IT’S INEVITABLE that men who really like women sooner or later desire, not only to have women, but also to be women, that they should be curious, that is, to experience the same sensations that women experience, wear their clothing, turn men’s minds inside out, go all languid . . . fondle a breast that doesn’t jut out from or hang off someone else’s body, but their own. The attraction for the female sex organ can’t help but push you into the fantasy of having one of your own. The act of hiking up a skirt is every bit as stirring if you perform it on yourself. The feminine potential of so-called lady killers is very highly developed, and it doesn’t matter whether or not it becomes explicit. A man who is seriously virile can’t be fully attracted to the opposite sex: he has to take substantial part in the nature of the thing that he desires, the theory of gender complementarity, if it’s not a flat-out piece of stupidity, is in any case an oversimplification, scholastic in nature, like the distinction made between Classicists and Romantics, Guelphs and Ghibellines, just to be clear. Desire is not fostered only by difference but above all by similarity, by semblance, and a womanizer’s narcissism is so acute that he dies of curiosity to know what a woman feels when she is wrapped in his arms . . . since when he is embracing a woman, he’s embracing himself.
A man of that kind might desire women as an ornament or a consolation, he might win them over, if only to paint them, he might molest them, humiliate them, emulate them, allow himself to be subjugated by them, or avoid them entirely. Or else it might be they who avoid him.
There was a time when taking it up the ass relaxed you, now
it pisses you off. Strange but true how the arc
of a long love story can be summarized that way.
(poem by Courbet)
A COUPLE OF YEARS after school ended I convinced Arbus to come back to the gym, just to “stay in shape.” At first he was reluctant, but then he accepted. His gaunt physique was growing increasingly bent with the passing of the years and, incredible but true, at age twenty, skinny as he was, Arbus was already showing something of a gut. He had completely given up the postural gymnastics that had been prescribed to straighten him. The initiative of buying memberships in the gym was perhaps the last thing we ever did together; the last thing I did with my friend before losing sight of him forever. We chose the gym across the street from my house, it was convenient. The proprietor, Gabriele Ontani, instructor for male customers, was a fanatic who reduced everything to two fundamental truths: “man is a beast” and “woman is a work of art.” As a result, he did everything he could to ensure that we became even more beastly. In the end, that wild animal and that work of art were destined to meet and couple, but we had to be worthy of them, and adequately prepared. It’s obvious that if you spend a whole lifetime redesigning bodies, reshaping backs, arms, chests, and legs, you can never overlook the sexual use to which those bodies will be put. And so Ontani spurred us on, stimulated us with insults of every kind (focused on the fact that we were beasts, since “man is a beast”), strictly to prepare us for the woman or women who awaited us, in order that we might be worthy when the moment finally came; and every effort we made, all the push-ups and the sweat and the constant repetition of the same movements (accompanied by Ontani’s imprecations and his typical method of setting the rhythm: “Go-go-go—come on now—come on—go-go . . . and Go-go-gogo-go-go . . . man is a beast!”) served chiefly to train us for intercourse.
That means that Ontani is the fourth gym teacher to appear in this book.
WE HELD OUT in there for a couple of months. I obeyed Ontani as best I could, executing his commands right up to the threshold of pain. As I said, few gyms back then had sophisticated equipment, and Ontani’s had none to speak of, sophisticated or otherwise. His was the old system of free body calisthenics, which have nothing at all to do with freedom, that is to say, push-ups, toe touches, sit-ups, bench press, the wheelbarrow, hand weights, bench weights, all very homemade and obsessive, and then exercises in pairs where you were supposed to lift your partner and haul on his arms until you’d practically yanked them out of their sockets. As an exercise partner, Arbus was implacable. He really pushed and yanked with all his strength, and sometimes, under my breath so that Ontani couldn’t hear me, I had to beg him, “Hey, cut that out!” especially in one exercise that involved sitting face-to-face, legs spread, feet arched toward the partner’s feet, and then, grabbing each other’s wrists, one had to pull the other forward into a bow until, if possible, his forehead grazed the floor, which is something you can do only if you are limber from plenty of training. Otherwise, stabbing pains and stitches beneath the thighs. If it had been up to Arbus, who I discovered to my great amazement possessed a grip of steel, he would have hauled until he broke my back. And yet it was because of Arbus that we quit Ontani’s gym, and it was precisely because of his notorious slogan. While we were executing the third or fourth set of ten push-ups, Ontani came to stand over me and Arbus as we were slaving away. My arms were trembling with every push-up, Arbus on the other hand was pumping up and down quickly and had almost finished the set, when Ontani leaned down until his face was level with our heads as if he was afraid we might not hear him clearly and, stopping his counting, he burst out with his usual catchphrase:
“Man is a beast!”
ARBUS STOPPED EXERCISING and sat on the floor. Without his eyeglasses, he looked at Ontani, who was still bending over, his hands braced on his knees, and was therefore close enough for Arbus to focus on his falsely threatening face, which was actually playful and mocking. Arbus said to him in a low voice: “Listen, sir, let’s get one thing straight: I am not a beast.” Ontani’s face maintained its smiling smirk but now it stiffened. “So you can stop once and for all shouting in my ears,” added Arbus, as he got to his feet. Ontani stood up too. He continued smiling, certain that my classmate was joking: it must never once have happened to him in his years of honorable career as a gym instructor that anyone had rejected his anthropological theory, and especially not the way Arbus had done, that is, taking it literally. For perhaps the first time, Ontani lost his proverbial arrogance. He was stumped, he held both hands on his hips as Arbus gazed at him with his mole-like stare, opaque but level, firm, and calm. At that point Ontani gave him a slap in the face. “Show respect for your elders!” was all that he managed to blurt out to justify an act that had disqualified him, revealing him to be an arrogant and easily provoked person, an act that everyone in the gymnasium, I am quite certain, deplored.
However stubborn and devoid of wit, Arbus in contrast came off famously.
I REMEMBER WHEN, at the end of lengthy construction projects that had torn up the pavement of the courtyard of the middle school, the SLM swimming pool was finally inaugurated. It was a grand event. From that day forth, the hours of physical education were split up between the gymnasium (with a very high ceiling and lots and lots of light) and the shadowy, dank pool, its walls covered with artistic majolica tiles. As far as athletic activities were concerned, there was quite a difference between swimming in a pool built especially for your school and kicking a ball made of crumpled paper down the hallway, as I would find myself doing later on, at Giulio Cesare High School.
SWIM CLASS WAS PUNCTUATED BY LINES LIKE: “You’ve got tits like a woman!” “And you have a tiny dick!”
There was this obsession with being somehow defective. You mocked others and were in turn mocked for the same old story. The mockery was crude, monotonous, and stupid: for example, if a pal or classmate was bending over, you’d run your finger upward between his buttocks, and in the meantime murmur into his ear: “The ssshaarkkk is here!”
Your classmate would jerk upright after being grazed by the “shark.”
Sometimes it was more than just a grazing.
And you never, never bent over to tie your shoes or pick up a folder off the floor. They’d knock your pen off the desk to make you bend over to get it . . . and while you were bent over . . . here it comes up behind you . . . the sss-shaaarkkkk!
AT SLM like so many deranged zoo animals we wound up wooing any female surrogate—any image or substitute object—attractive classmates, elementary school kids, even priests and their tunics that billowed in the wind like skirts, long and languid evening gowns, and then figures we cut out to glue into our theme essays, a statuette of the Madonna, milk white and sky blue, and our classmates’ mothers, who were women in flesh and blood, certainly, albeit unreal and untouchable. Once we were older, we’d reserve our unexpressed chivalry for the stark-naked girls of ABC magazine and, at home, in the corners of our little bedrooms, directing our eyes there, in that metaphysical void, in search of a point of reference, an apparition, like little shepherd boys ready to be blinded. There were those who fell in love with their classmate, their deskmate, others who fell in love with their own book bag and the books it held, some who fell in love with money (I believe that many great fortunes were built specifically to make up for this lack of a woman), while others still vented with soccer or sheer insanity. Crasta, a.k.a. Kraus, the stupidest one of us all, fell head over heels in love with the matron who sold pizza during recess, a woman well along in years whose enormous shapeless bosom kept her from moving freely.
12
ANOTHER REMARKABLE MARIST BROTHER, Brother Barnaba, is in charge of the SLM swimming pool. He is known as the intelligent priest. His intelligence is unquestioned, there’s no need to give any proof of it, everyone knows he’s smart, it’s like a hidden tattoo everyone talks about even though no one’s seen it. Tall and gangly, he walks silently, putting one foot in front of the other, along a sort of pre-drawn line down the hallways, with sharp right-angled turns at the corners. When he talks he’s subtle, cautious, laconic, and cool. He, too, like the headmaster—and in fact, he’s the headmaster’s right-hand man—wears smoked-glass spectacles with steel frames on the tip of his nose. Barnaba probably owes his fame as an intelligent priest to the fact that he has been put in charge, with great skill and success, it should be said, of the school’s extracurricular activities: in particular, of course, the management of the swimming pool, the playing fields, and the film forum. Activities that put us in relation with the outside world and normal life, the life led by men and women. And he is the one who establishes this contact. Barnaba is in fact the priest whom we can most easily imagine, the easiest to guess what he would have been like if he hadn’t been a priest. The fact that he is one seems like the result of crossed wires: as if one fine morning, while hastily getting out of bed, he had dressed in the dark without realizing that there, on the chair, was a tunic instead of his usual clothing, and once he was out on the street it was already too late, by now he could no longer take off that clothing, he had become one with his priestly habit. In the old days, ships would shanghai sailors by getting them drunk, then hitting them over the head, and the next morning the new sailor would wake up, aboard ship, land already out of sight. As a result, Barnaba is the one we admire the most, but also the one who makes us angriest, he remains a mystery, it’s not clear what he’s doing at SLM and why he doesn’t just discard his tunic and go out into the world, open an engineering office or a law firm like our fathers, get married and start a family and go the beach for his summer vacation instead of continuing to say mass and mumble prayers and sleep in the narrow single cot in his tiny room.
The rooms where the Marist brothers live and sleep on the upper floors of the school resemble college dorm rooms: they’re small and unadorned, devoid of the mystical allure of a monastic cell. The grown men who live in them lie down alone every night, reading a few pages always from the same books before dropping off to sleep. Aside from the breviary, the Holy Scriptures, and the textbooks for the subjects they teach—which each of them goes over scrupulously before their lessons because nothing could be worse than to be caught flat-footed by a smarty-pants student—I’ve never known a priest to read a book just for the pleasure of it. Reading must be useful, it must serve a purpose, and that purpose is growth. To grow as a human being, to grow spiritually, to grow as individuals, and to grow as a community with others—growth is the true obsession of all priests, and even as adults they never cease to grow and to expand their knowledge, their awareness, their faith, their hope, and their love. Their personal condition, as men or as Christians. In religious discourses the verb, in a succession of hammering anaphoras, is repeated with the addition of all the prepositions imaginable—we grow with love, we grow for love, we grow in the midst of love, thanks to love, we must grow with others, among others, amid others, for others, in others . . . All the things that happen in life, and especially the bad things, the misfortunes and the sorrows, are opportunities for growth. Our readings must contribute to this growth, otherwise they are only a waste of time. And yet, at every age, the little rooms where the priests live remain dorm rooms, typical of a boarding school or a university, but much neater. Perhaps it is celibacy that extends youth beyond all reasonable limits . . .
The priests I have known maintained for many years, even into their forties, a boyish appearance. Not only in their faces but also in their way of behaving. Their annoyance and their astonishment and their happiness were all expressed in infantile grimaces. And then their anger, which suddenly cast a shadow over their faces, as if they’d never learned how to contain it.
ONE TIME, in Seoul, in South Korea, I had a long conversation with a Buddhist monk, young and handsome, who had a round face, smooth pudgy hands, and eyes and mouth that glistened like a newborn’s. I talked to him for a long time, in part because his English, as is the case with nearly all Koreans, was fragmentary and incomprehensible, but it didn’t matter, since every sentence he uttered was followed by a radiant smile and his little eyes winked, that’s right, they winked, communicating a sort of happy disinterest toward the concepts that our mouths were trying, in the meantime, to transmit, with some considerable effort. Perhaps—in fact, certainly—he understood me, I didn’t understand the words he was saying at all, but the rest, his calm, the way he almost made fun of me, his lips twisted in disenchanted laughter, was very clear to me. To be able to talk to people like that more frequently! People who don’t argue, don’t harangue, don’t refute. Although we were taking part in an important ceremony with the official attendance of the highest religious and civil authorities, he wore his white tunic, with dirty sleeves, but truly filthy, and such indifference to appearance on the one hand astonished me, on the other, reassured me. It was as if he feared nothing, he wasn’t even afraid of appearing or being impure, and he suggested that I do the same. (I had already noticed during that trip various oddities, like the fact that the Buddhist monks were always clutching their cell phones, of which they sometimes had several, the very latest models, which they allowed to ring during ceremonies and religious services, absolutely indifferent to the noise, and they’d loudly answer calls with great bursts of laughter . . .)
After roughly an hour of nonconversation, interrupted only by the mouthfuls of food we’d fish off the dishes scattered around the table, an operation in the course of which the holy man had cheerfully further bespattered and begrimed himself, he insisted that I guess his age and tell him mine (when it comes to the way we managed to communicate these details between us, I’ll refer only to the fact that he took my right hand, turned it palm upward and laid it in his hand, and then, with his thumbnail, which he probably hadn’t cut in months, he traced grooves on it the way prisoners do to count, lots of parallel lines, crossed by a diagonal every so often. The number of years, the passing of time. With his fingernail he crossed and recrossed my Life Line).
I looked at him carefully as he lifted a fish ball to his lips and slurped it into his mouth with his gleaming tongue. He looked like a very young man but he couldn’t be all that young, his race and his way of life had preserved him, so I added five or six years to my initial evaluation and took a stab: “Thirty-two?” He burst out laughing. “Thirty-five?” He shook his head. Perhaps the meditation he practiced all day long really ha
d spared him the passage of time. Just like in a basketball game, the chronometer was simply stopped while he was intently praying. In the void, his metabolism went at half my rate. In that case, I thought, if he looked twenty, he must be forty. “Forty . . . but I can’t believe it . . . you’re forty years old . . .!” Not so. The monk continued smiling and ran his hand over his shaven head. I noticed that there were numerous scars on his flesh as if someone had whipped him with a belt when he was a child. At those points, the scars kept his hair from growing back. His lips pursed into the shape of a heart, he carefully enunciated: “Fif-ty . . . se-ven . . .!”
THEN FROM ONE DAY to another they get old. From young boys they suddenly are covered with wrinkles and their hair turns white all at once. Barnaba was perhaps the only one who looked his exact age, in short, he was a man and not an aged child. For some the desire of perfection can take no other form than a separation from the world. That was not the case for Brother Barnaba. He, too, had a thorn planted in his body.
IT’S A PROD, a thorn in the flesh, which produces an infection, and the infection eventually reaches the heart.
The thought is an autonomous entity. The thought speaks, suggests, insinuates, makes figures dance before your eyes.
The thought must be subjected to punishment.
A woman’s body is fire, a young boy’s body is fire.
But even without making contact with another body you can sin. You sin with your mind, which can be even more impure than your body.
If that thorn has spared you so far, it’s no merit of yours. It means that the devil just didn’t consider you worthy of fighting with him.
13
UPON MR. GOLGOTHA’S ENTRANCE, Eleuteri started singing vaguely in his faint contralto voice: in spite of the fact that he had a small dark mustache, the voice itself hadn’t changed since he had wandered whimpering and whining down the hallways of middle school because someone had stolen a piece of pizza from him, tearing it roughly out of his hands. And in fact, that’s what high school kids did: incursions among the younger students, not so much stealing their lunches and snacks as destroying them. One piece remained in the interloper’s hands, the rest flew onto the floor, tomato sauce down, smeared on the linoleum. (Linoleum, what a material: in twenty years, no one will know what it is, we’ll have to footnote it.) Since then, Eleuteri had grown, taller and stouter, but his voice had remained high-pitched and nasal and made us all, actually, not just teachers but us students, too, want to straight-armed slap him to make him shut up: you know, the kind of disagreeable sound, like fingernails scratching on metal. Hiding behind rows of drooping shoulders that no Brother Curzio would ever be able to straighten with his barked commands, his one-two, one-two, up-down, come-on-get-going, making us bend down and squat ten or twenty times over the little wooden cubes, and yet revealed unmistakably by that nasal tone of voice, Eleuteri struck up his blasphemous nursery rhyme to welcome Mr. Golgotha, our religion teacher:
The Catholic School Page 27
