TRUTH BE TOLD, this happened only the first few times, we were all impatient at the thought that all the fun was to be had in the water. Instead, in the pool, you don’t have much fun, and what fun you do have lasts only a few minutes: splashing, ducking others, sticking the lifesavers under your belly until they pop up out of the water: after that, you have to swim. Which is the most damnably laborious and pointless effort imaginable. The lane is packed with swimmers, it feels as if you’re having to dig your way through the water, barely advancing toward the pair of feet kicking and churning froth and bubbles in front of your nose, so that if you do manage to put together a couple of more vigorous and coordinated strokes, you’ll get kicked in the face for your trouble, whereas the minute you slow down the guy behind you will plow into you. If you stop in the middle of the pool you’ll never get started again, and you’ll sink to the bottom. Everyone gets pissed off and drinks mouthfuls of chlorinated water.
YES, among the classes of the week, the most popular and, at the same time, the most unpleasant is certainly the hour of swimming. On the one hand, nothing is as pleasurable as the prospect of being able to stop fooling around with pens and balls of crumpled paper and bothering your neighbors by plucking at the metal hooks where in theory you are supposed to hang your book bag from your desk, even though I’ve never seen anyone hang a book bag on one of those hooks, not once, in all the time I spent at SLM, that is, more than ten years—and then hurry out into the hallway, line up on the staircases, and then tumble down two or three stories until you reach the swimming pool and plunge into the water. Strange to imagine that in the bowels of the school it was always there, by day and by night, wobbling ever so slightly, that rectangle of green water which for only a few hours was kicked and smacked to a froth by the boys’ feet and hands, while the rest of the time it rested, smooth, dark, and cold. Until the next dive. A beautiful idea, but beautiful the way only ideas can be, because in actuality the hour of swimming was the most suffocating time of the week.
We pass through pebbled-glass doors, and it’s a slap in the face of hot, humid air, it seems as if we’re already swimming when we descend into the locker rooms. I’ve always been very shy and ashamed, and stripping embarrasses me, it even embarrasses me when I’m alone and I have the door shut, if I look at my legs and belly a chill runs through me. As I enter the booth I take great care to make sure I snap the lock shut, and I keep my eye on it as I take off my shoes, my socks, I glance at it again as I remove my trousers, and then underneath, just to get done quicker, I’m already wearing my swimsuit, on Thursday mornings instead of my underwear I put on my swimsuit, and I put my clean underwear into a bag inside my gym bag.
While the air might be warm, everything else in the locker room is freezing cold, the bench, the floor, the aluminum bars speckled with chilly drops of water.
The thing that always depressed me most when I was little and I had to undress was the moment it became clear that my undershirt was tucked into my underpants. The undershirt was mandatory and mothers in the old days took care while dressing their child that it was tucked in securely under the elastic band of the underpants, and since undershirts were often bought large and loose, a size too big, “with room to grow,” the extra length had to be tucked all the way down, below your buttocks. With the SLM swimsuit, which was black, pulled up over your tummy, and the white tanktop undershirt tucked into it, the image of any young boy was even more pathetic. But just as no one can say exactly what sadness is, likewise its causes are open to discussion, and you might reasonably think that it is one reason, but instead it turns out to be another, or another still, or it might even be that there are no particular reasons for being sad, you just are. Like circles under your eyes: you have them and you keep them.
BEFORE VENTURING into the water, a few minutes of those calisthenics that are supposed to make us become muscular. Arbus is a laughable spectacle because he is skinny as a rail and pale as a sheet and yet he struggles to press hand against hand, wrist against wrist, and the conviction behind his effort and his scientific reliability make us think that by doing that, you really can bulk up your muscles, “Five more seconds, hold it like that . . . five, four, three . . . two . . .” and soon even Arbus will have a sculpted physique, with every single muscle defined by isometric exercise, “three . . . two . . . one and a half, one and a quarter . . . hold it like that and you’ll turn into statues . . . like marble statues . . . like the statues in the Foro Italico . . . come on, now! You can release! And breathe!”
The whole swim lesson from start to finish is about holding your breath. We stick our faces in the water and pull them out only to gulp down a mouthful of air and then splash our faces back under. Everyone has the next boy’s feet right in front of him, parboiled by immersion in the water. Arms windmill and the chlorine stings. Our eyes and our throats. Already after four or five laps, the water feels heavy, and our bodies, now even heavier than the water, stop bobbing and struggle to move forward beneath the surface, only the arms break through like lurching paddle wheels and the thrashing of the feet, frantic at first, begins to slow, becoming languid, reawakening periodically, when we remember that we have our feet to help us get across to the edge of the pool, and we start thrashing them hard again, just a few more yards and we’ll be able to grip the edge and pretend to take a second to adjust our caps before turning and starting back across—embezzling a little more time to rest. Not even five seconds and the instructor will lean down and start smacking your head with a sandal if you don’t get going. And to think how much fun it was to dive in off the starting blocks! That’s what we ought to be doing, diving in, over and over again. Not struggling along, our lungs aching in the middle of a lap.
We students all wear the same black swimsuit, in a stretchy weave, with a stripe down each side, yellow and green—those are the SLM colors. And we’re all pale and white, in fact, an off-green shade, or maybe that’s just the light in the swimming pool, and by the end of the lesson we’re even more so. Hop out, taking care not to slip, dry off. The stunned state induced by heat and chlorine and effort (not really all that much effort, truth be told, but then and there, insurmountable) merges with the hot roar of air from the wall-mounted hair dryers, which turn off after a minute so you have to start them up again with a tremendous whack on the oversized chrome-plated pommel. The head feels as if it’s stuffed with heat, and you give more whacks to an ear, as you tilt your head to one side, to get the water to stream out of the other ear. Kidding around, jokes, the usual roughhousing. After the hour of swim lessons it’s tough to go back to class, dragging our gym bags, they, too, black with yellow and green stripes, up the stairs. To help us get up the staircases, which suddenly seem as steep as those in a bell tower, we intone in guttural voices, “Jeee-sahel . . . Jeeee-sahel . . .,” which was a sort of biblical anthem sung by a pop group back then, with guitars and bongo drums, and a nasal voice, drawling and twangy. Only Arbus, me, and a few others in class have long hair, but not as long as the longhairs who sing the lamentatious verses of “Jesahel.”
In her eyes there is light there is love . . .
In her body is the fever of pain . . .
It is always in any case an exodus, the journey of the students together in a school. They are marching toward a promised land.
She is following a light that walks
Slowly a crowd comes together . . .
8
MEN ARE INSECURE both when they feel insufficiently masculine and when they feel too masculine: sensuality shakes an individual down to his very roots, it makes him tremble. An excess of confidence is nothing more than an inverted effect of insecurity. We were obsessed with this problem, since we had nothing but other males surrounding us—our classmates were males, our teachers were males—and we were forced to engage in a continuous struggle for placement in the hierarchies, trying to preserve or improve the ranking we’d achieved through the usual systems—foul language, sports, stealing other students’ snacks, smac
king, laughing, joke-telling, and our fathers’ fantastic automobiles. What was missing, though, was the only reliable element to certify that a male really was one, namely, girls. As a result, this none-too-chivalrous tournament was deprived of its proper audience or, rather, of its natural referee. It took place in private, like a performance put on by inmates who are called upon to play all the roles, including that of the widow and the seduced young maiden, so that they dance together and kiss each other. Among other things, it should be pointed out that in our class there weren’t only awkward bespectacled young men and altar boys and tubs of lard, but also boys who, already at the ages of fourteen or fifteen, were very well developed, bursting with vitality, and yet those were the very ones who ended badly, as if the overabundance of masculinity had led them astray or else started to devour the organism that produced it.
IN MIDDLE SCHOOL and, later, in high school we had a very particular classmate, who never seemed able to sit still for a minute and who looked at least two or three years older than his actual age. He was skinny, dark-skinned, always dressed in motorcycle garb with a pair of short boots the rest of us could only dream of; his most salient characteristic was a pair of long, thin eyebrows arching over a pair of wide-set eyes as inflamed as the eyes of an Arabian stallion. His sensual gaze struck all of us, to say nothing of the priests who taught us, who feared him a little and were intimidated in his presence but were also indulgent toward that homegrown version of a Middle Eastern prince, in spite of his unimpressive academic performance. His name was Stefano Maria Jervi, and he was doing poorly in a number of subjects, starting with Italian and mathematics, which are the load-bearing columns of the whole structure—fail them and everything else collapses: especially if the reasons for the poor academic performance are different and at odds between them. In fact, Jervi did poorly in Italian because he paid no attention, when he even attended, and in mathematics and science because he didn’t understand. That meant he could neither save himself by pointing to his unrealized potential nor by adducing the effort he’d lavished on his studies. The truth was that school, that is, school for adolescents, meaning the school that you had to attend because you were legally a minor, didn’t seem to suit him: he was already an adult, in mind and body. His precocious development led him beyond the typical interests of a high school student, prompting him to skip lessons, to evaporate outside the walls of SLM that hemmed him in. Even sports, where he ought by rights to have excelled given his taut and fully developed physique, struck him as nothing but a waste of time. Strictly for kids, all that running around on the grass. The only exception he made was for skiing, which he considered “totally awesome.”
I have a recurring dream, in which I’ve flunked a year and had to repeat, and I’m being led by the hand by a headmaster who’s younger than me down a row of desks to take a seat at mine, the only unoccupied desk in the classroom, ridiculously tiny, so I wind up wedged into a minuscule chair with metal legs, surrounded by snot-nosed kids who turn to look at me, amusement in their eyes, while I am consumed by the disbelief of a dreamer who knows that sooner or later he’s going to awaken again, putting an end to this travesty, but also by the terror that, by the time the exams roll around, I won’t be able to pass them. I’ll never make it. I’m just not up to it. Those equations are too complicated for me, I won’t be able to solve them, or then there’s calculating mass, I don’t even remember how you’re supposed to find mass, or what it is, and after all, who gives a damn about equations, they don’t do you a bit of good in life, I’m a grown-up now and I can confirm your suspicions, kids, take it from me, 99 percent of the stuff they teach in school won’t serve any purpose later on, I’m tempted to tell them, and yet I’m deeply troubled by my unmistakable inability to perform those equations, to solve those problems, it fills me with a subtle wave of panic. There you go, inadequacy accompanied by a feeling of unjustified superiority. An adult who can’t keep up with a class full of kids who, in every other aspect of life, ought to be years and years behind him. Maybe that’s the way Stefano Maria Jervi felt. The drive of his hormones had already launched him far past school at a single bound, almost without realizing it. While most of us hadn’t even kissed a girl, and maybe hadn’t even held hands with one, it was whispered that Jervi had already had complete sexual relations.
Complete sexual relations, that was the formulation in use back then, when it was pretty well understood that girls were willing to put out, but on a sort of installment plan, in stages, or by anatomical parts, this one yes, that one no, maybe in a week from now, or maybe never. Touch, kiss, insert fingers, a Monopoly game of assorted acts, where you have to go back and start over and you lose everything just when you thought you’d reached the finish line, all because of an unlucky toss of the dice. Denuding one portion of the body, but not another, or else first one and then another but—careful—not all of them at the same time. (Truth be told, this little game is still played even when you’re a grown-up, with adult and reasonably consenting women, whom you begin to strip at one end while, in the meantime, they’re dressing themselves again at the other . . .) That’s just how arbitrary the stages of the erotic process could be, where none of the people involved ever seemed to be fully in charge, and things would stop or move forward on what seemed to be a rather random basis. Desire, no matter how powerful, is still terribly imprecise, and female desire is even more so, creating provisional moralities instant by instant, inviolable prohibitions that are swept aside in a matter of seconds, while barriers are erected every bit as rapidly on the foundation of an ethical code that is, as it were, blinking, that exists on one day but not on the following two. To say nothing about personal will, the most ambiguous concept that’s ever been coined and that, in the erotic context, practically loses all meaning or else seems eager to take on the first definition we care to give it. That we choose to give it. Complete sexual relations, in any case, remains a mocking and hypocritical expression, because there’s very little about it that can be called complete, since it takes place in a very narrow anatomical area, however sought-after and sacralized or reviled it might be, depending on traditions and points of view. Was it enough to spend a few seconds there in order to be able to talk about completeness? The penetration of one orifice by another appendage was mistaken for the whole of the two people implicated in this welter of organs, giving rise to the most clamorous of all rhetorical figures, a synecdoche as double in nature as the helix of DNA. For that matter, was it not the greatest of all modern philosophers who described conjugal relations as nothing more than a contractual stipulation allowing each of the two parties to the agreement to make use of the genitalia of the other? But maybe it’s only right that the matter should be so defined and in that definition be reduced to this, that it become simple, it’s all there and there’s nothing more to it, it’s not always true that language delves into the depths of the topics of life, sometimes it just clarifies them with sheer brutality, and perhaps it is true that the completeness of relations between man and woman, the culmination of all that the two sexes have to communicate with each other, cannot be attained in any way other than the insertion of one organ into another. For a few minutes. And if that actually is the way it works, then Jervi was a pioneer, the explorer who in all our names put to the test the formula that allows you to enter by rights into the realm of masculinity.
THE JERVI FAMILY was wealthy in the way that only the families of high state functionaries seem able to be, that is, in a sober and mysterious manner. The Court of Audit, the Administrative Court, the State Council, the Constitutional Court, the Prefectures, the Bank of Italy—these are all state bodies that never occur to you when you think of power. You tend to identify them, instead, with the government, the parliament, or else with wealth, the public works contracts won by industrialists, financiers, bankers, oilmen, film producers, real estate developers . . . And while politicians and businessmen are visible to the general public, these functionaries little by little climb the lad
ders of their careers inside a sort of hermetically sealed, soundproofed chamber, until they attain the chairmanship of agencies whose existence no one would even have suspected. It seems that Jervi’s father had already occupied a number of these chairmanships, and was continuing his rise through the ranks, always shrouded in discretion, as if the steps he climbed were carpeted in thick felt. Some of us there at school said that he was, or had been, chairman of the Italian State Railways, others said he chaired the Olympics Committee, and there were even those who claimed that he was the supreme accountant in charge of the most mysterious Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, where, just like in Scrooge McDuck’s massive money bin, he swam in a pool full of cash, from which Commendatore Jervi was able to turn on and off the faucets as he chose and pleased. Among kids, unless someone’s father had a very clearly defined profession (“He’s an abdominal surgeon”) or else there was some other reason for special pride (“He built a dam on the Nile”), the work he did was never the subject of any specific inquiry, and that rule applied to all the other fathers as well; on the outside, at SLM, they might be classified as more or less wealthy, or not wealthy at all, according to the car they used to come and pick up our classmates in front of the school. No one dared to ask Stefano Jervi: “What does your father do?” But everyone noticed how well he dressed, his little alligator-skin ankle boots, the complete assortment, right up to the very latest model, of the leading brands of sunglasses, which most of the time he didn’t even wear on the bridge of his nose, but rather perched on his forehead, to keep his raven-black bangs from tumbling over his eyes.
JERVI WAS THE FIRST one of us, and I think for a good long time, the only one, who went to the discotheque on Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons to dance, at a time when some of us classmates of his had mothers who were still hesitating as to whether they should go on buying us short pants or graduate to trousers. (I believe that I belong to the last generation of the Italian middle class that assigned this coming-of-age marker, this rite of passage: they kept boys as long as possible with their knees bare, until they finally seemed like irremediable idiots. I’ve thought long and hard about the possible economic motivation for this approach, which at first I believed was an attempt to prolong our childhood and therefore the pliability and obedience of male children to their parents, by forcing them to display their knees, just as it was forbidden to the daughters to display them. In reality, it was more because those shorts could be worn without having to constantly lengthen the legs or buy new ones, and they could be worn until it became impossible to fasten them at the waist.)
The Catholic School Page 11
