His brow furrowed, his eyebrows raised high, very high, his eyes red and bulging as if about to burst out of their sockets with the effort of bracing for each blow. But on his unnaturally swollen goatish red lips there fluttered a mindless little smile that one might have thought was due to his relief at the cessation of the torture. Well, actually, that’s not what it was at all.
IF I HADN’T LIKED this game of making a martyr of d’Avenia with the excuse of staging a passion play, and if I had done cowardly little to put an end to the game once it had stopped being one, he instead, who had been tied up, forced to kneel, and whipped, had actually liked it.
Yes, he had liked it. A lot, really a lot . . .
SUDDENLY I REALIZED that those eyes gleaming with tears were actually swollen with pleasure, and perhaps the only sincere glint of pain that I could see in them was a shadow of disappointment that the punishment had been suspended. More, those eyes were saying, more! Then why had his lips called out stay, enough? Had fear won out over pleasure? I mean to say, the fear of experiencing an even more intense pleasure, and to show it in that obscene fashion before the whole class? Or had he faithfully recited the oathbreaker?
“YOU’RE A COWARD, and this will suffice,” said Executioner Number One, Stefano Maria Jervi. “No God would demand to win back the faith of a coward.” And he gestured at Executioner Number Two, which is to say, Chiodi, who pulled a penknife out of his pocket that he normally used to carve words and pictures into his desk at school. Jervi instructed Chiodi to cut the bonds on the prisoner’s wrists. A number of classmates immediately swarmed around Marco d’Avenia and helped him to his feet. I hung back, watching him. His smile of pleasure was angelically transformed into one of gratitude. As he was straightening his shirt and tucking it in, he came toward me, still escorted by his more solicitous classmates, the one who had suffered most as they watched him being mistreated, among them Rummo, and I realized that the marks of the lashes on the white and sweat-drenched flesh of his back were nothing more than thin, pinkish stripes, not unlike the marks you might get almost without noticing if you walk barelegged through high grass. The streaks of blood like those seen in the painting of the praying martyr were just a trick of the imagination! Was I the only one who had had it, or was the whole class laboring under the same hallucination? Marco smiled at me, still in that same stupidly ecstatic manner, and then turned suddenly serious, as if he recognized me as one of those who, with their objections, had put an early end to the ceremony. “Listen, believe me, I didn’t do a thing!” I felt like telling him, laying eager claim to what I had most regretted just a moment before, my hesitation to make my voice heard.
At that moment, there rang out a clap that echoed through the bunk room as if we were in an underground cavern. It was the spiritual director, standing erect in the doorway. From his panoramic glance around the room, it was clear that he had realized clearly that in that place, until just a moment earlier, something impassioning, deeply impassioning, had taken place, and that the excitement had subsided all at once, emptying the gestures of meaning and, at the same time, fixing them in place, like those games where you’re supposed to freeze on the spot, all at once: but he was a man with too much experience of the world to think for a minute that he could delve into an event through a series of retrospective questions.
Without a word, nor did he repeat the initial signal he had sent by clapping his hands, he turned and left the bunk room, without ever having actually entered it, and all of us, including d’Avenia, who was still buttoning his shirt and staining it with sweat the minute the fabric touched his flesh, silently straggled out of the room after the director, from the big room that was almost too bright to the shadowy hallway. Out in the hallway I found myself walking behind Jervi; I caught up with him and took him by the arm, slowing his pace. He seemed satisfied but still grim-faced, as if he hadn’t yet abandoned the character he’d been playing a short while before.
“DID YOU DO IT on purpose?” I asked.
“Of course, what else did you think?”
“Me? Nothing. Just like he said.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, I don’t think, I don’t believe anything. Still, though, maybe you could have spared him . . .”
And I made it clear to him with a grimace that there had been no need to excite the other members of the class, to arouse their instincts.
“After this lovely first example, anyone is going to feel authorized to inflict punishment on anyone they please . . . perhaps to start them down the path of redemption.”
“Don’t say that, even in jest,” he said, again fully striking the grim pose of the inquisitor.
“You’re the ones who are joking around, and then you punish anyone who has agreed to go along with your game.”
“What game are you talking about? It’s not a game, I told you that. And after all, if we want everything to function properly, it’s enough to ensure that the punishments fall on those who deserve them . . . and who in fact already expect them. In fact, they can’t wait to be punished.”
He shot me a wink and then he looked me right in the eyes to see which side I was on, to see, that is, whether for once I would make up my mind to be on one side rather than another, and cut it out with all this fluttering high above everything and everyone, looking like someone who just happened past by pure chance.
“You know what I mean?”
I nodded without another word and lowered my eyes. Jervi pulled his arm out of my grip and walked on quickly, taking three or four long strides, but then coming to a stop and turning his head, he whispered close to my ear: “You know yourself that he deserved it. He deserved it, didn’t he? That half-queer. If at least he was a whole queer!”
IN THE MEANTIME, Marco walked on ahead, at the front of the group, smiling, no, actually laughing, forgetful of it all. We turned down the large staircase and the whole class started descending the steps, leaping down them, taking them two or three at a time, with headfuls of brown and blond hair dancing in front of me, and the silence broke into the usual silly little screams, wisecracks, beginnings of jokes. It’s over, it’s over, it’s over . . .
Why half-queer, I thought, too late. D’Avenia is 100 percent queer. Being half-queer, then, would be far more deplorable.
I WAS SO STRUCK with pity and filled with horror and curiosity by the scene of the flagellation that I imagined it being me, in my turn, who was stripped and thrust to my knees, to be whipped by my classmates. They took turns doing it, handing the rope around. For that matter, it was true that Marco had experienced pleasure in being whipped, but I had also glimpsed a gleam of pleasure in the eyes of those who were punishing him, and now I saw it glitter in the eye of the one taking the knotted cord to beat me with it. Yes, they enjoyed it, too, there was no doubt about it, whether camouflaging their excitement or manifesting it openly, and they seemed to relish punishing me in particular. What could the reason be? Was it because my martyrdom made sense, or because it was more enjoyable to take revenge on me, or because I had a greater number of sins to expiate, or quite the contrary, because I was innocent and the blood I shed was pure, and therefore precious? But what blood, what punishment? What am I talking about? In my fantasy it was all just a joke, in the end it was hugs all around . . .
Or at least, that’s what I believe happened, though maybe instead I was dying and my classmates were embracing me, bidding me a final farewell, as befits a martyr.
In any case, if this is the law, if everyone takes equal pleasure in the sacrifice, then there was no getting out of it: you were either the executioner or the victim or else one of the onlookers, but in any case, with full satisfaction and awareness.
SCHOOL WAS ONCE A LONG and complicated game of prizes and punishments. When you could claim that you’d learned its rules, that you’d finally learned how to play the game, then you left.
SO ANYWAY, Marco d’Avenia. With the episode of the flagellation, he came out into the open.
At the end of my classmates’ violent games, whoever had lost was expected to get down on all fours and carry the winner on his back, and it required no order or threat to make him kneel down, because the defeated one was already down, in fact, it was that humiliating position that proclaimed his defeat.
When is it in a battle that you proclaim victory or defeat? Who decides?
Well, while all the rest of us were humiliated by it, and we laughed hysterically and in a rage at having been put under, he liked it. He lost without a word, and if he hadn’t already been the weakest member of the class, except for Pik, I feel certain that he would have lost on purpose just to make sure he’d be put under and punished, used as a beast of burden by the victors, who were already kicking their heels into his ribs to spur him on, the way you do when you’re riding a donkey, and he, as the heels pounded against his sides with a pitiful sound, a sound I wished I’d never heard, he was smiling.
18
BUT ISN’T THE PRECEPT “Turn the other cheek,” deep down, masochistic, rather than generous and affectionate? Give your neighbor a kiss, now that, yes, would be a loving commandment, rather than: let your neighbor beat you silly without saying a word.
A punishment for a masochist is the proof of his guilt; the factors are inverted: you aren’t being punished because you’re guilty, you’re guilty because you’re being punished; and all the more pleasurable is the punishment, all the more grave must have been the guilt, until these two series, the pleasure of the punishment and the displeasure of the guilt, move away from each other respectively, they diverge to such an extent that the individual is lacerated, torn in two, as if he had been drawn by horses in opposite directions.
While it is perhaps possible and certainly our duty to try to resist our sadistic impulses, leaving them safely anchored to the plane of fantasy, why should we fight against masochistic ones? The moral brake is less effective here: after all, the masochist may think, I do no harm to others, and I must surely be free to harm myself. Countering masochistic tendencies is therefore more difficult, in part because it is more difficult to understand the scope of such things or to stigmatize them. A person must surely be free to suffer, as long as they don’t make other people suffer, right? Isn’t that what morality demands? And in fact, don’t morality, any morality, and education, any education (a Christian education in particular), always have a masochistic foundation? Don’t they teach, after all, that the highest value is that of self-sacrifice, to let the other person have the better portion of food, sit in the most comfortable chair, become our master? To put oneself at the service of the other, acting out a relationship of subordination, that is what courtesy demands: at your orders, your wish is my command, at your service, consider me your servant, I kiss your hands, and even the short word of greeting we use when we’re in a hurry, the most famous Italian word in the world, “ciao,” doesn’t that come from the word “slave,” I am your slave, do as you will with me, dispose of me as you think best, isn’t that what we say to each other in a ritual manner, dozens of times a day: enslave me, subjugate me, and I will be happy with it? Ethics consists of the purest masochism: the renunciation of power, the renunciation of pleasure, sacrifice yourself so that someone else can enjoy in your place, be as mild as any lamb, let yourself be nailed to the cross, give up your bed, your cloak, your portion of food, your money, your body, allow yourself to be flagellated, let yourself be martyred. There must be a form of pleasure in the renunciation of pleasure. There is no martyr who doesn’t revel in his martyrdom, and not only out of pride, as Thomas Becket had so clearly understood, and that is why he tormented himself, that is, he tormented himself with tormenting himself, but precisely for the physical pleasure of undergoing torture. A violent feral pleasure in a reversal of poles, swiveled around 180 degrees, just like the suicide’s pistol in Hitchcock’s Spellbound; to see blood flow and take joy in it, but not the blood of victims, not the giddy ecstasy of the wolf, but rather your own blood, intoxicated on your own blood instead of the blood of your prey—isn’t there, deep down, an extraordinary resemblance between these two spectacles, between these two phenomena?
And yet we always allow the masochist a certain margin of clemency, and of empathy, given that in his spirit we see mirrored entire cultures and roles and categories of humanity. Women are sweetly masochistic, all of them, apparently, inasmuch as they are women. Their approach to sex could be called masochism in the purest state. Priests—if it weren’t that some of them are sadists, as if this were the exception that proves the rule—perfectly personify the figure of the masochist, as do ascetics, eremites, gurus, and fakirs. In any married couple, at least one is a masochist and often they both are, in alternating phases, or else in different and complementary forms. Heroes are by and large masochists, if in nothing other than the epilogue of their story. Leonidas was a masochist and Pisacane was a masochist and so was Che Guevara; likewise, Saints Francis and Clare were of course masochists. Kissing a leper might belong in Krafft-Ebing rather than in the Little Flowers of St. Francis. That visceral love for the flesh—rotting, raped, wounded, crushed underfoot—for one’s own tortured flesh that is preferable, all of a sudden, overturning a thousand-year tradition, to the handsome and healthy and sound and athletic ethos of ancient statuary, rags and pusoozing wounds, sackcloth and hair shirt and stigmata instead of taut quivering muscles and rounded buttocks—aren’t these perhaps symptoms of a raging masochism? I believe that it was this, in the final analysis, that the priests were trying to teach us, however unsuccessfully: to be masochists, in full serenity, to take joy in our suffering, to redeem our pain and sorrow by discovering in the end that they are pleasurable, to love the wounds of Jesus as if they had been inflicted on our own bodies, and thus prepare ourselves for when this was bound to happen sooner or later: suffering. Suffering: the great and the only theme. The theme of all the novels and tragedies and works of history and poetry and textbooks of philosophy and compendiums of wisdom of all time. A daunting task, the one facing the priests! Extremely difficult, recklessly so. Because in fact their teachings and the examples they set and the words spoken all, constantly, grazed the bounds of the morbid, of a perverted love for disease, verging on the territory of sins far graver than those from which they were meant to safeguard us. To say nothing of the, so to speak, biological resistance to such a principle. A young body pushes back against the notion that its purpose is to allow itself to be mistreated, that its salvation lies in its mortification, that is, literally, to become dead. Every single indicator of vitality rebels against the very idea.
To compensate for and integrate this penitential and masochistic outlook, SLM administered the antidote of athletic activities, a safety valve to let off overabundant energy. The young, immature body: since they couldn’t crush it beneath the crushing press of martyrdom (this is no longer the historical period, and what’s more, the rest of us were attending the school not in hopes of earning sainthood but, at the very most, a diploma), it was necessary to douse those energies in some taxing endeavor, chasing back and forth on dusty fields or climbing poles or thrashing the water in a swimming pool with our hands and feet. This feature of SLM really was unrivaled, especially in the Quartiere Trieste, which in spite of its reputation did not offer (and still does not) anything at all to its athletically minded youth, except for a few tennis courts wedged between the condominium apartments around Piazza Verbano, or terraced into the lovely slope beneath the hill of Santa Costanza, now defaced by the horrible metro station, and if you otherwise wanted to do any swimming, you had no alternative but to be friends with a resident of the apartment house at Via Appennini no. 34, on the majolica-decorated façade of which, for several hours a day, there glitter the reflections of a sky-blue pool.
NOW, however, the parents who were gratified at having enrolled their young son at a religious educational institution so amply supplied with regular recreational and athletic activities (soccer, swimming, basketball, volleyball, gymnastics, judo, Ping-Pon
g) would have a chance to ponder a little more thoroughly the reason for this contradiction—perhaps only a matter of appearance, but still, visible to the eye at least—between the care for the students’ spirits and the care for their bodies, the emphasis that was placed on the latter, for example, in the advertisements for this private school (“It has wonderful playing fields in the green meadows along Via Nomentana! And then there’s the swimming pool!”), the modern facilities, and so on and so forth.
TROTTING, jumping, kicking, calling for a ball to be passed to you, fearing the violence of its arrival . . . balls thudding into your face, your stomach . . . and shouting . . . shouting until you were out of breath . . . but still they knocked you out of the game. I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired in my life as on certain dark afternoons, on our way back from the renowned playing fields on Via Nomentana. At age fourteen, at six in the evening, lying on my bed instead of sitting at my desk and finishing my homework, with one arm covering my face, listening to the savage pounding of my heart, I felt as if I were seventy years old, and when they called me for dinner, I’d just ignore them. I was voiceless.
With the excuse of strengthening the body, you actually extinguish it like a candle, with two saliva-dampened fingers crushing the wick.
LIKEWISE, the art lover, the opera fanatic, the ballet fiend, the connoisseur of all things, the aficionado of any artistic specialty or discipline and especially those in which what predominates is corporeal virtuosity (opera singers, gymnasts, dancers, and so on)—all of these are pure masochists. Their pleasure consists of being dragged and subjugated and strangled, to the verge of suffocating in their pleasure, by great pianists, brilliant conductors of symphony orchestras, sopranos who cruelly eviscerate those who listen to them, and phantasmagorical ballet dancers. Those who frequent the theaters where these human phenomena perform take joy in being overwhelmed and crushed by the genius of maestros and étoiles. Even when directing a pianissimo, the maestro’s wand whistles through the air like a riding crop . . .
The Catholic School Page 48
