The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  406. In the state I’m in now, I’d feel only pity and scorn for someone who, even if it were with the noble intent of communicating a sense of brotherhood to me in my pain, displayed any particular sense of transport toward my rotting body. I would much rather stir an appropriate repulsion or, at the very most, that this objective disgust might be held at bay, professionally, by the nurses who treat it with the necessary technical detachment, cleaning it, disinfecting it, emptying it with businesslike, uncharitable gestures, the way you would with a trash can, suppressing your natural disgust behind a routine smile. True compassion lies in doing your duty and in the meantime thinking about other things, say, a tropical beach. I’m the first to turn away and let myself be lulled by the escapist, childish fantasies in the minds of those who take care of me, whereas I would only be depressed by a fanatical devotion, completely focused on my aching guts or my Christian soul, about to flit away.

  407. The body is treated by the person who inhabits it like a house, that he or she can freely renovate, altering the original floor plan or even leveling it, to rebuild. There isn’t all that much difference between people killing themselves and people deforming themselves with plastic surgery or a sex change: in all those cases, a living human being is liquidated, the body as it once was, the difference lies only in whether they decide to replace it with another body, or not to replace it at all.

  408. What need is there for death to take possession of my life in such a treacherous and complicated fashion? I’d have preferred to hand it over willingly, rather than have it snatched away from me.

  409. I’d gladly settle for a cheap amnesty, obtained through institutional laxity, or by some subterfuge or error. A solution straight out of a comedy of errors. It would bring bottomless joy to be left alive in the place of some other random individual, undeserving of death.

  410. Does a gaze capable of going beyond things see things never seen before, or does it see the same things but in a different way? Or does it fall upon itself because there is nothing more to know? I’d like to know so I can understand whether or not it was right to stop my investigations—but I want to know soon, in fact, right away. Okay, yes, I admit it, I’m insatiable. That’s because in the final analysis I was interested in this good old world. I was even amused by its cynical spectacle, precisely because it was reprised, with some considerable technique, on different stages, and every time the audience willingly allowed itself to be taken in, aghast at its own docility. To object is a more childish attitude than to allow yourself to be persuaded. I admit that I fell for it myself, to have done nothing more than to protest, even though I knew it was sterile, as are nearly all ways of getting noticed. Every word added at the bottom of these lines is nothing but a protest, however weak, that risks being mistaken for praise, is likewise too timid and faint to be accepted by the One it was meant for.

  411. Among the wreckage, my mind has remained intact like certain dainty little drawing rooms that you can just glimpse after an earthquake on the fourth floor of an apartment building that has had its façade torn off. But you can’t get in there, if you do, the whole place will collapse.

  414. Depending on the voice in which it is delivered, the same announcement can sound like a threat or a promise.

  413. My mind shakes the ocean (as far as I can tell, this is the last sentence Cosmo wrote before dying).

  3

  IN A SEPARATE SMALL NOTEBOOK, a more diminutive format, pocket-size, with handwriting grown uncertain and irregular, Cosmo tells how he grew attached, in the last month of his life, to a nurse, Jelena: he asks the association that is seeing to his care to send her, and only her, to tend to him, none of the other nurses; he hires her, paying her under the table, to spend nights at his home, in a jury-rigged bed; for a brief moment he even considers marrying her, so that once he’s dead his teacher’s pension can be transferred to her. I seem to understand that she, Jelena, was there, with Rummo and the priest, when Cosmo died. I’m only going to feature one passage from this small notebook: I’d be uncomfortable transcribing the whole thing. The thoughts by Cosmo that I’ve offered above have a value that I consider anything but private in nature. His notes about Jelena, on the other hand, the shy trepidation of his novella, which is perhaps a love novella (I wouldn’t know what else to call it), will remain unpublished. For how much longer, I couldn’t say.

  JELENA IS THE ONLY EUROPEAN NURSE caring for me. The others are all Latin American or from North Africa. Very good at their jobs and kind, certainly, and brisk, almost cheerful, I’d say, in the performance of their duties, twice a day. For that matter, since I’ve renounced any therapy worthy of the name, it’s only a matter of administering the palliatives and supplements prescribed for me and performing the few hygienic operations that help to keep me from falling apart or, at least, not falling apart immediately: half an hour, what with the IV and all the rest, then they leave. I’m the one who encouraged them to speed up the IV infusion by squeezing the bag. “We’re really nodda sposeto, eh, Prof!” but they went ahead and did it. Everything becomes much more elastic when in the final analysis you’re just talking about letting someone die the way they please and choose, I mean to say, the protocols, the restrictions on schedules and doses with the accompanying scoldings if you go astray . . . what’s the point of insisting? They know it better than I do. We understand each other clearly on this point. As I said, it’s all very, very relative.

  They alternate in shifts that do not seem at all regular: the Peruvian caregiver, for instance, came three days in a row, while I was waiting for it to be Jelena’s shift at least once between morning and evening. She is the least prone to smiling, perhaps because she has a reserved character.

  With her, I feel like joking around. Smiling. I’m sure that she would smile, too. I’d certainly understand it. Who knows why the sweetness in me is buried so deep. And why the same thing must have happened in her. But she doesn’t have the excuses of old age and disease, which I hide behind. I wouldn’t want to reveal to anyone else the anxiety that seizes me when another caregiver comes in her place, such as the Peruvian, for example, who is good at her job and very polite, the poor thing, but she isn’t Jelena, she doesn’t have that same light in her eyes. By now it’s become a hard task to wait for her, and it’s exactly the kind of thing I do not want anymore: any feeling of yearning toward life, anything that summons me back. By now I’ve gone too far to turn around. Just now, when everything’s about to end, I wind up getting a crush on a nurse just because she comes to take care of me a few hours a week, because she’s silent, because if I look at her in profile she reminds me of nice things, from behind, of desirable things, and if she stands facing me, I see a melancholy human being who works to make a living. What does Jelena think about while she wipes me down, while she washes me?

  Why don’t I care about learning the same thing of the Peruvian? Is it because she flashes me the occasional quick smile, while Jelena doesn’t?

  Well, that is the last thing I need: this turmoil. Prompted by a woman who could be, not even my daughter, but my granddaughter. The blood that surges in my veins for a change, instead of stopping once and for all, that is what hurts me. And it fills me with shame and anger. Without wishing to, under the mechanical pressure of the years, I had been forced into wisdom, imperturbability, the virtuous contemplation of people and things, as if what had bent me were sermons in preparation for death. The presence of Jelena beside me acts like a powerful poison. But it doesn’t kill me. Jelena isn’t beautiful, she isn’t fetching, she’s just simple, and alive. She won’t manage in the end to make me yearn for my life back, will she?

  THE OLD MAN WEARS his new love on his shoulders like a harp: he’s strong enough to drag its weight along, but the effort keeps him from playing it.

  1

  YOU TURN AROUND and your brother’s hair has grown suddenly long

  You turn around and your sister has become suddenly beautiful

  You turn around and your brothe
r’s hair is brushing his shoulders

  You turn around and your father is dead and your mother stops smiling and you have your first car crash luckily not a serious one and you get your girlfriend pregnant and she has an abortion and you feel as if you’re about to kill yourself because you’re a useless and unhappy creature and you even try but you’re unsuccessful and the world hasn’t stopped spinning while you were in the hospital, it went on spinning neither slower nor faster

  You turn around and with the next woman you meet at a party you’ll have children and then you’ll leave her and your children will curse you for the rest of your life even if they hug you affectionately when you go to pick them up at school one week on and one week off

  Then the doctor says that he’s diagnosed an infection and you’re given an emergency operation and they just manage to save your life, another twelve hours and you would have been dead, and though you were ready to kill yourself before now you’re pretty contented that you made it out with your skin on even though you’re tired, very tired, and you don’t make enough money, and you’re in the hands of lawyers who continue to file appeals on your behalf without achieving anything clear and the roof of the country house inherited from your father collapses because of the heavy rains and the limited maintenance done on it or, to tell the truth, none at all

  You never even went there

  You turn around and your sister isn’t beautiful anymore, she teaches French in a middle school, she never married, she’s an old maid before her time, she has recurring panic attacks

  Your brother went to live in Panama. Actually, he fled the country. He left behind a wife and a son who has serious vision problems. You avoid getting too attached to that little boy because you’re afraid that you’ll have to take care of him even though, in the meantime, no one is taking care of you

  Whereupon you turn around and you see a woman, free and unattached and not bad-looking either and after spending two or three nights together you decide that things could develop into something with her, she’s a serious person, she’s serious about it, she seriously wants to do this, she’s already planning a vacation together for next summer and the summer after that, on account of which you start to withdraw, you gradually withdraw, you stop answering her calls, and before the month is out you’ve definitively broken up with her

  2

  MY ALL-CONSUMING ANXIETY has led me to scrawl out “Human Life in the Last Quarter of the Twentieth Century,” which you read in the preceding, exceedingly brief chapter. Does it have anything to do with the events described in this book? Yes and no, it could run on a parallel track, as an alternate plot. It expresses the fantastic desire to tell of an ordinary life in just a few words instead of a great many.

  I promise: the chapters that follow will be just as short or extremely short.

  So let’s start over again from the very beginning, from the QT.

  3

  QUARTIERE TRIESTE, tomb of courage, prison with transparent walls, cradle and decline of civilization!

  Seized by a loneliness and an unhappiness brimming over with unspecified desires, which pricked me to get up and move, no matter what the movement in question, on this brilliant and icy winter Sunday I left home early to penetrate once again, in search of who can say what novelties, given that your essence as a quarter of the city is that you never offer anything new, and even though I knew that so sharp and clear a light could hardly help but blind me and thrust me back into the mental enclosure inhabited by the usual thoughts, the usual memories, the same novel that I read and write, that I write and imagine, that I imagine and erase.

  Instead, my outing was interesting because there was a new development, a novelty after all, finally something new to see, even though it would have been far better never to have seen it, so graceless absurd incomprehensible and a blight on the landscape. On the slopes of the hillside that runs up from Piazza Annibaliano to the high point on Via Nomentana, where the basilica of Santa Costanza and its wonderful baptistery lie concealed among the trees, behold the brand-new station of the Rome metro: after years, it is done and it has come to light, since they took down the barriers that sheltered the secret project that had been toiling onward.

  It’s a sinkhole, a chasm, a sort of quarry of unfinished cement from the depths of which looms upward the tower of a gratework elevator that, once it reaches ground level, towers upward another dozen or so yards into the air, sticking right into the space that was once destined for a view of Santa Costanza by anyone covering the last stretch of Corso Trieste. Before they barricaded the entire area for the construction work (with a view, one might suspect, of concealing the horrible surprise still to come) between the looming apartment buildings of that last stretch of road and the dull brown housing projects, ten stories tall, on Viale Eritrea, which begin right at the edge of the piazza, the sudden opening of light and space almost obliged the passerby to turn his gaze to the right, toward Via Nomentana, and the promontory where, for time out of mind, both Sant’Agnese and Santa Costanza stood sheltered, a verdant nursery deep in the shadow of the tall holm oaks, a preschool, and a happy tennis club with terraced courts punctuating the slope of Via Bressanone.

  Now, right in the center of this lovely archaeological oasis in the QT, at the exact center of the painting that one might paint in commemoration of the martyrdom of the young female saint, willing to suffer her beheading, garbed only in her hair, on Via Nomentana where they had set her out as a prostitute, stands the gray thorn of the elevator tower of the Annibaliano metro station, topped by a red M so large that it could be seen from an airplane and could serve as the target of a bombardment which, for that matter, it would so richly deserve. From this piece of signage, a passerby might reasonably feel almost threatened, as if by any other outsized totalitarian emblem, so out of scale is it, and it seems to allude to the existence, down below, of the largest metro station on earth, where countless lines intersect and overlap, and you can easily get lost on your way from one to another: I don’t know, the way you might at Châtelet, Charing Cross, Grand Central . . .

  And instead it’s just an ordinary metro stop on the B1 line, though it’s been given this monumental appearance, as if it were an entrance to the underworld. Perhaps they were worried about solving the problem of what would be seen of the sad old Piazza Annibaliano once the excavations were covered back over, they had the brilliant idea of not covering it up at all, but instead exalting it, hailing it, that abyss, rendering it as grandiose as a monument to the Holocaust or to the War Dead.

  (Aren’t the stations on the metro line supposed to be underground, though? Isn’t that where they belong? Like in London, Underground, isn’t that what the English word means?)

  And the real kicker is that, when they decided to name the new station, which could certainly have just been called Annibaliano, since it stands, or really, sinks down into a corner of the old piazza, they insisted on adding the name of the monument the sight of which the station itself, with its tower looming up out of the crater, roundly defaces and obstructs. Which is why the metro stop is called Santa Costanza–Annibaliano . . .

  BUT ONCE I’D LEFT that monstrosity behind me, just a few steps farther along, the rage had already vanished, the indignation, deep inside me, had already dwindled: after all, what can I do about it now? And I realized that I’d immediately transformed that collective insult into a private sentiment. I’d immediately focused down into myself, into my own problems, my desires, and I couldn’t say whether this selfishness consoled me or made me even more intolerant. From the narcissistic point of view, that unsightly mess of a metro station seemed to have been built specifically for me, for me and me alone, as the sole future user of the system, either as a personal slight or else to take me away to the far side of the city, as quickly as possible, that’s right, they had spent billions just so that I could take that trip underground in just ten minutes . . . and then and there I swore to myself that I’d never take the metro, not from that statio
n, I wouldn’t descend into that grotto as garish and ostentatious as an amusement park.

  Then that fantasy vanished entirely and I went back to thinking . . . brooding . . . yearning.

  And as I was walking along, narrowly skirting the massive walls, drunk with the winter daylight, I thought that when all was said and done, there was only one thing missing from my life, missing even when I had it, in fact, missing especially when I had it, because the fact of having it only sharpened the pain of each successive instant in which I’d no longer have it, making it all intolerable, making me suffer for the fine-honed awareness of the difference that runs between having it, this thing, and no longer having it, having let it slip through my fingers. And this thing is woman, a woman, that special woman.

  I never yearned for anything else in all my life but to have a woman. No sooner had I emerged from the affectionate arms of my mother than I began dreaming of nothing other than a new embrace. But this time I wanted to be the one who embraced, who surrounded, who pulled a body close. I never cared about anything else and I don’t now. I don’t give a dried fig (as the delightful saying once ran) about literature, money, personal satisfactions and dissatisfactions, the past, the future, friends and enemies, justice, the fate of the world at large. I don’t care about God or the nothingness that stands in His place. Without the love, without the body, the attention, or the mere sight of a woman, my life has never meant a thing, that is to say, had any significance, or for that matter a minimal direction. And in fact, that is what I thought as I strolled all alone through the QT: that the woman I love was far away, and this was intolerable, it strangled me, it took my breath away. That women stir my blood and fog a mind already far too confused, too prehensile and distracted, at age twelve I couldn’t concentrate, speak, understand, or think if there was a young woman or a girl in the vicinity, in close proximity to me, or even if I saw her in the distance, passing by. Which meant that I really could never think at all, I never understood a thing, I was perennially upset and confused and the only instants of lucidity I could have hoped to attain would have been at SLM, where there were no girls or women. But even there, sure enough, if not in flesh and blood, in the image, in my imagination, all the space around me was populated with female figures, girls who weren’t there but might as well have been; it made no difference whether that figure did or didn’t exist, whether it was pretty or homely, whether I liked her or not: it was enough just to have a person of the opposite sex next to me or in my eyes or in my mind’s eye, to disturb me to an indescribable degree. I could feel the surge of blood in the veins of my arms, my legs, drenching my abdomen, and a flush at once icy and hot would stun me, rushing into my head, which was suddenly full, as if stuffed, padded, so that I was all at once both blind and deaf, my tongue lying dead in my mouth, paralyzed, precisely as in that famous poem. The senses, no longer coordinated, exclude one another, so that if I can see, I can’t hear, if I listen I can’t see, or my visual field shrinks to the few square inches of a detail, and if the girl that has so captivated my mind is close to me, I can give the impression that I’m enchanted by her mouth, or the wave of hair that having escaped from behind an ear now floods around it, and in fact, I see nothing but that, and in the meantime I sense nothing else, I hear nothing else, I don’t think, I don’t speak . . . my words are disconnected from my thoughts, my feelings, peeled away one from another . . .