“CALL THEM by the names that you prefer . . . the opportunities to err are numerous. We have countless numbers of different ways to get things wrong and a frequency that is daunting just to consider. Once a minute. Therefore it is a true miracle if at the end of a day, we’ve made only four or five mistakes, rather than a thousand, and if we’re lucky, none of those mistakes are grave ones, we haven’t killed anyone, our carelessness and our lies haven’t caused any apartment buildings to collapse, and the small change stolen from a dresser drawer, tomorrow, if we so choose, we can always put back, with no one the wiser. In fact, this is what almost always happens: we make mistakes without witnesses. We can make up for our mistakes, and we can pray that they go unnoticed, or that they’re almost immediately pardoned or forgotten. If there were no forgiveness, the defects of memory would ensure the same outcome: which is to say, that we never pay the price of our errors. The police fail to catch us, or if they do, they don’t have the time or interest to go after small fry like us, there are more serious problems to solve. The world doesn’t consider us the way we deserve for the good things that we do, much less for the bad things. The world is otherwise occupied, too distracted by the larger wounds, by the craters, the atomic blasts, to worry about tiny scratches. And that is how we start out, this is why we go on, but the conclusion will be different. We start out with a tickle, but we wind up burned alive. The scanty interest aroused by our misdeeds tempts us, first of all, to repeat them without fear, and then to make them intentionally much worse. Two-bit criminals that we are, we ought to be punished immediately, not because our infractions are so significant, but because the only way we have of emerging from the nameless crowd is to commit more spectacular ones. For that matter, you might reasonably say that it does no good to punish them, after all, the level would rise all the same, either because of the punishment or because of its absence. There are individuals for whom forgiveness, punishment, indulgence, or indifference all amount to the same thing, and obtain the same effect. They are an equation that, in whatever order you put the factors, and however you add them up or subtract them, multiply them or divide them, the result is always the same, namely zero.”
WAS HE TALKING ABOUT US? Was he talking to us? Golgotha had set off on a tangent. No one could stop him now, no one could stop his sermon, which wasn’t really a sermon at all, since he didn’t seem bound to convince or convert anyone. It was, rather, a soliloquy, that’s right, a way of letting off steam. When Golgotha grew animated, instead of growing more vivid and colorful, he just became dull and gray, his dark little goatee seemed to get damp, his eyes, already sunken in their sockets, turned tiny and blazed with a desperate, diabolical flame. It was, in fact, as if he were possessed. Flecks of slobber formed at the corners of his mouth, stirring in us a sense of disgust and of the ridiculous, but in the end, almost, of fear. Fear of what? Of him? Of his punishing us? Inasmuch as an agent of goodness, an angel of truth, while we were all sinners? Or was it fear of the fact that he had gone mad, and that he was actually the devil, concealed beneath the garb of a miserable, mild-mannered, unfortunate soul, in his face and in body and attire and certainly in the pittance that the priests paid him, this little religious studies teacher? What figure could be better suited to that role than this grim and emaciated Molise-born man of the cloth as an emissary of the Evil One? I didn’t know whether to sneer at him or admire him. So, most of the time, I did both, alternately, or joined in a single grimace, the face that you see in someone admiring a canvas in which a martyrdom is depicted, let’s say, the scene of a saint sliced to bits or burned at the stake or gimleted by his executioners, his tormentors, where the disgust, the absurdity, and the ridicule of certain sadistic details and sheer heroism are fused into a single figure, inextricably—that, in the end, is the sentiment that the painting inspires.
“. . . THE REAL TRAGEDY is when everyone is right, when everyone has a valid reason for doing what they do, which is to say, for doing evil. Or at least a smidgen of a reason, a crumb of a reason, the kind that drives us to take vengeance, for example, in the belief that we’re doing justice, righting a wrong, acting within the right. For that matter, if you don’t have justice, then you do justice, and you do it quickly, you make it at home, like you distill aquavit or you can chopped tomatoes, justice, too, can be taken into one’s own hands. You can’t live without justice, it’s something we need, without it we feel we can’t breathe, and that’s the reason for the eternal conflict among men, who are fundamentally unsuited to life and so they try to make up for their inadequacy by falling back on all means, legitimate or illicit, right out to the bounds of the absurd and the grotesque, and all this to procure the surrogate, whatever it is that can stand in for their missing arm, their diminutive stature, their poor pronunciation, or their shortage of money or intelligence. To put an end to those injustices, they create new ones. We are like broken dolls, from the very outset, it’s not as if someone twisted off that arm and broke it, it’s not like the dog ate it, we simply never had it at all! And it’s only normal that we object and we fasten on to the faintest hope, a lottery ticket. Here, we talk all the time about faith, don’t we? They talk to you about it, right? As something evident, normal, and concrete, true? Well, it’s not at all clear where the boundary falls between a true faith and just any old superstition, that is the great problem, knowing how to tell the difference, because once again truth and reason seem to be all over the place, even the devil has reason on his side, sometimes, and he makes his fine arguments that are not entirely devoid of their logic, quite the opposite, his arguments hold up, in fact, they hold up beautifully! He’s not all wrong, the devil.
“My lads, get used to thinking that the devil will show up punctually every time that you’re right, when you have right on your side, and when you’re pleased to be on the side of the angels, behold, that is when he shows up, as if he were bound and determined to cash in a part that we owe him, a commission for having kept his tools bright and shiny. The devil arrives at the very instant you feel inebriated, then, I mean to say, by your own honesty, your own correctness. Forgive me if I speak to you about Jesus and the Gospel, I’d promised not to do it . . . but that is exactly what Jesus criticized the Pharisees for: you are servants of the devil when you’re in the right, that is, when you cannot be criticized for anything, because that is exactly when, in such an abundance and culmination of honesty, you are actually full of the devil, of his impeccable logic, so typical of those who always and only perform their duty, and do it scrupulously, with precision . . . with style!”
“Teacher, sir, you’re delirious!” spoke up a voice from the desks, interrupting Golgotha before he could get started again.
It was Rummo.
“Stop for a moment and catch your breath . . .”
“You’re right, Rummo, you’re correct when you say that I should stop. But I’m not delirious at all, you know that? What I’m saying to you I say in full cognizance . . .”
“Yes, but in practical terms, unless I’ve misunderstood, sir, you’re telling us that when we behave as we ought to, we’re actually complying with the devil’s suggestions. And that,” Rummo said, shaking his head, “is impossible. Or else it’s impossible for me to understand.”
Golgotha massaged his temples. He stepped down from his dais and went on in an even hoarser voice, which turned shrill as he uttered the key words. “It’s the age-old question of the law,” and in fact when he pronounced the word “law,” it came out on a very high note. “The law, you understand, something that offers no margin. Something you can never get free of. Either you are crushed by it, or else you obey it just to avoid punishment, and therefore, in either case, you flee from it, or else you break it and you pay the consequences. Which means that the law will have its way, in any case. You can’t escape it, whether you respect it or you transgress it. Think about it, think about it: this dates back to the prohibition against eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, in the Garden of E
den. With that prohibition, sin became inevitable in its way, because it would have been a sin not to eat it, that apple, just to have left it there on the tree, what do you think? By respecting that prohibition, man would never have had access to the human condition, he would never have attained his fullness which, you may not believe this because it will seem absurd, but that fullness consists exactly, ex-act-ly, in its absence, that is, in sin! In other words, he would not have been a man while obeying, and he became a man only by falling, tumbling . . . becoming lost. There was no alternative. And there is none even now . . . perhaps.”
“What do you mean, perhaps?” Rummo had gotten a little heated. “You need to give us clear indications, teacher, sir! Otherwise, we can’t follow you. You’re saying, in other words, that we can become men only by doing evil, right or wrong?”
“When we commit evil and when we suffer evil. But in order to suffer evil, there necessarily has to be someone who inflicts it, no? Jesus couldn’t exactly clamber up onto the cross all by Himself, now, could He!”
Such a clamorous phrase had never before been heard at SLM. Perhaps not even outside its walls. But it had a logic all its own.
AT THAT POINT it became clear that Golgotha was gone now, out of his head. It was clear that the thoughts he was expressing were improvised, and yet they grew out of a long-pursued process of reasoning, a solitude that was macerated, decomposed, and anxious. How can it be, I thought to myself, that they always send us these bizarre individuals, on the verge of despair, to teach us? What’s behind that, what are they trying to tell us, what plan lies behind the idea of abandoning a defrocked man without a calling like Mr. Golgotha to the tossing waves of a class made up of misfit rich kids? Maybe they want to know what we learn from human failure. Maybe they’re starting us out from there, to help us avoid it ourselves? But at this point, I start to wonder, is it really avoidable at all? Or is it not more like a universal destiny that drags us all downward, toward misery? Or maybe they just want to let us sink our talons into an animate object, the way cats do. And Golgotha is our ball of yarn, they tossed him to us so that we could bat him back and forth between our paws. Thinking back upon it with hindsight, I find it only normal that these human cases should be found on a school faculty, where they serve as targets, as lightning rods, upon which the cruelty of the student body can be vented, thus sparing the other teachers: it’s a statistical law. Still, though, the religious studies teacher, of all the subjects, such a fundamental one, in a school run by priests! How could they ever have thought of hiring a maniac to teach us to believe? Could it be because they themselves don’t believe . . .? Or else, this could be the truth, they think that only a raving lunatic would be able to kindle a flame in our hearts . . .
“It is necessary, in other words, that this should happen,” Golgotha went on, recovering clarity and calm for a moment. “So we shouldn’t be surprised. The division of labor between good and evil takes place inside us, most of the time . . .”
And here I started to sense that I understood, or at least that I was starting to understand, more clearly. The division is inside us, yes, I thought so myself. And I’d experienced it, it was true, that was an experience I’d had many times: feeling divided myself. “One part does the evil, the other part suffers it . . .”
It was a part of being alive, this schism.
“Listen, couldn’t you explain this concept to us again?” asked Rummo.
“Shhh!” I silenced him. “Let him talk.”
“Don’t worry if you don’t understand, boys, don’t worry about it,” said Golgotha. “Just try to get used to the idea that the threat doesn’t come from other people . . .”
That’s right, I thought to myself, other people aren’t the threat . . .
“It doesn’t come from other people, the threat, it comes from ourselves. The left hand conspires against the right. We already have drugs in our blood, there’s no need to inject it, is that clear, do you understand it, yes or no?”
“No,” said Rummo.
“Maybe,” said Arbus. “Maybe,” he repeated.
I was unsure whether Mr. Golgotha really was a holy man, a sage we didn’t deserve, or simply nothing more than a miserable wretch, a charlatan, like those who sold miracle potions capable of curing any and all diseases. But in that case, why didn’t he cure himself first and foremost? If he had come so close to the truth, then why had he allowed himself to be worn down into that state, with sweat on his forehead and temples, his suit wrinkled and rumpled and shiny at the elbows? Could it be that the truth manhandles those who discover it, leaving them in such dire straits? In the things he said, there was something that made me admire him, but it was the same thing that made me scorn him.
“If that’s the case, then it is the blood of the weak and innocent inside us that is shed, and shedding that blood is the strong, the bullying, the violent one that is in us. Cain and Abel, you see? In the beginning, they were a single person. They were an only son . . .”
No, in that case he’s crazy, I thought to myself.
“Teacher, just a minute . . .”
“. . . then, in order to avoid confusing the simple souls, those who composed the Bible, skillful dramatists that they were, divided this son in two, doubled him into two, and there you have the two brothers, the shepherd and the farmer, the fair-haired and the dark . . .”
“. . . hold on, just a minute!” Rummo objected.
“The good and the bad,” Arbus added ironically.
“It would be more appropriate then to speak of suicide, for the first man born on earth, from the belly of his mother, and born already split . . .”
“No, that’s enough!”
IT’S A SINGULAR THING to see how two or three people having a spirited discussion can seem, as soon as they raise their voices a bit, as if they’re quarreling. Perhaps attracted by these sonic peaks and valleys, without anyone noticing that the door had been opened, the headmaster had materialized in the doorway, motionless, arms crossed. We leaped to our feet, a few who had been slumbering in the back rows were late in rising, imitating the others without understanding. From the position of his head, it seemed as if the headmaster were looking at us students, but I was almost certain that behind his dark glasses, his eyes were turned to look fixedly at Golgotha. Who was standing in front of the first row of desks, hands extended backward toward his desk, gripping it. The headmaster was sniffing the air, his head turning jerkily. Then he unfolded his arms, and in the process of that movement, he caressed the crucifix, repositioning it in the exact center of his chest, along the buttons.
“I thought I heard . . . how to put this . . . some uproar, in here. Fine. What sort of problem do we seem to have here, teacher?”
14
JESUS, Jesus, Jesus.
ONLY A PARADOXICAL FORM OF INJUSTICE, that gives up the idea of punishing the evil done, can reestablish peace. By restoring history to the point of departure, at a hypothetical year zero. The debt will be forgiven, the wrong erased.
THE HOLY SCRIPTURES ARE DISCOMFITING: a series of stories about treachery and great falls. Eve deceived by the serpent, then Adam by Eve, Abel murdered by his brother, Esau cheated again by his brother, Joseph in Egypt (beware of your brothers, rings the chief warning of the Bible), and then the universal flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Tower of Babel, there isn’t one story that doesn’t end with punishment of some misdeed, variously grandiose or petty, and the heroes, too, like Samson, are regularly betrayed and perish, or else others who seemed to be perfectly respectable wind up behaving far worse than the villains that they had defeated. Take David, for instance, the giant-killer, who in order to enjoy Bathsheba all to himself sent her husband off to die in the wars. The scandal lies in the fact that the murderer is allowed to live in the same world where the victim is cursed to die. And I can’t swallow this thing, it sticks in my craw, it won’t go down: I’m talking about David, the dancing youth . . . so you can just imagine when it comes to the other kings of Isra
el or any other realm. It seems as if all or almost all the kings in history were hysterical bloodthirsty lunatics, parasitically exploiting their kingdoms, tireless fornicators or anemic phantoms, as they appear in the portrait galleries of the museums of Europe, where our pilgrimages come to a respectful halt before long lines of debauched lethargic dolts with goatees, with large vacuous eyes, or else small vicious ones, or else lovely dreamy eyes, for which credit is due only to the painter’s bravura or shameless flattery, by which I mean, the painter was the one who interpolated that splendor in the eyes, between the heavy lids and puffy bags eloquent of nights of heavy celebrating or unanswered prayers. The kings of Israel are no exception, indeed they offer a full array of case studies ranging from the degenerate to the murderous despot, the ambitious conniver, the coward, and the terrorist; the Good, the Brave, the Wise, the Judicious, the Magnificent, but who do we think we’re talking about? Who ever called them that but their official historians?
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