The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  A CERTAIN NUMBER of us were homosexual, and the rest were homophobic. In as much as we were half-queers, we hated and laughed behind their backs at the real queers, the hundred percent, thoroughgoing ones, like Svampa, the chemistry teacher. The other part of us was turned against the first part, or to be more exact, in order to avoid acknowledging the existence of our own first part, the second part of each of us aggressively turned on the first part of the others, especially those in which the first part was even the tiniest bit more distinct, more pronounced . . . what I’m saying, in other words, is that it was fairly normal to be half-queers, queers by half, but not an iota more, no, not that, more than half an iota was too much! We’d have never admitted, for example, that there was any true love among us as classmates. That sense of transport, that quiver of pleasure at being together, even the attraction toward individual body parts of which this or that classmate might have particularly fine specimens, a pair of handsome blue eyes (that was the case with Zarattini), fine broad shoulders (in the whole class, only Sdobba and Jervi had them), nice legs (again, Sdobba, long, muscular, shimmering with blond hairs that made you want to pet them like a cat)—these feelings had to be mustered into the comradely category of friendship.

  IT’S NOT AS IF we hated queers, in fact, quite the opposite, we found them fun and amusing (I’ll talk later about the hilarious outbursts that followed the caresses exchanged among classmates in the classroom . . .); if anything, what we did hate was the thought that we might be taken for queers, even though we weren’t (at least not all of us, or at least not entirely . . .), in other words, the possibility of a misunderstanding. What worried us was that misunderstanding.

  THE FOLLOWING method had been suggested to me by a friend. He claimed it was infallible. Do you want to know if one of your classmates is a queer? Then get him to play a game of Ping-Pong. And watch him while he plays. If possible, make sure he’s up against a better player. There’s nothing that tests your nerves like being trounced at Ping-Pong—and the effort, the excitement, and the frustration at being unable to pull ahead in spite of all his efforts all provide the perfect setting for any individual to reveal his true nature. No one will be able to conceal their tendencies while playing a Ping-Pong match, two games out of three, or three out of five. If you’re a homosexual and you mess up a decisive forehand smash—even if you’ve done everything you can to keep from admitting it, struggling to conceal the fact from your parents and your classmates, because you couldn’t stand the mockery if they ever learned the truth—well, if your forehand smash hits the net, the queer lurking deep inside you is bound to leap out like a wounded tiger. With a little shriek, a foot-stamp of vexation, or some fretful phrase along the lines of: “I don’t even like this game!” or “No fair!” or else “Jesus, what’s wrong with me today?”

  It’s a method you can even use on yourself, if you haven’t figured out whether or not you’re queer. At a certain age you start to feel a lurking and generalized attraction toward others of your own sex . . . Play a game of Ping-Pong and you’ll know for sure.

  VIRILITY MEANS POWER. If I don’t have power, it means I’m not virile. If I’m not virile, I’ll never have power, the circle is unbroken.

  It is, in fact, the uncertain ones who care most about seeing their half-power affirmed: the ones who have full power feel no need to prove it over and over again.

  There can be no question about the fact that men as a group hold power, whereas men as single individuals rarely do. And they often react in a crazed and hysterical way to this clamorous disparity. They are going to have to invent the power they do not possess: by finding someone within reach to order around.

  One of my favorite scenes from a novel comes from a book by John Fante that I read many years ago, I don’t even remember which, in which the young protagonist, perhaps the famous Arturo Bandini, the author’s alter ego, appoints himself King of the Crabs. (Crabs again, sure enough, they always seem to pop up . . .) His realm was the beach, his throne was the dock. From there, he shouted orders to his subjects swarming over the sand, and if they failed to obey them, he’d shoot them with a BB gun. He’d execute them one after another. He slaughtered the mutinous crabs.

  Never once did they obey him.

  His was a very chaotic kingdom.

  BUT WHY an all-boy school, like SLM?

  Perhaps it was all about that: was that the specific quality of our education? The fact that we were all students at SLM instead of some other mixed-gender school: being deprived of all contact with the world of women, with the world of mothers and sisters that had once been our family universe. The family as a feminine couche (class or social layer) that the boy, like a young Spartan, had to be ripped from, as young as possible. Perhaps that is the only reason our school was all male: in order to highlight that separation, make it such a customary thing that our parents and we ourselves would be convinced that it was a sage and necessary step. Who knows whether our mothers, some of whom might even feel reassured by the thought that their son was being protected from the distractions, influences, and dangers represented by young girls in flower, who can say whether they ever realized that these restrictive measures were actually directed not so much at those cunning little contrivers, but rather against them, the grand intriguers . . . and that the bosom from which we were meant to be separated was theirs, and not the unripe bosoms of the female students of the Collegio Sant’Orsola.

  THE FEMALE EQUIVALENT in our quarter of SLM was, in fact, the Collegio Sant’Orsola, near Piazza Bologna.

  (WHEN, YEARS LATER, several of SLM’s alumni gained notoriety for their grim exploits, they became synonymous in the starkest terms with the problem of the all-male identity of the school: of its teachers, whether religious or not, and of its students. Women weren’t allowed at the school, and however hard I try to remember, I can’t conjure up a single female presence inside the school’s walls, with the possible exception of our mothers when they came to pick us up. Maybe, yes, there might have been one woman who sold pizzas at recess . . . But when school was in session proper, the place was a veritable Mount Athos. The only woman who wasn’t an intruder at SLM was the Virgin Mary. How lonely she must have been, though, there behind the altar!)

  NO WOMEN among my classmates . . . oh well, it’s more or less like prison. No women among the teachers . . . and this is stranger since, in Italy at least, school is predominantly feminine, an extension of the realm of the mother, a very prolonged version of nursery school. But in contrast, we, starting from elementary school, had for teachers no one but vigorous young men in tunics. Perhaps they wore tunics to remind us of the skirts from which we were torn away every morning: reminding us to reassure us, and in the meantime take it away from us, little by little, day by day.

  In any case, we were unfailingly raised by individuals in skirts: first our mothers and governesses, and later, priests. We transitioned from the laps of our nannies to fluttering black tunics. How they flapped in the SLM courtyard when the wind was blowing! I personally very much like kaftans, togas, and the shalwar kameez, as well as women’s dresses proper and skirts both short and long, while I have always found trousers to be crude and barbaric, acceptable only to ward off the cold.

  Men in skirts are assigned the task of transforming boys into men: an all-male line.

  HOMOSEXUALS, artists, priests, and warriors all aspire to a transcendental achievement that bypasses the ordinary and mechanical process of reproduction via the feminine element. They can do without women because they create or claim to create the future in another manner, through violent acts, prayers, artworks, and teaching. They constitute self-sufficient categories of males, and they give birth to ideas or deeds instead of children. Or else they adopt other people’s children to raise them themselves. While in other human groups and activities there is a continuity established over time, with the formation of dynasties, guilds, and professions handed down, as well as a family memory of shared customs, or at least a name, the cel
ibate brotherhood of priests ensures that every generation dies out without leaving heirs. Priests must be replaced one by one as they die out. New priests spring up out of thin air.

  THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF SCHOOLS, then: the first, in which virility emerges, is tested, and recognizes itself only in its interactions with the feminine (for the most part, that means an amorous encounter, a sexual testing of self), and the second, wherein the male finds his identity by separating himself, moving away from women, placing them between parentheses. The initiation then passes through women in the most literal sense (like the initiation of the mythical Enkidu, who becomes a man, from the half-beastly creature that he was, by means of fucking), or else it takes place by eliminating all contact with them entirely. An intermediate variant that was practiced regularly until a couple of generations before mine was to reduce the content of the initiation to its physical aspect, that is, to sexual intercourse considered as nothing more than a way of letting off steam. The place where a man was supposed to discover himself was the brothel.

  THE DIFFERENCE between males and females was that both categories constituted enigmas, but the enigma of women struck me, at least, as the more interesting of the two. As did their bodies: males were flat, both physically and in their souls, it seemed to me, while females were full of curves and recesses. Given their physical and mental configuration, ideal hiding places. Where you can hide any secret, and where even males can go hide from the rest of the world (I number myself among them). Penetration itself, instead of being an act of possession, can be viewed as an act of concealment. The search for a secret place, a haven. The nonvisibility of the female genitalia has always intrigued, disconcerted, annoyed, and sometimes even frightened males, if compared with the insolent, brutal, and laughable visibility of their own sex organ, which dangles like a salami from the ceiling of a delicatessen.

  WHAT IS OFTEN and crudely judged to be a flight from the essence of virility, that is, homosexuality, is, in fact, quite the contrary, and in the most concrete terms, a flight from the feminine in order to take refuge in the sphere of pure, uncontaminated masculinity, of a relationship between equals: it is a case of sexual separatism, where one swears faithfulness and love to one’s own sex. You seek asylum among your own peers, your own brothers: and for that reason, I have to imagine it must be terribly tough when they treat you with contempt and expel you from their midst.

  I’VE NEVER TAKEN PART—and I somewhat regret it—in conversations along the lines of “Have you ever done this? Have you ever done that?” about your first sexual experiences, about the things that girls did to you or let you do to them, how far they let you go, their mouths, their thighs, their panties, insistent focus on anatomical details, wet Kleenex, and, afterward, licorice candies in the glove compartment, to freshen her breath. I was never on close-enough terms with anyone. It was pointless to talk of such things with Arbus. Among my friends from the summer holidays, I felt too shy, since I was the least experienced of the group. I’d listen to their oratory on the subject, but I never dared to weigh in; for that matter, it was my good fortune that they left me out of it, as if I were somehow a pure spirit, and to tell the truth I really was, let’s say, an already impure pure spirit, stained with nocturnal thoughts and pollutions. Continual, racking: to wake up practically every morning in a puddle of dried sperm. I can imagine the sarcastic comments of whoever had to make the bed or wash my pajama bottoms. I realized the depths of the resigned wisdom or sheer insubordination of the housekeepers from the fact that quite often at night when I went to put on my pajama bottoms I found they were quite stiff, rendered parchment-like by semen: a signal that those women were sick and tired of washing them . . . I did it all in my own room, in my twisted mind, where those perverted conversations really never stopped, where those dubious questions were asked and promptly answered.

  The mind of an adolescent is a galaxy.

  Sex wasn’t an invention, after all, it was insistently present and manifest, inside us, planted deep in our brains even more than our bodies, a dull, thudding pulsation that made us tremble. It was a drive or a frenzy that was unquestionably natural, but where and how we were to direct it, that was much less so: this latter question was the topic of unending study, consisting in fact of fragments of phrases overheard here and there, from the orders issued to the entire team by some nameless shared sensibility, a sort of law that no one had ever set forth in clear terms, with its articles and clauses lined up one next to the other as unambiguous as commandments, which everyone or nearly everyone obeyed. What a strange thing it is when you are forced to see to your own education by peeping, perusing, winking, and yet to my mind it’s the only way, at least as far as sex is concerned. And perhaps the same can be said of literature. Everything else, though, should be taught to you by someone who actually knows about it. But in those two fields, we’re always self-taught and we always will be. After all, the more twisted the outcome, the better and the more authentic. You pick things up here and there, that’s how it works, you can’t really hope to study, you can only imitate and pilfer. Or else we’re talking about an apprenticeship so panicky and hasty that it hardly deserves the name: there is none of the calm, the systematic approach, the progressive acquisition of knowledge that ought to come with true study. Lurches, violent conquests, sudden, dazzling glares of light against a background which remains that of a blessed yet ignoble ignorance.

  For that matter, how much simpler and finer it would have been simply not to have it at all—a sexuality! To be cultivated, to be satisfied . . . and first and foremost, to be identified! What a relief it would have been not to feel its pressure . . . because, even if the others hadn’t been there to poke and prod, to offer suggestions, to make demands, to force you to have a sexuality of some kind, there would still be your body, implacable in its reawakenings like a dinosaur buried in the ice, and to force you sooner or later into that stupid pantomime with girls, into subterfuges with your parents and braggadocio or frustrations with your classmates, that whole rather ridiculous process that culminates in a brief venting, in four or five (and if there were a hundred, or even a thousand, what difference would that make?) thrusts of the pelvis . . . Sexuality: there exist bodies other than our own. Yes. Should we approach them or recoil from them? Which of them should we approach and from which should we recoil?

  I know people who simply can’t keep themselves from trying to seduce others. With smiles, a warm voice, glances. Anyone, man or woman, who is around these people must necessarily yield to their charm. While ordering an espresso in a café, or signing up for a gym membership, or paying a debt, the seducers are at work, 24/7/365: it’s a pursuit you never stop engaging in, the seduction of your fellow human being. An inability to have natural interactions with others forces you to try to win them over.

  For that matter, taking the sexual initiative, the thought of sex, thinking about sex, thinking about the opposite sex or one’s own—all these things can hardly be anything other than obsessive in nature. If sex doesn’t manifest itself as an obsession, then it hasn’t manifested itself at all. It has no way of manifesting itself other than as a mania, a frenzy, a morbid refrain, the hammering rhythm of thought. If it doesn’t pound, it doesn’t exist, it’s dead. There’s nothing on earth whose braided fibers are so durable: it’s so very difficult to cut through them, tear them asunder, just as it’s almost impossible to silence the siren’s voice as it echoes in your ears. Its song drives anyone who listens without taking precautions stark mad. Those fibers form an animate and palpitating continuum: it can be the one reason that keeps us alive. In an action movie, Russell Crowe asks another cop: “Are you thinking about pussy?” “No,” the other cop answers. “Then you’re just not concentrating,” and that vulgar wisecrack possesses a certain truth. Unless sex occupies your whole mind, it hasn’t really entered your mind at all. That’s how the game of soccer was for my mother, or classical ballet and mountain hiking were for me. Things that concerned other people. Becau
se once it gets its claws into you, sex never lets you go. If it doesn’t possess you now, in this exact instant, if you don’t hear the dull echo of its call, then that’s something that’s probably never happened at all, and which may never happen for that matter.

  Back then, for us at SLM, sex was something that belonged almost entirely to the domains of chatter and dreams, in hyperbolic dirty jokes, magnified no end by the words but extremely scanty when it came to the facts and deeds, consisting by and large of the occasional masturbation onto the ceramic tiles of the bathroom with a dirty magazine propped open to the double-page spread where a smiling Junoesque dame with enormous sagging breasts displayed an incredible tawny bush between her thighs and, beneath that bush, a pink slit that the fat woman held open with her fingers, in an effort to show it off. Not only the slit but the entire flaccid body were an overexposed pink that verged on the hues of candied fruit, patently unreal; and the color often seeped beyond the borders that were supposed to contain it, in a delirium of imprecise details, blurred and bleeding, the enormous nipples with irregular areolas, the lips of the mouth and the lips of the slit, psychedelic gradations of pink.

  WOMEN, then, were targets, and the ones in glossy magazines were easy to hit because they didn’t move, and attractive because they were half-naked or entirely nude.