And then, this is the principal engine driving people to work, to earn more, to venture beyond the mere, bare necessities: even the most selfish individual needs to be able to envision the handing down of the fruit of his labors in the form of an inheritance, thus fully satisfying his original selfishness and egotism, making him immortal and beneficent, deserving of gratitude. Why would we even be doing it, if we were only working for ourselves? We are almost never the objective of our own actions. We feel the need to transcend ourselves: and if that does not take the form of writing a memorable symphony, or standing up to the enemy on the walls of your city, then we might always try pushing a heap of money beyond the horizon of our life, like a croupier’s rake moving toward the winner of a hand of cards. This is demonstrated by the state of abulia into which people without any prospects or responsibilities toward others so often slip—be they confirmed bachelors, irreducible singles, those who chiefly cultivate their own individual welfare. To think only of oneself, take one’s own pulse, do push-ups and drink centrifuged carrot and pomegranate juice, is cloying and, over the long run, fails to produce gratitude in anyone else, and ultimately ends up depressing even the very narcissistic impulses that generated the egotistical thoughts in the first place. We make those so-called sacrifices first and foremost in order to get into the game, to throw ourselves into the action, for the thrill of risk, otherwise we might just as well stay at home and do nothing. I’ve never understood, for example, how certain people manage to cook just for themselves. Dishes like risotto, peperonata. They could just throw together a sandwich and be done with it. After all, nobody is going to compliment them on the risotto, no one’s going to sit in rapt admiration of the dome of their soufflé before deflating it with the tines of a fork. Almost all the things we do, we do to others or for others, but it’s not altruism by any stretch of the imagination, rather it’s the need to express ourselves, to make ourselves seen and heard, we have a desperate need for an audience, clients, recipients, guinea pigs, beneficiaries, and victims of our actions . . . whip, chop, mince, sauté, flambé, lard, stuff . . . and all for yourself? Just the names of these various culinary techniques lose their meaning. Any gesture that rises above the level of the most elementary is inevitably performed toward someone.
Parents are the audience for whom the children tread the stage every evening. Siblings are the audience for their siblings. And then the performance is put on with roles reversed, and the actors go to take their orchestra seats.
3
THE RULES IN A FAMILY are dictated by financial resources. If they are abundant, then they tend to lay out what you can do. If they are restricted, they prescribe that which you must do. The family’s patrimony is the beginning of everything; the individual always comes on stage after the show has begun. The patrimony is the very purpose of the family, to be protected and increased, or else, in some cases, to be torn to shreds, squandered, destroying it: in the chronicles of lines of inheritance, stories are handed down of legendary spendthrifts, poker-playing uncles, or others who spent freely on women, grandfathers with crazy entrepreneurial impulses, who bet it all on engines that ran on water or on a business selling boiling ice, champions of carelessness or full-fledged embezzlers, who ran through the whole sum in a single night, or in a decade or so, carving hemorrhages into the destinies of their descendants. In other words, people who influenced our lives long before we even came into the world. A bankrupt forebear swings from the ceiling in the gallery of every family. Next to him there are, instead, illustrious paranoids who spent an entire lifetime obsessed with the defense of their patrimony. Let us honor their neuroses, thanks to which we can nowadays purchase our salmon presliced.
The scope of the economic damage that we can tolerate gives the exact measurement of our wealth. True luxury would be to blithely ignore any such harm, or to leave unpunished whoever inflicts that loss upon us through carelessness or incompetence, especially if we are talking about ourselves: we really would like to be able to pardon ourselves with some noble gesture. But in order to be able to afford the nonchalant elegance of epic squandering, those who scraped together the fortune in the first place must have come before us. Much of the cohesiveness of the bourgeois family springs up (or until some time ago sprang up) around the multiplication and handing down of assets. I had a classmate named Busoni, number four in the class ledger after your author, Arbus, and Barnetta, who was obliged to hurry home to drink a toast with his father every time the old man landed a deal. It happened a number of times: after a phone call he’d turn serious, apologize to his friends, and then hurry away home to pop the cork on the champagne. With his father, his mother, and his siblings, I’d imagine, gathered in the living room, or perhaps in the kitchen, close to the fridge. The ceremony might seem grotesque but, after all, if you think about it, why not? It wasn’t really all that strange: that something should have been shown off and celebrated in order to cement the bond among the family members, allowing them to join in as participants in their father’s success, was in contrast carefully concealed in my family, censored, unspeakable, and barely even visible through the indirect forms it took such as paintings or porcelain: earnings, profits. What was vulgar was not, of course, the fact of getting money—but to display it, that unquestionably smacked of great vulgarity. It is typical of bourgeois families both to show off money and the prosperity that comes with it, and to conceal it or, rather, to make it implicit, refer to it only discreetly: we have it, thank heavens, but we are not to speak of it. Ever.
IN THOSE DAYS, bourgeois families were the bourgeoisie, they represented their class in its entirety. You cannot imagine or illustrate bourgeois life as anything other than family life, nor can you feature the bourgeois home except as a residence designed to house a family. The alleged individualism of the middle class in its original form presents itself as an attribute of the nuclear family. The family is the true bourgeois subject, much more than the individual people who make up that family, it is the organism struggling to attain its ultimate affirmation, the purveyor of a supremely selfish and combative vision of the world. And it cannot be identified in the single leadership figure of the father, old-school style, or be reckoned up in terms of the mere addition of individuals that compose it: in other words, the bourgeois family possesses a very specific personality and strength. To say nothing of its vices and diseases.
I REMEMBER HOW I once tried out the scornful Marxist vernacular while arguing with my father. The subject was political engagement. He didn’t consider it to be necessary nor of any superior moral worth in comparison with the activity of honestly pursuing one’s own personal interests. In response to his somewhat peeved question: “What if someone thinks of nothing in life but his own family, his children?” “Then he’s a filthy pig,” I replied.
THE CONSTITUENT ELEMENTS of a family are: a) the people and b) the things, plus a third category that bonds the first two together, and that is c) the relations, which in their turn fall into one of three types: 1) relations between people and other people, 2) between people and things, and last of all, 3) again between people and other people but this time as a function of, or through, the property owned. This last relationship, then, can be described as between “proprietors.” That is, between people who own things. This relationship is usually a competitive one, and therefore to prevent conflicts within the traditional family no one, except for the head of the family, possessed anything of their own, nor could they claim any financial independence (in a quick aside we might note that those who have no economic independence have no independence at all). It is the head of the family who, at his own discretion, distributes money to the other family members (“loosens the purse strings” is the apt expression—coughs up, antes up, or the equivalents in Italian: sganciare, or unhook, scucire, or unstitch). Things don’t change much if the distributions are generous or miserly, if they take place in wealthy or poverty-stricken settings. A vow of poverty, so to speak, on the monastic model, can regulate
a wealthy family, if that which passes through your hands can never accurately be called yours, truly your own. Property means just that, an exclusive possession, proper to one person. At my house, nothing could be said to belong to anyone and everything belonged to everyone. The sense of property was abolished. Selfishness and egotism were unthinkable. If a Vespa was purchased for, let’s say, me, then that Vespa, even if I drove it, implicitly belonged to my brothers, who would have the right to use it whenever they wanted. Gifts, too, were often collective in nature. In our minds and, actually, in cold hard fact, everything belonged to my father: it originated with him and was endowed by him to the rest of us only in usufruct, if at all. That fact led my brothers and me to encounter some serious issues of both a practical and a symbolic nature with our management of the family estate after the death of the head of the family, whereupon the estate was split up and entrusted to each of us. It wasn’t a matter of conflict among us, as is so often the case, but quite the opposite, a matter of confusion, of blurring, as if that patrimony were still held in common and had remained intact. Who is supposed to pay for what, who is in charge of what, who is responsible for . . .? Even the documentation, twenty years after my father’s death and the divvying up of the property, all of the documentation pertaining to the estate is held together in one place, and not out of any bitterness or regret. When I got married and I had to file a declaration making all my property jointly owned with my wife, I literally owned nothing. Maybe a motor scooter. Even now I have a hard time referring to the property that my father left me in his will as “mine.” I continue to think of it all as belonging to him and therefore, inasmuch as his, indirectly ours. But certainly not mine. A truly singular kind of communism. The one exception to that regime are the gifts my father gave my mother: dresses, shoes, jewelry, all those were, obviously, jealously and morbidly personal. But there we’re not talking about family, we’re talking about love.
SO, ARE WE TO ASSUME that succession, the hereditary transmission of property, is the principal factor holding the bourgeois family together? It might be the motive driving the hard work of the head of the family, but in point of fact, it can actually constitute an element of division and enmity, quite the opposite of cohesion, since every family is destined to split up into new families that the children will form with perfect strangers, who might be viewed as saboteurs of the family’s original, underlying integrity.
By the essentially egalitarian nature of the right of inheritance, the patrimony of a bourgeois family is something that, it is well known, will eventually be split up, shared out: it exists as an intact structure only formally, and for no more than a generation, whereupon it is dismembered. Dismemberment is inscribed in its makeup from day one: that is the fate assigned to it.
THE TRANSCENDENTAL IMPULSE in the accumulation of a patrimony also manifests itself in the exquisitely religious nature of its transmission, the way it’s handed down. The last will and testament in which that transmission is formalized and sealed is a gift that a dying person bestows upon the living to secure for themselves a serene and untroubled journey into the afterlife. Let’s call it a form of restitution, an offering . . . The dying man performs that act not out of any particular generosity or as a celebration of self, or even out of attachment to his own flesh and blood, but rather as a preliminary step of separation, the unclothing of the earthly aspects of oneself. While a powerful man once took all his most precious goods with him so that his soul presented itself to the gods of the underworld decked out and richly adorned, he now has to show up naked. At the very instant in which he relinquishes his possessions, he is given one last opportunity to make a great show of equanimity: the drafting of his will. I remember as if it were yesterday the meticulousness with which my father calculated and recalculated the portioning out of his belongings, applying countless different parameters, and on the basis of these reckonings he created a testamentary disposition that ensured that each of his heirs was given the right amount. The right amount? The problem is that the right amount never remains right over the course of time: it oscillates, it varies, in order to update it would require an endless array of reparations and compensations. In the last few months of his life, it had become an obsession, the sole occupation of his aggravated soul, the one paradoxical form of faith in an afterlife, since, riddled with metastases as he was, he might just as easily have ignored entirely the problem of whether the parking space in the basement on Via Parenzo was to go to me or my brother.
He would sit in his dressing gown at the table where he usually played hands of solitaire, but instead of a deck of cards he would have a calculator and graph paper notepads, which he’d fill with dense, crabbed calculations. In pencil. He’d work the numbers over and over again, a thousand times. He’d tirelessly update his estimations, some of which could be attained by simple and reasonably objective calculations, valid for the immediate present, while others were more evanescent, fluctuating, the fruit of predictions that necessarily extended out many years after his impending death, and there the margins of subjective guesswork were proportional to the level of anguish unleashed at the thought of his own passing, his own nonexistence. In the throes of a scrupulousness that verged on the hysterical, he strove to exert a mastery over time that was well out of his reach. It’s very much like someone tied to a chair trying to seize an object that is several yards away. The right amount is never the product of a mathematical calculation, otherwise all you would have to do is divide it all by four and your job would be done.
And instead: predispose correctives and amortizations, hypothesize devaluations, adjust the shares in accordance with the personal profile of each heir; whose needs were never the same, according to age, sex, aspiration . . .
How can you determine if a son or daughter will or won’t be successful? Will he make his fortune, will he earn money by the bucket, will she marry a rich man, will he marry a rich woman, and then maybe be divorced, will he end up living on the street, will he commit suicide, will he lead a sober and dignified life with just a hint of squalor, will he fail miserably at everything he sets out to do, will he set himself goals beyond his scope or beneath his abilities, attaining them with too little effort and even less satisfaction, will he squander the money left him by his daddy, eating away at the estate, in small mouthfuls, until nothing is left but the crumbs . . . will he become a rock star, a surgeon with gifted hands and bank accounts in Luxembourg, a highly respected university professor . . .
My father spent the last hours of his life tapping numbers into a virtual calculator that, after his death, proved to be fallacious, through no fault of his own, but because reality never stands around waiting, and more important, the numbers that you use to measure an estate, an inheritance, never really stand still for a second, they zip up and down like rubber balls.
Some values dropped and others remained there, motionless, or else skyrocketed.
OF THE RICHES that belong to us unjustly, we are the usurpers and thieves; of those to which we instead have fair and just title, we are only the temporary managers. There exists a scrupulous and exacting ethical standard according to which all the things we own are nothing but loans, which we are called upon to return the day we die, the way you return your room key when you check out of a hotel. We inhabited it, and nothing more. Even though we think the exact opposite of him, in other words, that he is attached to his possessions, I believe that the bourgeois has to a very large extent actually adopted the morality in question. He is bound and obliged, on point of death, to return his patrimony, amplified and enhanced, or at the very least, identical, certainly undiminished with respect to what was consigned to him; that would be worse than humiliating, it would be nefarious. If that happens, then what was the point of his life? It we accept that nothing actually belongs to us, it certainly doesn’t mean that we’re not expected to scrupulously preserve and increase the gifts that fate assigned to us. What renders imperative the duty of accumulation, and what defends the bourge
ois against any and all negative considerations concerning the vanity of attachment to material things, is in fact the powerful awareness that the restitution of that patrimony at the end of his life will not benefit some blurry and indistinct whole, say, the world or society at large, but his own children. Even his own body, his corpse, will be assigned to his children. A bourgeois without money and without children is by definition no longer a bourgeois, he has no title to the name, and if a bourgeois isn’t a bourgeois then he isn’t really even a human being.
MY FATHER’S ANCIENT, sublime, simple gesture of reaching for his wallet. I can’t remember, I think, a single time when he said no. At the very most, a faint skeptical smile, a hint of sarcasm accompanied by the pride of always, and in every case, being able to fork over. To be ready with cash in pocket, rolls of bills fresh from the bank, to satisfy any and every need, whether for my mother or anyone else in the house who might need cash. Ready to lay down “cash on the barrelhead.” It seemed endless, to us children, the wads of money folded in the back pockets of his trousers, bound together in bundles with yellow rubber bands, or else tucked away inside the ample covers of Trevelyan’s History of England (who knows why that book out of all others), as I wrote a few pages back, which, moreover, was a book of mine, I had received it as a gift for my fourteenth birthday. Who would dare give Trevelyan to a fourteen-year-old boy nowadays, instead of, say, a PlayStation, even if that boy was a shy and bookish grind, without expecting to have it flung at their head the minute the gift was unwrapped . . .? Who can imagine what my parents supposed, what they expected from me, when they gave me that demanding, burdensome gift. I read Trevelyan’s history from the first line to the last without the slightest idea of why I was doing it: perhaps the best way to read it. The War of the Roses pierced my chest and settled down into my kidneys, and the countless Henrys stood watch around the perimeter of my bedroom, menacing and bloody. Once merely a book, it later became the household coffers, our family treasure chest. The cash was stuffed into the middle of that book, somewhere around the Gunpowder Plot. Whenever you took out a banknote or two, you couldn’t help but read details about how Guy Fawkes was hanged and quartered. “Remember remember / the Fifth of November . . .” The money available to us was in fact far from endless, as it had once seemed, and I have the sensation it must have dwindled in the last years of my father’s life, from a certain point onward the cycle reversed—more money went out than came in. A tendency that only accelerated after his death.
The Catholic School Page 54
