The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  WE DEVELOP those aspects of ourselves that we think others will like best. First of all for our mother, then to our young playmates, and eventually to everyone on whom we want to make a good impression, contemporaries, grown-ups, teachers, girls, we present the part of ourselves, and only that portion, that we imagine has the best chance of being approved and accepted. The rest remains in the shadows, and only someone with a very sharp eye (generally, our friends, and even more than our friends, our enemies) is able to glimpse it. The face that we present to the world, hoping that it will be accepted, the face we lay all our bets on, is called the “false self,” but not because it is false—it certainly isn’t, it’s not a simulation or a masquerade, it belongs to us, it’s authentic, it really is our face or at least an expression that comes naturally to us; it is we who falsify it by presenting it as if it were all of us, whereas it is merely a part, and not even the most significant one.

  The false self can only feel alive if it is activated by a challenge to take on. It has a continuous need of outside tasks, tests to pass. Unless it acts, it might as well not even exist.

  HOW DIFFICULT it is to manage one’s contradictions, to hold them together! For instance, I have always had a hard time feeling alive in any sort of continuous fashion. The figure of myself that I had created to present to the attention of others was something that I was capable of sustaining for only a few hours a day, let’s say, four or five, or if I had decided to tough it out, at the very most, seven or eight hours in a row, after which disaster inevitably ensued: I would collapse into abulia, complete apathy, sheer anonymity, a sort of diseased torpor that, really, wasn’t such a disagreeable condition, if for no other reason than that it demanded no further efforts or displays. I didn’t much like being alone, but at least solitude offered the advantage of sparing me other people’s judgment, sheltering my general dereliction; and so, in the end, I grew fond of that apathy, that laziness, that exceedingly profound melancholy, and the scorn I felt toward myself for the very fact that I had spent so much time forcing myself to seem what I was not, or not really. I grew fond of that whole gloomy stew. I recognize myself more fully in those few hours of nothingness than I do in the poses put on to fortify myself.

  I could feel my nerves distending until they transmitted nothing more than a weak pulsation, like guitar strings progressively slackened until they emit a dull, hollow, slightly funny sound. A useless sound. That was the ideal condition in which to read books and listen to music.

  I THEREFORE CAME to the conclusion that we are nothing more than bundles of nerves and sensations to which an identity has been attributed for juridical reasons: in order to ensure that that crossroads of random and chaotic pulsations will pay the taxes, inherit his father’s house, can pick up prepaid tickets in his name at the airport, and sit in his assigned seat. Nothing more. Nothing more than a convenient way of tracking you down.

  And the name corresponding to this identity? Well, it’s nothing more than a registration: on a magnetic card, a notarized document, the caption underneath a photograph, the bronze letters bolted to a slab of travertine, and then let’s call it a day.

  THE LOCKER ROOM was the place where this ritual acknowledgment of masculinity was acted out. Perhaps there can be nothing more shameful than to display one’s body as a subject for comparison, even as it is still developing. When we went down to the gym and took our clothes off, there emerged from under a layer of largely equivalent clothing the bodies of boys who were more deeply dissimilar than so many stray dogs in a kennel.

  With inexhaustible wisecracks designed to target alien elements, be they women or faggots, an exclusive fraternity we were celebrating, but one that, paradoxically, wound up only reinforcing the homosexual tendencies at play within the group. It is an inevitable consequence of living in a wholly male community: what with all the demeaning and dismissing, even if only in words, of women and queers and faggots, and the waving of the banner of virility, you wind up seeking only the latter. True machismo cannot be anything but intrinsically homosexual.

  Very, very curious, this oscillation between the outright rejection of femininity and the almost desperate quest for it . . .

  But it was all a masquerade: consisting of displays of bravado, obscene language, tremendous bullshit, either uttered or committed, risky, idiotic behavior (there’s now a TV program specifically devoted to this type of behavior, steeped in a vaguely suicidal spirit: its protagonists swallow worms, strap rockets to roller skates, let themselves be flung off ceiling fans or butted by rams), in other words, any undertaking provided it is dangerous and absurd, capable of causing abrasions or making you vomit, self-destructive behavior, gratuitous violence, by which for instance I’d point to boiling a toad or filling the tank of windshield wiper spray with urine and then directing the nozzles to douse pedestrians and motorcyclists; by night, throwing cobblestones at the lions in the safari park, after luring them to the fence with the smell of raw steaks . . .

  STICK A HAMSTER into a microwave oven (a traditional oven takes too long to heat up . . .), throw coins out the window at street musicians, after heating them red-hot in a pan, give an unsuspecting friend a snowball to eat, with a center of frozen piss . . .

  IT WAS A TEST to which we were all subjected on a daily basis. We had to prove that we were man enough to tolerate the pressure implicit in the ongoing joke in extremely poor taste that is life in an all-male boarding school. Even though I was never particularly targeted, indeed, since I belonged to the group of the luckier ones as I was exempt from any glaring physical or moral defects, and also because I’ve always basically minded my own business, I confess that I’ve given in more than once to that pressure. A palpable, tangible pressure. So how did I let off steam? By crying. If possible, without being seen. There is no better and no faster way. A couple of times by getting in fights. In the Brief History of Punches that one of these days I plan to write, one chapter will certainly be dedicated to fighting at school. If you leave out the fights that originate out of politics—which can be examined in a chapter all its own, a chapter that is actually very important, about fights that see the school as nothing more than a theater for a dress rehearsal of a dance that will take place on a very different stage, in the streets and in the squares—fighting in a boy’s life is an integral part of his scholastic career, no less so than exams: indeed, they are just another kind of exam.

  THE MOST IMPORTANT human resources are spent on gaining acknowledgment of one’s role. At home, in society, at school, at work, on this earth. At certain points, it might seem that our principal pursuit was neither that of studying nor playing a sport nor watching television (which in terms of scheduling filled our days to the very brim), but rather that of playing a role. Which role? It’s not that easy to say, it isn’t obvious. The role of young people? The role of enterprising young males? The role of privileged young Roman Catholic Italian males? The role of good boys or the role of vice-indulging reprobates? Probably equal measures of all of these things, simultaneously or else in alternating phases, in rotation, changing roles between winter and summer, among the family or with friends—after all, it’s only normal to behave differently according to the situation, like the father and head of household who on Sunday goes out and sets fire to cars around the soccer stadium, and then Monday morning shows up right on time at his job. There’s a great deal of room in a single personality—it can hold two, or three, and maybe even more. The central story of this book will confirm that you can be obedient students by day and nevertheless still go out to kidnap and rape underage girls by night.

  IN KEEPING WITH a Romantic tradition with little or no foundation in reality—truly the stuff of aesthetes—a notion circulates that young people are rebellious, or at least more rebellious than adults. Nothing could be further from the truth. The vast majority of young people are superconformists. Instinct leads them to join the herd, only rarely to wander outside its bounds. If they revolt against certain rules, it’s only becaus
e they are obeying the dictates of others whom they feel have greater authority. During adolescence, the herd spirit dominates life in almost every aspect: nothing lies outside its control, from the way you dress to the things you say, from how couples kiss to which and how many cigarettes should be smoked, and how to inhale without coughing. Everything, everything is learned through imitation.

  PERHAPS THIS GREAT EFFORT, this continuous, endless mirroring and comparison of oneself, this interminable skirmishing with oneself even more than with others, this construction of challenges, this meeting and overcoming of them, this proving one is up to them, this hardening, as one grows wily and tests oneself, kneading one’s spirit and hammering one’s physique with runs around the track that leave one breathless and rounds of push-ups, this battle without quarter asked or given of crabs in a plastic bucket, well, perhaps it is nothing more and serves no other purpose than to prepare one’s entry into the world of work, and that’s all. Behind all these inner torments, there’s just one concrete purpose: finding one’s way out of the maternal Garden of Eden with the least possible amount of regret, in order to descend into the purgatory of practical, everyday life, where every conquest entails a corresponding loss, a slap in the face, a betrayal, and there are no sugar-sweet berries that simply plop into your mouth unbidden, nor do milk and honey drip from the trees. It is only so that we can tolerate this expulsion without immediately taking our own lives that we must “be men.” It is with endless amounts of muscle-straining and butt-clenching and eye-squinting and cock-handling and shouting and sobbing and dreaming of oneself as the recognized leader of the World Order that one reaches a sufficient average level of insensibility that the world ceases to instill overwhelming fear . . .

  I HAVE BEFORE MY EYES the last letter I received from Arbus before he exited my life. It’s dated May 12, 1980, that is, six years after he left SLM, in the spectacular fashion that I’ll describe in just a few pages. Let me transcribe here the passage that most struck me, hurt me, and convinced me.

  “The difference between you and me, Edoardo? I understood it many years ago, but it never stopped me from being your friend. And you know what that difference is? In spite of everything, you always wanted to be accepted by our other schoolmates, and you tried to get them to like you. You’d step away, from time to time, you gave the impression of being detached from them, but only so you could make a surprise return appearance, ensuring that everyone noticed both how you went away and how you once again conceded your friendship, how you participated in the pranks and all the rest. You needed it, you couldn’t live without it, just as a fish can’t live out of water. You always needed the others, and there’s nothing wrong with that, you need approval, admiration, even though you pretend to care nothing for it, in reality you think of nothing else and you wouldn’t be capable of bidding farewell to anything or anyone. You’d only leave for a while, but you’d never make a definitive break. You’re a weak and moody heart. I’ve seen you make trouble in class, not because you really wanted to, but because you were afraid to be the only one—aside from me and Zipoli, and let’s throw in Rummo for good measure—not to be doing it . . . You were afraid, and you had fun out of a fear not to have fun. Admit it. There remain two options and they’re irreconcilable: assimilate with the others, complying with all the conditions and expectations that have to do with being men; or else isolate yourself, really break away, remain pure and extraneous, noncompliant, rejecting all models. And what choice did you make?”

  Yes, Arbus is right, as always, I chose the first option, or rather, it chose me: I was unable to defend my diversity, and I never really cared to defend it. I wanted to be like everybody else. Deep down, that is what I secretly aspired to, even if I was too proud to admit it. Arbus wasn’t proud in the slightest. And indeed, he chose the second option, isolation.

  4

  WE WERE and we felt close to one another, without talking much. Better to do things together than talk about it. We were united, practically joined at the hip, and yet there was no real intimacy among us. In fact, if anything we feared intimacy.

  Intimacy means feeling and being vulnerable, and also displaying that vulnerability: weakness can be exploited, trust can be betrayed, exposing yourself just opens you up to derision.

  Actually, we felt no need to talk about ourselves, that is, about our hopes, our secrets, our fears, and our ambitions, no, these remained hidden and unknown, and I mean to say that, first and foremost, they were hidden from ourselves, we didn’t know what they were, we didn’t know who we were, how could I have confessed to my friends and classmates something that I myself didn’t know? Instead, we told stories that for the most part we’d heard from others, we joked, did imitations, issued proclamations, threatened impossible things, mocked and derided one another or really (it was an asymmetrical pursuit) we’d always make fun of the same four or five classmates, always the same targets of vulgar wisecracks and pranks, a couple of whom had accepted their sacrificial role to the point that they even self-immolated, if no one else was mocking them, they’d do it themselves, insulting themselves and then proving the validity of those insults by exaggerating their awkwardness and incompetence so as to draw more slings and arrows: thus managing to appear even shyer and fatter and shorter and clumsier than they actually were. Far more powerful than degradation, in fact, is self-degradation.

  INTIMACY: fear and desire. Perhaps it’s just a different way of expressing similar emotions—or maybe it’s a matter of awareness. You desire what you secretly fear; you fear what you unconsciously aspire to. There are those who see an absolute polar opposition between the masculine principle and the feminine one, while perhaps there are only different ways of experiencing and expressing the same forms of affection, the exact same emotions, dreams, desires fears and feelings, it’s just a matter of seeing the order in which these propensities are arranged, which are visible and even exhibited, and which instead are left hidden: it’s possible then that, while young women desire intimacy but subconsciously fear it, young men instead are frightened by an intimacy that, deep down, they desire, even if they’re unwilling to admit it: that would smack of sentimentalism. The mutual misunderstanding springs from this hybrid, this mixed sentiment of fear and desire, which is the ambiguous cipher of sex. Fearfully. Fearfully we oscillate between fear and desire, with the paradoxical result that we flee from what we truly desire, and desire to be like those we are most afraid of . . .

  Males: to hear them talk, they’re vulgar, but deep in their hearts they’re super-romantic, fragile, and emotional. They become dangerous when they lose their heads. A violent passion goes hand in hand with a matter-of-fact reckless kind of roughhousing. In some cases, violence against women has originated from this contradictory mixture: explicit brutality and vulgarity in practical terms, while deep in the heart there explodes a savage sentimentalism that will stop at nothing, ready even to transform the culminating apex of romanticism (“I can’t live without you”) into a stab wound, or thirty of them.

  In existing literature on sexual differences, it’s often stated that males are incapable of intimacy, that they fear it, flee it, dread it. In fact, in the context of intimacy they’re at risk of being seen as weak, afraid that others might recognize this and take advantage of it. Therefore, they prefer general topics in conversation rather than more personal ones. Let’s take soccer. It’s a common topic of conversation among young men and even grown ones, and it seems perfectly designed to avoid personal subjects. By talking about the draft campaign being conducted by your team as it revs up for the coming championship, and doing so with an ironic or self-ironic tone, oscillating between the jokey and the tremendously serious, with expressions that range from “With the defense we’ve got as a team, it’ll be a miracle if they don’t demote us to Serie B” to “This is the year that we finally kick your ass good and hard,” you start a conversation that can slither and slide for a good long time between that topic and others like it, and then eventually
flicker and die, without ever having introduced anything more serious or personal.

  IN ANY CASE, it’s true, I’ve always preferred working side by side to a face-to-face interaction: not telling each other something, but doing something together. At the very most, concerning the matter of talking together, revealing oneself to another, what I find interesting is the position of those who confess their sins with respect to the confessor; there, too, the schema is an oblique one: on the one hand, there’s the outline of a person whispering into a grating, on the other side is a person who lends an ear and is therefore in front yet remains invisible, protected by the door or a curtain. The separation between the two is minimal but essential. The asymmetry is a useful way to ensure that there will be some progress, to make sure that human interaction serves some purpose. The face-to-face interaction tends to silence, and in fact, it is ideal when you have nothing to say to each other, that is, when you love each other. In that case, it’s quite enough to gaze at each other.