The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  I COULD TELL a number of stories about Jervi at SLM, and perhaps later in this book, if you’ll be good enough to listen and I haven’t wandered too far afield by that point, and if they end up having anything to do with the principal story line, I’ll tell them then: for now I’m going to limit myself to something that happened years later, to be exact, seven years after the end of school, which was also the last year of Jervi’s life. An episode I learned about from the newspapers, identifying as my classmate—thanks to the publication of an old photograph taken from a falsified ID, in which Jervi looked absolutely identical to the way he’d looked when we were in class together at SLM, with his dazzling eyebrows, befitting a Latin American singer, and that half smile—identifying, I was saying, as Jervi a man who had been blown up while he was planting an explosive charge on the roof of the criminal insane asylum of Aversa, in the middle of the night on February 11, 1982. He’d lost his leg in the unsuccessful bombing, just like the publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, and he had died in the hospital the following day without ever regaining consciousness. And so he had had no chance to reveal the objectives of his attempted attack, credit for which was not claimed by any organization. It was only after further investigation and the arrest of several of his comrades, who practically didn’t have to be asked twice before spilling first and last names, Stefano Maria Jervi turned out to have been a recently enlisted member, and hardly a prominent one, of one of the numerous revolutionary groups to spring out of schisms and last-minute desperate recruitments in the final period of Italian terrorism, when it slid into its irreversible decline, producing a pyrotechnical and immensely bloody succession of shoot-outs, kidnappings, and murders, almost always committed at random or out of frustration, the last blossoming of the tree before the revolutionaries all wound up in prison or state’s witnesses or fugitives abroad. His revolutionary group, if I’m remembering right, was called the UGC, Unità di Guerriglia Comunista—Communist Guerrilla Unit.

  I was stunned to learn that Jervi had wound up in the UGC (how? when? and most of all, why?) just as the organization reached the end of its rope. A man who was about to die enlisting in the ranks of a moribund movement. What had driven him to climb onto the roof of an insane asylum on a winter night? Did he have accomplices or was he alone? Had he simply been trying to make a statement, or did he want to kill someone? And who could you be trying to kill on the roof of an insane asylum, except for pigeons or else, if you were trying to make the roof collapse, everyone in the top-floor ward with the cells of the confined inmates, which meant a bunch of criminals who were no crazier than whoever was planning to blow them up? In the newspaper article about Jervi, identified as such only two days after his death, there was some reference to the hypothesis that what was actually on the roof of the Aversa insane asylum was the arsenal or one of the arsenals of the UGC, and that my schoolmate had been killed in an accident having to do with the ordinary routine maintenance of that arsenal, in other words, while he was storing or picking up explosives.

  ANOTHER CASE of overabundant but not self-destructive masculinity was Pierannunzi, the son of a toymaker on Viale Libia. He wasn’t in my class, but one below me, which means that, while I was stepping over the threshold into high school, he still had another year left in middle school. At age thirteen he was as tall as he was going to be for the rest of his life, and he had a beard. Not in the sense that he could grow one, but that he actually wore one, and a fairly thick beard, too, like some character out of the Renaissance. It was quite something to see him with the rest of his class; he stood a head higher than them and had a full beard: Polyphemus as he’s about to choose which of Ulysses’s men to devour. But it was even harder to process the sight of him today, as I went past his toy shop with the exact same green neon sign that it had back then, the letters slanting to the right, in a sort of stylized script. The whole shop is the same as it was, even if now the display window is full of video games instead of dolls and six-shooters.

  Pierannunzi was behind the counter, resting his weight on both elbows, with a gut, but by no means as tall as I remembered him. He wore his beard trimmed short, perhaps because it was all white, his thinning hair grown long to cover his bald spot, and now only the black bushes of his eyebrows belonged to the cyclops that he was no longer. Forty years had passed over him, not like a train but like a sandstorm that had discolored him.

  I stopped to admire him, half-concealed behind the corner of the glass door as he patiently explained to an old woman, drawling his instructions with a nasal accent, exactly how to install the batteries in the back of a toy piano that she had brought back to the store, thinking it was broken.

  “You see them? You see them, signora, these little marks with the plus and the minus signs?”

  But the signora wasn’t able to see them, even though she craned her neck over the counter.

  “The batteries need to be inserted with the poles inverted, that’s why it wouldn’t work.”

  And he started tapping on the keys to test it, first at random, and then starting to play a piece of music, which he left unfinished after a couple of brief phrases. It ought to have been the first of Bach’s two- and three-part inventions. Or something very similar.

  Again, he went back to trying out the individual keys, pressing them the way a child with no knowledge of music might do, changing the settings so that the device produced first the sound of a trumpet, then of an organ, then of violins. Then he cut in the electronic drum set, whereupon the signora put both hands over her ears, pretending to be overwhelmed by the volume, which was actually fairly low.

  “Ah, signora mine, believe me, we could raise the volume quite a bit!” Pierannunzi smiled. “You could dance to it at the disco . . .”

  Then with well-rehearsed and very precise gestures, turning his eyes to the ceiling as if wishing to prove that he could do it blind, he put the keyboard back into its polystyrene cradle and pushed it back into the carton, carefully folding shut the flaps, which fit into a series of slots but had been torn by the impatient recipient in his haste to open the present. All the same, he was able to gentle them back into their proper form and the package was good as new, no different from the day it had been purchased. Maybe the gaze he turned to the ceiling was an exasperated one, or maybe I just read it that way in order to prove my thesis. The old woman thanked him and apologized for having bothered him, implicitly withdrawing her tacit accusation that the toyseller had tried to fob off a defective product on her.

  “My duty, signora,” the toyseller replied, “at your service. And I hope your grandson has fun with it.”

  I thought I had detected in this last line a note of irony. It’s well known, in fact, the way things go in homes where gifts meant to produce music, say drums or other instruments, are given to children, and how as the birthday party stretches out toward its final moments and the little friends all clamor to be allowed to play, the mob of kids produces nothing but noise as nerves fray and exhaustion sets in. The most irritating examples: xylophones.

  Pierannunzi had expressed his masculinity all at once in a mighty eruption between the ages of ten and sixteen, and traces of it still remained, interesting to revisit.

  DEEP DOWN, adolescence is one of those rare moments in life, perhaps indeed the only one, in which you have the courage or you feel the inexorable need to venture into the labyrinth of an inner quest, something that for the rest of their lives nearly everyone avoids, either out of fear of what they’ve glimpsed during that search, carried out in fact when they were young, or else because all their energy is devoted to the struggle for survival, to responding to the demands and pressures placed on them by others. Only during adolescence can solitude, however much it may be feared and disliked, produce any fruit that is other than bitter, arousing authentic curiosity and holding incredible discoveries in store. Behold, this newly formed individual, newly hatched from the egg, is the very individual who is so voraciously curious to know about himself.

  A
nd how can you construct an identity for yourself, how can you even come to know yourself if not by studying, long and hard, your own image reflected in a mirror?

  Who is the boy or the girl depicted behind the clothes-cupboard door, next to the stack of sweatshirts and T-shirts? Usually this dreamy posture is derided or upbraided, with the demand that it be replaced by a more adult, responsible one, open to productive interactions with other people and with the world, instead of standing there in enchanted admiration of oneself. The narcissistic lull, which is actually one of the few instants of reflection and self-awareness granted to an individual who is otherwise constantly asked to do, study, run, train, chat, have fun (that’s right, even having fun becomes an obligation, it’s constantly being devalued in the name of action and relationships). Having relationships with other people is good; having one with yourself, less so. We must immediately remind a young man who may be raptly evaluating and judging himself that only others have the right to judge him, only the evaluation that the world assigns him will be credible and valid. The young women who try on one skimpy dress after another, suffering the torments of hell over the defects that the mirror beams back to them, ought to be taken by the ear and marched away from that frustrating sight, there’s plenty of other things to study instead of their own bodies, there is chemistry and computers, there’s ancient Greek, art history, the buttocks of statues—those buttocks, yes, you can study them—then there’s algebra, the Revolt of the Ciompi in medieval Florence, there’s the piano, volunteering, the scouts, handball . . . anything, in other words, anything but an understanding of oneself, which only narcissistic self-contemplation could teach.

  I, too, more vain than any of the others, in fact, vain exactly like the others, that is, extremely so, spent time gazing at myself in the mirror, admiring from various points of view the shape of my nose, pulling my eyebrows back toward my temples, stretching them out of shape, grimacing to bare my teeth, arranging my hair in various ways to figure out which style looked best, which was the most charming look to present to others, or to be specific, and not veer into the useless realm of the generalization, to others my age, the only beings on the planet whose existence mattered to me. Those instants of observation lasted for hours and were of a deeply upsetting profundity: I would be not just a good writer but a true philosopher if I were capable of reproducing so much as a single minute of it. The heart raced, pounding, so full of thoughts, doubts, hopes, plans, that spilled forth: spilling forth out of me, exactly, that was precisely the sensation I experienced, namely that my heart could no longer contain the wave of images and ideas churning inside it.

  I misguidedly used the word “hopes”: I should have referred to “fantasies.” Even now I use the mirror to determine the onslaught of baldness and white hair, I live on fantasies, I nourish myself with fantasies or, rather, I slake my thirst with them like a horse at a trough, plunging my muzzle into them, I produce them and consume them on the spot, I’m obsessed with them, they possess me, I don’t know what to do with these voices anymore, these images and ideas and teeming phrases. For that matter, I couldn’t do without them, my life is already so bare-bones, so minimal, what would happen if the one source of daydreams were to dry up? These fantasies, moreover, serve to render astonishing the few things I do, the rare actions I actually take, which are so to speak swollen with all the aspirations, the fata morganas, the deliriums conceived in solitude, and so they give me unspeakable pleasure or scathing despair, according to whether they succeed or fail. If I fantasize about eating an ice cream and I discover that the ice cream shop is closed for a holiday, I give serious thought to the idea of killing myself. In me, sadly, the narcissistic self-contemplation of my adolescence never really came to an end: in response to the question “Who am I?” I’m afraid too many different answers have been offered to let me take any given one as correct. So, I still stand in front of the mirror, asking futile, self-regarding questions, like the queen in Snow White, and rejoicing or flying into a rage at the answers I receive. If I think back to Arbus and other classmates of mine, I ask myself: Which of them ever received a true, definitive answer? A single, sharp, clear, simple answer. Is there any one of them who at a certain point understood and said: Yes, I’m like that? I’m like that, period. Did anyone reach that point, early or late?

  9

  THE PRIVATE SCHOOL housed a group of young men who enjoyed the initial privilege of having been born into well-to-do families and the additional one of a solid education capable of preparing them to occupy a prominent position in the adult world. All of which was tempered by a catechism that, on paper at least, preached something like the exact opposite. It is a singular characteristic of Italian Catholicism that it carries on a millennia-old tradition of defending the least powerful while in point of fact it allies itself with the worldly interests of the most powerful. Perhaps this contradiction is the foundation of its greatness and its solidity. But it cannot escape anyone’s notice, and the ones whose notice it least escaped were us, the lucky students.

  ANYONE who as a boy belongs to the middle class doesn’t even notice the fact, in part because the privileges he enjoys or the privations he suffers aren’t really all that spectacular, in the final analysis; he hardly even imagines that he can qualify as a “bourgeois young man”: when he looks in the mirror he sees a young man, not a “bourgeois young man,” even though that’s exactly what he is and how he actually appears, even when he’s in his underwear he’s a bourgeois young man in his underwear, lifting weights to develop his arm muscles, in front of the mirror in the bathroom of a bourgeois home, etc. But he doesn’t perceive himself that way, at age fifteen or sixteen he hardly thinks that belonging to a class is significant, and most of all he really doesn’t think of himself as belonging to a social class, if anything he might consider the soccer team he roots for, the music that he likes or detests, the way he dresses, or his political beliefs, which, in the case of a middle-class young man, could vary from the extreme right wing to the extreme left without either option seeming odd.

  A borgataro from the poorer outskirts of town or an heir to a fortune or the scion of an aristocratic family almost immediately realize who they are and where they come from and where they’re heading or risk heading: the markers along the highways of their lives.

  The young bourgeois man, on the other hand, will all at once perceive, on a given day that is as likely to come at age eighteen as at age thirty or forty, the class he belongs to, and in a flash it will become just as evident to his eyes that his clothing, his home, his motorcycle or his car, his very thoughts and desires and the way he has of relishing life or suffering, and even the sweetheart he has chosen or who has chosen him and who might well now be his wife, and have been for some time—all these things are the way they are precisely because he is bourgeois.

  From that moment on, no matter what he might be doing, even organizing a picnic or signing an insurance policy or kissing a woman who might or might not be his wife, he’ll be possessed by that awareness.

  WHEN YOU ENTER SCHOOL at age six, as I did, from the warm protective safety of the family, without intermediate transitions through any form of social interaction with others, the risk is that you might acquire one of these two attitudes: either attribute to yourself a power over others, or else feel that the others have that power over you. Usually neither of the two things is real, or else it’s true even if it’s imaginary, like most things that a person feels and therefore does. Very few things in our lives are concrete before we ourselves make them so by materializing our fantasies, giving them a weight they didn’t have in the first place. Fears, expectations, and illusions shape the world to their own image and semblance. It’s rare that a concrete action takes its basis from a calculation, or else it entails a fantastic calculation which follows laws that are by no means rational, or else it might still apply an impeccable logic but to imaginary data. The person who spends the greatest amount of energy on calculation is not a mathematician,
but a lunatic. Or a mad scientist, a perfect compendium between the power of reason and the delirium of the premises and the objectives. Arbus probably corresponded to that type.

  BY THE SIMPLE FACT that we were enrolled in that school, by the fact that it was private, by the fact that our parents paid (thereby proving to us that we should forever be grateful to them, and to the rest of the world, which was no doubt suitably impressed that they could afford to do so) to have the teachers teach us things that all the other little kids in the country were being taught free of charge, making it clear however that what we were receiving at SLM, since it wasn’t being given away for free, must necessarily be a little more valuable, more special, more exclusive, a more highly concentrated fruit juice, a more highly prized vintage of wine, an advantage, a privilege, in short, for all this and more besides we felt, to use the English word, entitled. I can’t come up with an equivalent word in Italian: titolati, aventi diritto . . . I’ll search more carefully in the Italian dictionary that I pore over every evening.