ONE OF THE VERY FEW TIMES he ever vented to me, he did so using more or less the following words:
“I don’t like Italian class. What kind of subject is that supposed to be, Italian? To speak and write in your own language, and then what? Essays. Actually, what is it I’m supposed to say? And who am I saying it to? And does Cosmo seriously care what I think? What twenty-eight adolescent kids think about Paolo and Francesca in the Inferno? I have no desire to talk about love with Cosmo. At least in mathematics or physics, there are rules, whether or not you understand them, whether or not you apply them, and the result of an equation or a problem, in the end, will be right or it will be wrong. There’s no middle ground. Here, instead . . . What does it mean to say that an essay is nice? Why do people say that one poem is beautiful and another isn’t? There’s no one on earth who can prove it, I mean to say, actually prove it, and it’s pointless to grasp at straws, the way Cosmo does when he’s run short on chatter, it’s useless to latch on to that whole rigamarole of meter, accents, and rhyme . . . I could sit down and write a hundred poems, with meter and everything. A hundred poems, one worse than the last. And then this idea that you’re supposed to express yourself, your opinions, your emotions . . . talk about things in your own way . . . give a personal interpretation . . . How can I help it if I don’t have any personal interpretation of anything? If Catullus or Petrarch feel lonely, well, I’m sorry for them . . . best of luck . . . it’s not as if I don’t understand them, I get it, they feel solitary and sad, but what am I supposed to add to it all? I might even like literature, if they’d just stop asking me my opinion about everything. My comment. Certain pieces, well, I can see that they’re written well, but when it all comes down to it?”
ARBUS NEVER COMPLAINED. He accepted it all with a faint smile that might just as easily have been calm and serene or scornful or even concealing who knows what devilry. Maybe all he meant to convey is that he didn’t care at all about grades, school, priests, or us, his classmates. In that case, what did he care about? Well, I believe that he was curious about things themselves, about their shapes, the way they worked, how they differed each from the other, what might be the best way to distinguish among them and catalogue them. That mattered to him, that was something he liked: he liked to observe, without judging and without being judged, without turning ideas into performance, speculation into academic achievement, discoveries into grades on a report card. The exact opposite, in other words, of the rest of us, who only wanted to exploit to the maximum what little we knew and especially what we didn’t know, falling back on any trick imaginable to trade off our wily ignorance.
THERE WERE SOME WHOSE SKILL at deceiving the teachers during classroom essays and exams approached a level of genius, or maniacal obsession, something that always has a certain link to genius. And instead of studying, rather than studying, with an investment of time and effort that was certainly equal to and in some cases required far greater dedication and work than what would have been sufficient to prepare adequately for quizzes or classroom assignments, Giuramento, Chiodi, Crasta, a.k.a. Three-Toed Sloth, and even Lorco, who was actually a good student, would spend afternoons at a time miniaturizing on little strips of paper, narrow and long, dozens of names and the works of philosophers, theorems, tables with verb conjugations, and then they’d devote endless painstaking efforts to slipping those tiny scrolls into the transparent bodies of their ballpoint pens, twisting them in cunning spirals around the cartridge tube, which held the ink, only to unroll them in secret during the classroom assignment, in an equally delicate process, which was by and large pointless, since you had to know how to make use of those formulas, not just transcribe them onto the exam paper. Those reasonings would need to be recapitulated from start to finish, dates and names included in a narrative or argument with a shred of sense to it, and for those purposes these strips of paper or the inked tattoos on the forearm or the sheets of flimsy paper slipped into dictionaries weren’t often especially helpful. It would have been much, much easier and more productive, in the final analysis, to study. But for some of us that was unthinkable, a shameful alternative. Lowering ourselves to studying . . . never in life! If there was at least a chance of deceiving, of taking a shortcut, which, as I’ve pointed out, in many cases proved longer and twistier than the main road, if it looked at least remotely thinkable that you could get by without effort or achievement, well, then that constituted the achievement, that is, the fact of being capable of sleight of hand, prestidigitation, of being fortune-tellers, pickpockets, cat burglars, in other words, anything other than diligent students.
THE OTHER SOLUTION was to copy. Copying from your neighbor or deskmate is the oldest ploy in the book, it dates back to the caveman, it corresponds to an atavistic impulse, suggesting that the weak should copy the strong, believe them and obey them, entrust themselves to their generosity, or else to their reliability. Whatever the grind sitting at the desk on either side of you is writing on his sheet is certainly right, the correct answer, the proper translation. And if your deskmate is a hopeless donkey, then you do your best to sit elsewhere, move closer to the reliable source, the way a scrupulous historian or an investigator might do; or at least link together a chain winding from the knowledgable to the ignorant in need of help through a series of intermediaries, just as in ancient times signals were sent from one tower to another, so that a message could hopscotch across hundreds of miles. There were two main problems, though: that there are only one or two truly knowledgable students in a given class, or at the most three or four in each subject, and not all of those few are willing to hand over their classroom assignment; for example, Gedeone, Gedeone Barnetta, who was good at Latin and Greek, made sure to build barriers of books on one side and used his left arm on the other, so as to cover what he was writing, while Zipoli, strong at math, wrote with a fine-point, very-hard-lead pencil, in a handwriting so minuscule that you couldn’t have deciphered it even with a magnifying glass. That meant that the reliable sources in some cases dwindled to a single student in the whole class.
In that case, what ensued was a bizarre phenomenon of anarchy. Everyone copied from everyone else, from the good students and even from the bad ones, in a maelstrom of total mistrust of themselves, and there were even those who erased the equations they’d solved for themselves, and copied them number for number from the most ignorant student in the class, say Giuramento or Crasta. Who knows why it is that when you copy from your neighbor, you always have the sensation that you’re thus doing better than you would have done on your own. And by a strange law of statistics, similar to Murphy’s Law, between two classmates handing around a translation or comparing a math problem, it was almost certain that they would settle on the solution that was furthest from being right. You might derive a philosophical or scientific or psychological rule from this fact, delineating some very grave consequences for any kind of community or society that might emerge: namely that error is transmitted more easily and rapidly than truth. If one person copies from someone else, more often than not they replicate the errors and miscues of whoever they’ve taken as a model, or misinterpret him. Error, in other words, is more convincing, more attractive. I’m able to test out that rule, this morning, in the class I teach in prison: two of my Romanian students are conferring in low voices over a sheet of paper with a grammar exercise, and then they seem to come to an agreement and one of them corrects what he had written, correcting it to match what the other one had written. Walking around the desks, and brushing close past the doorway of the bathroom, which has no door, I come up behind them, and I look down at the first line of their official worksheet, and all I need to do is read the first few words: mio fratelo a comprato na moto. My brother bought a motorcycle. In correct Italian, it would have read: “mio fratello ha comprato una moto.”
All right, aside from the double consonant, so alien to the Romanian ear, I can see at least that Nicusor had written the verb correctly, “ha comprato,” but then, peeking over at
Ionut’s paper, he had erased the h, in fact, he had not merely erased it, he’d actually buried it under a layer of ballpoint ink. I told him: “You see that? You’re only capable of handing each other mistakes . . . but the good things, each of you keep those for yourselves. So everyone might as well do their own work, don’t you agree?”
Sometimes I emphasize the point with a crude image: “Everyone might as well take their own shits with their own assholes.” It’s vulgar, but it packs a punch. No one here would want their own asshole used to expel someone else’s shit, and the same thing ought to apply to their thoughts. Let everyone produce their own, right or wrong though they might be, and then we’ll see. (In that “and then we’ll see,” my provisional approach to pedagogy is aptly summarized.) But I’m speaking as a teacher, while back then I spoke and I thought as a student. Taking it for granted that the best students were few in number, well out of reach, and unlikely to share their work (that was, for example, true of Sanson) or else terrorized by the teachers’ monitoring, which was in truth very mild and indulgent, strictly pro forma in most cases, the strongest temptation was to ask just about anyone who had a passing grade, however low, or even undeserved, and then copy, copy everything, without posing any useless scruples or double-checking their work, without asking permission or begging their kindness or promising repayment just to get your hands on a single phrase or formula. That was where someone like me came into play; I had been a good student in middle school, but now that I was in high school, except when it came to Italian, my performance had started to slip in subjects I used to be good at; whereas on the new subjects such as ancient Greek or physics, I’d never gotten a feel for them, and gradually, as time went on and I neglected my studies and tended to other things and missed classes, in other words, what with my failure to take seriously both the teachers and the lessons, constantly assuming I was a good student without however bothering to study, constantly skipping especially challenging school days with a “Mamma, today I just don’t feel like it” (which was enough to allow me to stay in bed, with a caress from my sweet and overindulgent mother), the lazy young man that I was began to develop shortfalls that no amount of brilliant improvisation or sparkling patter or self-confident demeanor—the kind of thing that can persuade teachers to consider the students sitting across from them to be better and more thoroughly prepared than they actually are, and thanks to that brash display of confidence alone, looking the teacher who’s testing you right in the eye and speaking in a strong, loud voice, using such clever formulations as “certainly, it goes without saying that . . .” after which you add nothing, or else “one might also say a great deal about . . .,” in short, empty clauses that nonetheless invariably make a certain impression, and I was a bit of a master at flourishing these circumlocutions—I finally got to a point where all these contrivances and expedients were no longer enough to bridge my shortcomings.
My translations from Greek and from Latin, therefore, became increasingly half-baked, improbable, the result of guesswork, with interpretations tossed out at random because, since I hadn’t studied the grammatical rules that govern those languages with implacable rigor, I had no alternative but to rely on my ear or on random chance.
. . . I HAD NO ALTERNATIVE but to rely on my ear, on random chance, or on instinct.
The decline of my mathematical abilities, which at ages ten or twelve had been remarkable, was quite pronounced, and I was the first to notice. While at first I understood everything at first glance, with an intuitive leap, on the first round of explanations, I suddenly stopped following so closely, began understanding less and less, which in a certain sense is worse than understanding absolutely nothing; the same thing happens with languages, because if you just don’t understand them at all, their alien melody can prove to be enjoyable, it costs you no effort to sit and listen to it: but if, instead, you can pick up one word out of ten, then it turns into sheer torture, and before giving up, you make a tremendous effort to grasp the meaning of the nine other words, which are incomprehensible. Understanding mathematics only halfway, in dribs and drabs, in fragments, was a decisive factor in my decision to stop studying it. I don’t think I opened the textbook even once in my time at high school.
In Latin and ancient Greek I continued to scrape by: in spite of the fact that my linguistic ignorance only continued to grow, at least there I was dealing with books, with poetry, with poems, with writers, and I found myself in a familiar world, even if De Laurentiis, the classics teacher, did all he could to disabuse us of the idea that those writers were saying anything interesting and beautiful. Even though I remained a mediocre translator, during the classroom assignments there were still classmates who wanted me to pass them my version. Matteoli, Scarnicchi a.k.a. the Dormouse, even Chiodi, who as classroom assignments approached, shifted from a state of catatonia to one of uncontrollable frenzy, thereafter relapsing into the utmost indifference the second after handing in the embossed sheet of official test paper, scribbled over beginning from the wrong side, the inside of the fold, indifferent even to the grade he’d struggled so hard for during the classroom assignment, all this academic fibrillation focused its intensity on me, as well, eyes hungering for help, meaningful dancing of the eyebrows, lips curled, whispers practically shouted across the room, lightning bolts of hissing trained in my direction, but I had two limitations, two scruples: I was afraid of being caught by De Laurentiis, and that foolish fear was in any case sufficiently powerful to embarrass me. Second of all, honestly, I knew perfectly well that, along with my translation of, let us say, Livy, I’d also be letting him copy plenty of mistakes I’d made, I’d be giving him a contaminated assignment. Who knows why, since I had already shown on many different and far more important occasions that I was a reasonably courageous young man, or at least reasonably coolheaded in confronting risks and emergencies, I should still have been frightened by threats of such a small, minuscule proportion: such as being stopped by the highway police, who might discover that my registration had expired, or that a teacher might catch me passing a note. Such prospects practically terrorized me, and it is perhaps interesting to notice how I always feel these dangers looming up at me from the world of the law, the public institutions, the vested authorities—while I was never scared of armed bandits. Strange, I felt absolutely no fear at the sight of pickup trucks packed with Taliban militants with submachine guns slung around their necks; but during my early years as a teacher I literally trembled if I was summoned to the headmaster’s office. What could I have done wrong? What can they have uncovered concerning some shortcoming or misdeed that I most assuredly have committed, but I’m so careless that it’s simply slipped my mind entirely? There you go, carelessness. Maybe it’s on account of carelessness that I’ve gotten into trouble and it’s always due to carelessness that I’ve deleted that trouble from my conscience, stowing it away someplace where someone else may stumble upon it: which is exactly what I expect from one moment to the next. Practically every night I dream of being in prison, locked up for armed robberies I pulled right after I became an adult . . . Could that be, could I really have been an armed robber when I was a young man? Evidently so, evidently at that age I must have figured I could make money that way, it must have seemed easy . . . Then someone must have talked . . . and I wound up behind bars. In the dream I clearly knew that this wasn’t a case of mistaken identity, no miscarriage of justice, no, I really had done those armed robberies. And the law had pursued me, tracked me down, and was now punishing me. Yes, the only thing I seriously fear is the law. With all the capriciousness that it emanates, for example, the fact that it can come for you so many years after and at such physical distance from the commission of the crime. That is what so scares me, the fact that your misdeed might resurface, that it was never buried deep enough, and after years, and covering miles and miles, as if it had miraculously traveled underground, the corpse bobs to the surface . . .
The girl is buried already
and it all hap
pened a long time ago . . .
I DIDN’T IMMEDIATELY COMPLY with the furtive requests of my classmates. But it was Scarnicchi’s big staring eyes, or the thumb Chiodi ran menacingly over his throat, that convinced me to hand over the sheet of paper with my rendition. They copied it in less time than it takes a champion 400-meter runner to do a lap around the track, I don’t know how they did it, they seemed to have a panoramic view, a photographic impression, but evidently not faithful enough, so that they added new errors to the ones I’d already committed, due either to haste or lack of understanding or that bizarre law of literature whereby any scribe, unfailingly, will introduce creative variations in the text that he is given to copy. I remember one in particular: it was none other than Chiodi who transmuted, while copying, the siege that the Romans had laid on “una certa città,” a certain city, into the siege of “Macerata.” When he handed back the assignments with his corrections, De Laurentiis, who had developed a falcon eye for plagiarism and copying between one version and another, was almost speechless. His freckles turned beet red as he spoke, and a crust of dried saliva formed an off-white ring around his lips. More than anger, you could describe the sentiment that clearly gripped him as one of astonishment, mystification, and horror, clearly pushing him to the edge of collapse. His life was teetering on the brink of an absurd and unfathomable abyss: and all this merely because Chiodi had written “Macerata.” What? Why? But why? Wait, seriously, what?
The Catholic School Page 23
