For that matter, my friend didn’t particularly like to argue. “Arguments are rarely useful and they are mostly a waste of time and the cause of unpleasantness.” For that reason, too, we were forced to guess at many of the notions and beliefs that Arbus certainly possessed, because he took care not to make them known to us, first of all to spare himself the effort of having to explain them, and then having to defend them from our muddled and misguided confutations. The few times that he actually bothered, he had a ready response to our objections: unlike what most people do, namely to pile up the greatest possible number of arguments in favor of the position they hold, he was accustomed to considering and evaluating all the opposing reasons, like the true scientist that he was (if it strikes you as absurd that I use the term “scientist” to describe a fifteen-year-old boy, well it suits nobody I’ve ever met as well as it does Arbus, yes, he was a scientist just as Tartaglia, Newton, or von Neumann might have been, Harvey or Volta, even if, in the end, as far as I know, he never discovered or invented anything of any importance, or hasn’t yet, who can say . . .), so that he had already tried to find the answers to those objections by posing them to himself.
ONE TIME HE TOLD ME: “You have to understand that it was simple for Jesus Christ. What He did and what He said went together. And if He had wanted, He could have straightened everything out. My problem is that I can’t: that’s the difference between me and Him. My willingness, my intention would not be sufficient in any case. I just can’t do it, and that’s that. Jesus isn’t even an example for me. He’s nothing, nothing more than the usual fucking hero.”
(DO YOU KNOW who really was a hero within Arbus’s reach? None other than Tartaglia, Niccolò Tartaglia. And just who would that be? A great mathematician. A short while ago I was deeply stirred as I read his brief online biography. Niccolò Tartaglia, of Brescia, got his name—Tartaglia [“stammerer”]—because a French soldier disfigured his face and mouth, out of sheer cruelty, when he was just twelve years old. With his ravaged, restitched mouth, he was unable to speak normally. His father was murdered on that same occasion: and Niccolò, who had until then been illiterate, grew up an orphan and self-taught.)
15
EVERY RELIGION TAKES AS ITS SUBJECT AND, at the same time, as its driving force that feeling typical of any adolescent crisis, namely: dissatisfaction, the searching need for meaning, feelings of inadequacy and incompleteness, the demand for answers. But what was our initiation? Confirmation, a sacrament whose meaning has long since been lost, and even when we received confirmation, they had a hard time explaining to us what it was and what purpose it served. They told us during our catechism: “You’ll become a soldier of Jesus!” What’s that supposed to mean? Once we’d been confirmed, what war were we supposed to fight?
JUST ABOVE THE NAPE OF MY NECK, there’s a pointy bump on the back of my head. I can feel it particularly when I rest my head against a wall. Since it’s a popular saying that having a bump on your head means you possess a propensity or fixation for a certain discipline, and that you are inclined toward that discipline from birth, I asked an expert in phrenology what a bump like mine was supposed to mean. After touching it and examining it, and asking me to get my hair cut with a high fade, so that he could examine and photograph it, and forward the picture in turn to other experts and discuss the matter with them, he told me that he had identified it as such a well-developed bump for religion that it would have sufficed for ten priests.
It’s an odd thing, then, that I should always have nurtured a strong intellectual interest in religion but also, shall we say, a natural skepticism, instinctive and emotional; how little I’ve ever felt the sensation or the conviction that we call “faith” or “belief.” It’s not illogical or absurd to believe in something we cannot understand; but I’ve never actually felt it inside me. I’ve never felt, in other words, a sentiment of trust growing inside me, an ardor, a sense of transport toward the Creator, the original author of those stories that, in any case, certainly captivated and stirred me, starting with the Bible stories, like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, with the angels warning Lot to flee, and then what happens to his wife, transformed into a pillar of salt, and his daughters, who get their father drunk and have sex with him. All the same, I never could hear those stories with a different shiver of horror than the one I felt as I read about Palinurus’s death or the terrifying night Thor and Loki spent in the giant’s glove. I never managed to rise to Him who is in the heavens, I never ventured so high, and that’s why I liked myths and heroes instead, things that we can find, shall we say, midway between earth and sky: people a thousand times better than me, more powerful and more courageous, no doubt, but at the same time, actually, similar, even close to me, comprehensible, full of shortcomings and desires, sometimes even ridiculous ones, the way the gods so often are, in contrast with the Almighty.
THE RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT does not depend on any particular process of reasoning; it is not a conviction, like those that can be attained through reason; it’s something different, impossible to define, which will always remain so, something the atheists’ objections will never manage to undermine, because they’re always talking about something else. It’s not as if the atheists are wrong to say what they say, it’s just that they remain on the outside, they aren’t really talking about faith, they can’t talk about something if they don’t know what it is. I may know what it is, but I still don’t have it.
WE WERE ACCUSTOMED to defending ourselves from their sermons by paying no attention: this is true of priests and of grown-ups in general, but of priests in particular, because the style of their reasoning and the way they blandly admonished or implored or offered benediction was always the same, monotonous, querulous, and always seemed to fall back on the same basic arguments, indeed, it seemed like one single speech recorded on a disc that spun slowly at first and then at normal speaking speed and, as soon as it was over, started again from the beginning. It consisted of four basic ingredients: scolding, hope, humility, and forgiveness. Scolding was the general key the sermon was tuned to, its bitter undercurrent, the way it unfolded, heartbroken at the certainty that whoever was listening to it was inevitably at fault, was obliged to acknowledge his or her faults and begin to mend them. Everyone, no one excluded. Even if Jesus and the Madonna had been sitting in a pew listening to the sermon, They too would have been treated to the usual upbraiding, exhorted not to be lazy, to devote Themselves more to others, more and more and more, to acknowledge Their own sins, even the smallest ones—this is important, especially the little ones!—to cherish hope, and to show Themselves to be humble and forgive others. Hope and humility and forgiveness were in fact the most important contents rolled up in and, so to speak, protected by the verbal shell of the scolding. To infuse hope, send positive messages, turn ugly things toward beauty, detect benign signals amid great difficulties, engage in a constant effort to translate evil into goodness. And most of all, to learn to wait, learn to wait without impatience, learn to wait patiently for whatever the future held for us. But not the simple future, the ulterior future, the one that lies beyond the future, because it lies beyond life, after death. At the age of fifteen it’s already quite something to try to imagine what will become of us at ages twenty or thirty, much less trying to think of what it will be like when we’re no longer around. And indeed, this exercise of hope was the hardest one to kindle inside us, the most artificially induced, and the priests made great rhetorical efforts to guide us onto the path of hope.
With humility, it was already a simpler matter. It’s a clear concept, verging on the crude, and the concept of humility itself is humble, modest, rough as the sackcloth that represents it, but understandable, even if not necessarily something you subscribe to, or share; and after all, the Gospel is full of examples to explain it. It’s not very hard to understand what it means to be humble: it’s a much greater challenge to actually achieve humility, actually become humble, in real life, everyday life. In effect, though,
I can safely say that among my classmates there were at least three or four boys who were truly humble, Gedeone Barnetta, for example, and then De Matteis, Vandelli, and Scarnicchi, a.k.a. the Dormouse, even though in the case of the last-named paragon of humility it was perhaps more a matter of laziness and passivity, rather than genuine humility: attitudes and states of mind often border each other or even overlap, depending on where a person’s true center lies, they can be fundamental attributes or strictly tangential, lying along the peripheral orbits, where they interfere as they encounter other feelings, yielding in force or gaining in meaning. I wouldn’t know whether these classmates were humble in that way by inborn character, or because they had been gently encouraged in that direction by the upbringing and education they received at home and at SLM. I was certainly never humble, and I’m not humble now, and to tell the truth, I’ve never been sorry in the slightest not to be, but that is due precisely to the fact that I’m not. So I’d venture to think that it’s a quality you can’t easily acquire along the way, you’re either born with it or you aren’t, but it remains true that, if you have it, it’s a good idea for your teachers to reassure you that it’s a quality, a virtue, not a defect.
Last of all, forgiveness.
Here the matter begins to twist and turn. The priests no longer seemed quite as confident of what they were saying. The problem of forgiveness lies, in fact, in its conflict with the natural sense of justice: why should someone who has done wrong be forgiven, instead of punished?
Forgiveness is, de facto, an imbalance to the advantage of the malefactor. Rather than following the maxim of suum cuique, “may all get their due,” it ensures that those who have already taken from others are also given a gift of indulgence. Now God, in His limitless sovereignty, may be able to afford the luxury of issuing pardons and amnesties, that is, to go beyond the scope of the law and, in a sense, abolish it, deleting the punishment called for by due process, and remitting unpaid debts. But human beings? Don’t those who issue amnesties and pardons commit a sin of pride, setting themselves up as comparable to God in their sovereign decision not to carry out the punishment? If in God punishment is a right, in human beings it ought to be an obligation, on pain of loss of their very humanity, their sense of justice. Is it possible to be so magnanimous without verging on presumption or the ridiculous or, in the final analysis, the abject state of those who would rather wash their hands of the whole matter, because they’re simply unwilling to take on the highly disagreeable role of castigator? In their games, why do children always want to be robbers and not policemen? And not just in Scampia, outside Naples, but in the QT as well. Because the guardians of the law are always considered pains in the ass, except when you’re frantically calling them because you’re in danger yourself. Yes, indeed, that’s the way it works, no point in arguing with the facts: from the very outset, the lay of the land favors the bandit: the elevated novel and the romantic potboiler, the movies, the Catholic religion, our collective imagination—they’re all clamorously rooting for the bandit, and it’s pointless for a priest to turn up the volume from time to time on his righteous indignation against Camorristi and Mafiosi because, after all, by definition, they too are lost sheep, sadly led astray, and the father awaits their return with open arms to throw the fatted calf on the grill in celebration. Hate the sin and forgive the sinner . . . But are they really two such different things? How can you distinguish between them? How do you tell the dancer from the dance?
IT SEEMS, in other words, that evil adds a new element to life, tingeing life with new possibilities, a sort of bet, a challenge to see how the individual involved will come out of it: the culprits, the victims or their nearest and dearest, society as a whole—it’s as if they were all subjected to a new ordeal, a salutary exercise. Granted, no one can ever restore the condition existing prior to a given crime or sin, either in the material state of things or in the people affected, least of all in their feelings and ideas, which evil and damage have already irreversibly changed, and it is therefore necessary to create new solutions, come up with new approaches. Evil, then, becomes the chief agent of this transformation, and a stimulus to the invention of ways to repair it, overcome it, even take advantage of it, in order to ensure that things become better than before. Evil, then, brings great new things and it is not only God who uses it to attain His mysterious and concealed objectives; good people can also make use of it to achieve progress. It may sound like an inappropriate and cynical comment to add that the first to benefit are, in any case, the wicked.
Therefore, only a very particular form of injustice, a wholesale amnesty of the evil done, can restore peace: the chain of reprisals and punishments would stretch out endlessly, and therefore the decision is made, at a certain point, to break the chain, leaving unpunished the latest of the evildoers and his misdeeds, putting an end to it there, with forgiveness, renouncing any efforts to prosecute the wrongs done, forgoing reparations, canceling them from the record, in brief drawing a clear line beyond which all debts are remitted, and we start over again from scratch. We not only find this moral approach in Christianity; it is also expressed in the classic Neapolitan song “Simmo ’e Napule, Paisà!” which says: “Chi ha dato ha dato ha dato, chi ha avuto ha avuto ha avuto . . .” (The ones who gave, have given, and they gave, and the ones who got, have got, and they got) with the further invitation “scurdammoce ’o ppassato” (Let’s forget the past) addressed to those who, fair to say, if they really were to keep a running tab of the wrongs done by each to all and all to each, would still be waging war against each other until the last day of recorded time. Still, there is a difference; and that difference is there, in the past, a past that for Christianity can never be erased or forgotten, but which can also never lay a claim on the present, because it would continue to demean, in an intransigent manner, the reparation of the damage done: the inexhaustible theme of the novella Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist.
The substance of peace and its first active measure is amnesty. Or, in more cynical terms, amnesia.
It is true that coexistence among human beings demands that wrongs be righted: if evil is never sanctioned, if reparations are never made, a community falls apart. And so, forgiveness at once contradicts and satisfies this need.
Discretionality undermines any law. And forgiveness cannot help but be discretional, unilateral, and gratuitous, otherwise it’s not forgiveness, but a simple logical deduction, while forgiveness is the opposite of logic and utility, it’s sheer overabundance. I’ve always found it bizarre that in Italy the dicastero del Guardasigilli, that is, the Ministry of the Keeper of the Seals, which would be the Lord Chancellor’s office in Britain and the Department of Justice in the United States, should have been described as the Ministry of Grace and Justice. Why combine two such contradictory principles? Wasn’t the latter of the two sufficient on its own?
NOW I WONDER, asking perhaps ahead of time, in terms of the telling of the tale: can we offer forgiveness to the protagonists of this crime which, page by page, I’m coming ever closer to exploring and treating (too slow, too rambling, this journey of mine, you might well say? He certainly is taking his time about it? You’re right: but it was the very nature of the crime that demanded that its background and preliminaries be recounted; or should I say, the concentric circles that wrap around it, the rings that on the one hand lead to it, and on the other lead away from it, like in certain animated neon signs. The school, the priests, males, the quarter, families, and politics. It might turn out that the bull’s-eye on that target isn’t the crime in question at all, but something else entirely . . . and if you have the patience to follow me through this, we’ll find out together), can the guilty parties be pardoned, leaving aside the fact of whether they have or haven’t served the sentence imposed upon them by the state? And if not full Christian forgiveness, at the very least, indulgence, or simple forgetfulness? (Forty years have gone by, and it appears fairly certain that the most dangerous of them all, the fugitive
from justice, is already dead and buried. Another one has been released from prison. The third is serving time for new crimes.)
Can we get their personas out from underfoot once and for all? Will I, at least, I who was their classmate, at the same school as hundreds of other kids just like me, ever be able to stop thinking of their faces, their smiles?
What is the rate sheet, not exclusively penal in focus, that makes it possible to determine whether the price for that crime has been fully paid, or expiated? The law cares very little about the emotional consequences of evil upon those subjected to it, but if religion, too, winds up overlooking those consequences and prefers instead to focus on the redemption of the evildoer, then who will devote themselves to the suffering of the victim, who will lend the victim an ear, once the wave of momentary scandal and indignation has subsided? It’s not true that the testimony of evil, if ignored at sufficient length, simply disappears: to the contrary, that witness never dies out, that testimony is never consumed, indeed, it is fixed, it coagulates, it becomes autonomous, isolating itself from the rest of time and from the other events that are ground up and overrun by time’s headlong course, ultimately becoming a perfect example of what has been called “a past that shall not pass.” A clot, an embolism. What must be done, then, to ensure that that crime passes once and for all, that both its culprits and its victims finally move on? Is it enough to wait for them all to die, and for us, too, who lived at the time of those rapes and that murder, to all be dead, in twenty years or so, or to be optimistic, thirty? And what role does this book play, does it extinguish or preserve?
THE INSTRUMENT OF MERCY (grazia, or “grace,” in the highly Catholiccentric Italian legal system; the Italian Ministry of Justice, until the end of the twentieth century, was called the Ministry of Grace and Justice) can only be brought to bear on the guilty parties, never the victims. If the culprits are sentenced to the death penalty, then they are brought back to life when they were already virtually dead, while victims can never be resuscitated, they are beyond the reach of any human action and even, strictly speaking, any divine measures. It would therefore have been very interesting if one of the miracles narrated in the Gospels concerned not a sick man, but rather someone who had been murdered, in other words, a Lazarus who had been executed or killed in a brawl, or say, by brigands or bandits, because in that case life would have been restored not only to the one it had been taken from, but also to the one who took it. And the murder would instantly come under full amnesty. A twofold miracle, then, an intervention the likes of which we have no record of in Holy Scripture and whose interpretation might have entailed even greater problems than the already tangled issues attendant upon other marvels and prodigies performed by Christ. Resurrection, then, seems to affect the two categories in different manners: for the evil, it’s available in this life, through the agency of forgiveness, for their victims, strictly in the afterlife, in the beyond.
The Catholic School Page 31
