I’m sort of sorry for Monica.
15
RUMMO IS A COMPOSED PERSON. He was even when he was young. He treated everyone respectfully and gave them his full attention. I saw further confirmation of this trait in how he approached five-a-side soccer: a sport, or rather, a game that is quite eloquent, capable of bringing out all the players’ frustrations and hysteria after just a few passes and exchanges, especially in those who are getting along in years and yet stubbornly insist on continuing to play, even as they grow less agile and more likely to commit fouls and complain about it. In five-a-side soccer, you can’t camouflage or disguise your nature. And so, Rummo is a good, clean player, he passes the ball when he ought to, his elbows are no sharper than they need to be, he doesn’t shout or whine or kick the ball angrily off the field when he gets kicked. He acknowledges without arguing his own fouls and those committed by his teammates. He is a psychiatrist by profession, and yet you’d think that he rejects the more dramatic hues of life in advance, abjuring them.
Tragedies are just vast misreadings: if we were only capable of seeing them from the right angle, we’d understand that they’re ideal occasions, opportunities . . .
RUMMO CAME FROM a large and happy family. His parents were devout Catholics who had married very young and had given all their children names of characters out of Holy Scripture, some famous, others less so. The first born was Ezechiele, or Ezekiel, then came Lea (Leah), the third was Gioacchino (or Joachim, and he was in fact my classmate), followed by Elisabetta (Elizabeth), Rachele (Rachel), Tobia (Tobias), and last of all Giaele (Yael)—in Italian, it was only when you saw her that you realized Giaele was a girl’s name. Therefore, enrolling Rummo at SLM (as they had enrolled, a few years earlier, Ezechiele, better known as Ezi, or Lele, and after him, Tobia, who had just begun middle school) made good sense: his family believed strongly in Catholic teaching, in the Catholic school as offering the best kind of education in absolute terms, and not merely because it conferred a certain distinction to attend the school. The Rummos really weren’t that kind of people. Before they moved to Rome, they’d lived in Naples, and the beauty of their large Neapolitan house with its view of the sea was often summoned up with great yearning and regret by Gioacchino (it doesn’t come natural to me to call him by his given name instead of the appellation usually assigned him in roll call at school); to Rummo, the city of Rome constituted a place of exile, and the QT, so deeply loved and appreciated by most of its residents, appeared cramped and suffocating to him.
The Rummo brothers and sisters when all assembled in one place constituted quite a spectacle. On weekends, they would go for long hikes in the mountains, the two adults and seven children, ranging from the eighteen years of age of the eldest down to Giaele, age four, all dressed in what we might nowadays call technical gear, but scavenged, down-at-the-heels: oversized shapeless heavy sweaters, tattered and riddled with holes, felt trousers worn out at the knees in which a great many pairs of legs had hiked before the legs of the current occupant, athletic socks of some indefinable color that sagged around the ankles.
I watched them set out once, at the beginning of a long holiday weekend, in their van equipped to sleep nine, though God only knows how. I was especially struck by an aspect of the family to which I have always been morbidly sensitive, and which was dizzying in the Rummos: the color of their hair. Long or short, the hair of all nine members of the family displayed all the possible gradations of blond, with coppery or tawny highlights, or hues of wheat, honey, gold, and ash, ranging all the way down to the almost colorless and extremely fine hair of the littlest girl, Giaele. On Tobia’s head, practically shorn bald, the blond bristles changed color every time he would nod or turn his head.
THERE ARE TWO TRAILS that run around the Lago dell’Angelo, or Angel Lake: one off to the right, the other to the left. The one to the right cuts through dense woods whose trees run down to the lakeshore, while the opposite shore is high, bare, and rocky; at certain points the drop to the dark lake water must be fifty or even a hundred feet. In order to determine which path is shorter, the Rummos decide to split up into two groups, each of which will try out one of the two trails. Whichever group reaches the opposite side of the lake first will be the one that took the quicker route. Once the two groups have met at the far side, they’ll each come back taking the opposite trail, splitting up into the same two groups, each of which will return on the trail that the other group took on the way out, so that at the end of the hike both will have hiked the entire perimeter of the lake, one clockwise, the other counterclockwise.
“Listen, though, no running, understood?” the architect Rummo tells his youngsters with a smile; he likes to imagine these geometric circuits, plot and calculate the routes of their hikes, as if he could see them sketched out in a luminous streak before his eyes, on a life-size map. “We hike at our usual pace. Otherwise it’s no fair!” He reckons it will take a couple of hours to complete the circuit: a good long walk. But the boys and girls eye each other as they ready themselves for what they see as a game, and games are something you either win or you lose.
The two teams were chosen by lot as follows: Davide Rummo, the father, with Ezechiele, Elisabetta, and Rachele would go to the left along the rocky ridge; Eleonora Rummo, the mother, with Lea, Gioacchino, Tobia, Giaele, to the right, through the woods. “But what if Giaele gets tired, and doesn’t want to walk?” asked Lea, who was always something of a critic: a young woman with reddish hair, glasses, and freckles. “Then you’ll just have to carry her piggyback, you and Gioacchino,” their mother laughed, and the group set out. The other group, with Davide, Ezechiele, and the middle girls got moving, too. “Don’t forget, along the way, collect, collect!” called Eleonora Rummo, before plunging into the trees.
ELEONORA RUMMO, an architect like her husband, liked to spend her free time assembling compositions of tiny found natural elements, such as acorns, berries, pebbles, dried flowers, insect larvae, seashells, eggshells, shells of all sorts, feathers, pieces of quartz, and twigs, gathered on their mountain hikes or on the beach during the winter; she would then glue them to a background of gray or ocher cardboard and frame them as abstract artworks. Her children had developed the habit of filling their pockets and then offering their finds to their mother. This, too, turned into a sort of competition, to see who could find the loveliest and most curious objects. A dead lizard an inch long, desiccated and mummified. A piece of mother-of-pearl. A shard of glass burnished by the weather. The cap of an acorn. A fragment of blue or yellow majolica. So when they hiked they always had their eyes on the ground. Sometimes their pockets were packed so full that the memorabilia would crumble into dust, especially the more delicate objects such as snail shells or the exoskeletons of sea urchins, dotted with holes; so when they put in their hands to pull out their finds, they retrieved only a fistful of shards and dust. What a disappointment!
THE GROUP WITH MY CLASSMATE moves off through the trees. The trail is just a faint track marked by the recent passage of other hikers who have trodden down the underbrush: there are no other blazes or markings. It’s a little chilly. The single file tends to straggle and break up. Tobia hurries ahead, keenly aware of the importance of arriving first. “There’s no point in running!” his mother yells after him, “wait for us,” and Lea echoes her mother’s admonition; today Lea is lost in thought, walking slowly and bringing up the rear. Gioacchino is holding Giaele’s hand and telling her a story. My classmate has no imagination, he doesn’t know how to invent anything original, so he falls back on the stories he’s heard and studied at SLM starting in elementary school. This time he chooses Pharaoh’s dreams and the one who was able to interpret them, young Joseph. Rummo has often wondered why his parents didn’t give him that name, so simple and lovely—Giuseppe in Italian—rather than Gioacchino, so uncommon. He can’t imagine that before just twenty or thirty years have passed, many of these extremely common Italian boy’s names, such as Giuseppe, in fact, or Giovanni, or Mario,
will be practically extinct. “What is a Pharaoh?” Giaele asks, and Rummo (forgive me if I go back to calling him Rummo, I can’t help it) patiently sets aside his story to lay out a brief history lesson, and while he’s at it, a little art history as well. “A great king, very mighty, so powerful that in order to bury him they built the biggest tomb of all time, just think, all just for him! A pyramid!”
THERE THEY ARE, my classmate Rummo’s parents, walking in opposite directions, though in the end their paths will bring them all back together, which is the destiny of their lives. Davide is a very positive, energetic man, still young, who has a simple and convincing solution for every problem and a word of comfort for anyone assailed by doubts or difficulties. He’s brilliant and generous, honest and reasonable, and he has only one defect, though it’s a grave one, which derives, paradoxically, from those very same fine qualities he possesses in such abundance, the good fortune and the happiness he enjoys: he is, so to speak, overwhelmed with self-satisfaction, contentment with his work, which is thriving, with his beautiful family, and with those hikes they all set out on together, so enthusiastically, even though his children have such a wide range of ages. Davide is puffed up, you might say turgid with satisfaction for his children and his wife, Eleonora, still lovely after so many pregnancies, whom he loves just as much as the first day, indeed, even more, much more, since the experiences they have lived together in almost twenty years have just made their love deeper and richer and more nuanced. It is, in fact, on account of these very same experiences, so intense and exhausting, that Eleonora, though she, too, loves her husband as much as ever, no longer wishes to have relations with him, for fear she might become pregnant again. Already with her last child, Giaele, who fell from heaven a full six years after Rachele’s birth, when Eleonora Rummo was convinced she’d finished her childbearing years, it was an event accepted as yet another of God’s many graces, but an ordeal nonetheless. Though Davide was beside himself with delight when he heard the news, dazzled with the pleasure of that blessed surprise, for the first time she sensed that she did not want another child, that she did not desire that new baby about to arrive, which had been thrust upon her in the capricious way that God disposed of human lives, and about which Davide instead seemed to be so enthusiastic, as if this were the very proof of His existence. She would gladly have done without, foregone that last gift, but she could not turn it down—she could only make sure it was the last one. And so, when she chose the name with which that child would be baptized, a name that she had chosen all by herself, and not in common accord with her husband—and of course when this baby girl came into the world, she was loved by her mother every bit as much as, if not more than the six others—it may just be that there was an unconscious or mischievous reference to the episode that characterizes the biblical heroine Yael (again, the English version of Giaele), making her figure famous among those who are serious scholars of the Bible, and not like her husband, a childish and superficial reader of Holy Scripture.
In an episode recounted almost hastily, the young Yael kills a fearsome enemy of the Israelites, first by getting him drunk, and then by driving a large nail into his temple. And so Yael is always depicted, the hammer lifted high in the air by her muscular arm.
That nail, Eleonora had felt it inside her, at the beginning of her pregnancy, the way it scratched her, pierced her, right in the spot where Giaele’s developing fetus lay, and then, as she grew accustomed to the idea of giving birth and nursing and, all things considered, starting over yet again with all the chores and tasks that have to do with caring for a little one (they’d had to buy a new Snugli and a stroller because they’d given away the ones they’d used for all their other children to younger mothers), from one day to the next she had no longer felt that nail. In a remote area of her consciousness, another image had appeared: the nail that little Giaele would one day drive into the head of her father.
The shared beliefs and faith and the lengthy marriage and the blond hair might make you think that Davide and his wife resemble each other, but they don’t. Eleonora has an artistic temperament, gentle only in appearance but, in reality, stubborn and tenacious, and in spite of the web of relationships, of blood and of friendship that goes with such a large family, or perhaps precisely because of this unbroken expenditure of self upon others, she has always maintained with considerable reserve a zone of thoughts and feelings that excludes the others. And it is a zone that is far more vast and profound and mysterious than that happy-hearted Davide can even begin to imagine.
ELISABETTA AND RACHELE hopped nonchalantly along the steep brink of the cliff over the lake. Their father didn’t think he needed to keep too tight a rein on them. It was clear that they were accustomed to taking care of themselves, having been raised to be self-reliant as early as nursery school, where the sinks were set fifteen inches off the floor, and they each had a locker all their own with a set of personal effects, and every child from the age of three up dressed themselves, washed up on their own, kept their things neat and tidy, hoed their own little vegetable garden, learned to knead and bake bread, as well as learning reading and writing and arithmetic. The singular destiny of the Rummo girls is that, since their parents couldn’t enroll them at SLM, since they were female, from Lea to Giaele they had all attended very advanced elementary and middle school, coed, boys and girls together, and they had therefore become independent much sooner than their brothers. The idea that they might attend schools run by nuns the same way that their brothers attended schools run by priests had been ruled out from the start. The Rummos had at first discussed this disparity in education according to sex, and the same subject had surfaced over the years, every time they had to choose a new nursery school for one of their daughters, but Davide had managed, if not to convince Eleonora completely on the matter, at least to persuade her to set aside her doubts, presenting that compromise as the best available, given the situation. They needed to be realists, without undermining their own principles. Provisional decisions can sometimes prove to be as appropriate as if they had been the outcome of carefully pondered choices. Davide was convinced that he was doing the right thing when he allowed himself to be guided by solid common sense, and he liked to repeat the motto that he had learned from his spiritual master, an old Egyptian Jew who had lived as a layman until the age of forty, when he had converted and taken the vows: “Perfection is the enemy of the good.” This was the chief legacy, the essence of the many teachings, far more complex and articulated, imparted by old Maimone, and Davide Rummo had accepted it with such fervor because he had glimpsed in it a summation of the best of both worlds, of the life experiences of that man who struck him as a saint: the secular world and the religious one. Tolerance, openness to the world, and above all, a quest for what, then and there, without prejudice, may prove to be the best path available: Maimone had grown old and had died without once giving the lie to this proverbial, affable doctrine. Davide had often repeated it to his children when he saw them growing rigid in the face of any necessary compromise, when they chose to give up an opportunity if they felt unable to pursue it without doing some form of wrong. “You know that perfection is the worst enemy of the good.”
He was certain that he and Eleonora shared this moral outlook without even having to discuss it, and in that belief Davide was a little naïve, or perhaps he preferred to be thought of as such.
“POP, do you think I could take the van next Friday?”
“The van? Why not? I think so.”
“It’s to go out with a few friends,” Ezechiele specified, with entering into details.
“Why not?” Davide Rummo says again. “But we may need it. Your mother and I were thinking of taking a trip to Gubbio, all of us together.”
“To Gubbio?”
“Yes. It’s a beautiful little city.” His eyes lit up. “None of you have ever been there. Maybe your mother, but when she was a girl, with the scouts, and she’s not sure. And all around it, there are magnificent woods . .
. So, now, you were saying? Sure, of course, certainly. If you need the van and you don’t feel like coming with us, one way or another we’ll figure it out. Too bad, though, because Gubbio is really worth the trip, believe me, it’s worth it . . .”
“It doesn’t matter, Pop, I’d be glad to come with you. I’d be glad of a chance to see Gubbio, ag—” said Ezechiele, hastily, eager to skip over the matter, and avoiding any further reference to the fact that he had already been to Gubbio once before, four years earlier, and had spent a week there, for a basketball workshop, when he was so tall for his age that they thought he might be an excellent player. The super-gay basketball coach at SLM had shown great interest in him, in every sense of the word. Then he stopped growing, six foot two, tall, handsome, well proportioned, but not tall enough to be one of the real giant players, nor was he quick and technically proficient enough to become one of the “little” players of that sport. Davide Rummo no longer remembers the fact, but with seven children that’s more than understandable. Already it’s a tremendous achievement and a sign of goodwill that he only rarely mixes up names, places, and activities.
ELISABETTA WAS MORE OR LESS complaining for the fun of it, more than anything else to keep the line connecting her with her younger sister taut and active. When two young girls are so close in age (they were only a year and ten months apart), the elder of the two tends to give the line the occasional jerk and then reel the lure back in, like a fisherman. Even though it’s not necessarily the case that it’s the elder sister who always has the fishing pole in hand.
“I’ve made up my mind: this is the last time that I’m going to carry the water.”
“Then why don’t you drink it? That way the canteen will weigh less.”
Elisabetta was at once struck both positively and negatively by Rachele’s observation, at once intelligent and cynical.
The Catholic School Page 45
