The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  And that the unclean spirit, having left a body, might find seven others even worse.

  —BLAISE PASCAL, Compendium of the Life of Jesus Christ

  Contents

  Part I: Christians and Lions

  Part II: Flesh for Fantasies

  Part III: Victory Is Making You Suffer

  Part IV: Struggle of Interests in a Contest of Inequality

  Part V: Collective M

  Part VI: The Missing Shoulder

  Part VII: Vergeltungswaffe

  Part VIII: The Confessions

  Part IX: Cosmo

  Part X: Like Trees Planted Along the River

  Author’s Note

  Translator’s Note

  1

  IT WAS ARBUS who opened my eyes. Not that I was keeping them shut, but I had no way of being certain of what my eyes were seeing—these might be images projected to deceive or reassure me—and I was incapable of fostering doubts about the spectacle that was presented to me every day and which we called life. On the one hand, I unquestioningly accepted everything that befalls a kid aged thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and all the other years that follow in a row to bring to completion that “phase” (I’ve always heard it described as a “phase,” a “moment,” even when it lasts for quite a while, a “delicate moment,” or even a “crisis,” which truth be told will be followed by other moments and phases every bit as delicate or critical, coming one on the heels of the other in an unbroken succession until you are grown up, an adult, old, and finally dead), I partook without objection of the daily meal where the table was set with all the things that happen to any adolescent, the business he’s surrounded by as he grows up, as he develops (there you go, “development,” another keyword used by grown-ups to jimmy the padlocks of adolescence, the difficult “age of development,” the “development of a personality,” and then the horrible intransitive expression, “he has already developed,” which puts an unctuous glob of sealing wax on the secrets of the genitals), and which may not follow in any exact order, but which form the inevitable courses of any adolescent’s meal: school, soccer, friends, frustrations and excitements, all of it punctuated by phone calls and filling up gas tanks and falling off mopeds—in other words, common experiences.

  On the other hand, though, I was stung by a feeling of bafflement. Was this really life? That is, was this my life? Did I need to do something to make it mine, or was it being provided and guaranteed like this? Would I have to earn it and deserve it? Perhaps it was just a temporary life, and soon it would be replaced by the permanent one. But in that case, was it up to me to replace it, or would someone else see to that? Some external event? Life can be something extraordinary or something normal. What kind of life was mine? Until Arbus came into the story, these questions—which I am now at least capable of formulating, though I have long since given up all thought of answering them—didn’t even bob to the surface, because they dissolved before even emerging into my awareness, leaving behind only the faintest of tremors.

  Even the idea of calling it awareness is an overstatement.

  At the very most, the sentiment of being in the world. Of being there.

  Whoever projected the images that were so comfortable for me and that wrapped so snugly around me was a magician, a genius. I have to give him that. His lamp unleashed dreams that were perfect, sweet, and crystal clear, inside which I walked rapt and, indeed at certain moments, practically ravished. In other words, I was truly happy and I was truly sad. I inhaled deeply the mysterious air of the stage sets that were built around me and hastily broken down again the minute I went by. Something made me think that sooner or later a decisive event would occur that, rather than explaining one by one the previous insignificant twists and turns, would stitch them together with an irresistible thread like the kind used to bind the pages of novels so that you keep turning them until you reach the end, unable to put the book down. And so, merely resembling a piece of fiction but also possessing the implacable coherence of a piece of fiction, my life and everyone else’s lives could finally be called true, and real . . .

  They were moments that were precise and yet deeply troubling, I wouldn’t know how to put it any better, in which I perceived with painful clarity the confusion that took possession of me. All of me. It took hold of me and left no room for anything else—say, for ideas or thoughts. I was reduced to feeling and nothing more. To be exact, what I felt was the blood that flowed, amassing in my chest, my swollen, hurting heart, I mean to say, it actually hurt, really really hurt, as if it were about to leap out of my chest, to use the language of the novels of a bygone time, but though it hurt there was also a sweetness to it, strange, a truly strange sweetness, as strange as all the rest of it.

  Arbus was in the same class as me from the first year of middle school, but I only began to notice him as middle school was about to end. Just a month before final exams . . .

  STUDENTS ARE LEFT BEHIND by definition. All of them, with no exceptions. For that matter, teachers are also always left behind, too, they can never keep up with the study plans that they themselves drew up, and they put the blame for that on their students, which is right and wrong at the same time, since, let’s just imagine that their classes were made up exclusively of little geniuses, even then they wouldn’t be able to keep up, they’d still be left behind, maybe just by a page, or a line, or a millimeter. Their fate in any case is one of failure and giving up: for instance, giving up on the idea of covering all of Kant by the next-to-last year of high school. There’s no explanation for it and all we can do is fall back on the enigmatic expression “the force of events.” Goals are created in the first place to fall short of, it’s in the exclusive nature of targets not to hit the bull’s-eye. Whether it’s because you run out of strength as the journey continues, or because the destination recedes imperceptibly as you go, or else because the plans were too optimistic or presumptuous or abstract in the first place, or the obstacles more daunting than expected, and the rain days or sick days or strike days or election days were just surprisingly numerous. I don’t know the field of science he pursued or what he based his findings on, but a certain expert calculated that any project we get under way is bound to cost an average of a third more than the starting budget, and will take at least a third again as long as we estimated to complete. And this appears to be an ineluctable factor. Only the rarest of exceptions escape the dictates of this law of intrinsic delay, and one of them was Arbus.

  ARBUS, ARBUS, FRIEND, you skinny old fishbone. You were so skinny that the sight of your elbows when you pretended to play volleyball to keep from flunking gym sent a shiver down my spine. A shiver of pity or revulsion. To say nothing of your upper arms or your knees, whose sharp-edged bones practically poked through the black tracksuit with green-and-yellow trim that you had special permission to wear even as late as May, or the farther reaches of June, to protect your precarious state of health. However much you might pretend to focus on the game, everyone knew that if by some chance the ball ricocheted in your direction, into the narrow slice of the volleyball court to which we’d exiled you to make sure you did as little harm to the team as possible, you wouldn’t even see it hurtling downward because by then you’d be gazing in enchantment at the beams in the gymnasium roof, as if lost in calculations of the quantity of concrete required to hold it up. And if by chance, startled awake at the last instant by our shouts, you actually realized that you had to play (volleyball is a hysterical sport, a matter of crucial instants, in an entire game, you might or might not get your hands on the ball for a total of five seconds, and your turn comes unexpectedly), Arbus, come on! Pull it together!! Arbus, fuuuccckkk!! then you’d windmill your long, uncoordinated limbs, though it was unclear whether you
were trying to return the ball with arms raised or loft it from below or even to catch it, which is what anyone is instinctively tempted to do when they’re not paying attention and they see something coming straight at them. And in fact that’s exactly what you did most of the time, you’d catch the ball in mid-flight and gather it to your chest, and then look around at your teammates as if hoping with a disoriented half smile for their approval in the very same instant that it was dawning on you that you’d screwed up for the umpteenth time, a hunch that was confirmed by the chorus of your impatient teammates, “Oh no, noooo, Arbus, what the fuck are you doing!?” And in fact, that was something that happened to you pretty regularly, that your face would have an expression sharply at variance with what you were thinking or feeling. You’d smile while people were insulting you.

  The fantastic thing about Arbus was that he never got discouraged. He stayed impervious to events. Others couldn’t have put up with the constant ribbing and insults, and would have just thrown the ball at their teammates or lunged into physical combat or, as the ones we called little girls would do, burst into tears at their own undeniable inadequacies: reactions that I, for instance, gave in to on numerous occasions, incapable of putting up with the pressure of other people’s judgments, which always trigger a malaise or aggressivity in me even when they’re flattering, leave aside when they’re critical. I can’t say, however, that I ever saw Arbus looking crestfallen or worried. Anyone else would have suffered through this kind of situation and found it humiliating, but not Arbus, he maintained his equanimity as if none of it mattered to him or perhaps it did matter, but his face gave no sign of it, frozen as it was in a sort of delay, unable to keep up with his much faster mind. He took forever to register what was happening and to switch one mask for another. That’s it, maybe that’s really how Arbus was constructed, out of modular elements that weren’t synchronized each with the other, a lightning-fast mind, a cold heart, a face that was lazily incapable of shifting expression to suit the circumstance and was therefore often poised inappropriately (which is something that, as we shall see, brought him no small number of problems with his classmates, his teachers, and the authorities in general, who considered his expression to be insolent, irreverent, while his words sounded reasonable and obsequious, or the other way around).

  And then of course there was his uncoordinated body. Arbus was tall and skinny, his vaguely Slavic-looking face framed by long locks of dark hair, oily as if he’d never shampooed in his life, a mouth with fleshy lips perennially arched in the half smile that proved so irritating, and then the deeply intelligent gaze behind a pair of eyeglasses that would have looked perfect on the scientist in a sci-fi or spy movie, that is, the kind of glasses that make your eyes look enormous behind lenses thick as the bottom of a glass bottle, especially if your eyes are the light blue of water as Arbus’s were, or I really ought to say, as they still are, because Arbus is alive, I know that for certain, I have proof, though I have no idea where he’s living or what he does.

  IF HE WAS QUICK to learn (he took half the time I did, and a quarter or a tenth the time the others needed to absorb and translate theoretical lessons into practical exercises), he was every bit as good at instantly unlearning. It wasn’t that he forgot, it was simply that he moved on. Once he understood them, things suddenly ceased to be worthy of attention. At year’s end, he emptied out so he’d be ready to understand new things. Those who devour theories then go on to expel them. And those theories leave transparent traces of their passage through the mind, they seem to serve only to expand it, to make room for the transit of other, more complex schemes. When one’s understanding is so very rapid, one has no need to store up knowledge.

  Already in the first two years of high school, Arbus flabbergasted both the priests and the rest of us by going up to the blackboard and rewriting point by point the entire array of steps in a theorem that had just been set forth by the teacher only minutes ago. He would draw histograms and rotate solids in isometric projection, giving us the impression that he was actually observing them simultaneously from all sides—Cubism was nothing in comparison! The minute he pulled away the stick of chalk he’d sent screeching across the blackboard with nervous little strokes, without so much as an instant’s hesitation, he remained there motionless, long arms dangling, clumps of hair covering his cheeks, silently staring into the void as if he were waiting to receive new instructions before venturing a movement or uttering a word. Like a robot that goes into standby mode until it receives the next command to execute. You couldn’t call it boredom or impatience, if anything the opposite of that: indifference. And in fact, once the problem was solved, what more was there to add? Given that we hadn’t grasped it even the first time it was set forth by our math teacher, we only realized that Arbus had replicated it exactly by the amazement painted on the priest’s pointy face. He wasn’t exactly pleased by how easy it was for Arbus. This facility might suggest that the teacher’s job was, all things considered, superfluous. People like Arbus could simply have stayed home, curled up in bed, to leaf through the textbook and run through a month’s curriculum in a comfortable half hour. There was no real difference between going to school and skipping it, after all.

  Perhaps it would be better to have Arbus and the story of his well-understood genius written by someone at the bottom of the class, the behavioral problem, or the chronic underachiever, so as to bring out the full contrast. Instead the story is going to be written by me, intelligent, gifted, but not all that gifted, and most important of all, insufficiently endowed with the character needed to truly excel, like one of those young tennis players with enchanting backhands, for whom experts prophesy a spectacularly successful future, willing to swear up and down that they’re bound to become athletic phenomena, but instead as the years go by they never actually win major tournaments because there’s something they just lack. And what is it exactly that they lack? Determination? Courage? Tenacity? Balls? The killer instinct? What should we call that invisible quality without which the other, visible qualities are basically useless? Might it be no accident that we have the expression “first in the class,” while no one has ever talked about the second or third, or the fifth in the class, which is what Zipoli, Zarattini, Lorco, and I were, that is, the ones who, depending on individual performance, would surge forward or fall back in the rankings, emerging into or dropping out of the top ten grinds, though never coming remotely close to threatening the number one leader of the class, Arbus, unfailingly at the top of every ranking, in spite of the few solid points that we scored with doctored classwork or oral exams in which by pure chance we were questioned on the only topic we had studied, or the one we’d studied last, and which was therefore still fresh. Hence our inevitable ups and downs. Arbus’s scores, in contrast, were stunning, his results never fell below the top quartile, and so in his case the teachers were often forced to violate the great school taboo of the old days—that is, the full ten, the Italian equivalent of the A-plus. A grade that is supposed to mean: perfection. The teachers went through a moral struggle at the very idea of writing a ten in their grade books, and in fact there wasn’t enough room to fit double digits into the appropriate space. But for Arbus, even the most conservative teachers understood, the ones who pointed out, “But if I give you a ten, then how should I grade Manzoni?” Well, it was unthinkable to give Arbus anything less than the highest grade, no matter how they quibbled or made planetary comparisons with ancient Chinese sages or with Descartes. Personally, I was never one to pull all-nighters, but the great thing was that neither was Arbus, much less so, in fact; I believe that at home on his own he never studied at all. And after all, homework is boring.

  LATER, a great deal later, I would learn that one of the few things that Arbus did study, and systematically, were the different ways of killing people. I don’t know where he got this singular passion, since he was the most mild-mannered and inoffensive young man you could ever hope to meet, especially in those years that, as we sha
ll see in the course of the story, were marked by a very particular enthusiasm for violent abuse, an abuse that—rather than being exercised by the usual categories that are historically responsible for such abuse, that is, the rich (as a class prerogative), the poor (for survival), and criminals (by nature or profession)—was the province of just about everyone, on a scattered, individualized, personalized basis. You’d never call Arbus an aggressive or violent young man, and yet even then (though I learned of it only later, during our last years in high school) he cultivated a meticulous interest in killing, and let me be clear, killings of every kind and employing all methods or weapons—in war, of course, first and foremost, since war provides the greatest quantity and variety of killing—and then in ritual and sacrifice, in self-defense or for revenge, or else in the settling of accounts among gangsters or else to rid oneself of a boring husband or a cheating wife or out of sheer cruelty or else in the scrupulous implementation of a death sentence—in short, wherever there was a human being who for whatever reason or purpose chose to take the life of another human being, that was where Arbus turned his interest. In the pursuit of thoroughness, let me add that my classmate was also interested in the diametrically opposed situation (clearly, it was extremes that caught his attention): that is to say, not how one kills and is killed, but how one manages to survive.

  As children, actually, we were immersed in a constant round of killings, for the most part imaginary but nonetheless quite appalling. Every time we went out to play, we rubbed out a vast number of enemies and almost always, at some point, our turn came to die. That was a prerequisite of the story. The scene that I believe I’ve played out the greatest number of times in my life is that of the gunslinger who crumples after being shot. There existed a vast array of speeds and manners of falling, bending one’s legs, staggering, clutching one’s chest or throwing one’s arms wide, and then flinging oneself or slowly tumbling over backwards, followed by writhing and one final attempt to return fire at one’s enemy before giving up the ghost. Nearly blinded as we were by blood and dust, it was hard to aim accurately and the gunshot often went wild. There is no escaping the destiny of games. Your hand would fall slack and the fingers that formed barrel and hammer would spread out empty after one last spasm, and for good. We shed rivers of blood, including our own, it was a full-fledged school of life, and now that I think back on it, it’s rather strange that so few of us, after all, actually translated simulation into reality, and went out to harvest flesh-and-blood victims. It astonishes me how rarely people have recourse to violence, considering how you hear nothing but exaltations of it in books, movies, and games, and you enjoy simulations of it for decades at a time, on TV. By age twelve I’d already seen thousands of people killed or else killed them myself. I had taken part in executions by firing squad and funerals. I’d been responsible for bloodbaths. Today, you can attain the same number of kills in a few sessions with any video game, and you can send all those bastards hunkered down in the bushes straight to hell. You wipe them off the screen. The enemy has proliferated a hundredfold and the means to destroy that enemy have been perfected.