It was clear that he didn’t really want to say what had happened, and he muddled along, trying to come up with an excuse (“They fell off while I was running . . .” “I banged my face in the bathroom . . .”), piling up contradictory versions, until his voice cracked and he finally fell silent. He just stood there, holding his thick eyeglasses by the temples, hands trembling with nervousness.
The suspicion began to circulate that the guilty party might be one of our classmates, even if there weren’t any bullies or even any boys especially given to horseplay, aside from Chiodi, and possibly Jervi, who had never shown signs of any cruel or treacherous behavior, but then, without warning, it was the other Marco in our class, Marco d’Avenia, a chubby young boy with rosy skin and a blank look in his eyes, who got to his feet and told Cosmo and all the rest of us exactly what had happened. D’Avenia, in fact, tended to go off on his own during recess for fear that one of the older boys might steal his snacks or knock them to the ground with a rough shove, and so he hid behind the boxwood hedges that ran along the outside wall of SLM, and in the safety of that refuge he was able to devour his pizza in peace and quiet. From that vantage point, his mouth crammed full of tomato sauce, he’d been able to watch the bullying unfold. No one had noticed him hiding behind the hedge, and no one but him, in that corner of the courtyard, had noticed the older boys roughing up Lodoli. The boys had in fact surrounded him in such a way that no one could see what was happening inside the knot of bodies. D’Avenia, however, saw it all and told what he knew.
IT WAS A RARE THING to see Cosmo angry, or even irritated. Maybe he was neither this time. But when he strode out of the classroom after assigning Rummo to maintain a minimum level of order until his return, I’m quite certain I heard him utter, under his breath, the following words: “It’s high time someone taught a lesson to these gallows birds.”
THE TERM “gallows bird” had already long since fallen from common use in the time when this story unfolds: in fact, I place it primarily in the context of reading, the deliciously outmoded written language, books in other words, the yellowed and unequaled adventure novels I read, many of them in translation from the English, the French, and the Russian. And in particular I am reminded of a beautiful old large-format volume, perhaps twelve inches by sixteen, with magnificent illustrations, that I owned as a boy and which I must have read through, from cover to cover, dozens of times, until I had practically memorized the whole thing. It was titled Pirati, Corsari e Filibustieri—Pirates, Corsairs, and Filibusters. Cosmo liked to express himself in precise, ironic, literary turns of phrase, which were vividly realistic nonetheless. Since then I have been unable to forgo using the term myself. Gallows birds, that’s right, they were nothing but gallows birds, and for the crime they would commit not long after this episode, they would once have surely been hanged.
FOUR STUDENTS were summoned to the headmaster’s office after being reported by Cosmo, and for now at least I’m not going to reveal their names. A couple of those names will become significant in the second half of this book. As I said, they were a year older than us. In any case, I have no way of knowing what the headmaster said to them, how he confronted them, and in what terms he asked them to account for what they had done. I might try to re-create here—using the technique impudently picked up from the pages of Thucydides or Tacitus, when they imagine the speeches of generals before engaging in battle or diplomats determined to restore peace—a certain type of scolding lecture, in the style at once dismissive and elusive that was so typical of the headmaster, but that would simply be a waste of time because the only thing I know for certain is that no measures were actually taken against the four students, and that fact appears much more significant than any number of words, which after all, given the benefit of hindsight, we now know to have been spoken into the wind. Not even a disciplinary note on the school ledger, or a day of suspension, or a letter to the parents. I imagine that the matter of Marco Lodoli’s eyeglasses was simply filed away as a case of excessive physical boisterousness, incidental vectorial by-products of the kinetic energy that drove the bodies of those adolescents to clash in narrow spaces, like the swirling atoms in the visions of the ancient philosophers. That the incident had turned out for the best, at least from the point of view of our headmaster, was proven by the fact that a few days later, Ottetti (as we had nicknamed our custodian Impero Baj, on account of the otto etti, Italian for 800 grams, nearly two pounds, of pasta that he claimed to eat every day at lunch) came to Lodoli’s class to bring him a brand-new pair of frames, Lozza brand, or maybe Persol, to be fitted with his thick lenses. No one ever knew whether it had been the bullies themselves out of their own pockets, or the school, who had paid for them: the important thing is that Lodoli regained his sight, and SLM regained its equilibrium, for a while.
WE HAVE a deeper and more extensive knowledge of another significant day, that is, the day that Arbus went to the headmaster’s office to lodge a complaint because he wasn’t learning anything. The lessons were too dull and repetitive, the teachers were too lazy and predictable. Really, we classmates were the least responsible for that trend. It was the school itself that worked badly. An incredible number of hours and days, precious, irretrievable, spent amid those four walls—to learn so little!
With a cunning tactical move, the headmaster immediately summoned to the office Rummo, who was our class representative, so that he could either confirm or deny Arbus’s claim: actually, though, because he wanted the presence of another student as a witness, and he was convinced that to have one would restrain Arbus from expressing excessively radical judgments. Evidently, he didn’t know Arbus well enough (Who can claim to have ever really known him, that young man? Not even I can boast that I understood him, and perhaps I won’t succeed, right up to the last page of this book), and in fact Arbus spoke as if Rummo wasn’t even present in the headmaster’s office, in fact, truth be told, as if the headmaster himself weren’t there. It was, in fact, Rummo himself who told us about it later, filled with admiration. That was characteristic of guys like Arbus, if there has ever been anyone else like him: to pay no attention to their interlocutor, neither his rank nor his mood, to feel no need to come to terms with him, to worry about how he might react, and therefore adapt the things he might say to fit the circumstances, the way we do out of courtesy or fear or self-interest or mere hypocrisy. None of all that: Arbus wanted to say what he believed to be the truth, but without any demands or self-regard in teaching a lesson or laying down a challenge. He wanted to say, in short, what was right to say, even though it might be disagreeable or scandalous: almost without a care for what effect he might have, in fact, without even noticing that there might be any. Pure, ingenuous, innocent, pitiless, automatic: that’s what my friend Arbus was like. The presence of the unfortunate Rummo, in the final analysis, served only one purpose: to let us know, subsequently, how that meeting had gone. In contrast with what he did before the assembled class, which he treated with scorn, this time the headmaster reserved a treatment of utmost respect for Arbus. My classmate deserved it.
“SCHOOL? It’s just one more way of locking us up in a safe place and making sure we don’t cause any trouble. The teachers are nothing more than our prison guards. If they teach us anything at all, it’s by accident, or purely random, a collateral effect. Do you have any idea, Headmaster, how we could put the time we spend in here to better use?”
“That’ll do, Arbus, I understand your point. If I simply said that you were wrong, on the specific point, or else if I said that, no two ways about it, you’re not in charge of deciding how your scholastic career is to unfold, and that that’s up to your parents, I’d be insulting your intelligence, and at your age, that’s not a good thing to do. Fine. So how old are you?”
“Fifteen. Almost sixteen.”
“Almost. Fine. It is in that almost that we can find the answer to your complaints; which, in any case, I have no intention of overlooking. I’ve recorded them word for word, and I’l
l take advantage of your input to improve the quality of the service that we, with all our limitations, are called upon to provide to you, to give you students . . . This is our vocation, and you know what that term means, don’t you? ‘Vocation.’ It means that ours is not a choice, but rather a simple answer: the answer to a calling. Fine. Don’t worry. I’ll make sure that this vocation is tested, teacher by teacher, and that is a promise: without making any distinction between the religious brothers, like me, and the laymen. They, too, answer to the same appeal, and if it does not come directly from God, it will surely come from their professional conscience. But I feel sure that you know these things already. And that, deep down, you appreciate them. Fine. I believe, for that reason, that it is unnecessary to summon your parents to let them know about your dissatisfaction. Perhaps you’ve already informed them on your own initiative, back at home, is that right? Have you talked to them? Did you? Oh, you didn’t? That’s exactly what I thought: you didn’t. Fine. Very good. The first piece of advice, in fact, that I want to give you, is always to try to solve problems within the context where those problems have arisen, never outside, never, never . . . never expanding them, never extending the problem to a broader circle, never allowing them to migrate elsewhere, contaminating others with the leprosy of these problems . . . Discretion and determination, that’s what it takes. Is there something not working here at school? Fine. We’ll resolve it here at school. Among ourselves. Among those who are close to that problem, who know it, who are capable of intervening, changing things, taking action. Fine. It’s like the interior of our souls: if difficulties arise, the struggle must be an inner struggle, us against ourselves. The true target of any revolution lies in whoever undertakes it, not outside him. Pointless to involve the others, to upset them, to make them worry, just as your father and your mother would be worried if they were informed of the criticisms that you’re leveling against the school. I don’t criticize you in the slightest, and for that matter, with someone like you, so wide-awake and mature, what good would that do, right? All right, then, let’s put it in these terms: we aren’t perfect, either as men or as religious, much less as teachers. Fine. Could anyone but Our Lord Jesus Christ claim to be? Claim, that is, to be the finest man or the finest teacher possible? No, certainly not. Fine. The fact is that, my dear Arbus, my very dear boy, neither are you. Neither are you the perfect student. Or are you convinced that you are?”
“No, of course not.”
“Fine. You see it yourself. You’re an almost ideal student. Chronologically speaking, you’re almost a man. In strictly theoretical terms, given your intelligence, you’d be capable of studying all by yourself what remains to be studied from here to the end of high school. Is that what you want? Do you think that it would amount to the same thing, if you stayed at home with your books, instead of coming to school each day? What do you still lack to attain your objective? I’ll tell you what: you lack something that you’ll never have. And it’s the same thing that we priests lack, we teachers, we adults, and in fact all men and women lack, even your father and mother, if it comes to that. Becoming adults, we’ve never become perfect, you know? The margins of improvement were great . . . but even if they had been small, and we improved a little more, every day a little more, day after day, and we still do our best to do so, well, we’d still fall an inch, half an inch, a quarter inch short . . . and we’d never bridge that gap. If you learn, from this day forward, to accept this constitutional shortcoming, this lack in you, maybe you’ll be able to better understand the same shortcoming in others. And after all, it’s not a matter just of making better use of your own time: it’s a simple matter of letting it pass, of overlooking it, do you understand me, Arbus? Because it’s the time that passes that makes us grow, even if we don’t realize it, even when we have the sensation of standing still, we aren’t, time still sweeps us away, it transports us over great distances, like the current of a river, as long as we oppose no resistance. Fine. At the end of this journey, you’ll be a changed person, a greatly changed person, my boy, much more than you could ever imagine, and independently of any lesson in Italian or geometry, while you will have received other lessons without ever realizing that they were imparted to you. And it strikes me that this is a good, a fine thing.
“We’ll be behind you, I assure you of that, Arbus, we’ll help in every way imaginable to keep you from feeling like an outsider, so you don’t feel special: we’ll teach you to be normal, that is, to accept what all the others accept. Everyone. This is a lesson, too, the most important lesson you can learn. Fine, fine.
“As for your outlandish belief that you can’t learn anything here, you’re as wrong as can be about that. Of course you can learn here, Arbus. Absolutely. You can, if you want to. Fine. Do you want to know something? Do you want to know where you can begin? First of all, you should learn to know those who are around you. Your schoolmates. They are the first subject you should be studying, you know that? The human subjects are the most interesting ones, they come before history and geography and science, and they’re worth making an effort, at least an attempt to get to know them, don’t you think, Arbus? Fine, fine, that’s fine. Let’s take your teachers, just as an example. Are you convinced that you really know them? Or have you judged them without really understanding them? And I’m not talking about the subjects they teach, I’m talking about the people. Don’t you think you might have been a little too hasty in your judgments, perhaps, in your condemnations? Why, fine, that’s fine, I understand you. We understand you. You’re impatient because you’re intelligent, the two things often go hand in hand, and instead you ought to remain calm. Much calmer. Nice and calm, Arbus, understood? That’s fine.”
ARBUS’S COMMENT once he was back in the classroom was terse and concise. After being informed of all that had happened by Rummo, we asked Arbus how it had gone with the headmaster.
“Simple: he conned me.”
As if he couldn’t care less about it now. He had better things to think about.
12
IT’S ALWAYS DIFFICULT to relate to school, either critically or with narrative intent—virtually impossible during your time there as a student, almost invariably in a resigned or resentful tone if you teach there, inevitably sentimental if you limit yourself to remembering it years later, as an integral part of your youth.
The “well, it’s something we all went through” approach renders memories of school in general largely one-note, sentimental, anecdotal, and foggy. Paradoxically, for such a fundamental and universal and enduring institution, it is safe to say, with almost mathematical certainty, that the only true moment of joy that it offers is when its doors shut behind you for the very last time. And if it’s not joy, it’s relief.
Going to school is not something open to discussion; something that’s so clearly not open to discussion that it becomes natural, and therefore no longer conceivable as anything different from what it is, the most prolonged and cerebral artificial experience of our lives, considered by one and all to be an obligation that it would be uncivil to avoid: little boys and girls, teenagers of both sexes forced to spend many hours a day in virtual immobility, for a variable number of years, in closed rooms, to do what, basically? To bend their spinal cords over desks and clog their brains with classical or scientific or technical tirades spouted by out-of-breath tutors, hoarse from shouting, whose actual, unstated function, tacit yet obvious and primary in nature—as Arbus had so rightly understood (I only realize it now, he’d figured it out at age sixteen: that’s the enormous difference)—is to keep the students occupied to ensure they do no harm to themselves or others, serving as little more than custodians or guards, really, a job assigned to them by a society that must fill the void of surveillance created at the moment that exhausted families push their children out of the house, at least for a certain portion of the day, at an age when the world of labor is not yet ready to accommodate them inasmuch as they don’t yet know how to do anything (truth be told, they’
ll know even less by the time they’re done with their academic careers, but “that’s another matter”). This period of latency, by the way, has become so extraordinarily prolonged in the contemporary world that it lasts, when all is said and done, as long as fifteen years. Fifteen years to become adults ready to be ground up in the machinery. Fifteen years of an experiment that can yield (according to statistical probability more than any real method) some good fruit, there’s no way to deny it, but if considered dispassionately for what it truly is, it’s more appalling than vivisection itself.
AND THEN there are the academic subjects themselves, or perhaps we should say, the subjects that have been rendered academic—that is to say, boring, remote, and incomprehensible . . .
Not that the curricula themselves were mistaken, quite the contrary. They were full of interesting topics, the curricula. It’s so strange that at the political and bureaucratic level, people always seem to have a bone to pick with the curricula, which are blamed for being so damned antiquated, narrow, moldy, the curricula, junk from the last century—and maybe that’s because it’s easy to change the curricula, far less easy to change the people. It takes only a busy afternoon to rewrite all the curricula with ink on paper, maybe even inventing new subjects that have never been taught before or giving new names to the old subjects (one can only applaud the rhetorical variations that turn good old calisthenics into physical education, while what remains of history, the old subject featuring Hannibal’s elephants and the emperor’s red beard, has been rebaptized, alliteratively, historical and social studies . . .).
And the teachers, whether priests or non-priests, could hardly be blamed for any of this. Generally speaking, they were unfortunate wretches, obsessed and at the same time repulsed by their subjects after years of having to repeat the rote formulations that, over time, had turned into nursery rhymes, which they might as well learn by heart and recite in a singsong, like Tibetan prayers, and in fact over the years some of their voices had taken on the same nasal and guttural tonality that can be heard from the priests of all religions when they recite their psalms, a droning lullaby that emphasizes certain syllables in a single exhalation of breath, and which we in our oral examinations tended to replicate word for word, with all the very same pauses.
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