Class

by Francesco Pacifico

  “And the fact that I am here in this room, which contains these books, which are important to me, and especially this black Lack bookshelf in three units, which means so much to me because I bought it with my parents at the Ikea in Red Hook. We went by bus one day in winter, and we ordered home delivery, and we were there waiting for them when they came, and we assembled them together sitting on the wooden floor in an apartment on the eighth floor of a building so far from our dear ones, so far from our Rome, our Milan, finding ourselves, our aging bodies the core of a family destined not to breed. What did we see when we looked at each other? We were so far away now from the places that had turned us into a family for the first time, thirty-six years ago. The scene was captured in a photo taken by a relative in the clinic where I was born. And the fact that I am here, in this room, with this three-unit bookshelf that means so much to me makes it really hard to believe that there isn’t a resurrection of things, too.”

  CAREER

  In 1997, Nico moves back to Rome.

  In the aughts, blogs begin to emerge as a competitive force, a challenge to the magazines. He starts a blog and develops a following. He is hated, and his posts are reposted. He can’t stand all the hating. He tries to write novels and stories, but he stops because of something Flannery O’Connor may have said, maybe in a book of essays: “You’re really not required to write, there’s never going to be a shortage of writers anyway.”

  In 2009, he moves to New York because he can’t stand the haters. He was already spending more and more time in New York, in the isolation of his parents’ apartment. He gets a media visa.

  GONZO BORGHESE: EXTRACTS FROM BERENGO’S INTERVIEWS WITH WRITERS, THEOLOGIANS, ACTORS, AND MUSICIANS

  ______ is a gay artist who wears a leather jacket and a neckerchief and stares directly into my face every five minutes. The only thing he seems to care about during our conversation is that my respect for his artistic vocation is genuine and appropriately scaled. I tell him it would have never occurred to me to question it.

  —

  AT THE END of the day, though _______ and _______ are two men in their fifties, and each of them manages to keep his distance from me in his own way.

  —

  HOW DEEPLY SHOULD we commit to interviewing the great personalities of our time? How much of our hearts should we invest in it? Do you want us to take you seriously, or just to say: “Heeeeeey, so, what’s the deal with this greeeaaaat recoooord? Tell us everything?” I want to be able to talk about intellectual honesty with ________, about mental and physical illness. I want to be able to speak the truth, whereas he—I believe this completely—is bound by professional secrecy. He can’t tell his PR people that he said too much.

  —

  I HAVE SO many memories of ________ that I am suddenly moved to tears as I walk through the snow, skidding onto the frozen sidewalks, on my way to hear ________ and to interview ________ and ________ at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York.

  —

  YOU REALLY MADE it with your first _______, but how was it when the ________ phenomenon blew over?

  —

  THANK YOU FOR taking my question seriously. I was thinking—perhaps this isn’t actually a question—but I couldn’t fail to notice that everyone on the Internet seems to be freaking out about certain psychological issues of yours…Listening to you just now I was thinking that here is this person who is taking my serious question seriously, here is someone who knows what it means to suffer. Because when you’re suffering in your mind the problem of what is good, of how to do good, becomes a very serious issue. So this question—about how to do good, how to give to others…you end up thinking about these things at night, during your night terrors. You can’t sleep, and you just want to be sure that life has some value…well…now I’ve said all this, and I don’t think I should actually put it in my piece but…“I think you should, actually.”

  THE FAME OF OTHERS

  Berengo spends hours sitting in hotels, waiting to interview singers, and he feels wealthy and unproductive. These great, expensive hotels he hangs out in feel like home. Expensive hotels remind him of his parents, of what it’s like as a child to be in a hotel with your parents. He doesn’t even need to buy the magazines that publish the few articles he writes, a maximum of two per month. He is paid between €200 and €300 per article. “I would have to do six per month to earn the equivalent of what my father gives me. And I’m one of the best. (I think I’m the best.)”

  SELF-ENDORSEMENT / LACK OF INCOME / LIFE AS A DADDY’S BOY

  He meets up with famous people and tries to understand how fame has affected their lives.

  “You go in, and they give you an iPod. You listen to the album, the new album, which hasn’t been released yet. It’s a hesitant album—you can tell it was made by a star who is unsure if they’ll go on being a star or not, whether they’ll make a comeback or fade away. You listen to the songs, and you wonder if they’ve lost the fight. You hope the artist will make it; you hope it works it out for him. Lenny Kravitz is roaming around the room holding out his laptop, trying to connect to the wi-fi so he can see how many views his new video has on YouTube. He’s shorter than you think. The artist is tired and kind and twitchy. They’ve made it, and now they face the problem of having to account for it. Maybe they act tough for the camera but not for the interviewer. ‘Can we start with the first question? What’s the first question? Can we start from the first question?’ As if they’re in a trance.”

  NEW YORK, VISA, DETACHMENT FROM THE WORKING WORLD, METAPHYSICAL CONSUMERISM

  When he set up his blog to post his articles and email himself links, trackbacks, and random mentions, any comment would get on his nerves. Everyone always seemed to misunderstand him. He was always being discussed as a powerful man taking advantage of his position. “Does that make me the bad guy?” “Am I the bad guy?” He turned off the comments. On another blog, someone called him a coward for removing the comments.

  He often went to New York to stay with friends who worked for Vice, who were part of an extended network of Italian photographers. When he was in New York he accepted assignments to interview residents or visiting artists. When he was in New York he felt far enough from home to be able to spend less time online, googling his own name only rarely.

  He met a lawyer and sorted out his visa.

  He took the blog offline. He deleted Facebook. He kept Twitter but unfollowed anyone who wasn’t hugely popular. He didn’t want to work as much anymore; all he wanted was to be supported financially, so that he could be free to consume.

  Now he is unable to earn money. He feels that he deserves a €5000-a-month lifestyle, but writing thirty articles a month doesn’t seem feasible (€200 euros per article on average—a tenth of what we pay for them here). Why not write them in English? I asked him. He said that here journalism is the real deal, and he’s too old to learn how to write a good piece.

  (His mother is also unable to earn any money. She used to get offered good journalistic gigs all the time, thanks to her family connections—ask again about the idea of the raccomandazione—but she would always push back: “If you think someone put in a good word for me, think again. I’d rather get no work at all than get it like this.” She’s had a long militanza at il manifesto, the Communist newspaper for which Daria will later write, totally coincidentally.)

  CLASS STRUGGLE IN POP-CULTURE JOURNALISM

  “Paying for my own flights is the basis of my career. No one can compete with me. Not only am I the best pop journalist in Italy, but I also have enough money to pay for my business trips. The only issue is that I am my only reader: only somebody who lives my lifestyle can understand the importance of interviewing Katy Perry at the Greenwich Hotel, while her husband wanders off past the reception and into the area reserved for singers’ husbands.”

  LOVE

  He likes to be held and have his qualities listed aloud to him. Berengo in Daria’s arms, in bed, on a Saturday afternoon in winter, look
ing up at her as she lists his good qualities: “Can you tell me my good qualities? Do you love me? Why do you like me? No, just the good qualities, not the flaws.”

  THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF COMMODITIES

  Berengo has advanced beyond the inherited bourgeois notion that the world is composed of goods that can be consumed peacefully and pleasurably and renewed at will, according to the material needs of man. He has entered a stage he calls “the metaphysical consumer.” He sees physical goods as dull, heavy entities that occupy the border between life and death. The existence of physical goods seems an absurdity—they are, he thinks, a kind of offering from the dead to the living—a token delivered to us by inventors, creators, and previous users. It’s as if the dead had covered the world in statues, outside and in their homes, and now those statues are cities populated by the living. “Cities are dollhouses built by the dead when they were alive, and now we occupy them.” Or, more prosaically, they are objects that have been left behind. All of these objects would have disappeared into another dimension if human beings had held them in their hands as they passed away.

  If all of this is right—if it’s so spot on—then why is it so boring to take notes on it?

  I’m reluctant to admit that I might be wasting my time taking these notes.

  FATHER AND SON, REDUX

  The father believes that the world is going to end in 2012. He was persuaded by the idea of the “end of architecture”, because he thinks that human life can’t survive where architecture can’t prosper. Architecture knows that the world is about to end, and this is why it allows chaotic matter to proliferate: halogen life preserved inside shopping malls, their fragments assembled without purpose or order. Architecture has sensed the end of the world. In our times, according to Nico’s father, it’s pointless to seek out a progressive or an alternative lifestyle. He thinks: the reason why my son is so upset about the possibility that these buildings could exist without people—and he is telling us this—is that this will never happen, because it is all going to end in 2012, all of it at once. The end of architecture is proof that the most profound, useful, and organic of the human arts has prefigured the arrival of the end and has ceased to evolve autonomously, independently. Berengo is so close to his father that he is able to convey these statements word for word.

  His father wouldn’t mind if his son worked a little more because it would make his mother worry less, but he can see where Nico is coming from. Since he moved to New York, Nico stopped working almost entirely. He spends most of his time introducing people to one another, using his extensive network of contacts to help out his friends and acquaintances. To his father, this new behavior is proof of an enlightened, Franciscan path, a path that pushes his son to dedicate his life to others and humbly reject all personal ambition.

  The son salutes the role of consumerism in the end of the world: let’s consume all there is left to consume. “Before the wi-fi radiation kills us all.”

  BULLSHIT.

  His father handles the bank transfers—€2,500 a month into his son’s account—and all the taxes.

  NOW THAT HE’S INSURED, HE’S NO LONGER ABLE TO TAKE WORK SERIOUSLY.

  • Life insurance

  • Health insurance

  • Private pension

  His parents pay in the neighborhood of €10,000 a year to cover all three. “Why should I be expected to earn a salary if my parents are doing so well that they’re already providing for my old age?”

  BERENGO AND ME

  He is a cold and childish man. He’s loving and intense, and he’s doesn’t do much with his time. He has no steady relationships. He seems incapable of building anything. He is paralyzed by complexity and criticism, especially of his loved ones. I experience the exotic thrill of finding my Oblomov. Some days I revel in his frenzied apathy. He’s my Stranger.

  We met in 2008, at a party at Gary Shteyngart’s apartment. We sat on two stools Gary had bought at an auction that had once belonged to James Brown. (It was the night the DFW news broke. That may be why we bonded immediately. I had started teaching at Columbia, and I remember feeling awful, thinking about how Dave was going to become God.)

  “You never let your characters just fuck. You never have them enjoy it and just leave it at that. There’s a conflict or anxiety or regret every fucking time! It’s like you don’t know that there’s actual pleasure in the world. It’s really puritanical.”

  Also: “How come in Godspeed the bad news always breaks after someone fucks someone they aren’t supposed to? Like, Dad was supposed to pick up the kids after school, but he was late because he was banging his lover, so the kids go home on a friend’s helicopter and they die. Then people write about the helicopter metaphor, and they don’t even notice the function of pleasure in your work.

  My take on this is: “You don’t solve loneliness with pleasure.”

  —

  “HOW CAN YOU believe you’re speaking to ‘human beings’ with your books, to real people, if a European who reads them has to put aside everything he knows about pleasure in order to adhere to the abstract ethics of your cosmos?”

  And all I can think about is I should really spend a summer in Italy: the Magna Graecia, the Roman ideal of societas, villas filled with friends of friends of friends.

  INTERESTING ITALIAN SLANG

  Svarioni: A combination of anxiety attacks, panic attacks, and fear of death.

  Insicurezzine: Berengo’s petty insecurities.

  SEXUAL IDEOLOGY

  The problem with sex, he says, is that it’s associated with time rather than with space. You have sex during a period of time. It’s an event, so it can’t help but take on an aspect of causality—of cause and effect. “Sex happens when you go after it, and you obtain it. And then you obtain it, and it’s over. Satisfaction. But for me sex isn’t time; it’s space. If it’s a place, we can inhabit it with no purpose. Aristotle, right? Scrap the causa efficiente and pick the causa formale. We can inhabit sex without having to leave sex after the drive is satisfied.

  (This is BS. Should I point out all the reasons why I think it’s BS? Don’t I just enjoy writing all this down? Is that enough?)

  “If you give in to the tyranny of linear time—and this is the case with all your Puritanical redemption narrative shit—you get into this need to give ourselves moral goals we have to reach through sex, and…I don’t know, it’s a slippery slope, man. You think you’re different than the bros in the YouPorn videos, but you’re the same. You’re using your partner as a means to reach your ethical goals. My ideal is to inhabit sex completely, to empty it of purpose.”

  THEORY OF SWALLOWING

  Above all, Daria’s mythical blow jobs. Apparently she’s relentless, and she swallows in such a way that he can doze off while he’s being catered to. He says he doesn’t need to go the bathroom and rinse. So he basically faints: he’s stoned, he’s already lying in bed, and after he comes he passes out.

  His theory of swallowing is that it extinguishes a fire that, unattended to, can transform itself into more human life. Swallowing eats that fire whole.

  What is she like, really? Is she a fiction? “My wife doesn’t swallow,” I tell him, and this feels so strange to say. And writing it down is even stranger: it feels like an endeavor totally different from my writing, from my literature.

  BARBRA

  One of Berengo’s lovers. In 2010 she wanted them to be in a relationship, but he wasn’t interested. He had given her much thought. Twenty-eight years old, American, born and bred in Chicago. She had fallen in love with Nicola after spending two weeks in his apartment in New York while looking for a room in Brooklyn. The girl had brought a touch of grace to the house: she decorated and cleaned, bought fresh flowers. She encouraged him to drink boiled ginger root. Nicola was going through one of those phases where he felt like he needed to find a proper girlfriend, and Barbra was everything he might want. But when she left his apartment and moved into a room in Brooklyn, Nicola realized that he didn’
t love her.

  Barbra’s plan was to be an artist in Williamsburg. Nicola thought you were only allowed to “have a plan” before you turned twenty-five. By twenty-five you had to know whether you could make it or not. She avoided the subject, but she didn’t look like she was rich enough to be able to afford avoiding the subject. These might have been overly cold calculations—and it’s true that many of his friends and acquaintances thought that Nico was cold when it came to evaluating partners—but they made Nico stop loving her. He couldn’t imagine a future with her. (Which brought closure to yet another, febrile foray in search of Mrs. Berengo. Finding Mrs. Berengo is an impossible task—one of Zeno’s paradoxes— because of his relationship with Daria, who is ever present, despite being on the other side of the Atlantic.)

  But Barbra got in touch with him again. Nico agreed to go to dinner and accepted her invitation to come back to her apartment. He knew he couldn’t resist her, and something told him he couldn’t follow the impulse and just get laid and judge later. (He has never told me the obvious: that he was terrified that sex Barbra might take him somewhere.) So right there and then, he came up with a funny game: in order to discover the final piece that would explain why their relationship wasn’t meant to be, he would only let her kiss him if she paid him. The girl said she had no money: all she had was the $11 in her wallet, and she couldn’t use her debit card, because everything was allocated for her rent and her bills. Or so she said. Nicola had no way of checking. Barbra started to tease him with her mouth. She was dressed in black and had great breasts: they looked dreamy when she stood upright, as if pinned onto her chest by invisible hooks, mature but firm, with great, pale nipples. But when she lay down, they parted and fell to the sides, disrupting the overall vision.