Class

by Francesco Pacifico

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  ON THE NIGHT of the totem ceremony, Nicolino Morelli, a twelve-year-old first-year from Gustavo’s squadron, encounters the otherworldly roar of pots beaten by wooden sticks. Shtang! Shtang! Shtang! “Wake uuuup!” The Black Feet have been gathering under every squadron’s pile dwelling because their strange, muezzin stadium chant has to be performed in sync. They sing their ghostly, nonsense song at the top of their lungs: “Brama-pu-tra! Him-a-la-ya! Chin-chu! Chin-chu-ay! Born-fag! Dead-stiff!”

  It’s two a.m., and the earth is drenched from a downpour that cut the after-dinner campfire short. The fourth-years and the counselors wear artfully ripped shirts, their hands covered in soot from holding pots blackened by fire. Their cheeks are painted black, they wear bandannas on their foreheads, and they scream at everyone to exit their tents. The instructions are brutal, delivered with a snarl: “Wake up, idiot!” They climb in and look inside the Hawks’ tents, stomping on a couple of feet that scramble inside the sleeping bags, warning that the punishment for being late includes mandatory consumption of The Beverage.

  The younger kids, like Nicolino, are terrified and still half-asleep as they get pushed toward the flames. On a hill on the outer edges of the camp, the Black Feet have built a fire that’s much more powerful and far taller than what the kids see every evening.

  As the third-years gathered at the top of the hill, I looked down toward the artificial lake down below, eerie and rectangular. One of the Black Feet hid under a poncho and explained the trials to us in the voice of the goddess Kalì. The first- and second-years were in the hands of the fourth-years—Keen Porcupine and Gianki, or Thoughtful Antelope—who immediately began to impose their reign of terror on the preadolescents.

  “Your lives are worth nothing!” they shouted, their spittle raining down on the campers, their voices hoarse. The kids couldn’t have imagined anything like this: they lived easy lives in rich neighborhoods; they were accustomed to the softness and good cheer of the Jungle Book–themed cub scout camps or the day camps that were set up at convents during the summer.

  Nicolino was a little lord with careful manners—hairless, potbellied, his straight hair gelled back carefully, his features and posture feminine. It was his first time at the camp, and when he reached the promontory and kneeled down in front of the fire, he was accused of displaying inadequate submission to the goddess Kalì. “You haven’t mastered the art of submission!” Franchino shouted. “What’s wrong with your back? You’re not kneeling down enough,” said the other. “There’s too much pride in that back!” They beat the jugs right by his ears, deafening and, it seemed to him, blinding him.

  The Beverage was poured into his mouth from a cold ladle. An oregano twig got stuck in his throat as he drank the vile combination of water, tea, coffee, salt, soup, celery, beans, watermelon, cocoa, chicken bones, and a drop of piss from someone who couldn’t help himself (as well as, according to rumor, a used tampon, more likely a pristine one).

  “This isn’t fair! You told me to kneel, and I did it! Look, my face is on the ground! I submit! What else do you want?”

  “It’s not enough!”

  “Drink again, you worthless shit! How dare you challenge the almighty power of the Black Feet?”

  And after they made him drink more, they pressed him back down against the earth with their rods. He felt the rods piercing his back and experienced a grand feeling of outrage over what was happening, a feeling he’d always recall with equal parts affection and scorn. Their persistent focus on Nicolino was partly my fault. Nobody could remember where the tradition came from, but every year, for the duration of the session, the popular third- and fourth-year girls would pick first-years to coddle and keep around. For a certain kind of well-regarded girl, it seemed utterly natural to keep a darling little featherless kid nearby—to position him between your legs while sitting around the fire or to place him in the crook of your arm while lying in the grass. They were babies, these little boys: they had just a hint of down on their upper lip and were still in middle school, they had un-muscled bodies that we covered with hugs and kisses on their necks and foreheads and shoulders and arms. They sat with us and abandoned their weight against our breasts, and it felt so warm for them, so comforting; they knew they couldn’t find these feelings anywhere else in the camp. And it made us feel warm, too, and also powerful and possessive. The boys regulated our horniness—we could touch and play and carry on without hindering any of the sentimental things that were happening with kids our age or older. Nobody saw these hugs as sex, or even as anything sexual, but we gave ourselves over to the feeling, and as a result we had less time to spend with the older guys. It wasn’t unnoticed, of course: all this hugging and kissing with our little guys would necessarily provoke questions like “Did you jerk him off?” or “Have you two made love?”

  Gustavo Tullio, in particular, didn’t like how much time I was spending with Nicola, because it meant I wasn’t kissing the Lion Cub. At night, when the campfire was done and the singing and dancing were over, before I returned to my squadron in the tent, I’d grab Nicolino instead of talking to the kids my age or to Tullio. He was as tall as I was, but he looked like he could have been my son. We’d hug from the front, both of us stinking of fire and fried cheese, and we’d kiss each other’s necks and cheekbones and foreheads as we whispered Edoardo Bennato songs. “You are a wonderful person,” he’d say, “I really care for you.” I could always feel his hard-on: he didn’t move as he held me, but I could feel his coiled passion, his ecstatic energy. He’d sniff my dirty hair.

  I never asked Nicolino if he was being bullied by Franchino, Gianki, or Tullius, but it turned out that Franchino and Gianki were subjecting him to a light but steady torture: they farted on his face while he slept, stuck his toothbrush in among the dirty dishes, peed on his sneakers. They’d force him to go get water from the spring right after lunch, the two jugs weighing almost as much as he did, and they’d laugh when his digestion got the best of him and he had to stop what he was doing and run back into the woods (“Don’t forget the wax paper!”).

  Nicolino was a delicate drama queen, a delicate boy full of artful complaints: he’d tell the second deputy in the squadron that he’d “almost fainted due to the farts” or that carrying two full jugs every day after lunch was “altering his posture.” The squadron reveled in the precision of his formulations.

  I accepted the reality of this bullying, this nonnismo, the way any Italian perceives the existence of the mafia. The girls discussed it among ourselves, but we ignored the best stories, like the time Franchino took a dump, wrapped it in paper towels and aluminum foil, and handed it to Nicolino, passing it off as a chocolate salami. “We smuggled some Ciòcoleit Salàmi from the pantry, now go set the table for teatime.” Nico only figured it out when he unwrapped the package.

  So,

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  ON THE NIGHT of the ceremony, as Nicolino drank ladlefuls of the Beverage, the six of us began the trials that would lead to our initiations. Someone was sent into the woods to look for specific kinds of leaves, while someone else had to figure out what certain objects were while blindfolded, the older boys screaming in their ears the entire time. The Black Feet filled a small, inflatable pool with cold, dirty water, and we had to bob for apples with our teeth. Nicolino didn’t get to enjoy this particular spectacle; the two Black Feet were still on him full time. “You’ve broken my back!” he moaned as they shoved their muddy boots deeper into his spine—a loud and futile expression of paranoia. He was still gagging from the disgusting taste of the Beverage, which lingered in his mouth.

  They made him drink more Beverage, though he was still gagging from the last portion, and this time he understood that there was no point in keeping anything down: he spit onto his right thumb, wiped it on his t-shirt as best as he could, stuck it in his throat and, as soon as he could feel the acids gurgling in his esophagus, directed his mouth toward Gianki’s sock-less sneaker. The fourth-year madman responded wi
th a rageful shriek and started to wave his arms around.

  Nicolino stared down at the earth, a few steps away from the pool of his own vomit. He waited for Thoughtful Antelope to be carried away by the wiser Black Feet. He had lost interest in the ceremony and was relieved when one of the counselors, a woman, came over to him and told him to go back to the tent. She escorted the limping victim back to the pile dwelling, her hand on his shoulder. When they were outside, he told her that he was too dirty to go to sleep, and she suggested that he take off his clothes and leave them outside the tent. So he stripped down to his underwear in front of her, right under the pile dwelling. She had large, saggy cheeks that made her look a little like a beaver. “Please,” he sobbed, “please come up to the tent.” She didn’t respond for a while, but he kept begging, kept sobbing, and at last she agreed. He went first, a master of the rope ladder, and when he slid inside his sleeping bag, still in his underwear, he uttered a strange sentence: “I feel so deprived” he said quietly. He found a way to rest his head on her crossed legs, and she began to stroke his hair to calm him down. Then the counselor (unemployed, gourmand, big-bellied, mantenuta, twenty-seven years old, soft pink complexion, unmarried) gently suggested that he put some toothpaste in his mouth and lean over the edge of the pile dwelling and spit it out onto the ground.

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  THERE WAS ONE other time when Nicolino rebelled against the nonnismo at camp. We were sitting around in a circle one afternoon, drinking tea and reading the newspapers. He was sitting to my right, facing me, his posture somehow both cherubic and lecherous, his kerchief as dirty as his hair. Gustavo was sitting to my left, his cock visible through his tight jean shorts. The wind was cool, the sky huge and flecked with scattered clouds. At one point, Gustavo put his arm around my shoulder and thought he’d grabbed my hand. He caressed the small, delicate hand distractedly but intensely. It was a firm and friendly gesture at first, but as he went on he dug his thumb deeper and deeper into the palm—a sign, according to the era’s code, that he was hungry for sex. I shifted around in my seat to get a pebble out from under my ass, using both hands to shift my weight around, and it was at that point that Tullio realized that it wasn’t my hand he was holding but Nicolino’s.

  The whole thing made Tullio feel loathsome, like a tyrant who’d discovered evidence of the people’s disgust in him, and right at that moment he realized that he would have to choose between nonnismo and mysticism; there was no middle ground.

  Still, he couldn’t help but tell Franchino about what had happened. Franco was known by some in the camp as “Gusty’s puppy,” and the incident with the hand was what provoked the chocolate salami prank he implemented the following day. Unwrapping the gift, Nicolino saw that moist, human thing, its smell overpowering all its other physical qualities, and he felt hopelessly lost. When Tullius got news of the prank later that afternoon, after an all-male jerk-off session in the woods, he didn’t protest, but he made sure not to thank Franchino, either.

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  AFTER THAT, GUSTAVO came to feel a connection with Nicolino. He’d witnessed the Beverage scene from a distance, and during the rest of the night he recused himself from overseeing the trials. One day, after everyone had had their showers, he took one of the warm water jugs out of the pantry and brought it out into the woods without being seen. He left it where another girl and I were supposed to be subjected to a new trial.

  At a Black Feet meeting prior to the next ceremony, the group agreed that a girl known as Fat Lorella and I would be sent into the woods half-naked to pick up carrots with our mouths from a plastic poncho laid out on the ground. The counselors rejected the proposal that we do this in front of the younger kids—too provocative—but they’d approved the concept. We would also have to put some green peas in our underwear, mostly because piselli, peas, also meant wieners. The field where we were meeting was a thousand meters above sea level, and the nights were cold. There was another element of psychological torture for fatty Lorella, who would have to walk half-naked next to me, the camp’s anointed new beauty. And Tullio would be sticking the green peas inside our underwear himself, and he’d be the one to escort us back after the trial.

  We arrived at the meeting point in bras and panties, muddy, our hands tied behind our backs. We walked toward the faint light we saw flickering in the woods. Tullio was waiting for us with a camping lantern. He wore a t-shirt with a single rip that revealed his left nipple. He came forward and said, “This stays between us.” We’d been instructed to wash ourselves with cold water from a jug only after we’d picked up five carrots each, tied up and clumsy. Tullio showed us a clean rag, wetted it with warm water and proceeded to wipe the mud off our bodies, First Lorella, then me. He delicately stroked us with the rag and washed everything, bra included, except for our panties, which we cleaned ourselves after he untied us. Lorella and I were silent. He didn’t tell us to pick up the carrots. “Lori,” he said to Lorella, “if you need to go to the woods, go now.” She got the message and ran off into the darkness, pretending that she needed to go. Tullio gently pushed me against a tree, made me rest my back against it, then pulled down my underwear a few inches. (My period was almost over. I’d worn dark colored panties and had thrown my sanitary napkin into the bushes outside our squadron’s pile dwelling; I was afraid of being made fun of.)

  Tullio squeezed me against the tree and slid his long right arm behind me, absorbing the uneven bark into his skin. His arm kept sliding, first into my crack, then out to my butt cheek, which he grabbed with a burst of force. The arm seemed to stretch farther and farther, surprising me with its reach, until his finger rubbed the wet folds of my pussy, peeked in, emerged, then suddenly shifted toward the rim of my asshole and then, even more surprisingly, entered it. I had experienced this before, but only with my own finger. I could tell that he had washed his hands with soap, but I was often constipated and was worried that something would go wrong. I didn’t know how deep he wanted to go.

  He turned me so I’d face the tree. We were both standing there facing it, and I wanted to fall apart, to crumble into pieces. Then he pulled out his finger, and after a moment I felt his index finger enter my pussy and his thumb enter my anus. I froze.

  “Do you see how perfect this feels?”

  When his fingers were settled inside me, he seemed to want them to touch each other through me. Only a membrane kept the two fingers apart. (We’d discuss that membrane in the years that followed. If only there were no membrane under the perineum, that sweet zone he loved and pressed every time before entering my two holes with his two fingers, “I’d make a ring through it so I could cling to you.” When he met my parents and was welcomed into my family, they were smitten, but he urged me to hate them. He highlighted the unfairness of their behavior toward me: the way my mother would physically shove me when we argued, which meant, he said, that she didn’t love me. As to my father, he said that while he thought he did love me, he was cowardly because he never distanced himself from my mother’s behavior. With his two fingers inside me he’d say, “I’m your real father, so you have to listen to me.”)

  After shouting a shy “May I?” and receiving an okay, Lorella returned. Gustavo strained some canned green peas through his hand, rinsed them, strained them again, and told us to put them in our panties ourselves. Lorella nodded silently, and I didn’t say anything either; I was listening to the night’s cool air. What he’d done lingered, as if his thumb were swelling inside me. We walked back to the fire, where everyone thought we’d washed ourselves in cold water. We pretended that our limbs were numb.

  After the trials, the six of us were blindfolded and our hands were tied behind our backs. Our feet were tied together, too, so we had to walk perfectly straight, very close to one another. We were still in our bras and our underwear, suddenly exhausted now that we’d finished the trial. A thin strip of ground separated the artificial lake from a small precipice, and we walked in rigid formation, hyperaware of our surroundings. (The next morning w
e’d be told that our slow, careful walk, illuminated by the fire and the moon, had been a formidable sight.) The goddess Kalì taught us our new names, and each of us was supposed to scream them as we took turns jumping over the fire, which was now only about a meter tall. When they untied me, I felt the green peas jammed inside my panties. I jumped over the fire and shouted “Generous Frog!”

  You always tell me, Sergino mio (here we’re in our early twenties), that respectable long-term relationships between respectable young people like Tullio and me are a dream longed for far more by parents than by their children. These relationships tame us and rob us of life during these dangerous years, and the damage caused by giving in to the wishes of one’s peers puts us in a category with the broken, the war veterans, the cultists. You always tell me that you’ll never be fooled. You love to preach, just like Tullio does, just like all my men do.

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