NOW ARBUS WAS A SORT of latter-day Ivan Karamazov. In fact, he did seem like a young Russian of the particularly bloodless sort, austere, his flesh lustrous, his lips swollen, his raven hair silky and long, eyeglasses with heavy black frames, just as we might imagine the prototype of a sorcerer’s apprentice or a young scientist or, even better, a science fiction author. And in fact, Arbus was the perfect incarnation of the nerd who patents infernal machines in his garage, or the young musician who practices obsessively, repeating scales on the piano, over and over.
They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool
Till you’re so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rules
NERD. Back then, the term was unknown in Italy. The so-called nerd is a student who exclusively pursues intellectual interests, and remains segregated from the social aspects of student life, such as parties, fashion, relationships, and sports. He is therefore synonymous with shyness, awkwardness, isolation, and anachronism. He is antiquated and futuristic at the same time. His intellectual superiority—almost always manifested in scientific and technical subjects, which sometimes leads the nerd to merge into the stereotype of the mad scientist, of which he is the youthful prefiguration—is counterbalanced by his ineptitude when it comes to human relations. The nerd is by definition unpopular: he is mistreated by his more athletic classmates, mocked and humiliated by the more desirable females. He wears eyeglasses with thick lenses and celluloid or Bakelite frames and, in the version handed down to us, his shirt pocket is decorated with countless pens and pencils. He wears his hair short and neatly groomed, or else long and greasy and unkempt. His unimpressive appearance might serve as a mask or a provisional identity beneath which may lie concealed a superhero like Clark Kent or Peter Parker: but not even the special powers and the admiration aroused by his heroic alter ego are sufficient to cancel out the introversion and the ineptitude at human relations of the original character, who is awkward, shy, and incompetent. Which inspires a blend of irritation, compassion, and fear toward the nerd. In the reverse situation, in fact, it might happen that the nerd, embittered by his failures in love and the humiliations he has suffered, decides to take revenge, transforming himself into a diabolical character such as, in fact, a mad scientist capable of causing catastrophes. His intelligence, just like the sciences and technologies in whose service he has enlisted, giving up any and all other forms of satisfaction, since it presents itself as a neutral element that could as easily be directed toward good as toward evil, is nonetheless and in any case fearsome. There is nothing more fearsome than a nerd’s revenge, precisely because it’s guided by a superior intelligence. When a nerd emerges from the phase of deep reflection and finally goes into action, his technical abilities and his inventive resources prove to be utterly implacable (suffice it to think of the movie Straw Dogs, 1971), and his apparent emotional coldness, which once constituted an obstacle in terms of human relations, becomes the ideal instrument for shrewdly aiming his strategic moves.
In psychological terms, nerds are introverted and intuitive. They are interested in and stimulated by ideas and objects, more than by people. They can spend many hours alone, absorbed in their pursuits, whether that means studying, computers, comic books, television, collecting, various compilations, model-building, trading cards, model trains, chess, extinct animals, or classical music but also punk rock and heavy metal, and books with a distinct inclination toward fantasy. They are more at ease with abstract concepts than direct experience. They prefer reasoning to emotions and they almost always prove that they are every bit as incapable of conveying their own emotions as they are of understanding those of others. The social alienation of young nerds can be so profound and intense that some create imaginary friends to keep them company. Often, they are pedantic, using coded or exaggeratedly formal language, on occasion displaying a lightning-quick sense of humor, usually based on wordplay. While they ought by rights to be model students, they often feel deeply uncomfortable when it comes to doing homework, or taking tests or facing other learning challenges in which they may paradoxically achieve mediocre results, despite their generally superior qualities. Instead of being proud of them and coddling them, some teachers find them annoying and turn mistrustful or even hostile toward the nerds who pop up in their classes, ultimately stigmatizing them as bad students, apathetic and unable to complete tasks, or else, on the other hand, as potential competition in terms of mastery of the subject. Targeted for classroom bullying on account of their inability to react in accordance with established social standards, nerds obey those norms only within the limits whereby they are able to perceive them, or only until, having taken the time to analyze them, they fully realize the irrational nature of those artificial constructs. Their misfit status also derives from their inability to acknowledge hierarchies and authority, toward which they largely, and by and large unconsciously, take a defiant stance. If provoked, their moral or political neutrality may then easily be transformed into open rebellion.
TOGETHER WITH ARBUS, and for one season with Gedeone Barnetta (what a coincidence, the first three names in the roll of attendance . . .), who however decided the next year not to renew his season subscription—from the last year of ginnasio, to middle school, to the second year of liceo, or high school, that is, eleventh grade—I attended the concert season at the SLM auditorium. Even though the performers were rarely first class, the program was varied and interesting, in Arbus’s opinion, and I believe I missed very few of those Tuesday evening performances. For us students, the subscription was quite affordable, and we were also allowed to move from the cheap seats at the back of the room down to the front rows, where there were a few empty seats, in the last few minutes before the concert began.
Arbus generally said little while we waited for the musicians to come on stage and begin to play, but his carefully measured words meant more to me than any program notes that might be handed out. Aside from the usual Vivaldi, Mozart, Chopin, and Bach, pieces were performed by composers I’d never heard before, or even ever heard of: and in those cases, Arbus provided me with succinct introductions to their body of work. Those were the loveliest and most interesting lessons that I’ve ever sat through. In five minutes, my classmate was capable of preparing me for what we were about to hear, without delving too deeply into the technical details; neither, however, did he settle for a few superficial impressions or spur-of-the-moment judgments or generic comments along the line of “He is a very passionate composer” or “He delves into the depths of the human soul.” He was never willing to translate music into petty sensations. Afterward, moreover, he was capable of explaining to me whether the execution had actually been a fine one, something that I usually barely even noticed, or where the performer had shown weaknesses, and whether they were minor or grave. There were times when chamber groups or small orchestras would perform, but most of the time they were either soloists or, more frequently, pianists. In those cases, Arbus’s expertise—expressed without any arrogance or pedantry, but in the simplest of terms, direct, light-years away from the affectations that blight the conversation of connoisseurs of classical music and, in general, the maniacal aficionados of any other discipline—was to me a source of endless pleasure. When all was said and done, along with the lessons of Professor Cosmo, Arbus’s lessons on the basics of music, delivered in the few minutes before the concerts in the SLM auditorium, were the most valuable learning experiences I ever enjoyed, and they introduced me to an understanding of and appreciation for things, facts, forms, and personalities, the vastest array of sentiments, the broadest expanse of ideas, and all of this thanks to a high school classmate who had invited me along. A young weirdo, no doubt about it, but an invaluable one!
Barnetta was wrong to stop coming with us: but he got bored at the concerts, and very few adversaries manage to get the better of boredom.
DEEP DOWN I, too, was a nerd, even though I didn’t need to wear glasses and I was rather good-looking, but still, I possessed a
fair quotient of nerd in my personality, and perhaps I still do, and perhaps I would have written my books in a different way if I hadn’t remained a nerd at heart; perhaps we should just say that I was, as in so many other episodes in my life, a part-time nerd. There is no affiliation or identity or conviction to which I have adhered in any lasting way. Frequently, in fact, I have juxtaposed three or four, until nothing made sense anymore, and I could no longer say who I was or what I wanted. More than the body, I had the brain of a nerd. What boy at age fifteen, after all, could take serious interest in . . . what was the name of the composer, atonal and yet structurally classical in approach? Honegger? Hindemith . . .? Yes, who would have chosen to spend their evenings listening to Hindemith or talking about Hindemith (or was it Honegger?) with Arbus, instead of taking a girl on a date?
THE FIRST TIME that I went over to Arbus’s house one afternoon, his mother called his sister out of the room where she had been studying and invited her children to perform a four-handed piece on the piano for me. I watched them from behind, brother and sister, as they raised and lowered their hands over the keyboard, the backs of their bowed heads, and I almost didn’t listen to the music at all, so taken was I, it struck me as a scene from bygone times, even though the rapidity with which Arbus’s sister fled back to her room and shut the door once they had finished the piece, and the suddenly glassy look in my classmate’s eyes, made it clear to me just how unwillingly that performance had been executed.
An obligation, one of the many obligations that dot the day of an adolescent. Heads bowed over the piano keyboard, as if in punishment. Education is a forced journey. Its results are attained by forcing nature but it’s only by forcing nature that you comply with it . . .
Even without seeming to put any passion into it, his mind traveled with great agility through every kind of schema or diagram or musical score. At a certain point, school must have weighed down upon him, an uninteresting burden, to be off-loaded or sidestepped as soon as possible. Or perhaps it was his family pushing him to step up the pace so that he could attend university at the earliest opportunity.
There was a time when having a child who was “a year ahead” at school was a considerable source of pride. My folks tried to enroll me a year early, but I was not accepted. In any case, it is true that in Italy school lasts too long, at age eighteen what you really need is to be out in the world, to get plenty of fresh air, fill your lungs full of it! Away from the lunchroom mini-pizzas and teachers calling roll and bells marking the end of class, our whole educations should be shortened, intensified, and abbreviated, while nowadays instead we tend to drag it out, we luxuriate in it, taking our time, and what with postgraduate degrees and various specializations, there are those who find themselves going bald but still walking around with a stack of books under their arm, indeed it would seem that the pedagogues are advocating the idea of a “permanent education,” perhaps because that would even allow them to test out their theories on little old men and little old ladies. Each and every discipline seeks to expand its dominion, to take possession of different fields and age groups. After decades of swings from the progressive to the conservative, I have come to the conclusion that the ideal educational model is the one described by Descartes in the autobiographical portion of his Discourse on the Method: until age twenty, he studied very hard, then from ages twenty to thirty, he turned away from books and delved into “the great book of the world,” which is to say, traveling, trading, fighting, accumulating experiences, and then, at age thirty, he began his adult efforts, harvesting the fruit of everything he had learned, in books and afterward. At that point, there are no longer any excuses you can turn to or stories you can make up: whatever you’re going to be capable of doing is what you do then.
WHAT DID ARBUS do the last day before leaving school? What was his farewell to the Catholic school?
No one saw him, no one noticed as he worked away, nor was it possible afterward to figure out how he had done it or what technique he had employed, but when he stood up to go, the desktop was inked, from top to bottom and from one side to the other, in banner letters that formed the two words of the most common profanity.
The first letter was a “g” and the last was an “n”: seven letters in black-ink block print, fifteen inches high.
It was supposed to be his last day of school. He turned around for a second on his way out the classroom door and said to us, quite simply: “Ciao.”
THE NEXT DAY, however, he was back, accompanied by the headmaster, who slid into the classroom like a shadow right behind him and announced that our classmate, before leaving to study for his final exams on his own, had one last thing to say to us. Then Arbus spoke.
His head remained bowed, with locks of hair hanging down on either side of his face and the glint of his eyeglasses preventing us from seeing his eyes; his voice, too, was low and it quavered slightly, yet I had the impression that the corners of his mouth were tilted upward in a sort of smile. Just the faintest ironical twist. He said, without beating around the bush, that he was very sorry he had written that profanity on the desktop and had thus offended not only God, but all those who believe in Him. Then a bottle of denatured alcohol and a rag appeared in his hands, objects that no one had noticed, and Arbus set about cleaning the desktop, in utter silence. He had been forced to abjure and to erase his profanity, and in fact, after twenty minutes of alcohol and elbow grease it had, sure enough, disappeared, and no one could say it had ever been there. The case was closed just twenty-four hours after it had first exploded. It was a masterpiece of diplomacy.
Once I got over my astonishment and my sense of distaste at that retreat, which resounded like such an act of cowardice to me, and above all, a ridiculous one, I felt an admiration growing inside me, in a way that hasn’t wavered since, for that double, twofold hypocrisy: the hypocrisy of the one willing to abjure (Galileo), and the hypocrisy of those willing to accept the abjuration (the Church) even though they knew it was insincere. Two formally impeccable positions that made it possible to move past the impasse caused by that profanity. Because it was obvious that Arbus, after that painstaking project of blasphemous scribbling, could forget about his A minus GPA, which was what he needed to gain admission to the final high school exam: that must have been the argument the priests had inserted their crowbars under and exerted their leverage.
If he wanted to make the quantum leap and go straight to the final examination, Arbus would have to apologize. And there was nothing on earth that Arbus desired so ardently as to get out of our school, and as quickly as possible. Nowadays, it is very common for people to be asked to make public apologies: both institutions and individuals who have been guilty of both horrendous crimes and negligible instances of bad manners are asked to beg publicly for forgiveness, either a few hours after the offense, or else decades and even centuries after the crime in question. “If they’d only at least say they’re sorry,” is the demand. It’s not enough that they are thrown in prison or treated to universal reprobation: they have to apologize. Politicians, soccer referees and misbehaving players, TV sorceresses, popes and former monarchs, tycoons of high finance lurching into bankruptcy, hit-and-run drivers, kids who’ve thrown rocks off bridges over highways, distant heirs to long-extinct ideologies, soccer hooligans, surgeons and chief physicians, all now say they’re sorry. The religious custom of asking forgiveness has migrated into the layman’s conscience, along with the profound sense that it is a ritual to be commemorated, if possible, with open declarations on TV or over the Internet; and yet this by rights ought to be the farthest thing from the layman’s mind-set, the idea of a verbal or emotional reparation for the harm done, with a resulting pardon. That’s right, because once the offenders have felt remorse and asked for forgiveness, then the pardon must follow, it’s practically obligatory. When the parents of a young woman murdered for trivial reasons, and with grave cruelty, appear in public, the first thing that the journalists hasten to ask is this: “Have you forgiven,
eh? Have you forgiven the murderer?”
Arbus apologized.
He apologized, which is something that requires no particular effort, as proven by the glint that I’m certain I saw in his eyes the minute he looked up at the end of his act of contrition, in fact, it’s simple as can be, a mere formal statement, which can actually be done in a manner that’s more offensive than the original offense, as is so clear in those children who, when forced by their mother to make amends with a friend or a younger sibling, shout a loud “Sorry!” into their face, causing more hurt than the punch given previously.
Arbus apologized and that became his last day of school.
A FEW YEARS LATER while I was leafing through some pulp newsweekly, such as Oggi or Gente, while waiting my turn at the barber shop, I noticed a photograph in which two policemen in riot gear, billy clubs raised high, were dragging a half-unconscious student by the armpits, his knees dragging across the asphalt. The caption said that the officers were “assisting a demonstrator.” I thought I recognized in that emaciated, long-haired young man Arbus, and of course his eyeglasses, which dangled from one ear, with the lenses shattered.
The demonstration where he had been beaten, inside the University of Rome campus, would in time become quite famous, because a twofold battle had been waged during it, between the union demonstrators and the revolutionary students, and then between the revolutionaries and the police.
The security forces of the various political groups certainly didn’t use a soft touch: the last demonstration I attended, a few months after the one at the university, also grimly famous because a young woman was killed at it, was my last one, because of handguns tucked in belts and under the tails of jackets and raincoats.
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