It was obvious that Iannello was taking care not to refer to the most evident aspect of the changes in his sister Annetta: the incredible pair of breasts that had erupted from her chest, round and proud like the breasts on the goddesses carved on the façades of Indian temples. In any case, Annetta strongly resembled a slave girl out of the Arabian Nights or an Indian princess: all the Iannellos, father, mother, and children, were dark-skinned, with glittering eyes, red lips, and white teeth, as in the descriptions of Eastern poets, and very much like a fabulous actress from those years, Claudia Cardinale. And Annetta was just fourteen years old, in fact she might not yet have turned fourteen! How can a boy her age who, in the meantime, has only grown bigger, pimplier, and clumsier handle the bruising impact of all that? And what do you suppose all that even is, if not the normal progress of life?
Which means that life itself is unbearable for a boy, then for an adult, and then for an old man or an old woman, the protagonists or perhaps the victims of this incessant metamorphosis.
“It’s not as if a guy doesn’t have a dick . . .” Iannello went on, in astonishment, under his breath, turning to look at me during our science lesson, “and then from one day to the next he finds he has one dangling between his legs!”
I clearly understood my classmate’s point of view and his disappointment. He was referring to the fact that breasts, which previously had simply not existed, something that girls didn’t used to have, when they were just as flat as us boys, had suddenly begun to swell, protrude, outthrust . . . and unexpectedly become the central focus of attraction and comment, something to dress up and undress, support, fondle, blame . . . Something that just a few months ago hadn’t existed was now planted firmly at the center of our collective attention and concern.
“They’re ruining my life . . .” Iannello hissed, before being forced to turn back around to face the front of the room, summoned sharply by Svampa.
We’ve encountered Svampa before, he’s the chemistry teacher.
“Hey, dark-haired boy, there, in the front row . . . what’s got into you today to make you so . . .” and he struck him on the hand with the long pointer he used to indicate the position of the elements on the periodic table that hung on the wall, “make you so distracted, eh?” Iannello shut his eyes, waiting for a second, harder whack of the pointer. In the meantime, his mind’s eye continued, indifferent to all the calls to attention, to wander off in pursuit of a pair of twin shapes, protruding from a slender torso, apparently with the sole objective of creating mental upset in someone like him, and in many others. (No, if you please, don’t let’s start arguing about whether those breasts serve or will someday serve another purpose, a noble purpose, a maternal purpose . . . in reality, the way they’re made and where they’re located, they can’t serve any purpose at all, that is, no purpose other than to become the object of female concerns and male obsessions and fantasies. Pointless, in other words, to try to remind us that these are mammary glands, and that they’re there to feed our little ones, exactly like so many other mammals have them. Have you ever taken a look at them, the tits of other animals, of dogs, monkeys, I don’t know, dolphins, and where they’re located? It’s written in plenty of books that the day we stood upright, we for all time inverted the order of our functions, putting the objective of sexual attraction in first place. And these days, breasts are popping out earlier and earlier, practically while they’re still little girls, whereas women have children later and later, and in ever smaller numbers, and they breast-feed them for shorter and shorter periods: which means that, if all goes according to schedule, it might be a good fifteen or even twenty years before those uselessly precocious boobs will feel the hungry mouth of a newborn baby, and then another or at the very most two more little rugrats, meaning a total of just a few months over the arc of an entire human lifetime . . . while, over that same period of time, dozens of male adolescents or adults or old men will dream of doing the same thing, touching, squeezing, biting, sucking those breasts, and a few will succeed.
Before winding up in the mouth of a newborn child, at least in Western countries, those nipples are going to be sucked on by a great number of grown men; and once the suckling child has been forcefully removed from the source of nourishment that in theory was created expressly for it, and successfully guided toward powdered milk and disgusting baby foods, then sure enough its daddy, and maybe other grown men to whom the mommy is willingly and well disposed, will latch back onto those nipples. Taking turns. Hungrily. Greedily.
So now I have to ask myself: When all is said and done, who has sucked a woman’s breast less than her own children?)
It is inevitable that in the presence of a pair of naked breasts, a male will regress. Proof of the fact is the enduring popularity of the famously big-breasted woman, that is to say, women famous for being big-breasted—it would be as pointless as simple to draw up a list of them here, seeing that any one of us can easily get hold of that list instantly, accompanied by an eloquent array of images. And in those images, these ladies do nothing other than to thrust forward or pretend to hide and shield their gifts of nature, hefting them, pressing down on them with both hands or compressing them into skimpy outfits or tops or bras . . . and by pretending to hide them they show them off, because it really is impossible to keep them at bay, make them sit in a corner, as if in punishment, no, because they’re simply too much, they’re just too damned . . . eruptive. Perhaps that’s the adjective I’m looking for.
(I CONFESS that what has always attracted me most in the female body is the bosom, the breasts, the source of the greatest pleasure and frustration that a man can experience through physical contact, or when that contact is denied him, in simple line of sight: a lovely pair of breasts exalts, unnerves, caresses, and disturbs the male eye much the same way that phosphenes do, those mysterious sparks that swim across our field of vision. One cannot hope for anything better than to see those breasts laid naked, freed from the miserable constraints of corsets, girdles, bustiers, bra cups, underwires, spaghetti straps, elastic undergarments . . . The apparition of a fine bosom freed of all that paraphernalia has something superb and, at the same time, utterly pure about it, a form without compromise that astounds: it’s “like a stag stepping out of the forest.” The dazzling beauty of a pair of breasts is assisted by the fact that it need express nothing at all, unlike the human face, that field of battle devastated by sentiments and thoughts, which everyone looks at to interpret, everyone scrutinizes to know what you’re feeling, what you’re thinking. There’s nothing more to be learned from a fine pair of breasts.)
FROM THE MOMENT that girls began to exist for me, the thorniest problems were always shyness and awkwardness.
What were the right things to say, the right things to do? Uneasiness, uneasiness, uneasiness . . . it took years before we could find a passable way of communicating with the opposite sex, the same manner that I still use today. When I looked at a girl back then, I almost immediately blushed and turned away, at the thought that she might have similar fantasies and intentions to those that had come into my mind. That’s what embarrassed me most, to imagine that girls could read my mind or that I might read theirs and find that it was the same as mine, or even much filthier.
IF I THINK BACK to the girls I had crushes on, during the vacations, in a confused but venomous way, to the point that I was incapable of thinking about anything other than them, of their eyes, which seemed like deep wells of wonder, their artfully pouty lips, their hair, their thighs, and that invisible thing they clamped tightly between those thighs, well, I can’t help but agree with those who believe that behind that figure of an ordinary girl, more or less unexceptional (just as my own figure was unexceptional, the persona of an infatuated kid), there lurked a luminous image, not entirely of this world, a radiant form capable of enchanting and subjugating, a form with which I was entering into contact for the first time through those very same pallid fourteen-year-old girls, just as they were doing through me,
and through mine. Ephebic adolescents, slender, almost haggard, on the boundary of the insignificant: it was unthinkable in a way that they all on their own might be able to give rise to such heat, such splendor, that they—if someone loves them and desires them, or even just if they feel themselves being observed, if someone watches them with a furtive glance—can unleash an energy with all the scorching power of a hydrogen bomb, sucking the air out of the atmosphere for miles in all directions around their mighty sphere of flame. How can all this be explained? Since I’ve watched the same thing happen to my children, I’m convinced that it functions precisely as described. Yes, it’s a mystical experience, what else could it be? An experience of which we pallid figures are the substrate, the vehicle.
IT THEREFORE HAPPENS that the crucial years of scholastic learning coincide with the years of maximum emotional turbulence, when one’s sexuality emerges from oblivion, frightening and seducing and confusing and scorching the brain of those who cross the vast expanse of adolescence, the baking sands.
BUT NOT ARBUS. Arbus was different. He always had been, and in every way. While we were kicking soccer balls around on the crunchy ash of the playing field, he was secretly constructing his mind. He never revealed—as far as I know, or at least not as long as I was still in contact with him—his weakness, his frenzy toward images of women; he never fell into rapt enchantment, as Iannello did, at the thought of those shapes, those faces. Or else he was capable of masking it successfully, as he did so many other thoughts.
Then, when I lost track of him, he must have discovered it, after his fashion, or invented it, seeing that he actually got married.
That’s right, Arbus found a woman, I came to hear of his singular marriage much further on, and in a few pages, if you have the patience to bear with me, I’ll tell you how.
3
SVAMPA, our chemistry teacher, the elderly priest with the thin, nasal voice, used his pointer with all the agility of a fencer pointing his foil.
In spite of the fact that it was so very long, he whirled it and nailed the target spot-on for the most part.
And in fact, he never clubbed us, it was more like striking a billiard ball, as if trying to run the boys through, which wasn’t all that different really from what he would have liked to do in another context, in compliance with his repressed erotic desire.
But was it, after all, so very repressed?
We wondered that quite often.
That he was head-over-heels a homosexual, there could be no doubt: but no boy at SLM that I ever met or spoke to told me that he’d been molested by him if, as I trust and hope, we don’t consider molestation the loving phrases he lavished on his pets, the most attractive and effeminate young boys, or those, on the contrary, who were precociously virile, the young men like Iannello, in other words.
That “I could just eat you alive with kisses, Riccardino mine!” aimed at Modiano, who at the time had an angelic head of hair, fine and fluffy and blond, sadly, the kind of hair that falls out early, was actually just a form of scholastic encouragement, when Svampa gave him back his classroom assignment with a passing grade.
THE SCIENCE CLASS might just as fairly have been called the alchemy class.
Although they taught modern sciences there, it was like a piece of the Middle Ages set in the rationalist building of SLM, the cabinet of Doctor Faustus, upholstered with symbols, skeletons, creatures pickled in formaldehyde, carnivorous plants that masticated and swallowed insects, nourishing a fleshy, purple flower, which blossomed for a single night, surviving only the following day, and ultimately causing the death of the plant, drained of its life force by having engendered it.
Gas was Svampa’s assistant.
A filthy, bowed little old man with long white hair and enormous snowy eyebrows, who must have worked every type of job and disgusting endeavor known to man before donning the rough, stained gray lab coat, spotted with sprays of chemical substances; without ever uttering a word, he helped Svampa to clean up the lab when the experiments were over. The flasks, the bottles, the alembics, the electrical generators, the mirrors for optical experiments.
Svampa, in fact, was very messy, terribly disorderly, and as he explained things his excitement mounted to the verge of euphoria, as he shrieked in a falsetto, and if it hadn’t been for Gas’s assistance, he would surely have blown the whole school sky-high, especially when he amused himself by boiling his potions over the Bunsen burner—and as often as not, he’d forget to extinguish the flame.
Gas never opened his mouth, and looked at us, over Svampa’s shoulders, with true hatred, especially when Svampa abandoned himself to his amorous tirades aimed at the more attractive of my classmates, the usual ones: Jervi, Modiano, or Zarattini.
He’d review us one by one with that hate-filled glare, amplified by his enormous scruffy white eyebrows.
Gas hated every last one of us pampered brats, without exception.
IN FACT, it could just as easily have been Merlin or Paracelsus in Gas&Svampa’s stead.
While the two old men stood bowed and busy over the workbench where they did their experiments, they looked like a couple of corpse thieves, the notorious Burke and Hare. For that matter, among the many rumors concerning Gas, there was one going around that, before being hired at SLM, already in his late fifties, he’d been a morgue attendant, perhaps working in the office of the medical examiner, responsible for washing the corpses and reassembling them after autopsies. It was also said that he had been an alcoholic, and some insinuated that he still was. In any case, whether truth or legend, there’s nothing to be done about it. Scientists are just one notch above, or below, shamans and sorcerers.
AS IF THAT WEREN’T ENOUGH, Svampa was convinced that a young man’s talents and character were inscribed in his features: as a result, it was not only because he was a homosexual that he would scrutinize each of us with a gaze that seemed to physically palpate the face and grope the body. If he decided that one of us wasn’t suited to the study of chemistry because, let’s say, of the shape of his nose or his forehead or hands, then he’d abandon any effort to teach him, he’d never test him, he wouldn’t answer his question or requests for further explanations and—this was the topper—he’d just put a D on his report card so that he wouldn’t have to waste any more of his time or breath on him.
ONE TIME, Jervi and Chiodi played a tremendous prank on him. An unforgettable one. Even now, the alumni of SLM talk about it. Svampa had in fact raised this very rare agave plant, which he tended with loving care while awaiting the day it would finally bloom. It was supposed to flower just once in its lifetime, and Svampa waited months for it to blossom, the way an expectant mother awaits a child. You could say, without rhetorical overreach, that he watered that agave plant with his tears, the tears of an old repressed queer priest, and there must have been plenty of those tears, shed both over the sins he’d committed and those merely imagined, let alone for his continual sacrifices and frustrations. By now the solitary agave bud was swollen and juicy as a young artichoke, and you had the impression you could feel the petals within pushing their way out, eager to open up and display their garish colors, which would instantly redeem the little shrub’s unassuming appearance: a grayish trunk that, if it hadn’t been for that monstrous sucker ready to open out, you would have thought was withered and dead. During the last class held before the prank—if that’s what we want to call it—was played, Svampa had seemed distracted more than once, and had turned his gaze toward the vase, set just below the window to accelerate its vegetal processes, as if he wanted to witness the exact moment of the blossoming. But the miracle seemed to be slightly delayed. When Gas, leaving the laboratory unguarded, the keys left carelessly in the keyhole, went down into the cellar to get some cleaning soap (though some claimed he went down there to drink), my two classmates Jervi and Chiodi scampered in and poured half a bottle of bleach into the agave’s vase. To hear the two of them tell it (though it might well have been an invented horror-film detail
), they’d actually given the plant “an injection,” directly into the stalk. The effect, in any case, was already unmistakable the next day. It was a Tuesday, a day on which we had no science lesson, but word spread in a flash down the hallways: Svampa was sitting in the laboratory, head cradled in his hands, and before him was the agave in its vase. He was unable to restrain his sobs. His shoulders heaved uncontrollably. The boys who had gone in at the sound of his laments had found him in that position. We arrived too, on the run, the minute the bell rang for recess, crowding around the laboratory door, and Svampa was still there, rapt in his wake for the flower that had died unborn. The plant, in fact, was as gray as ever, but its succulent bud—through the partially opened corolla in which you had been able to glimpse the red thread of its petals until just the day before—had fallen off the stalk, tumbling to the floor. Now Svampa was turning it over and over between his fingers, dead, dry, and colorless; he seemed to be trying to figure out what had happened, but if you ask me, he knew perfectly well. And he bowed his head in tears.
Standing next to him was Gas, red in the face, his white hair standing on end and his eyebrows even more tousled. He kept a solicitous hand placed on Svampa’s shoulder, where the priest’s black tunic was worn and almost shiny. But consoling the broken teacher was not the first of his concerns. He knew that before long the headmaster would begin an investigation into his failure to adequately safeguard the laboratory. And he looked at us students with a hatred that I doubt has ever been felt in any human soul toward his fellow men. A pure, absolute, justified hatred.
And all for a flower.
The Catholic School Page 17
