The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  If Jesus was just a man, albeit a very special man, then He was a con artist, in spite of all the messages of love and brotherhood. He cannot be anything but God. Otherwise, if He is not God, He lied, and the Gospels aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.

  Nor does the commonsense interpretation apply. Is it really necessary to explain that God is unlikely to take His inspiration from plain common sense? And in His turn inspire it in us? And that faith cannot limit itself to having a mere calming effect? We have pills for that already.

  If all that was needed was to put in a good word among men, then what need was there for a solution like winding up on the cross?

  “WELL? How did it go?” I asked Arbus as he came back, lost in thought, from confession. “What did Saturnino tell you?”

  “He told me to kill my bad thoughts.”

  “To kill . . . what?!”

  “Sinful thoughts. As soon as they come out of your head, he said, take them and hurl them to the ground . . .” Arbus waved a long arm in the air. “You have to crack their skull wide open,” and he suddenly lowered his arm. “On a rock.”

  I didn’t understand. Crack the skull . . . of your own thoughts?

  “Yes, they’re just like newborn babies, tiny and adorable,” Arbus explained, “and for that very reason they make you feel sorry for them . . . you’d cuddle them to your heart . . . but then they will grow and become dangerous, and by then it will be too late to stop them.”

  This was the first time that my classmate had been struck by a religious idea. Maybe because it was so violent.

  “Have no fear, just grab them quickly,” Father Saturnino had told him, “seize them by the feet, and crush them . . . kill them. It may hurt a little, true, but it’s the only way to get rid of them.”

  “So that means we must show no mercy . . .” I murmured.

  “With ourselves, with ourselves. None.”

  “And with the others?”

  Arbus nodded. “Well, if they refuse to understand . . .”

  THE NEXT DAY it would be my turn to say confession. I saw it as a sort of test I would have to take, and I wondered if I would be fully prepared for it. As long as it was a matter of repeating lessons you’d heard in class or things you’d read in a book . . . but the things you’re supposed to confess aren’t written down anywhere. They were going to have to come out of me, out of my soul, and what’s more, they were bad things, nasty and filthy, my sins.

  Whichever way it goes, you come out looking pretty bad. If you were to confess little or nothing, it might seem you were trying to conceal your wicked deeds (which in fact amounts to one more wicked deed), or else it must mean that you are such a good person—but I mean so full of sweetness and light—that you had nothing to tell the father confessor, in other words, a disgusting little angel.

  To me, the intimacy required to tell someone else the harm I had done was inaccessible. You can conceal it, the harm, you can invent it, exaggerate it, or attenuate it . . . but you can never say it.

  I’ve always been troubled by the doubt that what Arbus told me wasn’t true. I’d never heard Father Saturnino use violent or fanatical language. His long white beard, which he let us stroke and even pull, was designed to encourage us to confide in him.

  As long as I went to confession and said confession, it remained a genuine torture for me. I was sincere but, at the same time, I lied, and though I was sure I’d told the truth, at the end of confession, it seemed to me that I hadn’t told the truth at all, both because the sins confessed weren’t true, and because I had kept the real ones carefully hidden. I thought that I’d forgotten to mention important things, wrongs I’d committed that were far more serious than those I’d confessed, even though when I stopped to think about it, none actually came to mind. Or else I have the even more sinister sensation that I had soft-pedaled my sins, telling them in such a way that I came out looking good, so that when all was said and done I got away scot-free, I practically deserved to be congratulated, if not for having committed them, at least for having recounted them so very nicely. Too nicely, in other words, like Rousseau and his Confessions, which of course I hadn’t read at that age but in which I’d later recognize a reflection of myself, make no mistake, not for the spiritual greatness and breadth of thought, unequaled and unattainable, but rather for the pervasive hypocrisy, about which there could be no doubt. But my greatest remorse came from the awareness that I had by no means actually repented, that is, that the repentance declared at the end of confession was in no way genuine. A convention to be respected, a formula to be recited. I only had one real regret—that I felt nothing. Nothing at all. No authentic repentance nor any impulse to make a new resolution or deep emotion or a vow to give something up. I wasn’t ashamed, exactly, but neither was I proud of the wrong I had done, the way one may feel when one is truly wicked.

  I FELT INSINCERE, whatever I might say or refrain from saying. My remorse was never authentic or spontaneous, my contrition was always contrived, copied from some other model, from something I’d read or heard or seen, just like so many other behaviors in my life, truth be told, that I adopted simply out of imitation, like a talented calligrapher, without ever feeling them wholeheartedly as my own for even a fleeting instant, without believing in them or, rather, believing that it was best, all things considered, to act that way, because that’s just the way people act, because it’s required of you, because that’s what others do, because everyone else expected it of me. This is a more than adequate reason to go along: the problem is that slight feeling of being out of phase, that instant of detachment. My confession was like a song being lip-synched, with the background music playing and the lips moving as you pretend to sing, but all it takes is the slightest hitch in the timing and the fakery is revealed on the singer’s face. Confession was, for me, the utmost moment of artificiality, that is, of distance not between what I was saying and what I was thinking, but rather between what I was saying and what I was feeling. And that, I am sorry to say, was nothing at all.

  And then there was that morbid certainty of having forgotten perhaps the only real sin that was worth bothering to confess and expiate. Sincerity, courage, memory: zero. Exactly what this great buried sin might be never came to mind, no matter how hard I tried. It was there, of that I felt certain, but it remained out of my reach.

  I NEVER MASTURBATED until I was old enough to be drafted and serve in the Italian army. Probably no one will believe it, but it’s the truth. I mean to say, it’s not as if I had never tried, I gave it a go many many times, starting when I was just a kid, I knew that my contemporaries were doing it, and I couldn’t stand the idea that I was somehow different from them. But by the end of half an hour or an hour of autostimulation, with my sex erect and flame-red from the rubbing, nothing had happened. The application of mechanical movement hadn’t produced any effect, and I was just worn out and disappointed. It all struck me as strange and I was afraid I hadn’t really understood what I was supposed to do, what I could try that might be better, might be different. I continued to have wet dreams, or pollutions, as the terminology went, as I slept in the night, but if I tried to reproduce the phenomenon in a waking state, I could never bring matters to a fitting conclusion. Not once.

  I must have been twenty-two or twenty-three years old, I’d already been having sex with girls for some time now, when I managed for the first time to achieve an orgasm, solitary and voluntary, and maybe you won’t believe this detail either, but in the end I managed to get it done while reading a novella by Boccaccio—that’s right, none other, I know it sounds like a joke or, even worse, a literary contrivance or piece of snobbery: the idea that someone, instead of using the usual pornographic pulp rag, should be aroused and actually ejaculate onto the pages of a fourteenth-century Italian classic, and yet that is exactly what happened. I was studying for an exam at the university, and I was reading the Decameron, and specifically, one of the dirtiest stories in the Decameron, the tenth tale of the third
day, which has become proverbial for a very bawdy film, Metti lo diavolo tuo ne lo mio inferno (Put Your Devil into My Inferno), a box office hit and the founding example of a long-lived Italian film genre.

  I had come to the part where the naïve and lusty fourteen-year-old girl, whose vagina’s inferno simply would not leave her in peace, invites the hermit to fuck her for the umpteenth time, by saying to him the famous phrase, “. . . let’s go put the devil back into the inferno,” etc., and while reading I had had an erection, indeed, to borrow Boccaccio’s phrase, a “resurrection of the flesh,” whereupon my own personal devil had reawakened and was bothering me no end. With an automatic reflex I took my devil in hand.

  And this time I succeeded.

  6

  ALREADY, toward the age of fourteen, in upper middle school, the class was divided into two parts: those who Did and those who Didn’t (or at least not yet). By Didn’t I mean: those who were compliant rather than arrogant, incapable of giving a soccer ball a good hard kick, uninterested in girls, beardless, as yet unfledged. Those whose mothers back home still hadn’t packed all their toys away. In other words, the ones who were behind in the great race toward the conquest of masculinity: which many never entirely attain, those who will never entirely move over into the other column, the column of the Did.

  It’s a rough, approximate schema, but one that more or less works. There are many oblique approaches to the conquest of points of masculinity even for those who do not possess the natural endowments: power, money, perhaps even cruelty. These things do not constitute a virile identity, but they do provide satisfactory substitutes.

  When it came to such sports as soccer and basketball, I wasn’t particularly talented, but I was precocious. I could perform reasonably well simply because I was physically better developed than other boys my age. It’s an advantage that bites back two or three years later, when the ones who are really good players actually begin to emerge, catching up with you, passing you, and finally leaving you in a cloud of dust, so you know you’ll never get close to them again . . . My physical precocity, in fact, created many false impressions. At swimming and skiing, where what counts is technique and nothing else, I wasn’t very good. There it doesn’t help to have whiskers a year earlier than the other boys.

  It is obvious that what we were looking for in sports and especially in soccer were confirmations not so much of our skills as of our masculinity. Someone who was a strong player was treated with a certain respect; the duds, on the other hand, who ran around the field leaping and prancing and waggling their asses, chasing the ball in the air as if they were bathing beauties (an expression that my mother always used to use, when I was small, as a somewhat ironic compliment: “Hey, what are you doing, where are you going, bathing beauty?” inspired by the movies with Esther Williams), could only hope to be scorned. A boy who was no good at sports, not even a little bit, was not a boy, he was just a girl. For that matter, even among the better players, scenes of utter hysteria would break out: it’s a notorious fact that when a brawl erupts among soccer players it’s rare to see a genuine, well-thrown punch: they’re always chaotic windmills, or shoving or face-slapping, as if they’re trying to scratch their opponents’ eyes out. They look like screaming fights among transvestites, and the only thing missing is people hitting each over the head with handbags.

  WE HAD a destructive and self-destructive attitude. Self-destruction was the science we knew best, the discipline that we practiced most assiduously. Even those who studied seriously or attended a gym on a regular basis, and thus seemed to be interested in strengthening their mind or their body, would end up distorting them both, generating maniacal thoughts or bowing themselves down under a heavy blanket of muscles. There seemed to be only two paths: either reject all exercise, or else take it to a fanatical extreme. Whichever path you took, the result was unharmonious.

  We were out to conquer the world, or actually, the universe, but before doing that, we had to beat the closest adversary, even if it was just at a game of cards: there, your deskmate, that’s who you had to defeat, destroy him—but at the same time, help him. That’s what they taught us at SLM. The weakest must be defeated and, at the same time, helped.

  It’s the same contradiction we encounter so frequently these days in politicians’ speeches, when in the same breath they claim to be fighting “for a meritocracy,” but also to ensure that “no citizen is left behind,” when it’s plain as day that the first thing excludes the second.

  WHAT MADE A CLASSMATE a good classmate, what made a pal a good pal? What are the qualities that make a kid a “good kid”? I’m talking about that singular, indeed unique form of coexistence that consists of being together in a classroom, a coexistence that can endure for many years through a series of coincidences, in some cases throughout one’s entire scholastic career, from elementary school to high school, and might constitute for some the most long-lasting bond experienced in a lifetime, therefore providing an endless source of memories, even if those memories are increasingly distant and legendary. Well, a good classmate and pal is someone you enjoy being with, who tells funny stories or who is himself funny, who is loyal to you in the sense that when he can he helps you out and has no doubt that you in turn will help him. It’s well known exactly when a person needs emergency help from a pal and a classmate: during oral quizzes and classwork, and during the study sessions leading up to these important events, sessions that fill entire boring afternoons, when the better student explains it all to the donkey from start to finish, or else when the other classmates take it out on you, and you need an ally. Plus, the bond between pals is cemented by the daily adhesive of wisecracks, smart-ass comments, jokey insults and real ones, and then gossip, tall tales, and so on . . .

  You like each other, you stimulate each other, you give the other strength and you receive strength in return: if you’re together with a good pal, you feel fuller, more authentic . . . protected, that’s what it is, you feel protected. You could fly along with your eyes closed and you wouldn’t run into anything because there’s someone watching over you as you sleep. That must be what it’s like in wartime when you entrust your sleep to a sentry standing guard.

  At the same time, the exchange also consisted in a constant poking and prodding of your pal, continually testing him, making disgusting allusions to the sexual activity of his mother or his sisters, the small size of his dick, the fact that when he walks he swivels his hips and wiggles his ass, or else sticking a finger in his ass crack anytime he turns his back to bend over and pick something up under the desk.

  We called it friendship, but it’s the wrong term . . .

  We were all eager to spend time together but at the same time we were terrified at the idea of opening up, revealing the truth about ourselves. Pranks and crude jokes were the best way we had to conceal our inner life, drowning it in a vulgar laugh that was always slightly awkward and embarrassed and defensive. It was in fact much simpler to show off your penis in the locker room after gym class by swinging it like a lasso than to display any other undefended part of your personality. The crudeness cauterized wounds or prevented them from being inflicted. Sports were the ideal activity for this purpose, they allowed us to spend time together without obliging anyone to open up in any real way. In fact, by playing sports with our classmates and pals, we developed a supermuscle of control. In order to protect ourselves from the risk of potential confessions (the kind of stuff you’d expect from young ladies), we preferred to do things instead of talking about them, and in sports there’s next to no chitchat at all, a game is the kind of thing that after an hour and a half or two hours of insane intensity, thank heavens, comes to an end, so that you’ve given your all without actually giving anything specific or useful, the most burning commitment over the shortest period of time—and in fact it has many things in common with sex. That is, it allows you to emerge still virgin and uncontaminated. Risking your physical safety in sports ensures that you preserve your psychological safe
ty. Male locker-room camaraderie, in other words, has very little in common with intimacy; instead it’s something midway between vaudeville, with its rat-a-tat volley of gags and bullshit, a lineup of suspects, and a conference table surrounded by generals with maps and charts before or after a battle. The things that are said there have the muscular character of an exhibition, and the rhythm of a variety show.

  Unfortunately, true intimacy doesn’t exist in a partial or moderate form: it’s always, by its very definition, excessive. Made up of vertical lunges. Contaminating, like saliva in French kisses. That’s why we feared it, because we dimly sensed that you can never quite recover from contact with it, you can no longer veil what has once been unveiled.

  Rather than opening up to your pals, then, it was necessary to conquer them, or, at least, stand up to them. Hold your own in public in such a way as to avoid being riddled with indiscreet questions. What it required were such gifts as a powerful or strident voice, the capacity to tell jokes and anecdotes (a good memory was fundamental if you wanted to keep stock of your repertory), quick repartee so that you could offer a clever or filthy riposte to any mockery, the ability to lay your audience low in helpless laughter or else make them shut their mouths with a sharp glare. What’s more, sports, as practiced intensively at SLM, were a reasonably effective bulwark against the threat of girls, or at least the thought of them, seeing that there weren’t any in the surrounding area. The only individual of the female gender in the entire school, as I’ve previously mentioned, was a woman who sold pizza at recess. Still, even a vague thought can be every bit as unsettling as a physical presence and, in some cases, even more intrusive. I, for one, can say that I’ve never felt females to be so incredibly close to me as the times that all I saw on all sides were other males: in my years at SLM, during my mandatory stint in the army, and in prison, I could easily swear that they were physically present, that’s just how close I felt them, intensely close, upon me, inside me. It’s like the old joke about the guy who goes to the doctor, claiming that he’s a hermaphrodite; “What are you saying, are you sure of this?” the doctor replies. “Let me take a look . . .” Then, after an examination, the doctor reassures him: “Trust me, you’re fully male, perfectly normal . . .” “No, doctor, the thing is,” the guy insists, in desperation, “I have a pussy, more than one in fact, right here!”—and he slaps his hand against his forehead.