Hey, are you still listening to me?
Do you still want me to continue?
Then I’ll go on for a little longer.
THIS STORY TAKES PLACE during a time when women, nearly all women, became in a very short time, a matter of a few years, far more available to men, ten times more available, and as a result, ten times more threatening. The new erotic freedom, coming hand in hand with other forms of emancipation and therefore amplifying them, seemed at first to enhance their influence. In every historical period, from the Greece of Socrates to the chivalrous Middle Ages to the court of Louis XV, sex has had this effect—of sending a chill down the back, sharpening awareness to the verge of the painful, throwing open new fronts upon which, in good time, science, ethics, philosophy, and politics would eventually battle. You might say that sex has to do with individuals’ private lives, their bedrooms alone, but in fact it shakes society as a whole from top to bottom, reshaping it into new entities, repositioning all values, reformulating all relationships. Erotic relations between man and woman, man and man, woman and woman, are what cause movement in both individual and collective lives, the reason wars are fought and peace is established, the foundation of intelligence, the cause and at the same time the objective of every enterprise, the key to unlock mysteries and the hidden significance of any clue . . . Sexual relations occupy the young man’s mind and, obsessively, the old man’s mind, too, if not as desire, then as dream, memory, regret, and they permeate the thoughts of the chaste every bit as much as the licentious. Sexual passion is the very origin of the personality and the way that that personality can draw upon itself.
Men back then felt that they still had to pay for this easier access to intercourse, pay for it not with cash, but with the coin of an anxiety never hitherto experienced. An anxiety caused when they found themselves face-to-face with an unknown feminine power, unleashed by new sexual customs and by the pill, a contraceptive that made them virtually unstoppable. For men, in other words, fucking continued to have a cost, though an undeclared one, less easily identified than in a former time, and therefore not as easy to pay, or perhaps we should say, to pay off. How? How much? To whom? Feminine availability, at first celebrated as a form of liberation or, more cynically, as a feast of plenty for the males, who dove in headfirst, in time began to reveal its more unsettling aspects, once the early pioneering stage was a thing of the past. Everything that has no clear limitations, no obvious stopping point, is disquieting. As it had done a century earlier, a specter was haunting the West, festively menacing. It lent itself famously to frightening the bigots and church ladies, it was ideal for mocking them, but this irreverent use was a trifle when compared with the genuine subversion that it brought in its wake: this was something that shook the branches of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, making all the fruit tumble to the ground.
7
THE DESIRES, incompatible with reality, that drive a young boy or an adolescent are destined to wane, and it’s a tormented decline. Sex life at that age can be considered intensely pure, immaculate, practically crystalline, or to the contrary, exceedingly impure, since it consists solely of dreams and desires, and almost never of actual experience. Now, which is more perverse: a dream or reality?
Like many other boys, but I believe with an acuity that was out of the ordinary, that sunset in me was accompanied by an immense, inexplicable suffering. And this suffering, this monstrous uneasiness, never ceased, continuously changed shape and intensity, and from the moment that it became possible to satisfy at least a part of those boundless if vague fantasies that shot through me like meteors day and night, instead of improving the situation it only worsened it, the frustration at not being able to satisfy all the other fantasies swelled disproportionately, becoming a thorn in my side, an obsession, a genuine well of unhappiness. Unhappiness about what? Because of what? I could say that up until now I had enjoyed a full and fortunate life, and in fact I do say so, comparatively speaking, at least. So what am I wasting your time complaining about? Nothing. What’s the problem? There is none. I’m not complaining, I am a complaint. I suffer every single instant that I’m not being touched, that I can’t hug, clutch, caress, that I can’t penetrate: therefore, a very considerable part of the time I’m alive. My hunger is never placated. Forget about good breast and bad breast! All breasts are mean to me, the ones that are denied me but also those that are conceded to me, that I clutch, caress, and suck, because they are never conceded to me sufficiently, I’d like to squeeze them and suck them uninterruptedly. The good breast isn’t good, because, as I already know, as I know in advance (and this is why I hate it), it will soon turn bad, it will be denied to me.
It is happiness, it is fulfillment itself, touched ever so briefly, that engenders unhappiness. It gives us some sense of the yawning gap that separates the possibilities of life from ordinary life as we know it. It seems clear to me that someone who had never experienced any satisfaction of their desires would be far less unhappy as a rule, someone who had always been denied access to breasts; his unhappiness would be clear, unsullied, crystalline, not stained here and there by patches of pleasure that make it not only unbearable, but also obscene, filthy, indecorous, and even ridiculous, that’s right, ridiculous, because if someone stands there constantly whining for them to give back his toy, the toy that they took from him, his yo-yo, the soft, swelling bosom, the illusory and boundless sweetness until just an instant before the stimulus, the frenzy begins again. I’m such a frenzied individual that when I was a child I was forced to learn the harsh law of the postponement of pleasure, by dint of necessity, at school, at home, I understood and digested that cruel lesson, but then I forgot it, I’m afraid so, it may sound incredible but as I grew older, I forgot it, and at age eighteen there I was again, whining and stamping my feet, at age twenty-five, let’s not even mention it, and at forty and fifty even worse, things continue to deteriorate with the passing of the years. The further into the past my childhood recedes and the more I’m choked with rage and self-pity, if they don’t immediately give me back my yo-yo, then I turn red in the face and I suffocate with rage and sorrow, if they don’t find the breasts and bring them back to me. I lived on these rewards and these offers, which I believe to be undeserved, and which always come unexpectedly, but unless they arrive promptly, every time that I feel the need for them (which is to say, always), every day and every minute of my life, I am filled with fury and tears. Mine is not a narcissistic wound, as books describe these things: it’s a veritable sinkhole. A cleavage that splits me in two from head to foot, like those characters in Dante, or Italo Calvino’s famous cloven viscount, though with a significant difference: that in the book by Calvino, the cleavage split Medardo of Terralba into two distinct and opposite parts, one good and the other wicked, while the two halves into which I am split both love, lust after, want, suffer, and contend for the same things: food, beauty, respect, sex, oblivion, thrills, intelligence, abandonment, and rest, but it’s only one of the halves that manages to gather a few scraps, while the other half goes hungry. So there’s always a part of me that suffers, abandoned to itself, while the other half has a high old time: the part that suffers is the part that foresees the instant in which the enjoyment will come to an end, and it despairs at the thought. The blade of narcissism splits me into two equal parts that look at each other in the mirror and admire themselves, pity themselves, detest themselves, and feel contempt for their helplessness.
In spite of the fact that I spent countless hours studying and striving to practice the highest forms of human wisdom, and although it was well within reach of my spiritual means, the frenzy by no means diminished over time, all that subsided eventually was the energy with which that frenzy expresses itself, in fainter but for that very reason more piercing forms: in other words, I’m now an older, but no means a wiser man. And what with the insistent determination of their stubborn persistence, these frenzied and limitless desires, uncensorable, which eventually dwindled to o
ne and one alone, the desire to be loved, yes, to be loved whatever that expression may mean, and whatever nuance or shape that desire may assume and in whatever gesture it may present itself, the infinite extension of the same state and still of the same reaction to that state (as I was saying, a mixture of anger, self-pity, languor, passivity, pride, and even brutality, something in the depths of which I was able to glimpse how the feminine traits and the virile aspects of the human character, more than intertwining, coincided, became one, possessing in reality a single identity, which showed me once and for all that men and women possess the same identical nature—that they want and desire and fear the same things, or else different things but in the same exact way, that they are constituted, that is, by a single desiring element . . . and that there cannot exist a desire more hysterical and irritable than the lust for arms instead of for clothing and jewelry, which seriously means that Achilles is in no way different from Deidamia, he lunges at the swords and axes with the same frenzy that the princess and her sisters experience as they grab and snatch at pearls and silks—what changes if the object is different but the excitement is the same?), and what with the repeating and repeating the same illusion and disappointment, like a moth continually bumping against a lantern whose light attracts it, banging into the glass, finding the strength to beat its wings only to slam up against the glass again, each time feeling the same disappointment and yet unable to register that stubborn fact, or else inventing the monstrous formula whereby that foolish slamming against glass actually becomes pleasurable in and of itself, that’s right, pleasurable, and in the end that is the objective, after all, the object of the desire has simply changed, and it has become the pursuit of pain and hurt, as painful as possible, by slamming against that hard barrier. It hardly even matters anymore that there is a light behind the glass, the moth can’t even see that light now, all that matters is the pane of glass against which it bangs its head, the pain growing ever greater, the noise growing louder, scattering the colorful dust from the wings as they frantically beat. I’ve grown fond of this repetition, as one grows fond of anything that has accompanied a person for a long time, even if it’s negative, so in the end I’ve developed a bond, since by now I’ve become that thing, that crazed moth. And here I am, then, happily unhappy, satisfied in my dissatisfaction. As long as I haven’t thrown myself out a window, it means that things have been going smoothly, life goes on, where I couldn’t say, and yet it’s gone on until, in fact, it reaches that sill and that wide-open window. Only the window is a guarantee. In terms of comprehension, the real problem is that, by repeating and repeating, I still haven’t understood a jot more than I’d already understood at age eighteen. The endless recapitulation of the same schema protected me, I curled up inside it. And even now, I don’t want to know about anything else. I know that I suffer and that no one can understand me, including those who understand me, no one loves me, including those who love me, in fact, I hate them all the more, I’m furious at them, since, considering that they love me, well, in that case, they ought to love me more, much much more than they do, they shouldn’t stop loving me for so much as an instant, thinking about me and dedicating themselves wholeheartedly to me. But instead what do they do? At a certain point, they just stop. They turn elsewhere. They think of other things, they love other people. And the cloud of suffering envelops me. Nothing exists but that dark, clammy fog that pricks me, that pierces me.
My words are nothing but an ongoing lament, I know that, but it’s what I feel, what I think, even in this exact moment as I write I’m feeling and thinking this and nothing other than this, you might not believe it but I have a heart swollen with bitterness and self-pity, for no good reason. It’s a beautiful day out, full of sunshine and wind, I acknowledge the wonderful things that have happened to me, the unforgettable places I have visited, the extraordinary people I have met and come to know, whose works I have read and listened to and admired, the fantastic individuals I have had beside me or whom I’ve even helped to engender with my semen, and yet even to this book I only want to confide the desire to climb up and over that windowsill. All fine things conspire against my mood, by showing me, pointing out to me, that which, if I ever had it, I have nonetheless lost. I have lost it precisely because I have had it. Fulfillment, contentment, are unbearable terms of comparison, their blinding radiance kills. I feel perennially exiled from that fulfillment, that complete happiness, in the instants in which I have enjoyed it (not few in number, truth be told, but fleeting, as frequent as they have been ephemeral) it was not possible for me to enjoy it in full. When one ought to enjoy, one cannot, one enjoys only afterward, in a subsequent moment, which might even arrive quite soon, but only after the fullness of the enjoyment has ended, one then enjoys thinking and remembering just how much one has enjoyed and regretting that one can no longer enjoy in that manner. Those who take pleasure, in the instant of that pleasure, feel nothing, since pleasure is only retrospective, and it is precisely that, the sign that you are taking pleasure: the fact that you feel nothing. Pleasure will lie in the interpretation, the regret, the abandonment, it is there that it establishes and finds its measure, and therefore it inevitably contains within itself displeasure, without which it would not know how to value itself, appreciate itself.
That’s what every novel always is: the narration of an unhappiness. Even when the author joyfully lays claim to the fullness, the exuberance of life, or proclaims its aridity, invariably and in every case he is narrating his unhappiness about something that went away after being there, or else something that he awaited in vain, or that passed close by, very close, even too close, such as love, for Uncle Vanya, or glory, for Bolkonsky, but they didn’t move fast enough to seize it. I, for example—I partly remember the time in which this story unfolds, I partly studied it or heard other people talk about it, I dream of it a great deal, to an even greater extent I invent it depending on what the story requires: it’s a snake in the grass that you glimpse for a fleeting instant, and there is more of a sensation of having seen it, relived it in a shiver that runs down my spine, than a clear sighting of it before my eyes.
ARBUS HAD TAUGHT ME not to trust: it’s not much, as lessons go, but at least it’s clear. Certainly, it’s not especially inspiring: you’d prefer to receive a lesson that runs along the lines of “This is,” rather than “This might not be,” or “It’s not the way you think it is.”
And the first people you’d better not trust, according to Arbus, are precisely the masters, the authority figures, the grown-ups, the teachers, the ones who are supposed to know. The ones who are supposed to know, don’t: they think they know things they don’t, they don’t know that they don’t know, so they presume. Their authority is based on nothing. On this point, Arbus was categorical: I never once saw him take a statement at face value, whether it was written in a book, or spoken by a teacher, much less the stories that circulated among us students in such legendary forms that they should certainly be taken with a large grain of salt just on principle alone. The funny thing is that Arbus had nothing to hold up against the truths propounded by our teachers, in fact, even more than mistrusting them, he said, we’d be well advised not to trust ourselves. Let’s take the unhappiness I was talking about earlier: well, Arbus didn’t seem to be touched by it even in the slightest. I never saw him, even once, sad and concerned, I never heard him complain: and yet he’d have had good reason, certainly more than I ever did. He’d never had a father; his mother seemed to be much happier to have, say, his friends at their home (for instance, me) than her own son, taking every opportunity to mock him, practically humiliate him, for his awkward physical appearance, because he dressed badly, because he was shy, because he didn’t understand any part of what was important or pleasurable in life: and in effect, Arbus, even leaving aside the acne that tormented him, was homely, poorly dressed, seldom washed (especially his hair), and didn’t seem to be liked by anyone, or almost anyone, nor did he make any effort to be liked. I often wond
ered whether the friendship that I endowed upon him was a product of the confidence it gave me to know that I was handsomer and luckier than him, even if I wasn’t as smart. Arbus was more intelligent than me and all the others, no doubt about it, and not by a small margin, but by leaps and bounds; in every other aspect, however, I was a genuine Prince Charming in comparison with him, and it may be that I bonded with him as a gracious princely concession. Or else that extraordinary intelligence of his really did exert a power over me, it was the magnet that drew toward him all other emotions, interests, predilections, even a singular physical attraction. That’s right, Arbus, so gangly, oily, and bony, attracted me physically. Not enough to want to hug him (something I doubt I did even once in my whole life) but enough to leave me in a rapt state of enchantment, gazing at him, especially at school, admiring his profile, and the gleaming black shocks of hair that dangled from his temples down to the corners of his mouth. This was his study posture, while he read or wrote. He wrote slowly, never lifting the tip of his pen from the sheet of paper, because he used a special unbroken style of handwriting, which he had invented himself.
At school, when in-class exercises were assigned, at the end of several minutes of concentration, during which his eyes remained half-shut behind the thick, dirty lenses of his glasses, he would suddenly start writing and he wouldn’t raise his head or his pen from the sheet of legal paper until he had completed the translation or the series of problems in mathematics or physics. He never seemed pleased or dissatisfied, much less worried, as if those exercises that mattered so much to everyone else meant nothing to him. And in fact, his grades weren’t always excellent.
CONSIDERING HOW INTELLIGENT HE WAS, it’s strange that he never got a higher grade than a six—what Americans would call a D—in Italian literature. Barely a passing grade, and sometimes not even that. Class essays irritated him. “What you wrote is accurate but devoid of thought,” Signor Cosmo would tell him, handing him back his classroom assignment, untouched since it had been turned in. Not a mark, not a correction. What Arbus lacked was the reason and the incentive to write.
The Catholic School Page 22
