And so each of them takes a snippet of that Christ figure and imitates it as best he can. There’s the good Christ, the humble one, the teacher, the victim, the mystic, the anarchist, the consoler, the implacable one, the violent Christ, that’s right, even violence can be found in that unequaled figure, or at least the violence of those who use words as swords to smite and cut, to sever. There’s a mocking Christ, incurably comical, in contrast with what Nietzsche claims (“There is not one single buffoonery in the Gospels; that alone suffices to condemn a book”), and, of course, a tragic Christ. In short, He leaves His followers an entire array of characteristics and attitudes, even though each man will at most manage to take on just one of them. This was already manifest in the apostles (each of them a tile in the mosaic that, taken as a whole, depicted the Master), let alone in the priests of yesterday and today.
The brothers who taught elementary school at SLM were enthusiastic young men, driven by I have no idea what force to remain faithful to their callings. Our teacher was named Brother Germano. I remember him as a young man, open-faced, his hair trimmed short on the back of his neck, a good soccer player. He was a first-rate teacher, or at least I learned a great many things from him, indeed I would say that most of the things I learned there and still remember today were taught to me by Brother Germano. If I were to reckon up percentages of my knowledge, I’d have to guess that 90 percent dates back to my time at school. Later (at the university and in life) I didn’t learn much more. Sure, a few notions of art history . . . certain political theories that called for a world ruled by very special tyrants . . . plus a bunch of other things that came in useful then and there and which I used and almost immediately forgot about. Many topics that I studied specifically to write about and then forgot. It’s the only way to free oneself of an obsession.
As recently as the sixties, there were still young men in Italy who chose the harsh path of chastity and poverty (by which we mean the renunciation of individual ownership of money and property), and all this in the name of teaching, that is, in order to be able to provide young people with a Christian education. Even if eventually a chemistry teacher would have to do that, teach chemistry, which in and of itself has very little to do with matters Christian or non-Christian, and the same can be said of a French teacher or a gym teacher: what specific aspect of this is Christian I couldn’t say. Is there really any reason, in order to explain to a classroom full of lunkheaded, spoiled boys how sulfuric acid is formed, or to get them to repeat the nasal French sounds of an, en, in, on, and un . . . why the teacher should take vows? The teachers, in fact, weren’t even priests (I call them priests for convenience, but they were by no means priests, and they couldn’t say mass), having received only minor orders, which made the meaning of their sacrifice even more mysterious. What reward awaited them in return for their efforts? To see us become good Christians, or good citizens? How many good Christians did SLM actually produce? Formed as men to go out into the world, from that confessional and nonconfessional clay. While in elementary school, our teachers were priests, enthusiastic young priests, in middle school the teaching staff was a mix, and in high school the teachers were nearly all laymen. The only priests in high school were the philosophy and chemistry teachers. The Italian teacher (who I liked very much, Giovanni Vilfredo Cosmo) was a layman, and so was the Greek and Latin teacher, likewise the math, physics, and art history teachers. I never knew if that was because of any lack of specific knowledge and preparation, that is, whether there were no priests trained to teach those subjects; perhaps it was because that order’s specific choice was to devote itself to primary education, which forms individuals at an early age and in an indelible manner, while single disciplines at higher levels of education can perfectly well be imparted by qualified professionals. I’ve always wondered whether the lay teachers at SLM were ever asked, when they were officially hired, to make an explicit profession of faith, in other words, just how these teachers were asked to comply with the model of a Catholic school, and with its principles. When I think back to my high school teachers, none of them seemed sanctimonious to me—not even vaguely religious. Never once in class did they mention God or the Virgin Mary. Indeed, the Latin and Greek teacher, De Laurentiis, showed an unmistakable inclination toward paganism. It was the subject itself, with its erotic and heroic undertones, that sent him into a state of ecstasy, and that veil of excitement was enough to conceal the sense of ridicule and defeat that gnawed at him, and make up, at least in part, for the frustration of having to teach all those luxuriant riches to classrooms full of ignorant, spoiled boys, who simply looked on at his vehemence with pity. It is love’s fate to be the target of mockery. Not one of his passions was conveyed to us, not even a line of the poets and philosophers he read out loud, emphasizing their meter, entered our heads or captured our hearts. His heavy Neapolitan accent as he declaimed Thucydides and Virgil, for that matter, left us disappointed and indifferent. Our detachment was far crueler than any mutiny could have been. Nothing could be worse than a classroom of boys who snicker at things that you personally find exciting and stirring. De Laurentiis had made up his mind to let us hear a sample of ancient Greek music, he’d obtained sheet music from some obscure source, and he’d had his son play it on an electric keyboard of some kind, I think a GEM Mini or a Bontempi organ, or else an Eko Tiger combo organ, and in class he’d played the recordings for us. They were whiny monodies, played with a single finger, and he would follow their ascending and descending notes with the hand gestures of a rapt conductor, as if painting the melody in the air, half-closing his eyes against the sunshine beaming through the branches of the pine trees outside the window, murmuring “mmm . . . mmm . . .” along with the melody as it monotonously rose and fell, rose and fell, “mmm . . . mmm . . . mmm . . .,” until the sheer joy of his exclamation, “mmm . . . mmmusic from ancient Greece!!” It seemed as if that thin line of notes had crossed twenty-five centuries of history just so that he could grumble along with them. Then he’d open his eyes, giddy with happiness, and discover that no one, no one except him, was even listening.
BUT THESE WERE INNOCUOUS mythologies, minor ecstasies that we concede to anyone so disposed. The mania that lurks in all our hearts, if anything, is snuffed out by an excess of tolerance, and certainly Catholicism, whatever else might be said about it, is the most tolerant, elastic, and indulgent of religious professions, what with its constant habit of forgiving all and any sins, even the most infamous, and it practically gives the impression that it’s justifying them, so that in its noblest and most elevated moments it skims dangerously close to amorality, its embrace is so ample that it becomes practically impossible to escape its conciliatory grip, those welcoming arms become tentacles. In a country that was still as profoundly religious as Italy in those years, where only avowed atheists were willing to step outside of and set themselves against common sentiment, evidently the fact of being a Catholic, a good Catholic, or only just someone who attends Christmas mass “because it’s so charming,” was considered a natural state of affairs, something along the lines of the air that you breathe. Deep down, after all, I think that our teachers were asked to do nothing more than be like everyone else. A friend of mine who had applied to teach at a private girls’ boarding school a few years ago was asked a question by the headmaster, who had gathered all possible information about the candidate and checked out his extensive CV; he knew that this question would be decisive to the outcome of the interview:
“Are you married?”
“No.”
“Engaged?”
“No.”
“But then, tell me . . . do you like women?”
It was obviously a booby trap. My friend’s instinct to lie (in reality he would drool at the sight of any even faintly desirable young woman) would have led him to reply precipitously “No!” which would have spelled his ruin. Ah, no? Liar, or pederast. But if he’d frankly replied “Yes!” that would have been even worse. At a girls’ boarding school, w
hich is more dangerous and unseemly, a teacher who likes women, or one who doesn’t? What about at a boys’ boarding school (this question, as we shall see, is even more interesting and would require a courageous answer . . .)? My friend, instead, improvised an answer in perfect priestly style: that is to say, a masterpiece of evasiveness.
“So, do you like women?”
“Well . . . just like any good Christian,” he said, with a smile.
CATHOLICISM CALLS FOR a reasonable restraint of one’s instincts, rather than a total repression. “For it is better to marry than to burn.” There was a time, in the early eighties, when St. Augustine was fashionable, more or less like Siddhartha. Personally, I found that his famous yet painfully slow conversion grated on my nerves, that reluctance to be willing to become good. If one day you really understand the right thing to do, then hurry up and do it, right? I prefer, however crude and fanciful they might be, the dramatic crises, the falls from horseback, the dazzling lights and thunderous voices telling you what to do, so that you obey without hesitation—the psychology of Augustine wears me down with all its nuanced twists and turns. Our philosophy teacher was named Brother Gildo. He was a cold and meticulous man, already rather well along in years, who scrupulously prepared his lessons, though he gave the impression that the material was far away, no longer within reach, and that he’d had to study it all over again, making more than a few efforts along the way. In other words, he seemed like an aging reservist called back to active teaching in the aftermath of some emergency. Perhaps he’d studied theology as a young man, and the headmaster, encountering staffing problems, must have thought that philosophy worked more or less the same way: a succession of implacable abstractions. Strange how the science of God proceeds with roughly the same pedantry as the others, interrupted here and there by great bursts of flame. Taking the breviary out of his hand and hastily thrusting a history of philosophy (and perhaps a few volumes of Cliff’s Notes) in its place, he then tossed Brother Gildo into the trenches of the classrooms. Up until Aristotle, his detached and notional lessons led us to believe that the earliest philosophers were, basically, deranged maniacs who were in the constant throes of hallucinations and saw the world as if it were made entirely of fire or water or atoms with little arms and paws to clutch at other atoms or as a slanting rain of grayish matter or other such nonsense, to say nothing of the absurd Platonic myths. Recounted, or rather coldly reported, by Brother Gildo in his nasal, incredulous voice, those daring phantasmagorias left us cold. I really found it incomprehensible that anyone could ever have taken this bullshit seriously, such as the idea of men parading back and forth like targets from a sideshow shooting gallery with statues tied to the tops of their heads, and all this just to play a game of Chinese shadow puppets in order to deceive prisoners in a cave (?), seriously, what, are we kidding? That was supposed to be philosophy? The greatest creation of human intelligence? That everything is number (which means what?) and that dogs have souls and it’s forbidden to eat fava beans? And those would be the champions of world thought?
Then came Aristotle’s turn. There the schematic nature that Brother Gildo wore emblazoned into his very physique, skinny and gnarled as he was, was elevated to the dignity of a system. The curly brackets on the blackboard grew thick and fast and his voice became increasingly nasal. Since he was incapable of speaking spontaneously off the cuff, he was constantly forced to refer back to his notes, which were written in such a minute script that even he struggled to decipher them, adjusting the little wire-rim spectacles that slid down his beak of a nose. In the end, he gave up the idea of explaining at all and limited himself to reading aloud variously from the textbook, now from his little sheaves of notes. Or else he’d copy his diagrams out on the blackboard, and we in our turn were expected to copy them into our notebooks. Aristotle himself is already the barest of barebones reasoning, so it is hard to imagine how he managed to render his work even more schematic than it already was. This was a charming pastime known at school as “dictating notes”: a pure oxymoron. Notes that are dictated are, by very definition, not notes. Under dictation, the very essence of that most noble art is lost. Note-taking is the very first form of understanding and framing of a broader topic. Dictating notes is an approach that only very ignorant teachers, at the beginning of their careers, employ, or else exhausted ones, at the end. They turn on autopilot and churn along until the bell rings. The result of this further distillation of the philosopher’s thoughts was an incomprehensible algebra. It seemed as if Brother Gildo, by impersonally dictating those formulations, had freed himself, and consequently us, from the duty of understanding. That is why some students are fond of this method, which has the advantage of being clear and requires no particular effort, resulting in a reasonable tacit understanding with the teacher: he is not forced to raise his voice, and peace and quiet reigns sovereign in the classroom because all the students are silent as they write.
They come out much cleaner, those pages of counterfeit notes, nice and dense, tidy, regular, and free of corrections or scratch-outs.
We had a classmate, Zipoli, who wrote the notes for all his subjects in a single notebook, in pencil. He only needed one notebook because his handwriting was so small and precise. In half a page, he could fit the entire Renaissance. His handwriting was as fine as a hair on a newborn’s head. But why in pencil? The explanation came at the end of the year. On the last day of school, Zipoli took an eraser and deleted everything that he had written during the year. Patiently, page by page, in a fine shower of rubber shavings. The notebook turned blank again, ready to be reused the following year. It became virgin again. In five years of high school, Zipoli only ever owned one notebook, always the same one, plus, of course, various pencils (with 3H lead?), and a set of erasers. He came from a large family, with five or six Zipoli brothers, I never knew whether they handed their notebooks down from one to the other, if they were deeded at the end of the school career. Sometimes I imagine that the entire Zipoli family used that single notebook, like the Graeae, who shared one eye among them, passing it from one to the other. (By the way, the Zipolis didn’t own a TV. As far as I know, they were the only family who didn’t. That fact amazed me.) Zipoli did well at school, after Arbus he was one of the best. Scrupulous, reserved, understated, he had curly blond hair so close to ash in color that it seemed white, in fact he looked old already; at age seventeen, Zipoli looked like an aged Swede. One day he asked me to lend him a helmet so he could go on a trip by Vespa, riding behind a friend, to Sweden, in fact. Two months later he brought it back to me, without a scratch on it.
Zipoli was accustomed to leaving no signs of his passage. If he did produce them, he carefully erased them.
WITH HIS PAINSTAKINGLY MINUTE WORK, Brother Gildo was successful in ruining, or perhaps we should say, in forestalling my understanding of philosophy, roughly speaking, from Thales to Kant. Something I never fully recovered. I am sorry to say that my mind grew deformed and quite modern. Those gaps in an education can’t be backfilled. Subsequent readings and studies are like artificial limbs applied to a mutilated limb: however artfully made, they struggle in vain to simulate the naturalness of gestures, with their hooks at best you can reach out and clutch a glass and raise it to your lips, but you can’t use them to play the piano. Certain topics or historical periods or even entire disciplines have remained out of my reach, like kingdoms that were destined to my rule, but lost before I could wear their crown. Luckily, at least Kant would be wisely reviewed by my new philosophy teacher (a professoressa, a woman! After a priest, a woman!) the following year, after I left the school run by priests for the reasons I will lay out later. She knew that there was no way ever to understand Kant sufficiently, it’s not humanly possible to assimilate and remember it all after a three-month summer vacation, and I certainly couldn’t have, given that I, thanks to the good offices of the elderly Marist brother, hadn’t understood a single thing Kant had written, and so she explained it all from the very start. From first
principles, which is where that body of thought itself begins, the first thought, as if it burst forth from nothingness.
My new teacher at Giulio Cesare High School felt the utmost contempt for me because I had been attending a school taught by priests. She considered me a child of wealth and privilege, spoiled and ignorant, which for that matter is the exact description I offered a few lines earlier of both myself and my classmates. The simple fact that I’d ever attended a private school at all disqualified me in her eyes. My math teacher and my Italian teacher felt the same way about me. At a public high school with a bit of a reputation, as was the Giulio Cesare of the time, anyone who came from a private Catholic school might as well have been branded with a mark of infamy. So you can just imagine if they’d transferred in senior year, in the offing for the final exams. If they didn’t want him even there . . . that is what they must have thought about me. I was a piece of human detritus, in short, kicked upstairs from one grade to the next until the priests had grown heartily sick of me, so sick that they were willing to give up my tuition. I had in store for me some real ostracism and a bounty of humiliations—on one of my first days of school there, I was tossed out of class for “sitting impolitely” (that’s right! In the middle of the seventies such a thing was still possible!) with the sarcastic comment, “They’ve spoiled him, the young master . . .” I walked out into the hallway, filled with shame and disbelief. I’d never thought of myself as “different.” Apparently, however, I was.
To have studied at a school run by priests was an original sin that would have to be scrubbed out.
What does that sin consist of?
FIRST OF ALL, it’s a marker of social class. Anyone who attends a private school clearly has money. And this condition of privilege, admired or envied in other ways, can have its disadvantages, its contraindications, its collateral effects. That is why even the rich are sometimes ashamed of their wealth and tread a path of purification spangled with charity, enlistment in revolutionary movements, rejection (for the interim) of the inheritances that await them, and systematic squandering of great estates. Italian society is, in fact, a class-based hierarchy, like all other societies, but it’s equipped with ingenious mechanisms of reparations, for the most part fantastical in nature, just like any and all systems that dream of compensating for injustices while leaving unaltered the harsh economic facts on which those injustices are founded. The supposed vendetta almost always remains on the verbal plane, where the Italians are past masters. Indeed, I would say that the central axis of Italian culture is formed of geniuses cursed by misfortune who console and ennoble themselves, craft their vengeance, and invent a better fate for themselves or lay waste to their enemies in a bloodbath—all with words. The most illustrious and unattainable paragon: Dante. But before him and in his wake there is a horde of wildcat desperadoes who tirelessly produce elegies and songs and cantos, landscapes and dreams, virtual paradises and enchanted groves and knights and sorcerers, and revolutions and visions and prophecies and apocalypses that were meant to rectify (or at least help to forget for a while) the wrongs inflicted. Only thus made whole—alas, on a strictly symbolic level—can life become tolerable. The rigidity of social distinctions is probably less unforgiving here in Italy than in England or France, but if wealth in any case remains out of reach, then it is made the target of a very particular scorn. Which is not merely the thuggish and plebeian sneer, the bow from the waist turned on its head with an insult (“My good sir, would you care for some shit?”) or a Bronx cheer. No, what I’m talking about is the seething petit bourgeois resentment that springs from frustrated aspirations, from dashed admiration for something to which one imagines to lay legitimate claim by proximity. Or else from a thirst for egalitarian principles that, unable to raise one, merely degrades, incapable of elevating, hurls down, and is therefore only too eager to exult every time a wealthy man tumbles into disgrace. When this, all too rarely, actually happens, there is genuine jubilation. It’s time to pay for the original sin of money.
The Catholic School Page 4
