The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  The curse of gold . . . infectious . . .

  The wealthy man, this figure out of the Gospels, rendered legendary . . .

  In Italian society, the rich often tend to camouflage themselves, and in fact it is more likely that the false rich or the halfway rich show off their Audis purchased straight out of the showroom, with zero mileage. True wealth refracts its image deceptively, allowing others to believe what they will, turning away gazes, fostering illusions, raising screens and mirrors.

  What’s more, wealth in Italy is only rarely recognized as something that can have been acquired honestly and through merit; it is far more likely that people will think of it as the fruit of theft or good fortune, or a blend of the two. Rhetoric flames when it’s time to stigmatize “the easily acquired fortunes and quick profits,” but only when the tax authorities are pulling up out front, rarely if ever before then. The rise and, even more eagerly, the fall of the rich are followed with all the excitement of a public lottery. And the extraordinary thing is that the catastrophe is almost never definitive, the wealthy always seem able to rise from the ashes and begin their climb again until they can reach a height from which it is worth one’s trouble to fall.

  (Only those who die early are permanently out of the running: this is the origin of every suicide’s damned impatience . . .)

  Now, the students attending SLM were for the most part the sons of a medium-to-high-level bourgeoisie, but even of the petit bourgeoisie, whose parents had decided to put on airs by sending their boy to a private school, or else hoped to protect him generically from the threats and pitfalls of the world or assure him teachers who wouldn’t be replaced in the middle of the year or go on strike, a swim course and a pottery course, and maybe even procure him a few useful friendships to carry him through his life. I believe that few if any did it for any exquisitely religious preferences, that is to say, the real reason that the school existed in the first place. The tuition wasn’t high enough to scare off the shopkeepers and civil servants of the Quartiere Trieste and Quartiere Africano, or even of farther-flung neighborhoods that back then constituted the outlying borders of the city: such as Talenti. They’d make a sacrifice, and sometimes they’d make it double or even triple, depending on how many brothers there were. If I think about those who will soon become the protagonists of this story, and who will be described in the popular press as young and pitiless nabobs—well, one was the son of a hotel desk clerk, another one’s father worked in an office at the national Workers’ Compensation office.

  Another good reason to sneer at an alumnus of SLM was the idea (I have no way to verify this in any statistically grounded fashion) that in that school even utter dunces were passed from one year to the next just because they paid tuition. Private school considered as a professional service is a paradox, perhaps the only case in which it is the supplier of the service who judges the quality of the work, rather than the paying customer. That is the inherent contradiction of thinking of teaching as nothing more than a hired service: I do a job for you but in the end it is I who tells you that the result is unsatisfactory, and whose fault is that? Mine? No, yours . . . If a teacher is the equivalent of a dentist, and he teaches lessons the way he might drill a tooth and fill a cavity, but then the tooth splits, is it because you just didn’t try hard enough as a patient? In order to avoid such a contradiction, I believe, rather than any full-fledged act of corruption, it was in fact rare that anyone flunked a year at SLM. And they tended to involve the edge cases, the most serious cases of misconduct. For better or worse, all the others seemed to be promoted to the next grade, this much is true.

  But the genuine reason for discomfort in the presence of the new arrival was the faint scent of the sacristy. I didn’t know I was emanating it. But it wasn’t just the teachers, my new classmates could smell it, too.

  SLM (SAN LEONE MAGNO) took its name from the great Pope Leo, who had barred the barbarian king’s way by holding up the cross. Whereupon the barbarian had halted his onslaught, choosing not to invade Italy. A savior, in other words, a protector. I’m not interested to learn that this story is a legend, that the invader was actually paid off with the gold of who knows how many crucifixes melted down, and agreed to turn around and go off to devastate some other land, or some other prosaic explanation of events: the demystification of ancient stories fundamentally irritates me, having spent half my life swallowing stories like molten gold and the other half being told that not one of them was true . . . well, I’m actually much fonder of the first half. Just like the convicts I now teach, veritable sweepings of the nation’s prisons, who clap their hands over their ears if I venture to tell them that the Trojan horse is a fairy tale, no, hold on a minute, I don’t believe you, teacher, that can’t be true! Otherwise the whole house of cards of school itself tumbles to the ground, and in fact it’s been crumbling since the day they first dared to state that the heroes of antiquity were basically rogues and criminals, Gaius Mucius Scaevola a self-destructive kamikaze, Joan of Arc a schizophrenic, that it wasn’t the Arabs who killed Roland at all, but the Basques, and before you know it the protagonists have vanished from the stage of history, and with them their swords and their oaths, to be replaced by an insipid socioeconomic porridge. This unmasking of history, let it be said, was sacrosanct duty, no two ways about it. Teaching is based on myths and, at the same time, like the prestidigitator who makes things appear with one hand while making them disappear with the other, the destruction of those myths. That’s the intrinsic metabolism of education, the natural cycle it has to follow. But if you start straight up with disillusionment . . .

  In the final analysis, what is it that a young boy should or shouldn’t learn?

  AND YET LEO TRULY DID DESERVE the sobriquet of Great. He spent his life refuting heretics, and in particular those who refused to acknowledge Jesus’s dual nature. Denying that dual nature was the easiest and most logical thing to do, and therefore also the stupidest, when rational thought is unwilling to give up the ghost so it fights on with its blunted weapons, A is equal to A and A is different from B. No doubt, that is the way it works here on earth, but what about in heaven? If you don’t believe that Jesus was also a flesh-and-blood man, and that he really and truly died on the cross, or do you think instead that he was only a man, albeit a rather remarkable one . . . in that case, how can you call yourself a Christian? Why not just drop religion entirely? What’s the point of mongrelizing the great mysteries with cold reason that cannot understand, will not understand, demands or pretends to understand, without even bothering to make the effort required to understand? No religion would be acceptable, no religion would make even the slightest bit of sense by the lights of the principle of noncontradiction: they would all be nothing but processions of absurdities. Why did Odin hang himself from a tree, and what does it mean that he sacrificed himself to himself, and how could it be that Dionysus was born from one of his father’s thighs, or that Athena was born from his forehead? To common sense, practically nothing makes sense, starting with the simple fact that we’re here in the world at all. Beneath its patina of reasonableness, common sense is actually the true delirium: it darkens everything with its demand of enlightenment. To these philosophers Pope SLM brought to bear the palpable chill of reason joined with the heat of action.

  Yes, I admit it, I took a certain mental habit or way of thinking from the priests, made up of incessant logical reversals, sophisms, virulence banked beneath the ashes . . .

  ONE OF THE DUMBEST and perhaps, for that very reason, one of the most successful pranks was this: during Brother Gildo’s philosophy lessons, we would nod as he explained, let’s say, Aristotle; we’d nod after each sentence he uttered. We’d gaze at him levelly and listen to every word, and with every statement he made we’d nod our heads yes, every last one of us, as if eager to assure him that the things he was telling us were true, that we’d understood them, and that we shared them. An entire class of students, serious and attentive, nodding their heads, heads bo
bbing up and down almost uninterruptedly, like the bobbing heads of those spring-loaded dogs that people used to put in the rear windows of their cars. I have nothing more to say about Brother Gildo.

  Socrates tells us

  And Xanthippe gives thanks

  Better one fuck

  Than ten thousand wanks

  3

  HERE IS THE IMAGE that I’ve always had in my mind of a class of boys in an all-male high school: crabs in a bucket, that’s right, crabs heaped up in a pail.

  . . . AND JUST as these animals, waving claws and pincers, climb over each other’s backs, hoisting themselves up the sheer walls only to fall back and start over from the beginning: the bucket teems with helpless life . . .

  BUT IT IS NOT at all true that there is nothing but competition among males, quite the opposite. The profound and natural need that males feel to win love and tenderness and warmth from other males almost inevitably remains unsatisfied, and that is why it is wholly (and sometimes brutally) turned upon women; women who in turn end up, willy-nilly, invested with the unsustainability of that demand, brusquely and violently; likewise, the ritual manifestation of masculinity so often takes a menacing and disproportionate stance toward women, and is actually displayed simply to win respect from other males. Males, in other words, are the real audience other males are appealing to, especially in their teens, it is their judgment they depend upon, it is from them that they anxiously seek approval and admiration: it is from his classmates and friends that a male, only rarely able to earn love, expects at the very least recognition. And in order to obtain it, he’s open to anything.

  HOWEVER MUCH I may now complain about not having had girls in my classes at school, I can’t really imagine what it would have been like to have them. To experience a normal adolescence at least concerning that aspect. Like the adolescence of my own children, for example.

  But, come to think of it, perhaps not even my own children are experiencing one: I think of the younger one, my daughter, a student at the Righi public high school, and her girlfriends, constantly the targets of abuse and harassment, exposed to the cross fire of gossip on social media, the rankings of who is the biggest slut in the school and things like that: stuff that can knock your level of self-respect down to zero or send it skyrocketing to the stars in a giddy and hysterical oscillation . . .

  At the age of fourteen they’re incessantly subjected to grabbing and groping, intrusive roughhousing, offensive appraisals, and whatever terminology you may choose to apply to it, to a constant psychological and physical pressure on the part of certain of their classmates, who are however (and this is the surprising fact that perhaps deserves further discussion) not at all the early developing or fully developed “macho” males, but quite the contrary, the ones who are still half-children, and almost half-females, without a hair on their face, high-pitched voices, layers of baby fat that have not toughened into muscle or been absorbed, so that the muscle mass can break away from the bone. Their annoying persistence remains childish, but it faithfully predicts their behavior as adults. It is as if, through their bullying (which, luckily, my son, who’s a little older and roughly a foot taller and attends the same high school, has promised to put an end to by delivering a pair of well-chosen punches if these students persist in bothering his sister), they fooled themselves into thinking that they thus had grown two or three years older in a single day, thus earning the status to subjugate their female classmates, especially the attractive ones.

  BEING BORN a boy is an incurable disease. Arbus wasn’t the only one who proved to be awkward and uncoordinated. We all constantly made ungraceful movements when we went to do any given thing, even only to throw our book satchel over our shoulders (back then there were no such things as backpacks, except for camping). If psychologists had chanced to observe our uncoordinated lunges, the way we scratched ourselves or flung our arms in the air, they would have deduced that we were mentally ill. No one realizes just how far a boy would go in order to win the approval of his classmates and pals; the quantity of abuse that he can make up his mind to tolerate, whether inflicted upon himself or inflicted upon others, in order to earn recognition. The game was wearisome and repetitive: it was necessary to prove that we were men, that is, macho males, and the minute we were done proving it, we were immediately required to prove it again, each time starting over from scratch, as if it were always possible simply to lose the masculinity that had just been measured, as if that risk always lay lurking in ambush, as if already having proven a hundred times that we were men meant nothing, because a single misstep, just one failure would erase all the results achieved, wiping out the entire stake one had accumulated. Like in card games or in those sports where the points laboriously piled up can be lost all at once on the next turn, what good does it do to prove your masculinity if just a minute later you wind up back at square one, required to prove your worth again?

  And in fact, having come to this conclusion, after striving eagerly to pass these blessed tests, after posing for a lifetime so as to appear courageous, daring, virile, responsible, serious, and so on and so forth, well, once and for all, I’ve given up, let them take me for queer—amen.

  THE GAME was very simple, it was just a matter of being fast: whoever was first to accuse someone else of being queer, wasn’t. Whoever had been accused of being queer, in order to disprove the charge, had to accuse someone else, and so on. It was pointless to retort by turning the original accusation on the first one to level it: you had to pass it on to a third target. Anyone who didn’t think about girls was queer; but even those who thought about them to the exclusion of all else, the whole blessed day, was equally queer. They both deserved the same amount of mockery.

  Hierarchies among boys are established in a crescendo of orders, insults, alliances, and challenges.

  When it came to the bullies at school, you could be:

  a) Subordinate

  b) Complicit

  c) Persecuted/marginalized

  d) Or belong to a category that was difficult to define (Nonaligned?), that the bullies left alone, considering it too much effort or basically useless to fight, sort of the way Hitler treated Switzerland. I belonged to this fourth category. The appropriate term might be “neutrality,” except not enough thought is ever given to the reasons one might have for remaining neutral, and what is required in order for that status to be granted.

  IN ORDER TO BE FUNNY, a prank has to contain something amusing and something hostile. A perfectly innocuous prank makes no one laugh, it remains inexplicable: if it isn’t crude, why do it? Why bother to organize it? Even the victim, if he is in no way harmed by the prank, wonders why he was targeted in the first place. Vulgarity, for example, remains absolutely necessary if one means to forge a bond of brotherhood: vulgarity tends to be established on a lower level, tending toward the filthy, the trivial, the offensive, but since brotherhood per se tends to strive upward, it is clear how one can proceed in just a few rapid steps from mongrel wisecracks about women to the sublime love of the Dolce Stil Novo, and from the heavy-handed spirit of the locker room to acts of altruistic self-sacrifice and heroism, migrating from body to soul by imperceptible degrees . . .

  For instance, I’ve reached an age at which it is customary to consider one’s status to be an achievement gained after a lifetime of effort, and yet, strangely enough, I care little or nothing about status now, while I cared about it frantically when I was thirty or so and even more than that when I was a teenager, ah, how I worried back then about how others saw me, how I worried that I be considered the handsomest, the smartest, even the most likable, even though I knew I was none of those things (Arbus’s intelligence knew no rivals; the laurel wreath of sheer beauty was fought over among Zarattini—an angel—and Jervi and Sdobba, and when it came to likability, I knew that I was struggling feebly, while both Modiano and Pilu would have swept the vote with unanimous victories), and how I suffered at the thought! But it wasn’t only at school that this desire burned
within me, but rather during the holidays, when the landscape was adorned with girls and the frenzy to lead the pack was focused on them. How I yearned, at the beach, in the summer, at the ages of thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen, how I seethed with the desire to be held in consideration by the others my age, boys and girls alike! I’d have done anything to please them, to win their respect and approval! Even though I was shy and pretty much a coward, I’d have been willing to take part in any risky or disreputable undertaking if it would allow me to emerge from my state of anonymity, that place in the shadows where no one ever remembers your name and they mistake you for someone else and it always seems like they’re meeting you for the first time.