All blood had drained from his face, aside from the freckles that flamed on that muzzle of a tame tapir, and De Laurentiis was clearly having difficulty breathing, his respiration caught in his throat, he was stammering, waving Chiodi’s classroom assignment in the air.
“But I . . . Chiodi . . . Macerata! Where did you get that? Where, Dio mio . . . where is it . . .? I . . . I . . . I just can’t . . .! It isn’t . . . it’s not . . . I must be dreaming! Chiodi! Well, then . . . Chiodi . . . Macerata. But I ask myself . . . I truly wonder . . . Macerata . . . queshto . . . queshto . . . Good Lord above! Good Lord Almighty! Blood of a ram, it’s your . . . eh! reshta . . . reshta l’unica shpiegazzione . . . ’na possessione diabbolica . . .” The mushy esses were pure Neapolitan.
As he grew progressively angrier, his Neapolitan accent swelled, like rising yeast, because that’s the way De Laurentiis was, or perhaps it’s the way all Neapolitans are, that when they’re swept away on an emotional or intellectual wave, a gust of sorrow or anger or amusement or focused reason, they immediately start talking with a strong accent and an inflection of the mother dialect, and in fact, when he was in a good mood, De Laurentiis, smiling and jovial, turned into something like the local maschera, a character out of commedia dell’arte, a strolling serenader or a Pulcinella clown, and the same thing happened to him in those outbursts which weren’t, as I said, anger pure and simple, but rather sorrowful astonishment.
“Agge ritto che solo ’o demonio . . . Chiodi . . . solo ’o riavulillo pote fa’ chiove ’rinto ’o competo tuje ’sta parola: Macerata!” I said that only the devil . . . Chiodi . . . only Satan himself could have wedged that word into your paper: Macerata!”
But the strangest thing is that, in the end, Chiodi had been given a passing grade because his version (that is, 99 percent mine, aside from Macerata) had only six mistakes, two of which were serious (two points off), and four were minor, half a point off each, which meant four points off, hence, six. The Macerata error had so shocked De Laurentiis that he hadn’t counted it.
In fact, I got a six myself, that time.
I WANT TO MAKE one thing clear about my friend Arbus, lest he seem like a pompous ass, a know-it-all. He really wasn’t. Even when they were noteworthy or brilliant, Arbus always undercut his statements by framing them with “in my opinion,” peppering them with “maybes” and “perhapses,” and thus presenting them as ideas that wanted nothing better than to be contradicted and proven wrong, while to me they immediately rang clear as irrefutable. I don’t know if he did this out of insecurity, or in mockery, or because he’d already attained the type of wisdom that intentionally avoids formulating categorical ideas, considering them intrinsically to be the epitome of stupidity.
8
CERTAINLY, Arbus’s acne-inflamed face was no treat for the eyes.
It looked as though his skin had been raised at certain points and dug out at others, like land carved by the plow, so red and flushed that it was repulsive just to think of him washing it, putting his hands on it every morning, that pockmarked face.
It wasn’t until ten or fifteen years later, when I met a man in London who’d been disfigured by erysipelas, or St. Anthony’s fire, as it is also known—only then did I see anything more horrifying than Arbus’s face at the peak of its inflammation.
Arbus, my poor friend!
It was clear to the eye that he was embarrassed, pained, resentful.
Many of us had zits scattered over our cheeks, our chins, our shoulders, and in the middle of our backs.
Iannello and Chiodi had them, for instance, and I, too, around age fourteen, that is, when I started to shave, felt those painful bumps start to erupt on my chin or in the folds of flesh behind my nostrils on either side of my nose; sometimes they broke the surface, other times instead they remained pulsating just under the reddened skin, unable to find an outlet. My mother would prepare plasters of boiling-hot salty water, after which she’d give me a grayish liniment with a repugnant odor to apply to my face: “Put it on, it helps the pimple to ripen . . .” and I still can’t say which of these things was more disgusting, the slimy liniment itself, with its nauseating odor, or the very idea that you had to ripen, as if it were some kind of fruit, that lump swelling beneath my face, upon my lovely adolescent face; in short, all us kids, or nearly all of us, suffered from skin problems, some had skin that was too shiny, for others it was too greasy, too scaly, too oily, too dry, too something, as if the organism itself were incapable of regulating its hormone and sebum pumps.
But nothing came close to Arbus’s face.
What about his mother? Didn’t she do anything for him?
Couldn’t she be troubled to lift a finger?
9
EVER SINCE I was a small boy, but also in the heart of my adolescence and then on into my years as a young man, in spite of my total naïveté and, so to speak, growing up in the shelter of this overextended and, therefore, guilty innocence, and feeding on it all the while, like a termite concealed in the heart of a plank of tender wood, there lived in me a ravaging and overwhelming sensuality—all the more overwhelming because it was veiled behind a very powerful strain of modesty. While other kids my age let loose with rowdy and bumptious manifestations, speaking in vulgar terms of genitalia, slutty women, condoms, men’s semen and women’s saliva spattered and dripping in all directions, I—who grew troubled and scandalized and fell uneasy prey to this explicit language of theirs—was trembling deep inside at the power of that sensuality they were expressing so recklessly, I could feel it pumping through my veins a thousand times more powerful, impetuous, dangerous, and invincible than that of all the young males I knew put together. That sensuality made my head spin, it filled me with nausea, it made me dizzy until I felt I was suffocating and falling.
I’d like to cite two episodes, both linked to an object, the mere mention of which, now, as I write, stirs in me an inexplicable agitation so enduring that I know, even now, that once I’m done writing I’m going to get up from my desk and I’ll start wandering aimlessly through the rooms, I’ll climb downstairs and up, at first touching myself furtively between the legs, and then in an increasingly determined manner, until I end up masturbating—in fact, I’m afraid that I’m going to have to start doing it immediately, now, before I even manage to begin narrating these episodes, and all this because they both have to do with a subject, indeed, because in both of them the same object plays a role, and that object is a swimsuit, and the mere expression, “swimsuit,” written or visualized, unleashes in me such a tempest that it shakes me from head to foot, I can feel a riptide, a hot whirlpool draining life force from my legs, I can feel this vital fluid pulsating and turning and concentrating at the height of my hips, torn away from other parts of my body, weakening them, so that my hands tremble and my sight blurs, all merely because I’m sitting here writing about a swimsuit, a soft, colorful object, drenched with water, I have to run off to masturbate, that’s right, just because of that, because of the simple verbal wrapping of the word “swim-suit,” two sounds, all it takes is two syllables, and because my love is not here, otherwise I’d go from room to room in search of her, wandering in a random and nervous fashion, ravening, I’d find her, I’d wrap my arms around her from behind, I’d put my hands beneath her breasts, lifting them, I’d tell her how beautiful she is today as I rub up against her, overcoming her objections because I interrupted her while she was busy doing something else, like reading, writing letters, cooking, talking on the phone, brushing her hair, putting things away, still I’d try to get her clothes off and lay her down to make love, or not even strip her entirely, because all I’d need would be to get her naked just enough to slip inside her quickly, right then and there where I found her, still standing.
This demon is always with me, it’s been living inside me for a lifetime, it never abandons me for an instant, so much so that if one day I no longer felt it churning my blood and thickening it, well, I’d assume I was dead, that I’d died withou
t noticing it. A powerful surge in my heartbeat is the way it has of knocking from within. I felt it once when I was little more than a child, in a changing booth at the seaside resort of San Felice Circeo—shame, excitement, curiosity, a throbbing in my temples and a heat in my thighs and on my back—and on the beach at Terracina—the sea murky with sand, bathers laughing as they were slapped by the waves, and my cousin, whose disgusted face I can still see before me if I meet her on the stairs, and my own face, morbidly enchanted.
Even though I had not the faintest idea of what sexual desire might be, I could still sense its presence every time that even the simplest events, the most ordinary gestures and glances started to seem strange to me, directed specifically at me, and to torment me precisely because I had no explanation for what was happening. I couldn’t yet describe that state as arousal . . .
I HAD BEEN INVITED to the Circeo by Zarattini, my best-looking classmate in middle school. And after going swimming over and over again in the sea off the resort club where his family kept their chairs and beach umbrella, we went to the changing booth to get out of our suits. Back then, the heavy fabric of the suit would get drenched and stay wet for hours. “You go get out of that wet suit right away” was a typical thing for a mother to say, with the equally typical anticipation of the pronoun at the beginning of the sentence. Zarattini and I changed with our backs to each other, out of modesty. I tried to change very quickly and I got snagged, coming close to tripping in my haste to pull the suit up. Rather than paradise or the starry sky, the specific dim light and cool air of the changing booths represent for me, in the most literal terms, the ineffable: what human words are incapable of describing, at least, the ones that I know how to use. For instance: the almost-shiver of cold that catches you in there, while the sun beats down furiously outside, the sandy floor, the smell of salty mold. What made me start and almost lifted my heart into my throat, as if I had suddenly gone mad with shame, was the dull thud behind me of Zarattini’s swimsuit, drenched with water, as it fell onto the rough concrete surface immediately after he’d taken it off, and the thought that he at that moment was nude unsettled me to a far greater extent than, an instant earlier, I had been filled with embarrassment by the fact that I was.
AT TERRACINA, on the other hand, an event occurred that was, if possible, even more insignificant, and yet which still echoes and resonates inside me. The seawater was cloudy, because of the waves that were kicking up sand from the seabed. But the kids were going swimming anyway, wearing scuba masks. Not that there was anything to see, beyond the yellowish wall of sand in suspension, but that way you could stick your head underwater without burning your eyes, dive in, guess at the shadows of the friend standing closest to you in the water, and grab him as a prank. Instead, there was someone who saw something. It was my cousin, a couple of years older than me, and she was swimming a little farther out than where the rest of us were splashing and wallowing. We saw that she was heading in with great and powerful strokes, struggling through the waves, windmilling her arms, her hands paddling flat. She was indignant. She pulled off her mask and swept back the locks of wet hair. She was shaking with outrage. “Just disgusting!” she said, once she was close to us. “Why, what happened?” She turned around, pointing to a couple in the distance who appeared and disappeared beyond the foam of the breakers. The two of them had their arms around each other and were kissing, or at least their heads were close, as they bobbed on the passing waves. I remember, she had a yellow swim cap: I can still see that as a fundamental detail, I’d be willing to swear to it in a court of law. My cousin’s voice was cracking with the emotion. “I was swimming over there, around them, and I almost ran straight into them . . .” While she was talking and we were listening to her, a wave caught us by surprise, slapping right into our faces. My cousin emerged from the water, her face grimacing in disgust. “But I could see that she . . . that he was taking her swimsuit off . . . the bottom part!”
The bottom part of her swimsuit . . . the “bottom part” . . . the “bottom” . . . of the “swimsuit” . . . I felt myself flushing red at that information. I was swept by an immediate fever, a fever that has never since subsided.
ALL OF THIS SENSUALITY, like several other morbid inclinations of mine, comes I believe from my mother and her side of the family, consisting of a small undivided army of neurasthenics. Among themselves, like in some novel from the olden days, they talked about their nerves as if they were an autonomous entity, independent of the person they inhabit, like so many tenants incorrigibly behind on their rent, sleepless and insolent, who just won’t stop bothering the landlord with their inopportune misbehavior: loud shouting, violent crises, nighttime commotion, arguing, screams. These nerves, my nerves, calm my nerves, I don’t know what’s up with my nerves today, she gets on my nerves, oh, my poor nerves! I haven’t really heard that expression for some time now, but in those days it was the terminology of the day. People spoke of “nervous breakdowns” as if they were always lurking around the corner, on the steep edge of which everyone was blithely strolling, possibly without a clue of the danger. My mother and everyone else in her family, all they ever seemed to do was tip over that brink and be heroically wrestled back up over it. Today the expression “nervous breakdown” has been replaced in everyday Italian by “stress,” but that’s hardly the same thing at all . . .
EVEN THOUGH I’ve often felt abandoned and alone, and being well aware that I was fighting battles that were lost before they were begun, or worse, that most people wouldn’t even understand in the name of what I stubbornly insisted on fighting them, at various moments of my life I’ve experienced the subtle pleasure of continuing to act that way, a pride that verges on the cheerful, the mocking, the enjoyment of doing something exotic, of serving a deity whose identity was unknown to me. A characteristic that I think has been with me since I was a child, in fact, that I had especially as a child, was that my mind wasn’t occupied by a single thought, but rather by a great number of different discordant thoughts at the same instant. Which caused me a strange happiness, the singular sensation of always having company, along with a constant sense of apprehension, to say nothing of confusion and uncertainty. Uncertainty, that is, about what I actually thought, and what I believed about any given topic, since I was well accustomed to thinking one thing and its exact opposite at the same time, along with a series of intermediate thought processes; and the same thing applied to my convictions and even my desires. I liked everything and every person and, at the same time, I disliked them, and I wanted to do everything and at the same time I feared doing it or I thought it was wrong. I wasn’t really the master of my own thoughts, rather it was the thoughts that entered or exited me or remained there as they pleased, it was they that inhabited and possessed and governed me, to such a degree that, in fact, it seemed wrong to me to refer to those thoughts as mine, any more than a meadow might venture to describe as its sheep the sheep that graze upon it. In that case, who was I? To which of those thoughts and desires could I attach my own name? It was when I was out walking that I was especially able to notice just how dense was the crowd of thoughts and different voices that swarmed inside me. Even for very short walks, like the one I took every morning to school, to the SLM Institute, which measured by my present-day pace and stride is roughly one hundred fifty steps, while with my legs back then it might have been two hundred. Well, those two hundred steps were sufficient to produce in me a trancelike state, so raptly did follow the various threads intertwining in my head, twining around the slightest notion or idea, or image or word, to the point that I lost all contact with the reality that surrounded me, namely the street, whether I was walking along it or crossing it, Via Bolzano, Via Tolmino, the square of Santa Costanza. And more than once, while walking to school, I realized that I had gone past the bronze-colored gates with SLM written above them (a few years ago, those gates were repainted a harsh yellow color) and I was already proceeding along Via Nomentana, beneath the trees that run along that
thoroughfare, in the direction of Sant’Agnese, dazedly listening to the string of thoughts that were my guests without daring to interrupt them, the way you let someone talk whom you’re afraid to contradict. My mind did nothing, the same as it does today: it just let me talk.
I STILL LULL MYSELF in the childish hope that it might all at once become possible to reconcile all incompatibilities; the ones that I feel within myself, overwhelmingly powerful, and between myself and the others, for now irremediable . . . And because this dream tends to vanish as quickly as it appears, I feel as if I’m the unhappiest person in the world, and naturally I exaggerate when I feel this way, and display that state of mind to those who are close to me, I exaggerate my affliction, and it is here that I find my chief and abiding vanity: because I know that human points of view are far too disparate for there ever to be any hope of reconciling their divergences, and yet I feel them within me, as vivid and immediate as thorns.
AT AGE TWELVE I was already stunned and excited to the verge of agony by my readings of myths and chivalric exploits, I knew by heart all the adventures of Siegfried, the Valkyries, Jason, Mordred, Arthur, Hagen (or Högni), and Sir Kay, all the misdeeds of Loki and the wily cunning of Hermes as a child, the murderous folly of both Apollo and Hercules, the mocking cruelty of Dionysus . . . and I had taken in hand the various swords, Excalibur, Durandal, and Balmung, windmilled them mercilessly against the frost giants, Mjölnir, the hammer of Thor. I read so greedily that I almost didn’t have time to grasp or understand.
I COULDN’T SAY whether I have a tireless mind housed in a lazy body, or a lazy mind curled up inside a tireless body. There’s one thing I feel and know for certain, however: that since the day I was born, and all the more now that I have reached and passed middle age, my mind and my body don’t get along, so to speak, they don’t keep the same hours, when one is awake the other is catnapping, and when the other boils over with vigor the one languishes, weakened. My metabolism is staggered into two series that never meet and never coincide. That’s why I’m never entirely alert and never fully placated. I know neither the fully waking state nor complete repose. At night, for example, my physical exhaustion becomes the ideal setting for insistent, tormented, hallucinatory thoughts, extremely lucid in their obstinate determination to create a perfect delirium. While at other moments a simple and obtuse force applies and squanders itself in actions amid which I feel stupid, blind, inanimate as an automaton. In full agreement, at peace with myself? Never.
The Catholic School Page 24
