’d rather not. This isn’t a good time.”

  “Pas de problème. If you like, though, I’ll keep you posted on his progress . . .”

  “Of course, no doubt about it, in fact, call me whenever you like. Let me know how he’s doing. Or else I’ll call you. It’s just that . . .”

  “There’s no need, you don’t need to say a thing.”

  ACTUALLY, it’s never a good time when someone is sick. When someone is so terribly sick. It’s not a good time to die and it’s never a good time to spend time caring for someone who’s dying. The good time may perhaps come when all is said and done, once the enormous, vain agitation comes to an end, and “the book full of anxieties, sorrow, and pain” will be shut in the darkness. Which means it will no longer be a good time.