(I was the latter.)
Let’s admit that Jervi was proud to have a sister who was so sorca (such a piece of pussy, I use this word because I’m sure that I heard him describe his sister with it, at least a couple of times, with full awareness, preceding the vulgar term with the usual formula, “un pezzo di sorca . . .”), but he was proud of her more or less the way you might be proud to own a nice motorcycle, no more, no less: his sorca sister, that is, placed him a step above those who didn’t have one.
Yes, indeed, I was always captivated, transported by an ideal love for the sisters of my classmates at school: the two older, beautiful blond sisters of Marco Lodoli, much older than him, whom I have the impression of remembering as already married, and with children, Jervi’s stupendous sister, Iannello’s miraculously well-developed sister, and then Barnetta’s sister, known as the muzhika because of her stout, powerful legs and the red apples on her cheeks, and last of all Leda, Arbus’s silent sister.
It was common at SLM to have pairs or even trios of brothers. With their range of ages, they covered entire eras of that school’s history, often inheriting the same teachers, for instance Cosmo, or Svampa or Brother Curzio. There were the Ducoli brothers, the Abbadessa brothers, the Di Marziantonio brothers, the Sferra brothers, the Bellussi brothers, the Pongelli brothers, the brothers Giannuzzi, two Cerullos, the Dall’Oglio brothers, the Rummos, and even the Albinati brothers . . .
Back in the day when this story unfolds, families were large, with lots of children and cousins, which allowed them to express and contain a high if capricious erotic potential, in the sense that you could peruse and review the entire family, pondering and fantasizing, lingering enjoyably over the examination and the many doubts that surfaced as you did so, striving to determine which of the brothers or the sisters would be most exciting to fall in love with, which would be the smartest to marry, just who was the prettiest or most handsome in the family, a judgment that might well take in parents, as well, as there were frequently mothers who far outstripped their daughters in terms of personal attractiveness. A mythology of those years, fomented by the movie The Graduate, stirred dizzyingly obscene fantasies and projections around the subject of alluring women in their forties.
Now I have to wonder, concerning these abusers and torturers of women who will take on the role of protagonists in this book, or at least in a section of it, serving as leading characters; well, I have to wonder, as I was saying, just what kind of relationship did they have with their mothers, with their sisters (if they had any), that is, with the women closest to them? Contempt, morbid love, jealousy, long-simmering rage? Or was there something pure, who can say? Who was it they were actually yearning to deflower, sodomize, and strangle? Who was it they wanted to punish, and who had, perhaps, humiliated and punished them in the first place?
The classic formulation would be: absentee father + morbid mother = psycho. But I’ve never found that to be especially persuasive. There’s something second-rate about it, the work of an unimaginative screenwriter.
IN THE CHAPTERS THAT FOLLOW, I’ll have some stories to tell about one of these women, one of these mothers, the mamma of my dear classmate and friend, perhaps the most interesting of all the mothers I’ve ever met, the strangest, and as far as I can remember, the most beautiful or, in any case, the one who made the strongest impression on me. Beautiful just like my mother, though very different, physically the diametric opposite: a redhead, freckle-faced, with small green eyes. When I speak of Ilaria Arbus, I’ll speak of the mothers of the period, all the mothers I’ve known, the mothers of my classmates, the Signoras of the QT. Together, let’s turn this page.
8
LOVELY, she was lovely. Pretty, she was pretty. And I’d say unhappy, as well. Unhappy with that sort of lurking unhappiness that tormented mothers with a family, between the ages of thirty and forty, who have brought children into the world, fed them, dressed them and cared for them, and now that they were no longer children, found themselves with an almost empty life. These days it doesn’t happen so much because everything starts later, but back then it was normal that a woman at age thirty-five or so should have already substantially completed her maternal duties, at least those that consisted in care and feeding, strictly speaking. She no longer had anything to take care of with fanatical intensity. She still had her daily round of household chores, but the heroic phase was over. And now. What remains to be done, to do? What is to be done with one’s life, beyond grocery shopping and planning the weekly menu and the management of the bills and the mending of worn-out cuffs and collars? At the age of thirty and change, one might say that three emotional cycles of a woman’s young life were now concluded, the one in her original family, the one with her husband, unlikely to fully resume after the shock of conjugal life, and the one with her child or children, perhaps the most exclusive and demanding love story of them all, which is transformed from a visceral dependency into a problematic relationship, no longer exclusive, marked instead by the fracture of the mythical union between mother and child. So now what?
For a certain period of time, the same years in which the main part of this story took place, Italian mothers oscillated between radically different options, although they sprang from the same sense of uncertainty. Some of them embraced wholeheartedly and for time without end, as if taking confirmatory vows, the role of vestals of the family, and they managed to carry on with that role as long as possible, even with a husband largely indifferent and children now grown and married in their turn, organizing and staging with disarming punctuality the domestic rites of times now past: meals, holidays, birthdays, presents, vacations (if bourgeois) or outings (if working class), even the quarrels and the insults and the misfortunes and the periods of mourning seemed to have been planned out in detail by these women who wanted to remain mothers and abbesses and queens and governesses of nothing, but a nothing kept in perfect order, overseen, dominated, regulated, administrated, managed, an enclosure, in short, from which escape would be sheer sacrilege; others, in contrast, the more emancipated Italian mothers, with the demeanor of one who wishes to prove who she really is, having left behind the reproductive phase, threw themselves headlong back into their studies, either never undertaken in the first place or else interrupted or pointlessly completed, into the careers that they’d set aside for such a lengthy period of time that they basically had to start over again from scratch, or else come up with a brand-new one; among the women of my mother and Arbus’s mother’s generation, for instance, one who already had a degree in law was finally able to practice her profession; another opened a toy store specializing in Swedish natural wood toys, and another still founded a music school where children were taught the notes as physical gestures in sequence: raising an arm or a leg, taking a step forward, a step sideways, jumping in the air; with surprising moves these women founded associations, started newspapers and magazines, research centers, corporations, joined political movements, in short, they did all they could to explain with deeds, and not in words, that a new life had begun for them, indeed, in some cases, that that was their real life, as opposed to the preceding conjugal-maternal version; others, suddenly realizing that they were still desirable to anyone who wasn’t their spouse, frequently the only man they’d ever been to bed with, and starving for love or something different, after decades of rigorous fidelity, decided to take the path of sentimental and sexual adventures, in the vast majority of cases, experienced without stepping outside the network of old acquaintances and the circle of the lives they’d always lived, therefore taking as lovers classmates from school or university, encountered by chance after all these years, or else the husbands of their longtime girlfriends, emitting signals in a code so allusive as to allow them to be interpreted as innocent, manifesting an interest in them not limited to the conventional niceties, making it clear that there could exist between them an affinity extending to planes beyond that of the collective choice of a movie theater or a restaurant; and then their so
ns’ classmates and even their daughters’ boyfriends who, excited but at first reluctant, wound up giving into the morbid fascination of the idea—in which they could luxuriate, looking back, of having had both mother and daughter, that is, the high point of the male erotic imagination, especially that of the Italians, which reserves a place of honor in its anything but limitless repertory for the maternal figure (nowadays, celebrated and scorned by the deplorable acronym of MILF). Most of them, and I believe that Arbus’s mother was among them, didn’t choose to take on any of these clear-cut positions, but instead limited themselves to floating in the void of the everyday passing of time: the children at school, her husband, Professor Lodovico Arbus, absorbed by academic life (or at least so everyone believed), the home silent, neat and tidy, and in no need of attention any more paranoid and obsessive than, say, sitting down to polish the pewter ware, the world outside buzzing, face and body reflected in the mirror . . . under examination . . .
The mothers of my classmates and the matrons and housewives of the QT in that period expressed their will to power in the form of a maternal instinct. To them, the whole world, or nearly the whole world, was formed of objects to tend to and mouths to feed: children first and foremost, of course, but also friends their age and classmates from school and friends from sports activities, in a radius stretching ever outward, and then, unfortunate or sick relatives, pets, elderly parents, poor people who attended the same parish church, all those people whose lives needed to be straightened out, brought under control. If by any chance there was a momentary shortfall of charity cases, the mothers weren’t about to stand around twiddling their thumbs, they went out looking for them. It would be a terrible thing if all of a sudden no one had any need of their tender loving care anymore.
There were other mothers less decisive and less interventionist, who, having suffered the invasive treatment of their own mothers, took great care not to replicate it with their children. My mother, for example.
Ah, Arbus’s mamma, with what transports of delight she laid into her son! I realized that I yearned to be given the same treatment, but she made it clear that she had no wish to make me the target of her harassment, so that when it came right down to it, by treating me kindly, she mocked me, and was well aware of the fact. I wasn’t worthy of her, in other words, I was unworthy even of being treated as an unworthy creature, as a slave, a parasite, a speck of mold, a storm-tossed hulk. Arbus was her target, the target of her love. I had been found to be, at the same time, too young and too full grown: too young as a male to bother subjugating, too unripe to procure any satisfaction, and yet too full grown to be cradled in her arms, cradled and knocked to and fro, cradled and tormented. In other words, I wasn’t sufficiently defenseless but then I also lacked sufficiently formidable defenses . . .
She’d make me an afternoon snack, carefully spreading butter and jam out to every corner of the slices of bread, but instead, when she made one for Arbus she’d knock it to the floor, after slapping on a spoonful of jam to make sure that it would overturn, tipping off the edge of the plate. “And this is all for our Edo,” she’d say, handing me the bread and then, as she watched me eat, she’d ask: “Happy?” How could I remain indifferent to her mocking intent?
When it came to the zwieback, things were even worse: she’d give me the intact pieces, while Arbus would always get the cracked ones, which crumbled in his hands the minute he picked them up. Pointless to specify that the broken pieces fell to the floor butter-side down.
“What a clumsy son I have . . . what on earth do you have in that big head of yours? What are you thinking about? Who are you thinking about, heh?”
And saying over and over again “Who? Who?” she would knock on the top of her son’s head with her knuckles. Arbus pretended it didn’t bother him, as the sharp raps increased in intensity and frequency, and he went on meticulously recopying his notes, then he’d dodge his head to one side, without a word.
“There’s no secret in here,” his mother would say, pretending she was out of sorts.
Then she’d turn to me with a smile and ask, “But you have secrets, don’t you? And just what are you hiding, come on, let’s hear.”
“Me?”
“Yes. The things you won’t tell your mother. Come on!”
“Well . . . I hardly tell her anything at all . . .”
And so the afternoons at Arbus’s house were always exciting and unpredictable. I mean, they were actually deadly boring, but the boredom of studying was continuously interrupted by the incursions of Signora Arbus. Interruption was the cutlass she brandished. Whatever we might be doing, she sank the blade of her proposed alternatives into the heart of it. If we were watching TV, she demanded that we turn off the set then and there, and that my friend get up and play some Scarlatti. As soon as he had started playing a piece, she ordered him to play a different, more challenging one, and then she’d bring a snack to ensure that his fingertips would be sticky with jam or mayonnaise. One time, we were studying chemistry. Prostrate at the death of his flower, Svampa had sworn that from now on he’d make us put everything in writing, no more explanations, no more oral examinations, he no longer wanted to talk himself hoarse, waste his squawking voice, or hear us spouting singsong renditions of the acid chains, he’d only give extremely challenging written homework that would leave us with no alternative but to study the subject on our own, poring over our textbooks—get busy, then, he had told us, his eyes puffy with angry weeping mixed with genuine sorrow: get busy if you’re so smart. And so Ilaria Arbus had entered her son’s bedroom in her bathrobe, with her hair wrapped in a towel, perched on her head like a turban, interrupting our litanies.
“What are you doing? I’ll bet that you’re wasting time as usual, aren’t you, Edo?”
“Why no, signora, we’re just doing our chemistry homework,” I had begun eagerly to explain, “and . . .”
“Not one is turning out right,” she promptly ended my sentence for me.
Ilaria Arbus was only partially right. Despite the fogged-up eyeglasses and the ostentatious disinterest in such a crude subject (“People who like to fool around with test tubes,” he dismissively called chemists, even if they were Lavoisier or Madame Curie), her son still successfully solved at least two-thirds of the questions, while I would always get at least one step wrong, sending my answers sadly askew.
“Let me take a look,” she said, and yanked the sheet of paper out of my hand, on which were written the exercises that Svampa had dictated to us.
“All right . . . let’s see,” and she ran down the list, “. . . a sulfuric acid molecule (H2SO4) has a molecular weight of 98 AMU . . . Hey, what does AMU mean?”
Arbus snorted. “Atomic mass unit.”
“Of course it does, that’s obvious,” his mother continued, “atomic mass unit . . . a-m-u . . . all right then, yes . . . it has a weight of 98 AMU. Calculate the percentage of oxygen present in the molecule.”
She glanced up from the sheet of paper and looked at us, with a smile. “You know how to do it, don’t you? The percentage of oxygen. It’s not that hard.”
“No, it’s not that hard . . . but I just don’t know how to calculate it,” I confessed. “I can’t remember.”
“What about you, Mamma, do you know?” Arbus asked in a mocking tone.
“Caro, if you’ll just let me think for a minute, I’ll come to it. I studied this stuff twenty years ago!”
Well, while it was unmistakable that she didn’t understand a thing about chemistry, I still expected her to get the right answer from one minute to the next, as if it had been suggested to her by an angel. Both of us watched her, Arbus with annoyance, me with anxiety. Seeing her furrow her brow, I made the effort that she was only pretending to exert. I struggled to remember the last lesson that Svampa had taught us, before going on strike over the death of his flower.
AND I FOUND the solution.
While Arbus continued to stare at his mother with a look of defiance, I wrote the ans
wer in the margin of the book, hoping I had done my calculations right: 65.2 percent.
The signora spotted what I had done without her son noticing. She peeked at the number. Then she heaved a deep sigh and tucked back a lock of hair that had tumbled out from under her turban while she was studying the problem.
“Well, actually you two ought to be telling me . . . but let’s not waste our breath, it’s sixty-two percent, the oxygen, or actually, to be exact, it’s sixty-five point two percent, am I right?” and she shot her son a look of defiance that matched his, in a way that I found irresistible.
“WELL THEN, seeing that we already know our chemistry, what do you say to a little game?” proposed Signora Arbus, causing every zit on her son’s face to blush beet-red.
“A game of what?” I asked in surprise.
“A game of cards, what a question. Poker, if you feel like it.”
“Mamma, really! The idea of playing cards!”
“You don’t want to because you’re no good at cards. And you’re afraid you’ll lose your allowance . . . Aren’t you?”
“Mamma! I’m not afraid of anything.”
“Of course you are,” said Signora Arbus, sitting down on the desk as if to cover the chemistry textbooks, as if she wanted to use her body (in fact, a noteworthy body it was) to prevent us from studying, and thereby letting a leg slip out of her bathrobe, and that leg hung there, dangling and swinging, before my eyes.
“You’re afraid of having fun. That’s all. Did you know, Edo, that your little friend is terrified of having fun?”
I was so embarrassed that my embarrassment actually became pleasurable, to feel myself dazed, filled with admiration for the sheer shamelessness of Arbus’s mother and, let’s admit, her extraordinary beauty, to which it was agreeable as it was surely fatal to submit wholeheartedly for someone like me who has never found more cogent arguments than a smooth white leg to put an end to all reasoning. In order for my mind to draw a whole and complete blank, a vision like that was more than sufficient: Arbus’s mamma, in a bathrobe looming above us, towering over us, two students crammed into our little folding chairs, pencils in our mouths so we could underline. Anyway, that day we gave up studying chemistry and played poker, I lost what little money I had with me in just a few hands (Signora Arbus soon grew bored and, clutching the bathrobe to her chest as if with that gesture she wished to allude to the sheer insolence of the way my eyes had strayed there, she left the room), and the next day I was forced to pretend I was sick with a fever in order to avoid a classroom assignment in chemistry that I would certainly have flunked. And yet I can safely say that that day, at Arbus’s house, unlike my classmate, I had enjoyed myself.
The Catholic School Page 40
