And I’m talking about handguns stuck in the belts of demonstrators, not just those of the policemen.
And so, on the Garibaldi Bridge, while the sounds of the first shots reached our ears, I turned on my heels and, from that day forth, I was done with politics, understood in that sense.
I was done, period.
And I’m glad I was, it meant I’d have done one thing right in my life.
I HAD HEARD that Arbus was involved with a group of Nazi-Maoists.
That is, the people who chose the worst—or in their opinion, the best—of right-wing and left-wing extremism.
I don’t know how reliable this rumor is and I know very little about the Nazi-Maoists, nor for that matter am I very interested in knowing much more.
In a certain sense, it’s a fairly obvious point of arrival for anyone battling against capitalism.
It’s a political model that remains relevant today, indeed, if anything, perhaps more so than forty years ago.
But in that period, the names and acronyms of groups of lunatics and fanatics flourished and proliferated and the only reason you’d even be aware of them was if you yourself were a member of one of those splinter groups or else, to your misfortune, happened to be targeted by one of them. In that case, you did start to pay attention to their combative proclamations. There were vast numbers of combatants in the field, militants and militiamen, squads, flying units, enforcers making their rounds, and platoons. Like cells on a microscope slide, they pullulated, they split and divided and hastily rushed to outflank one another, to the right or to the left, formulating planks and platforms that were increasingly delirious or vague. Movements, fronts, cells, brigades, battle committees, counterforce committees. It didn’t take much to throw together a few scattered shreds of ideology and shape them around the need for action because that, action, was what everyone lusted after and hailed. For someone like Arbus, becoming a Nazi-Maoist wasn’t really all that strange. In effect, nothing was strange for someone like him: after all, he was the outsider, the alien. When you’re light-years away from everything, even the most absurd things can ring familiar to you. Persons, things, ideas—Arbus seized at them all with his telescopic pincers and brought them close for observation beneath the thick lenses of his eyeglasses, and in them he saw things that he alone could see. He did experiments to provoke reactions. He was a chemist who regularly scorched his fingertips. I believe that what he was seeking in that curious political position was precisely the irreconcilable: if it hadn’t already existed, then he would have invented Nazi-Maoism himself expressly for that purpose, in order to disgust not only the fearful, the right-thinking, and the respectable, but above all his hypothetical extremist allies. You wound up borrowing from every last one of them. An isolated, radical, and ambiguous position, that was the ideal place for Arbus.
I heard reports about him at long intervals, decades at a time: that he had become an expert on wolves, and that he’d camp out in the mountains for months on end to catch sight of one, then that he had become a specialist in artificial intelligence and spent his time building robots.
Concerning the reliability of this information, I certainly wouldn’t swear an oath.
But then, I wouldn’t swear to anything, for that matter.
2
I ONCE ENTERED A CHAPTER OFFICE of the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI). Salvatore, a classmate of mine, took me. I was at his house on Via Tolmino, maybe to study or to play or else for one of those visits that have no real purpose, at thirteen you go out just for the sake of going out, the afternoons drag out endlessly, empty, a quick phone call and a brisk walk can take you over to see the most accessible classmates, the easiest to reach, with a mamma who makes snacks or the stereo or a courtyard in the rear and neighbors who don’t complain if you play soccer: and that gets you to dinnertime.
“Can I come by your house?” means that a kid is running away from his own house.
In those houses, you’re always welcome.
AFTER WE’D RUN OUT of things to do, Salvatore asked me if I wanted to go down to the MSI office, downstairs just a short walk away. I agreed. We found the chapter in a basement room, a short flight of stairs beneath street level. I feel comfortable in those kinds of places, they’re familiar to me. In Rome it’s in those basement-level offices that all the extracurricular activities took place, it was there that all a boy’s free time unfolded: in a basement I played the saxophone, in various basements I played pool, took part in Ping-Pong tournaments, listened to records, exercised, wrote and rehearsed school plays. Small windows with security grates, concrete-framed glass panels, the smell of mold. The blithely unaware feet and legs of people walking by on the street, while down here life teems and thrives.
The MSI office was shadowy, and not only because of the grim tone of the posters hanging on the walls: as if penetrating into its inner recesses was part of a process of initiation. The slogans invited you to dare. Everywhere were trophies, symbols, and dangling pennants, slightly dusty-looking: everything was stagnant and old.
The only luminous objects, like so many phosphorescent globes in the dim light, were busts of the Duce’s head, white or in ivory.
Each of them one and a half times or twice normal size.
Mussolini’s head has been described countless times, far too many for me to care to try again.
Features far too distinct to be able to avoid the temptation of caricature.
The Duce’s body, about which books have been written, was little more than an appendage to that famous head.
The most voluminous and spectral bust was perched atop a cabinet, and from its lofty vantage point, it looked down on anyone who entered the room, which was also the farthermost, the innermost, the darkest room in the chapter.
THE PROBLEM IS THAT THIS VISIT, which may or may not have lasted all of five minutes, had consequences, or perhaps I should say, it didn’t, because of my father’s prompt intervention. I was naïve enough to tell him that very same evening, at dinner, where my classmate had taken me, in response to the ritual question, “What did you do today?” posed to one child after another.
His face darkened.
“Why did you go?”
“Why? No reason, just to have something to do . . .”
He insisted on finding out exactly what had happened in that place.
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“Nothing, nothing at all happened . . . We took a look around and then we left.”
“And there was no one there?”
There had been someone, actually. Beneath the last of the busts of the Duce, at the foot of the cabinet, there was a young man sitting at a desk. He’d turned out to be very nice. He’d asked who I was and Salvatore had spoken up for me, he’d introduced me, he’d given the young man my first and last name. And the young man had written them down.
“Where?” my father asked in a brusque tone of voice that wasn’t customary with him. “Where did he write them down?”
In a ledger book. The MSI clerk had taken note of my name, and then he had asked me my home address. It didn’t seem to me that a person’s address was much of a secret, you can find it in the phone book. In part because I lived not a hundred yards from Via Tolmino. But from the way my father’s face changed when I told him that I’d given the MSI clerk my address, that is, our address, I realized that I had made a huge mistake, and suddenly I felt as if I were a traitor, or a fool, a foolish child who had played the spy.
“I’m sorry, Papà, but I didn’t think that . . . I just went there to keep my friend company . . .”
He clearly manifested the depth of his rage by saying nothing. He no longer uttered a single word about it. Silence at my house was always the way in which a broad array of feelings and states of mind were expressed, ranging from simple disapproval to full-blown rage. The subtraction of words made you inscrutable and in any case unsettling, even when the clouds cast only passing shadows. My
father’s concern transmitted itself to me and proliferated into my own concern, and for a while I thought about nothing but the extremely stupid mistake I had made. And yet I didn’t understand what could be so serious about it. I’d set foot in the place, and that was all. I’d seen posters with the Fascist lictor’s staff, the black shirts, and a bust of Mussolini’s bald head. To me, it meant nothing much more than the curly-headed bust of the philosopher, a copy of a sculpture by Vincenzo Gemito, which stood in the entrance to our apartment with a cigarette stuck between the lips as a joke.
Well, we could have put the same sort of thing in the Duce’s mouth. Maybe a cigar.
Clearly, though, something serious must have happened, because the next morning my father went down to the chapter office and succeeded in getting my name taken off the list. I have no idea what system he used, jovial, friendly, or threatening. For all I know, starting a file on a thirteen-year-old boy is illegal.
I heard about it later from my mother. Had my father acted out of ideological conviction? To keep me out of trouble? Did he hate Fascists? Did he fear them? Was he defending his good name?
This book is unable to answer a great many questions.
STRANGE THAT HE HAD TAKEN it so seriously. He had always taken a mocking approach to this sort of thing, like when he told us how, one day, during a visit by the Duce (the real one, in flesh and blood) to his school, Giulio Cesare, the middle schoolers like him had been lined up along the staircases to greet him, and the dictator, out of breath after the first flight of stairs, had stopped on the landing where my young teenaged papà was standing and had patted him on the cheek, putting on a gruff and paternal tone, whereas he actually just wanted to catch his breath. “Bravo, good boy,” Mussolini had said. As he told this story, my father would turn his cheek to his mother-in-law, my grandmother, telling her: “Go on and touch my cheek, signora, touch right here . . .” and when my grandmother reached out her hand, “Touch right here . . . it’s still there, nice and warm, the Duce’s handprint.” And his eyes would glitter, ironically. “Since that day, you know, I haven’t washed my face once.”
And my grandmother became indignant because she’d taken him seriously, and she yanked her hand back as if the sense of ridicule had scalded it.
“EVERY TIME that politics surfaces in literature, it does so in the form of impotent hatred.” This is a phrase of Stendhal’s that I never tire of reflecting upon, and in the meantime I go in search of examples that contradict it, valid exceptions to the rule. I rarely find them.
SALVATORE WAS A CLASSMATE with red hair, shy and polite. He had a slightly awkward way of moving. He was a very good boy, which made him generally well liked but not particularly interesting. By which I mean that no one was interested in busting his chops, but no one cared much about him at all. It was his good luck that the reckless and bullying classmates had an array of targets to take it out on (Marco d’Avenia and Picchiatello, better known as Pik), otherwise someone like Salvatore could very easily have become the next chosen target. There are those who claim the opposite, that is, that it’s only a way of stimulating dangerous levels of competition among males, but I personally believe that the presence of females in a class mitigates the aggressivity, forces them to moderate their impulses, exert some self-control, come to an overall judgment concerning their behavior. At a mixed school, the girls serve as mirrors in which the boys can see their reflections, every time they open their mouths or do something. Like in a gymnasium, where you use mirrors to check whether you are exercising correctly. It is true, of course, that females can be even crueler and more implacable in rejecting and marginalizing someone. They do it with a perfect dosage of contempt and indifference, an invisible cordon sanitaire drawn around the unfortunate victim.
In an all-male school, on the other hand, the threat can be sensed in a physical way, as it is among dogs. I say this, having had twelve years’ experience of it as a student and another twenty as a teacher with all-male classes. To say nothing of the time I spent living in barracks during my mandatory military service. Teaching in prison, in the past few years I’ve had a few transsexuals in my classes, and all it takes is one to change the atmosphere, they enter the classroom and it’s as if a gust of wind had suddenly thrown open the windows, in part because someone of that gender and in that setting has the impact of three or five. Insinuating his, or her, physical charms, which are usually explosive to say the least, into the grim and gray compactness of the manly group, she re-creates for an instant the natural mixing of life on the outside, of normal life, the life prior to being segregated from the world. Males are monotonous, and monotony tends to evolve into frustration, and frustration in its turn splits into melancholy or aggression. Spending time among males is like talking to yourself. Only a woman can interrupt the basso continuo of foul language, the verbal and mental automatism. Without the needle-sharp disturbance of a feminine presence, all language turns into slang: the jargon of fishermen, truck drivers, soldiers, where the absent woman is evoked in dribs and drabs, bits and pieces, broken down into her orifices and protuberances, but the same thing happens in learned language, like that used by philosophers. As with any prolonged privation, it can even lead to elevated and spiritual results. To a sort of dizzying or horrifying purity.
SLM WAS AN ALL-MALE educational institution until 1979, five years after I left. It would seem that the admission of girls was a decision due to nothing more complicated than a lack of enrollees.
The opposite sex wasn’t banished in absolute terms, merely kept away during classtime. This meant that gender segregation was specific to an idea about teaching, about the transmission of knowledge. Women, mothers, sisters younger and older crowded the school’s courtyards every day, when they came to pick up the students at the front entrance or spent time with them during their afternoon activity or attended mass on Sunday—mass was celebrated in the big modernist church. Dozens of women leaned over, elbows braced on the balcony railing as they watched their sons churn up the water in the pool, waiting for the end of the swimming lesson to take their boys home. There were a thousand and one occasions of mixing and mingling. I understand the point of Mount Athos, but once you’ve admitted those female creatures into the enclosure, why not just enroll them in classes, let them attend the school? Is it just to avoid the problem of differentiated latrines? What harm could they actually have done? I’ve always wondered what the mothers thought, when they came to get their sons outside a school where they, as little girls, wouldn’t have been admitted. Could it be that they approved of this discrimination or found it to be salutary? To offer a variation on Groucho Marx’s famous line: I do want to belong to any club that doesn’t care to have me as a member. Why would these priests, devotees of the cult of a woman, according to whom it was a woman who crushed the serpent’s head and saved all our souls, these priests who exhorted us to pray to her with the words “our life, our sweetness and our hope, hail!” those priests whose very order bore her name—why would they exclude women?
More than a religious interdiction it was a social legacy. Perhaps females really were considered to be too great a distraction, an element of persistent disorder or sexual alarm (at eight years of age?). Maybe the families were happy to know that their daughters and sons were separated at least during their hours of study, reciprocally safe from each other. Maybe for that dozen or so years it would be better to have each gender off on its own, bent over their books, separated by a partition that was in any case easy enough to sidestep or climb over, after all we were going to spend the rest of our lives together in a campaign of mutual destruction, in love or in hate. The war of the sexes, some claim, is something you want to get started at the earliest possible opportunity, and in fact these voices propose returning to a separation by gender beginning in elementary school, to protect little girls from the harassment of violent males, since there is no longer any way or even any intent of restraining or repressing these violent boys and young men. Maybe so. All it ev
er did to me was harm, and I’ve spent thirty years licking the real and imaginary wounds produced by that segregation. The tree of love came up crooked, the code of relations with the opposite sex had too many chapters censored or overblown, so that I was forced first to indulge in endless conjectures and then to leap straight to conclusions. Something excessive, maniacal, in both the shyness and the brutality, something hasty and furtive, but devoid of the sweetness that furtiveness would still possess at an innocent age, something like reparations repeatedly demanded but never obtained, no matter how many women you might go on to have or even collect in your life, afflicts those who spent their school days the way we did at SLM. In elementary school, deep down, it’s easy, even natural, you advance across the chessboard like so many pawns, all equal, all the same, and in fact it’s almost an advantage not to have those whining, detestable little girls underfoot; in middle school it already starts to sound odd, it’s become increasingly clear that half the world is missing in there, but the unhappiness of developing male bodies is still thus protected from all embarrassing comparisons and can be vented almost entirely in sports and fisticuffs; in high school, the realization is tinged with bitterness, becomes derisory, you decide that a mocking, contemptuous god locked you up in there for no good reason, you’re a clueless idiotic Sabine male whose women were all stolen away from you, and if you want to get your own back you’re going to have to go fishing for them with a long pole, outside the safety of the port, in the open waters plied by experienced and hostile ships. Relations with the opposite sex have become a desperate parody. Forced to become more enterprising and predatory than other boys, you turn shy. Your moves are tosses of the dice and applications of abstract rules. No everyday experience, no familiarity, no natural interactions, ever, with the opposite sex: it’s like trying to learn Arabic with a collection of cassette tapes. You can do it, that much is clear, but it requires efforts that will only embitter your results. And there can be nothing more dispiriting than the lack of spontaneity.
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