The normal occasions for meeting girls (which weren’t normal at all, but rather extraordinary), such as dances, parties, the movies, didn’t interest him. He had never chatted with girls or tried to smoke a cigarette with them, leaning on a windowsill, or asked them if they cared to dance. Until that time, at private parties for adolescents, birthdays, etc., there ruled a strict code of conduct almost typical of a dance hall, but deep down not all that different from the behavior of the aristocrats at balls described in novels like War and Peace, except that the girls didn’t have a little notebook in which to mark down their future beaux chevaliers, and it all took place in a far more disorderly fashion, even if the basic concept remained the same: girls sitting on sofas and settees waiting for someone to approach them with an explicit invitation, “Would you care to dance?” or the more succinct and generic: “Wanna dance?” (which might be greeted with any of several answers, “No,” “Yes,” “Sure, but not with you,” “No, but with you, maybe”), right up to the version that could be read, depending on the tone of voice, as either desperate or else, quite the contrary, almost proof of brash arrogance: “Dance with me?”
Which, of course, applied to slow dances, which demanded direct contact, but also for the faster kind.
Marco d’Avenia recoiled from all this.
DURING PHYS ED, he was visibly excited, albeit inept and awkward in his movements, especially when he wrapped his arms and legs around the climbing pole and hung there, motionless, five feet off the floor, like a lemur clinging to a tree trunk: instead of pulling himself up with the strength of his arms, he just rubbed up against it, clamping the pole between his thighs as his gaze took on a defenseless light, mortified but at the same time brimming over with beatitude.
Even though he feared it as a disaster, in the final analysis he preferred solitude, in the abiding fear that the other boys might discover his tendencies or mock him or attack him. In reality, he felt no desire or erotic impulse, and for the sole reason that this absence of sexual interest of his might be viewed badly or misunderstood by the others, he allowed it to torment him, only the judgment of others made his condition disagreeable, and made him experience it as a fault, a shortcoming. Because, truth be told, if it hadn’t been for this overriding fear, he often felt a curious sweetness, a strange warmth like what you feel when you wet the bed, which is a disgraceful thing that brings with it scoldings and threats, but long, long after it’s happened, whereas then and there, in the immediate aftermath, it’s a wonderful sensation, to feel your body warming itself from interior to exterior, miraculously, as if it wished to wrap itself in a hot, damp, reassuring film. Marco often felt this sensation, on various occasions, almost immediately, though, exactly the way it feels when you pee yourself, accompanied by the worry of being caught and mocked and punished, not so much for having done something you shouldn’t, as for having taken pleasure in it. He feared that in the long run this would ruin his life. As a result, although it was punctuated by so many episodes of forbidden pleasure, happily consigned to oblivion, in which he forgot everything, and first and foremost, himself, regressing toward a sort of cradle of beatitude, the present for Marco d’Avenia was pure misery and his entire future life shaped up in his mind as a burden to be borne.
Since he had a yielding, submissive nature, he had intentionally constructed an attitude designed to conceal his true character. He tended to reject all human interactions, or else he would suspend them the minute they became even slightly more personal, because he knew in advance that he was bound to show himself to be compliant, which he actually was: his shyness was only a mask concealing a languid soul and a flaccid body.
I DON’T THINK that we were particularly cruel, but cruelty fascinated us all. Certainly, the cruelty that is expressed in words and images. We were crazy about Nero and the way he burned Christians or fed them to the lions. What was supposed to inspire pity in Quo Vadis? just met with our enthusiasm. When the gates were flung open and the lions burst into the arena from their underground cages in the Colosseum, we were on the lions’ side. Burn the heretics, crucify the mutinous slaves. No pity for Ulzana. I remember being disturbed and fascinated by a movie where they find the body of a man who had been tied up by Indians at the base of a tree, seated, with a fire burning between his legs, which have been spread open and staked in place. As the men are untying the unfortunate corpse, burned alive and charred from his genitals to his face, one of them comments along these lines: “The Indians are sure good at making sure their prisoners die slowly, suffering as long as possible . . .” Yes, it might have been in Ulzana’s Raid, an atypical and nihilistic Western. The movies in those years launched a genre that still hasn’t died out: movies about cruelty being inflicted on the helpless. What was it that was so irresistible about cruelty? The fact that it was gratuitous, unpredictable, and at the same time, curiously realistic. And therefore necessary. If we compared it to all the sickly sweet things the priests had to say about the need to love one another, hug one another, extend the hand of friendship, sing songs together of jubilation and brotherhood, well, those ferocious Indians who took such brutal revenge seemed to us far more real, and therefore more human in that sense, at least as much as the soldiers in blue who had been sent to massacre them. And the same went for the barbarians with horns on their helmets, or else the Greeks with the Trojans. If this was the way that things had always gone, everywhere and throughout history, wasn’t it simply hypocritical to preach all those sermons to us about relations between people of goodwill and full of optimism, looked down upon from the clouds on high by a God of “infinite goodness,” a God who nonetheless from the beginning of time had never done anything but strike the earth with lightning bolts, flood it, allowing its cities to be consumed by flames and the inhabitants to be put to the sword, without lifting a finger to save them, indeed, expressly ordering them to be exterminated? So where was all this much-ballyhooed mercy, what was the nature of justice anyway if not in a flaming sword unsheathed to punish, or a hail of thunderbolts, or a plague of locusts, or blood, or a rain of frogs . . . (all of them, of course, things that we loved, those incredibly cruel punishments that struck so many innocent people, since we’d sat through at least ten showings of The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston playing Moses, with a beard that grew longer and whiter scene by scene, but after all, was it right for us to love bloodbaths the way we did, even if they took the form of divine justice? And what should we say, in fact, about the infinite goodness of that God who killed all the firstborn sons including the newborns and infants, just to get Pharaoh to finally straighten up and fly right?), and after all, in this cruel world, wasn’t He, the Lord God, the cruelest being of them all? Wasn’t the purpose of prayers merely to jolly Him along a little, to calm His bottomless wrath? Instead of going in search of Him, pursuing Him in every corner of Creation, in the deserts and in the depths of our own hearts, wasn’t He actually someone to look out for, whose talons you could only hope to elude, even though you’d done nothing wrong, seeing that in those (nonetheless riveting) Bible stories it was always the guiltless who died, consumed by fire or drowned in the sea?
If you just barely scratched the surface of the teachings that we were given, a very different version emerged, another religion, a reversal of the moral.
You only had to go a few lines down or a few pages further on, among the episodes less frequently recounted, concealed among the parentheses and the summaries, such as when Achilles slits the throats of a few Trojan prisoners, to celebrate Patroclus’s funeral. There you go! He cuts their throats while they have their hands bound behind their backs. This is stuff they teach you at school (or they used to teach, not anymore, but in my day they taught it—and how) to little kids, age thirteen or fourteen, and they taught it as examples of heroism, models to be imitated, I mean to say, yes, the great Achilles, a legend, a hero! Not a Nazi criminal. And just what was this hero like? Cruel. Indeed, cruel, and that was what was especially superlative about his heroi
sm. Perhaps even crueler than him, because slyer, craftier, was the other hero, for whom we rooted feverishly: Ulysses. The king of Ithaca. Who on an expedition into Troy cut the throats of his enemies as they lay deep in sleep. And Hector’s young son? Ulysses had him hurled off the walls of the city in flames. Once he returned home, he disarmed the suitors so he could massacre them at his ease, and then hanged from the rafters of his palace all the unfaithful serving women. A glourious basterd: but that’s why we liked him. When he drives the stake into the cyclops’s eye, blinds him, and then mocks him . . .
Then there were Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero (who ordered his mother executed) . . . our forefathers.
Nothing can be as arbitrary as cruelty.
By rights, you could describe anything as cruel that might just as easily have been spared the person who is subjected to it. Mistreatment of a prisoner, for example: if the only purpose of his imprisonment is to render him harmless, then why throw in the beating? If all I want to do is immobilize him, then why do I bother cutting him up with a razor blade? Cruelty therefore is the overabundant, anything that goes beyond the strict purpose (and which thereby reveals that strict purpose not to be the real purpose). Whatever contains no practical objective, save for pure enjoyment, on the one hand, and on the other hand a reputation to which, by acting with cruelty, a soldier or a bandit aspires, in order to become more fearsome. They want it known just how pitiless they really are.
Anything that might just as easily have not been done is cruel, when he who has already won could decide to make do without, if only he chose, without his victory being therefore called into question. Cruel is that which is inflicted on those who are incapable of defending themselves, if that cruelty is practiced solely for the reason that they cannot defend themselves. Cruelty is that which offers no right of reply, and therefore it has as its condition and its very reason for being the weakness of those who are subjected to it. Weakness is cruelty’s favorite target. If cruelty is unleashed on the weak, that is not only because he who practices that cruelty can do it without encountering resistance, but because he loves to. It is not merely an obvious ratio of force. Weakness arouses a cruelty that otherwise wouldn’t exist. A person becomes cruel when catching a whiff of someone else’s weakness. And so the ideal object of cruelty is the hostage, the kidnap victim. You can only inflict pain on them pointlessly, because the cruelty does nothing to increase the dominion exercised, which is already total.
Let’s take a frog caught by a gang of kids. It’s certainly not to keep it from escaping that they cut its legs off with a jackknife, or pour a pan of boiling water over it, or stick a lit cigar in its mouth. And so: frogs, lizards, children, sick people, girls, old men and old women, the mentally handicapped, kidnap victims, hostages, prisoners. Cruelty is the way we have of highlighting their subalternate status. It’s a tautology: that which is defenseless doesn’t deserve to be defended. That is why those who act cruelly can convince themselves that they are merely applying in an exemplary fashion a law that cannot be evaded by either those who suffer its rigors or those who inflict them. What can I do about it if you’re incapable of defending yourself from my mistreatment? That is why I inflict that mistreatment upon you. Cruelty is engendered by the inequality among its actors, it has no purpose or objective other than to reiterate itself, whether on a transitory or permanent basis, and whether it responds to an unmodifiable law of nature or a contingent social situation, or merely a fortuitous circumstance whereby you, now, have fallen into my hands, and are therefore at my mercy.
AFTER HAVING HEARD a great deal about it in the past, for the first time I saw on the Internet the series of grainy black-and-white photographs of a Chinese man sentenced to death, who is tied to a pole and, little by little, cut to pieces, that is, literally sliced apart, so that he remains alive and alert while one piece of flesh after another is cut off him, his muscles are resected with great precision, vertically, first his pectoral, then his buttocks, then his thighs, until all that remains of him is a sort of long stump, almost entirely stripped of flesh, with the ribs and other bones glinting white, clearly visible. Only his face is spared the razor, as if they wished to allow the crowd to savor the spectacle of the sensations that he is experiencing minute by minute as he is flayed alive. The procedure is called lingchi. A philosopher who was a scholar and fan of the excessive, Georges Bataille, thought he detected on the lips of the condemned man a smirk that resembles a faint, ineffable smile, probably due only to a nervous contraction, and went so far as to claim that the man was actually enjoying the experience, in a virtually superhuman manner, and that he was in a state of ecstasy. Supreme pain resembles or is even identical to pleasure in one aspect: the out-of-body nature of the experience. While pleasure and pain, joy and terror, are and remain distinctly different things, they do share the quality of being extraordinary, that is, they shatter the normal course of the everyday.
SINCE WICKEDNESS CAN PARTLY BE HEALED, and is partly irremediable, sticks can beat out that which can be modified, that which can be corrected, while axes can lop off that which is incorrigible, says an ancient author. The problem is that corporal punishment is an inadequate form of education, because then there will always be those who receive too much of it, those who (like me, for instance) have been given too little, or none at all. It is difficult to apply just the right amount to make it effective: too much deforms, too little tickles, none at all causes regret.
YOU COULD SPIT IN SOMEONE like Marco d’Avenia’s face ten times a day, if you wanted to.
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NO, YOU CAN’T. No, you don’t. No, you mustn’t. And, no, that’s not something you can say.
You don’t point your finger at people, you don’t whisper in people’s ears, you don’t yawn without putting your hand in front of your mouth, you don’t show familiarity with strangers, you don’t keep people waiting if you have an appointment, you don’t betray promises you’ve made. You don’t bother people. I grew up with only one oath in my heart: I shall not disturb. Ever. Anyone. Not even if you’re dying of blood loss with an arrow piercing your throat, even then you don’t bother other people by pestering them with requests for help. Not disturbing means not disturbing the peace, not interrupting the brief postprandial nap (sacred), the serenity of the after-dinner interlude (likewise, sacred), and therefore, no phone calls to a home after eight o’clock in the evening. In a certain sense, you shouldn’t even disturb yourself. I have to confess that this minor and apparently secondary precept, just as it was first taught to me, remains one of the few valid ones among my ever-vacillating convictions: I try to practice it as best I can, and I am endlessly grateful to those who observe it when it comes to me, and thus spare me any given disturbance. That’s right, they spare me. From the dubious education and upbringing that I received, what I have preserved is the counterintuitive principle that warmth, love, and affection can also be shown to us by not doing something, by avoiding, by letting slide, remaining silent, and steering clear, in fact, by sparing us bitternesses, annoyances, useless punctilios, interruptions, intrusions. How often, instead, the manifestation of one’s ideas and sentiments, even the positive ones, takes the form of afflicting one’s neighbor! Therefore, to emotions displayed I prefer emotion contained, a sentiment that clearly shows some effort has been made to control it.
In a previous book of mine, in order to characterize his personality, I wrote that my father did not love music. Now I’ve reached the conclusion that he considered it deserving of classification with any other garden variety of disturbance. In other words, an incomprehensible and deliberate violation of silence, however refined and even sublime it might be, which if anything only makes things worse, inasmuch as it is thus the work of people not bereft of civility, who therefore ought to have known better. Those orchestral eruptions, such as Beethoven’s Ninth—how they must have rung conceited and unasked-for to his ears! What need was there to splash in the face of other people such a tidal wave of the tragic, an
d at top volume? Or the noisy dancing cheerfulness of the Pastorale? And the horns, the brass section? Why can’t you go blare it somewhere else, and not under my window, he seemed to be saying, as if there were no real difference between the Berlin Philharmonic and a chorus of car horns in a traffic jam. To say nothing of pop music or rock or jazz or easy listening . . .
(I won’t even begin to say what it was like to sit next to my father on the sofa, watching a broadcast of videos of Devo doing their covers of “Satisfaction” or “R U Experienced?”)
THE UPBRINGING I RECEIVED was necessarily contradictory, as was the upbringing I handed down, in turn, to my own children. Made up of a grab bag of disparate elements—hygiene language ethics culture and so on—that are in part consciously inherited in part adopted by default and in part fabricated on one’s own—it may seem advanced in some areas and quite backwards in others. Here and there I have applied to my own children norms dating back perhaps to my grandparents or great-grandparents or even farther—nineteenth-century relics, in short. In many ways, my parents were more open than I am and they certainly were if you consider the years in which they played their roles: for instance, I don’t recall them ever sticking their noses into my personal business, monitoring my phone calls, and so on. Since every family lies at the intersection of multiple generations, and therefore constitutes an overlay of different customs, every family winds up being at once traditional and modern, both archaic and reckless to a fault. The boundary between old and new ways is a jagged one, a patchwork of behaviors convictions and punctilios: as they jostle and take each other’s place, the generations first reject and then wind up adopting at least in part the rules handed down from their parents, remodeling them on their own children and their own times. Certain pat phrases, mindless gestures, automatisms. Systems concerning which I said to myself: “The day I have children of my own, that’s something I will never do,” well, in the end, that was exactly what I did end up doing. All the same fateful words, “This house is not a hotel, you know,” no, I never once uttered them. If ever a family could be in everything and entirely traditional or modern, in a clear, unequivocal way, then all internal debates would die aborning, or else they’d break out into open conflict. Instead they go on endlessly nurturing and feeding on incongruities.
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