The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  Nothing remained to us, in other words, but mental projections that we’d try to exorcise with chaotic basketball games, hikes, push-ups on wooden handles, kicking balls back and forth on dusty red fields, raising long trailing clouds behind us with every galloping charge, like in the cartoons with the racing ostrich. Some went so far as to try heading a seven-pound medicine ball. With actual flesh-and-blood girls, in any case, we wouldn’t have begun to know what to do, what to say, it was an unknown ritual, one that most of us would learn, if anything, by testing out and rehearsing an array of phrases and acts borrowed from our older brothers like good suits, but only after we’d graduated. Once we were expelled into the real world. Only a mechanically applied ceremonial protocol would allow us to get over the shyness we’d accumulated over years of dress rehearsals.

  People can’t begin to imagine what a fragile fabric male shyness is, they never seem to make the effort, except perhaps to make fun of it. And they never consider, even more than the stumbling block of shyness itself, just how mortifying it is to have to make recourse to various stratagems to find one’s way out of it: in pathetic little vignettes, the movies and TV have retailed the tryouts, a boy in front of a mirror rehearsing his lines, as he plans to invite a girl to dance, the declarations of love uttered to one’s own image in the mirror by gawky guys who then shut their eyes and wrap their arms around their own shoulders and kiss themselves, but all this is strictly to get a laugh out of the audience, while male shyness really does have a dark, morbid side, demented and mad, which can lead variously to murder and suicide, forget about sophomoric comedies with Jack Lemmon or Adam Sandler! When you feel as if you’re being strangled . . . that the air won’t reach your lungs . . . and a devastating wave of desire rises to the verge of an anxiety attack, and yet it still can’t breach the levee and transform itself into action. You don’t lift a finger. Your voice dies in your throat. And she impatiently turns away, walks across the room, starts talking to other boys . . .

  Even idiotic pranks like taking a classmate’s underwear, left in the locker room during swim lessons, and drenching them thoroughly (this was a trick played frequently on Arbus, and I confess that a couple of times I myself was a member of the gang of pranksters), played a role in this process of negotiation. These were moves on the chessboard of our identities, constantly under construction. In this way, we negotiated the fear of being taken for faggots. We negotiated the desire, however small or large that desire might be, to be faggots without letting it be seen. We negotiated the rank that we were to be given in the hierarchy, where the classmate forced to wring out his sopping underwear was dropped a level or two, and if subjected sufficiently to cruel leg-pulling and ass-kicking, might sink to the very bottom of the barrel, and even remain there, a permanent pariah. To become the target of ridicule, in fact, constituted our greatest fear, a fear that we negotiated with ourselves, each of us splitting into a dual personality, at once victim and agent of the same persecution, to see which of the two personalities would be the first to collapse, the faggot within me or the real man? The serial killer or the naked girl in the shower? When you’re an adolescent, it’s impossible not to be both things at once. We negotiated our way through that rising tide of pointless, vulgar words and a barricade of rude and repetitive gestures pushed well beyond the bounds of the absurd (pinches, knuckle-grinders, nape-smacks, accompanied by shrill whistles and neighing, goat-nips and donkey-chomps, soldier-slaps, unannounced smacks to the testicles), struggling the whole time with our aggressivity. Put like that, I wouldn’t be able to say whether we tamed those aggressive impulses or became enslaved to them like so many robots.

  Since all of us were equally revolted by the thought of playing the part of the victim, we had to study, like so many would-be professional executioners, how to lop off a head, hurrying feverishly lest our own head be lopped off first. Honestly, I never really believed in even a tenth of the jerky wisecracks or extravagant boasting I spouted back then, in retaliation to those spouted by my pals and classmates, and I’m not saying that I realize that only now: I already knew it at the time. And yet, like so many others, aspiring as I did to be like everybody else and, when it came right down to it, succeeding—I said those things. I spouted them. Well, what’s so bad about that? You were in trouble if you missed a chance to make a rhyme with words ending in “-ock” or “-ucker” or “-ussy” or “-unt.” They just made your mouth itch at the chance. We also negotiated these succulent opportunities to show off our poetic or creative sides. To show some wit—wit, which delights in whistling through obscenities. Though none of us were born to the working classes, the low humor of our filthy nursery rhymes challenged the finest creations of an age-old tradition, in general, and Roman tradition, in particular, based on long, filthy lists and a ruthless vision of life, a cavalcade of cynicism and ass-fucking.

  But foul language made us feel like good kids. Why not, a genuine community of good kids. It’s often said of people with dubious reputations, even of criminals, that deep down they’re good kids. If you scratch the surface, deep down you’ll find a good kid. What is it exactly that makes a young man a “good kid”? What are we talking about? About someone who’s always loyal to his buddies and ready to do what they’re willing to do without hesitation, to follow them anywhere, even when we’re talking about deplorable deeds, because if he tried to pull out at the last minute, then what kind of a buddy would he be, what would be so good, after all, about this good kid? A man is judged by the things he does, not by the things he says, so if someone doesn’t happen to get the chance to show what he’s capable of, he runs the risk of remaining a child, in the sedentary society we live in, stingy as it is with special moments. That’s why sports were invented, that is, a rapid succession of acid tests that can be administered two or three times a week, even at school, without having to wait for a war to break out or an apartment building to catch on fire in order to test those who are involved, to test their courage, their emotional control, and their willingness to endure pain. With the fairly pedestrian excuse of physical exercise, improving their posture, etc.: and at SLM they’d understood all this perfectly, to the point that they outfitted the school with a very modern gymnasium, and a pool where half of the Quartiere Trieste now splashes and swims (we’ll talk about that later on), as well as a sports center with basketball courts and soccer fields on Via Nomentana, where every afternoon buses full of shouting kids would pull up, and then leave several hours later full of the same kids, but now exhausted. We’d return from that sports center so sweaty and weary that often, in the winter, when night fell early and Via Nomentana was jammed with traffic, we’d fall asleep, dusty heads leaning together. Maybe males can establish relationships only in the midst of raging battle, so they re-create that condition on the playing fields.

  SINCE BACK THEN the schools were very crowded, as many as thirty students in every class, or even more, in our class there were enough kids to form not one but two soccer teams, and there were even kids left over. But instead of distributing the talent pool in a uniform manner so that the two teams were more or less evenly matched, it was customary to choose the best players and put them on a Serie A team, call it major league, which would compete in the Serie A tournament, while the rest of the players formed a minor league, B team, with its own Serie B tournament.

  In other words, the boys who knew how to play, the ones who might be better or worse but were, in any case, real players, and on the other hand—the jack-offs. Never in history has a discriminatory system been less called into question, even though it was questionable at best, at least around the statistical edges of the classifications, where the two categories bumped up against each other, since between a real player with serious defects and a jack-off with great energy and determination there might not be much difference when it came to actual performance on the field. All the same, the thing that astonishes is how willing the jack-offs were to be recognized as such and therefore to play on the B team. I don’t
remember who was in charge of the selection, as delicate and cruel as it might prove to be, I don’t recall any envy or remonstrances, or demands for reclassification, quite the opposite. The jack-offs were comfortable to be grouped together and were delighted to be playing against other teams of jack-offs, soon forgetting that they’d been categorized as human garbage. Their games, however revolting they might have been in the narrowest terms of fine soccer, were still lively and hard-fought, I enjoyed watching them, and not just for their comic potential. The fascination of the struggle actually became purer amid that chaos. The ball spent nearly all the time in the air, as if the objective of the players in kicking it was to get it as high off the ground as possible, while far below, in a dense cloud of dust, the awkward bodies of the jack-offs were scrambling and flailing in jury-rigged uniforms, running and leaping without end. From the opening whistle to the game-ender, more and more chaotically and confusedly, but never slowing down in the slightest. It should in fact be said that the jack-offs proved they had almost inexhaustible stores of energy, and every bit as much determination, considering that in order to perform even the slightest acts of athleticism they squandered at least triple the effort, for instance, in delivering a corner kick or a penalty kick, for which they’d back up dozens of yards from the ball and then charge at it, head down, like excited bulls, delivering a tremendous kick with the tip of the toe but then only moving it a short distance, as if someone had secretly, at the last minute, replaced it with a cannonball. When they leaped in the air to deliver a header, they’d grind their teeth, preserving that demoniacal grimace because their tendons had trouble releasing it, and even the most elementary throw-ins from the side of the field, using the hands—something that any normally coordinated human being ought to be able to do without any particular talent or training—when done by them, seemed like extremely difficult exercises, requiring several attempts. The unsustainable level of competitive fury displayed by the jack-offs was accompanied, oddly, by a singular show of sportsmanship. In the aftermath of the frequent collisions between players caused, as often as not, by the reckless speed at which they lunged, legs extended, to take possession of the ball, in groups of three or four at a time, they would immediately leap to their feet, shaking hands with the rivals who’d been entangled in the scrimmage, though only after cleaning the dust from their hands with the tail of their shirt; afterward they’d immediately tuck the shirttails back into their shorts, as required by regulation.

  ALL OF THIS TOOK PLACE in order to keep the body straight and the mind clear and to consume all our aggression in harmless skirmishing, though, mark my words, not to the point of utter exhaustion of that vein of aggressiveness, since that is what pumps life into an individual and assures he won’t succumb when he comes face-to-face with the first obstacle. The correct dosage of aggression is the secret of rearing and educating males: it can’t be repressed, otherwise it will build up and might erupt all at once, nor can it be denied or inverted from negative to positive, because that runs the risk of producing a litter of altar boys or (heaven forfend!) a genuine sexual inversion. Whereas if you exalt it into something healthy and vigorous, well, that’s the shortest path to fascism, even if it is camouflaged in lily-white outfits. The story that this book is going to tell, alongside other stories, ought to show how, on at least one occasion, on the basis of groundwork laid long ago by numerous contributing factors, around the middle of the eighth decade of the last century—the 1970s—the priests got their formula wrong, in other words, they misjudged the dosage of various ingredients or were just plain unlucky, because what happened next was that the flammable blend caught fire and exploded.

  7

  EVERYONE had some problem or other with their physique. If they had a nice one, they had to cultivate it, if an unattractive one, they were required to modify it, but no matter what, they could not and must not leave it as it was, which in any case would be impossible, because in the meantime, your body would change of its own volition, and almost never according to plan, it stretched out and hunched over and twisted up. You’d never think muscles even existed in a state of nature before the invention of weights. No one would ever have developed without pumping iron. Pump, pump, pump. Otherwise your rib cage would resemble that of a little bird. Repetitive thoughts and actions lie at the basis of all training.

  Swim class was a revelation, a leaden Mannerist painting: pale, misshapen bodies were exposed, jutting shoulder blades, rolls of baby fat jiggling on hips. Few of us were exempt from the urge to cross our arms to conceal our sunken chests, a gesture that people think only women perform, to cover their breasts; well, let me tell you, we did the exact same thing, out of shame but also partly because we were cold, since the priests tended to be cheap about the heating, of both the air and the water, and you’d find the big windows in the locker room thrown wide open, even in the winter.

  YOUNG DENUDED VERTEBRATE, what did they do to your back? Why don’t you straighten that cordillera of vertebrae, each jutting out in a different manner, like large rocks laid out hastily in the middle of a stream to cross it, why don’t you tug it straight, all at once, with a pinch of pride? Your pallid back seems to stand there, just waiting for a whipping, and even if your daddy is a physician or a noted accountant, there isn’t much difference between you and some slave awaiting punishment. Places like the swimming pool of an exclusive religious school, designed and built to enhance the health and development of the boys attending there, become instead theaters of the most stinging humiliations, those who aren’t saddled with a bully who mocks them will just take on the job themselves—you need only to go running past a mirror, flopping along in your flip-flops, shoulders bowed, on your way to the showers, and you’ll see the specter of your own adolescence go shambling past.

  PROFESSOR CALIGARI, swim instructor, would line us up along the side of the pool to review us: he never said a word, he’d just stop to caress with his gaze the weak points of the various boys’ constitutions, weak points that were so numerous in some of our physiques that he might stand there scrutinizing for as much as a minute, prompting us to laugh and blush. Who knows why it is that shame so often expresses itself in the form of a snicker. “There’s nothing at all to laugh about here,” Caligari would exclaim, “quite the opposite . . . if anything, a person ought to cry at the sight of you. You bring tears to my eyes. You’re all so many charity cases. (Titters from the class, shivering with cold.) Though the last thing I think when I see you are charitable thoughts. (Titters and snickers. Almost everyone is crossing their arms on their chest, rubbing themselves or covering some part of their body, alternately.) But let’s keep our hopes up. I’ll take care of things. (One or two boys slide their hands into their swimsuits. It’s a childish gesture of self-protection.) I’ll turn you into living statues, you understand? You’re not just going to become men, you’re going to become statues,” Caligari crowed. “I promise you: sta-tues!”

  The exercises that our teacher assigned us to begin our sculptural transformation were only two in number, rudimentary and not especially effective: pressing our hands together in line with our sternum, or else hooking our fingers together and yanking outward, in the same position, elbows out. That’s all. Ten seconds of pushing, then ten seconds of yanking, and back to the beginning. After firing a starter pistol, Caligari would count—one, two, three . . . at regular speed . . . but once he got to seven he started to go slower and slower . . . eeeighhhhttt . . . eight and a haaaalf . . . while we tried to hold that absurd position of prayer, pressing our hands together until the effort began to make them wobble, eight and three-quaaarters . . . and our elbows would tremble, and the usual involuntary snickers would explode in our sunken chests. This line of hairless boys (with the exception, of course, of Pierannunzi, about whom I’ll have more to say in the next chapter), the sinews of their necks quivering, was pitiful to behold. From the corners of Busoni’s mouth, straining in a grimace of effort (after ten seconds!), streamers of drool descende
d. Without his eyeglasses, Arbus couldn’t see a thing. “Aren’t we here to swim?” Zarattini, who was the skinniest and most effeminate of the kids, would ask the other boys closest to him, under his breath, but Caligari didn’t miss a thing. “Excuse me, I’m not sure I heard what you said? Maybe you said that you like the water, or am I mistaken?” Whereupon he promptly ordered the others to toss him into the pool. Gladly! The skinny teenagers standing around him were suddenly transformed into musclemen, who grabbed Zarattini and hustled him over to the side of the pool, then held him right over the surface of the water, as if about to toss him over a cliff into a very deep gorge. It was an image of great festivity, and no festivity can begin without a human sacrifice. Indeed, the entire class would ally itself against Zarattini, obeying Caligari’s instruction with blind and cheerful uniformity, because after he was thrown into the water, that splash served as a signal for one and all to dive in after him . . .