But that concerned my classmates, not me.
WHAT HAPPENS at night in the beds of adolescent boys is something known only to those who, the following day, while the boy is off at school, have to make his bed and change his sheets, given that in Italy it was (and I believe still is) rather rare for the moderately spoiled young man of the house to have to make his own bed, if you leave aside the dreary interval of military service, when on the first day of boot camp he is taught the extremely complicated and absurd operation of “fare il cubo,” as the Italian would have it—“making a cube,” literally—that is, transforming his pallet by folding the thin mattress over on itself and swaddling it tight with the sheets and blanket, so as to assure that it’s impossible to lie down on it during the day.
As Italian mothers and housekeepers undo the bedding, they discover stains, either dry or still damp, and the same is true of the pajamas (which have long since been virtually abolished and replaced with a T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts, as in the American series we watch on TV).
Back in the day when this story took place, male Italian adolescents still wore pajamas, and stopped wearing them—because they suddenly were perceived as something ridiculous and awkward—only with the official beginning of a true love life, with the first nights spent in bed with a girl, when it would only seem embarrassing to be seen in checkered flannel bottoms and tops, buttoned to the chin.
Whatever you wore to sleep, once the garments were stained, they went straight into the laundry hamper. I’ve often wondered what goes through the mind of the saintly Italian mother in those situations; whether she thinks of the word “sperm,” or uses some other term, more commonplace and vulgar, or whether she simply doesn’t think a thing and just goes on with her task, like any of the other routine household chores of the day, with that brisk, blind, and healthy mindlessness that preserves those who toil all day cleaning up other people’s messes, their defecations, the remains of the food collectively consumed, saving them from considerations that range beyond the strictly practical: there’s another load to run through the washing machine, we’re almost out of fabric softener, I’m going to make stuffed zucchini for dinner, and so forth.
ITALY IS A COUNTRY where the mothers do everything, where it is said of even the most famous Son of all time that He wouldn’t have achieved a thing if it hadn’t been for His Mother, sainted woman that She was. Sainted women were those well-to-do matrons who found themselves, unexpectedly, dealing with problems that went well beyond the matter of grass stains on white pant legs. Sainted women are those who tolerate, conceal, and hide from the fathers the misdeeds of their sons, choking back tears.
THE SEXUAL EDUCATION that was imparted, or more often than not, not imparted, consisted for the most part in an assortment of prohibitions, in precepts of a negative, or else hypothetical nature: don’t do this, and if you do that instead, trouble will follow . . .
Considering that it was a religious school, at SLM they were very bland and vague on this topic, aside from occasional initiatives on the part of some individual priest who was a little more rigid and old-school than the others, such as Father Saturnino, for instance, the father confessor.
5
IN ONE OF MY MOTHER’S PHOTO ALBUMS, I found a picture of my first communion.
It’s taken at an angle, arranged vertically like a composition by Paolo Veronese or Tintoretto, where figures tower from on high over someone who is far below, imploring, receiving without argument; the only thing missing is fluttering banners to complete the allegory; and that tiny kneeling figure with the face turned upward is me.
My hair is neatly brushed, I’m wearing a gray jacket without lapels and a pair of gray shorts, white calf-high socks and shiny shoes, but these conventional details tell us relatively little compared with the position of the head, the neck twisted back, and the mouth open to receive the host. A position of expectant trust and concern for something that must be extraordinary.
There are three priests looming over the little boy, and I can recognize two of them. The way in which their figures are modeled, and the way they hold and intertwine their hands, and tower over the child, all seem to have been devised by a painter, starting with the elderly priest with the long white beard standing straight on the right, and if he weren’t wearing a pair of eyeglasses he might just as easily have emerged from any devotional painting as the figure of a saint or a prophet. This was Father Saturnino, and he must have died many years ago. He used to come visit me at home when I was sick and missed a great many months of school, to assist me and console me, and it was with him that I said confession for the very first time.
Confession is a sacrament that may be even harder to understand than the eucharist—when you’re ten years old. He would ask me what sins I’d committed and I didn’t know what to answer. I would have been glad to accuse myself, in utter seriousness, of something very bad, but I searched and searched, almost desperately rummaged and struggled to feel a powerful sentiment of remorse, and nothing came to mind except for trifles and the desire to be done with it: I was, as so often happens to me, deeply moved and at the same time bored and impatient, and so I replied to Father Saturnino that I’d told lies . . . and then, that I’d disobeyed . . . disobeyed Mamma: but even that was half a lie, since I was an obedient child. Still, I was ashamed to have so little to confess and, therefore, little of which to repent; I really was embarrassed, not of my sins, but rather of their paltry number and negligible nature, and as a result I wished I could invent a few more, to make a more interesting sinner of myself, one more deserving of forgiveness, a prodigal son. I had understood that the more you sin, the greater the joy your repentance will cause. Indeed, to use the language of the religious, the greater the jubilation.
This blessed rule stupefied me then as it does now and should be classed among the things whose spiritual grandeur I am able to intuit, but it is in fact that very grandeur that upsets and irritates me, undermining my very sense of justice. This would happen to me many times in the years that followed, when I saw men of the cloth so impassioned in their devotion to sinners that they made them their pets, almost their fair-haired boys: repentant terrorists, bank robbers who have turned to painting Madonnas, murderers who, in the end, seem almost to be better people than their innocent victims, seeing that, by choosing goodness after committing so much evil, they’ve helped to shift the scales in which the world’s good and evil are weighed, because if they stop their killing, then the dish of the scale that holds evil will in fact become that much lighter. I once thought of a way to win the Nobel Peace Prize: one sure method would be to become a terrorist, plant bombs and blow up airplanes, etc., and then at a certain point, decide to give up my wicked ways and lay down my arms and, in this exact manner, become to all intents and purposes a peacemaker, a man of peace.
Victims don’t stir the same passions as a rogue redeemed, that much is obvious.
I sincerely wanted to attain redemption but I didn’t know what from, so Father Saturnino came to my aid, convinced that I was ashamed to confess my sins, while I was actually struggling with a shame of the exact opposite hue; and just as good-hearted teachers do during an oral exam, when they see that a student is having difficulty, it was he who suggested to me a few of the sins I might have committed: and even if it wasn’t true or I didn’t begin to understand what the specific sin might be, I hurried to answer yes, yes, to each of his questions, yes, I did that, as if I thought that in order to obtain that blessed pardon I needed to reach a certain quota, a predetermined scorecard of evil, so that I could reset that number to zero and start over, as in the card game of sette e mezzo or blackjack, or a loyalty program at a gas station.
And I remember very clearly just what the last sin was that Father Saturnino suggested I go and rummage around in my memory for, just in case I might have committed that one, too.
“Have you ever watched dirty movies?”
“What?”
“Dirty movies.”
This ti
me I hesitated to answer yes, because I really didn’t know what the brother was talking about. Dirty movies? Was he possibly talking about . . . pornographic films? That couldn’t be. I was ten years old. It wasn’t like now, when a kid can go on the Internet and watch people having sex, or threesomes, or group sex, rapes, and orgies. Again this time, when the wise brother saw me hesitate, he decided to help me out.
“You know what I mean, don’t you? Movies with undressed women.”
Just the mere word “undressed” made me blush violently. I’d never seen undressed women, in the movies much less in real life, if you leave aside a certain episode from my childhood that I may perhaps tell you about later on. And so, deciding that enough was enough, that I’d confessed to enough sins to give an image of myself as a sufficiently wicked Candlewick, I was about to say no, when the father confessor specified: “Like, Double O Seven movies.”
Secret agent 007. Bond. James Bond. And I had seen at least a couple of those movies, back then, Goldfinger for sure, and maybe Thunderball, but the women were never actually nude, when they took off their bras or when 007 unhooked them, they always had their backs to the camera, and even when they let their robes fall to the ground, the only thing you saw was their shoulders. Yes, in effect, I found those movies very unsettling, the brother had hit a bull’s-eye. And in Goldfinger I remember that there was a girl completely naked, dead on a bed and covered from head to foot in gold, painted gold . . .
It was Father Saturnino who heard the boys’ confessions, since the men I call “priests” here weren’t actually fully ordained, but simply Marist brothers, and they couldn’t administer the holy sacraments. Strange to live an entire lifetime as a priest but never enjoy the prerogatives of the role, that is, let’s say, the powers.
The other priest I recognize in the picture is in fact a Marist, Brother Domenico, who’s still just a young man in the snapshot, and who reaches up, solicitous but also serious, stern, fully taken with his role, to support the plate beneath the host. I don’t know, on the other hand, who the officiant is, perhaps it’s a bishop, he grips the pyx in his left hand and delicately extends the host, between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, his gestures and faint smile suffused with calm and benevolence. A good father, in other words, or perhaps we should say, a good grandfather. The photographer showed great skill in capturing the exact moment in which the event has not yet taken place but is, in fact, still on the verge of taking place, or actually, is already in process, and though nothing has really happened it’s already inevitable that it will, we now know with certainty that the host was swallowed, after that moment of imperceptible hesitation or suspension of time that can be experienced only retrospectively because reality itself flows too quickly, like in photographs of sporting events, a fleeting second that remains transfixed in an endless duration. The actors on that stage could hardly help but recognize themselves many years later, just as I am doing now, for the first time in forty years, forty years have passed since the boy in the good suit tipped back his neck and opened his mouth, and in all that time I’d never once laid eyes on that photograph, which I found rattling loose in an album where my mother keeps images of different times and places without ever making up her mind to paste them in. With the transparent adhesive corners that are still waiting to adhere. The so-called ricordi, or souvenirs. Children at various ages, vacations, trips, dead people, children in black and white and in full color, ceremonies, ID cards.
What emotions did I feel? Should I make a considerable effort to remember, or should I just rely on what the photograph says? Children are innocent but, at the same time, monstrously guilty, sincere and simultaneously full of make-believe, they think that the whole thing is a performance but that, if they are good actors, the performance will become reality. And they want it to. If a boy really concentrates on being good, then he truly will become good, and God will spring forth from the wafer that is dissolving in his mouth. After he goes back to his seat and, kneeling, rests his face in his hands in a sign of spiritual concentration, God’s presence in his mouth will make itself felt, and if it doesn’t, then he must once again rest his face in his hands, pumping up the level, increasing the dosage and intensity of the prayer, the pathos of that special day. It’s impossible to imagine that nothing will happen. A few years later, I had the same perplexed sense of expectation while I masturbated. I was supposed to feel something, but it just kept not happening, I just kept not coming.
I know that pairing these things will sound blasphemous, but the expectation is the same and if it doesn’t click, if the proper mental connection isn’t there, you sit there with the communion wafer in your mouth or your dick in your hand wondering not so much why nothing’s happening, but rather what is supposed to happen.
AS LITTLE CHILDREN and then as boys and young men, we were full of doubts of a legalistic nature. Do we or don’t we? Are we allowed to? And under what conditions? What were the terms established, the oaths sworn? Isn’t this a bizarre miracle—that something prohibited should suddenly become licit? Why? Isn’t it perhaps unjust that that which is unjust should suddenly become just? Schedules, quantities, measurements, very precise calculations, boundaries not to be transgressed. As far as the gate, only up to the sign that says DANGER, no later than eight o’clock, not before meals, be back in an hour. Even games are made up of prohibitions. The observance of every commandment ends up giving more importance to the rules as such, than to the reasons those rules were established. The prohibition against going swimming after a meal is an obvious and generic precaution, but if you give it an exact duration (when I was a kid, no less than three hours! You couldn’t go swimming for three hours after eating, which in our imagination meant that if you dove into the water two hours and fifty-nine minutes after polishing off a panino, you’d die the minute you hit the water . . .), when you draw an exact line, then all the forces are marshaled on one side and the other, like two armies lined up in battle, the forces of good and evil. Children are the most inflexible custodians of the given promise, of the geometry of prohibitions, and when they break their word or a prohibition, it’s out of either extreme courage or desperation, never out of solid good sense, they never think, “Oh, come on, how much will it really matter . . .” the way adults do. There’s no adjustment possible in the mind of a child. Home before dark, is that clear? All right, Mamma, but dark, exactly . . . when does dark begin?
With holy mass, the same thing happened. I had more scruples than an elderly Pharisee, and if I had been born an Orthodox Jew or a fundamentalist Muslim or any other of those many faiths brimming over with rules and prescriptions telling you that you must take care how you walk, when you breathe, what you drink, watch, and eat, which hand you use and which hat you wear and how many times you wash, painstakingly attentive to the smallest actions that are all regulated from the very outset, I think I would have been perfectly at my ease, ahhh, life would have been prescribed and guided minute by minute according to the observance of the laws, like a ticking clock, calmly, ineluctably, and once you’ve respected those rules you’re all good, no one can say a thing to you. You’re safe. You’ve paid in advance. The sternest law works this way, so that the very fact that you’ve observed it constitutes punishment enough. You punish yourself by obeying it.
The problem, though, is that little by little the moral core of the law begins to escape you, and you limit yourself to doing the basic minimum necessary to respect it, not a gram, not a lira, not a second, not a genuflection more than is strictly required. The rule is reduced to bone, worn shiny from being gnawed. Done! you can say to yourself once you’ve observed the precept. Done with that, now, too!
When I found out that a mass was valid once you reached the Our Father, then there was no way I was going to attend the whole service. Never. I split the second to make sure I got there just in time for the eucharistic liturgy after I discovered that that was all it took.
SCHOOL, for that matter, isn’t exactly a place to
study, or certainly not for studying alone: it’s a period of your life when you explore the borders of the known world and what is permitted, when you buzz around them. And the friendships that you cultivated there were nothing more than a free zone in which to experiment and behave in ways that are otherwise forbidden, receiving support instead of scoldings. To develop our personalities, there was nothing left but to step over the borders. You achieved great progress by breaking rules, after which you either suffered cruel but fair punishments, or else you learned that there was no punishment after all. Or else, that there really was no rule, that the rule had been set up there like a scarecrow in a field, or else the rule was something completely different that we hadn’t understood yet. After all, everyone knew that the rules would keep on changing, or that they would be interpreted in ever-changing ways. You grow in spurts, by making mistakes and doing reckless things, and if you don’t die in the end, voilà, you’re grown up now, but everything you left behind you has grown too, in its fashion, that is, becoming twisted and deformed, and it continues on its way, only in the opposite direction, growing smaller, getting older, and while you understand more and more things, an ever greater number of things, you understand them less and less clearly, until in the end you don’t understand them at all.
And in the midst of all this relatively pointless anxiety there’s Jesus.
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.
Jesus remains the true and only problem. There. You can’t take Him and reduce Him to nothing more than an agitator and enemy of the Romans, nor was He just a mild-mannered and permissive preacher. He claims to be the Son of God, right? As a result, He either is the Son of God, or else He’s a liar and therefore all His other personas (prophet, revolutionary, moralist, and hippie), however charming and attractive and likable and estimable they may be to those who do not believe He was the son of God—and likewise everything He ever preached—all simply go out the window. There is no escaping this contradiction. You pay no attention to what a liar has said, just as you don’t pick and choose among the things he said according to whether or not they’re convenient for you to believe.
The Catholic School Page 8
