AMONG MY CONTEMPORARIES, I know hardly anyone whose memories aren’t inhabited by a depressed mother, in the throes of inexplicable migraines, subjected to sleep cures or other therapies, mothers unwilling to get out of bed or leave the bedroom during the long, shadowy winter afternoons. A mother with perfect posture who heaves deep sighs, each respiration as if she were inhaling opium, as coils of steam rise from the cups of tea sipped in the parlor with her mother-in-law or the girlfriends who drop in for a visit. As they leaf through their photo albums, these elegantly dressed young housewives, often very beautiful, exude an unconstrained sadness, their mascaraed eyes staring down at the gray sea, the silhouette of the Alps, the happy moments that appear static, however, too heartrending, almost painful in the end, even if we’re just talking about a vacation, it wasn’t wartime, after all. Their hairstyles look alike.
WHO IS THE AUDIENCE before whom the gleaming silver is displayed, who will bother to notice the absence of dust on the credenzas and shelving? Once upon a time, it was the ranks of kith and kin, aunts, grandmothers, cousins, whose numbers have dwindled in recent years, as has the frequency of their visits, as their judgments have gradually become less and less crucial, while many guests deep down would be delighted to abolish even these last remaining processional displays. Christmases, birthdays, communion and confirmation parties. Do people even still go through confirmation, these days? And if so, what’s the result? That the silver remains buried in old suitcases tucked away in closets, like stolen property (and in a certain sense, maybe it is . . .), the furniture with the fingerprints, the poorly ironed shirts, the plastic utensils, the children just so many little savages, and everyone even more frustrated than before, women most of all, since that residual list of chores to be added to work already won as a right instead of rejected as a sentence, a burden, will just be added to the responsibilities they already face.
In the families where the mother did nothing other than to look after the children, when the children grew up and became adults and moved out, the mother would slide into a crisis, starved for both affection and a reason to live. To what could she devote herself? In any case, the best way to continue to keep her busy is to cause all sorts of dismay, keep her up nights, break her heart. Like troublesome children, the criminals who committed the rape and murder in a villa on the coast kept their families very busy, causing trouble at the age when children normally stop causing it. The mother who goes to clean up the house after the torture, as if it were some sort of New Year’s party, the father of another one of the criminals who bribes correctional officers. Seriously, those parents were forced to work overtime and went on looking after the scions of the family for the rest of their lives, handing out tips and paying lawyers’ fees, opening special accounts, bribing functionaries, hiring expert witnesses, fabricating documents, phoning apprehensively overseas, just like the families that send their children to study English in Oxford over the summer.
HOW TO MAKE ONE’S WAY in the world? The best way was to listen to your parents’ instructions, because they knew all the right recipes. All you had to do was apply them. Then the world started speeding up, faster and faster, and then too fast. Little by little their expertise began to be called into question, their experiences and their tastes began to fall behind. A son, however obedient, felt torn whether to accept notions (technical, and also moral) that were now useless and out of date, imparted by his parents, or else to accept more recent notions that were in clear and open conflict with the former. For their part, the more self-aware parents began to realize uneasily that their body of knowledge was being drained of its significance: even though some of their axioms still sounded right and just, at least in abstract terms, how could they honestly hand them down to their children? It would be like asking them to study geography with an atlas bearing the borders of 1989, 1939, or 1914. Every parent suddenly became nineteenth-century in their beliefs and knowledge. They were backdated with a sudden shove that knocked them into the arms of their grandparents. And they found themselves (as they still do) in the condition of the immigrant whose children know much better than he or she does the language and the customs of the country they live in. Parents became chronic misfits, deserving of faint smiles of commiseration. Therefore, in a way that was at once tragic, ridiculous, and steeped in heartbreaking pathos, a good parent must refrain from handing down ideals and rules of behavior (codes that they have followed all their lives) lest they cause their children to become maladjusted. Those ideas remain valid, but only for them, and they will cherish them as long as they live, but those good parents will not be able to profess them openly nor teach them. What is required of a parent, if they wish to be a good parent, is that they simply cease to act like a parent. Let it be, it’s what common sense and my own fatherly or motherly love demand, I’ll stop teaching them about a subject I don’t actually know as well as I once thought I did: life. That’s what a good parent says to himself, and by this point he has shrunk so tiny that he vanishes from the horizon. Careful, though, weak parents are by no means the same as unimportant parents, because other people’s weaknesses, like our own, are decisive in our lives. If previously children were subjugated by force, now they depend upon weakness. A silken leash is every bit as hard to break as a steel one. Starting in the years in which this story unfolds, an implacable law was taking shape, which marked the new relations between parents and children: less prestige = more affection. Less authority = more love. Countless fathers and mothers therefore came to this conclusion: well, then, seeing that I can no longer be believed or feared or respected, I might as well see about being loved. I won’t do anything that might endanger the love that my children feel for me. Let me take myself as an example. Many, I’d even say all of the mistakes that I’ve made in my children’s upbringing have been due to this spasmodic, slightly cowardly need for affection, my failure to meet the less agreeable duties of a parent in order to ensure myself gratitude, benevolence, and fondness from my children. “Deep down, I’m a good father . . . proof of the fact is that they love me.” A father, in other words, as a sort of indulgent grandfather, or an understanding—because in the final analysis irresponsible—elder brother.
Relations between generations, then, instead of a system of reciprocal duties and bonds, became an extortionate sentimental game.
My generation found itself teetering between the influence of a declining parental authority that remained, however, still powerful, utterly unwilling to give up its prerogatives—and the growing domination of fashion, the sway of the markets of taste and behavior, consumerism as the only way to enter into contact with the world. Perhaps during this interregnum we were freer, since the new gods had not securely seated themselves on the thrones just abandoned by those that had fled—or perhaps we were the servants of two masters and not just of one, as had been the case for the previous generation, which had been entirely subordinated to the command of the family, and as it would be for the subsequent generation, wholly enslaved by the market. Without recognized masters or else serving under a double yoke. The topic of this book is entirely wrapped up here, in this question: How free were we? Free of what? Free to do what? Many of us experienced scraps of old-style family oppression, hybridized or alternating with a permissiveness that was still the product of our parents’ specific beliefs, not due to their exhaustion, the waning of their mental energies, or poor habits. In order to be modern and open-minded, nowadays, with your children, you need only ignore them and the game is done. I mean to say that this was a period when freedom still had a price and was not merely a by-product, a collateral effect. It was conquered in brusque, sharp episodes, or else conceded in pioneering open-minded awakenings, by a reformer proud to have undertaken real change. In other words, both in order to be stubbornly old-fashioned and in order to establish freer relations in the family, parents had to make a conscious investment, and that took a great deal of conviction. There existed no clear trend to go along with. The arrows of morality point
ed in all directions—a veritable compass rose. While nowadays freedom is like one of those immense Atlantic beaches from which the tide has withdrawn, leaving the sand covered with litter, and you find that expanse at your disposal without having had to do a thing, and nothing is exactly what you will be able to do when the ocean decides to reclaim it.
AUTHORITY, unless it wishes to become arbitrary and repressive, must be based on reasonableness and affection, but by so doing, it liquidates the very principle of authority.
The idea, reasonable at first glance, that reasonableness provokes automatic consensus and compromise from one and all is very naïve.
My generation scorned the word and the concept of obedience.
To obey was tantamount to making oneself ridiculous, pitiable, pathetic.
What had been considered for centuries to be a precious value, and was still touted as such, was to us a humiliating practice.
We were disgusted by the prospect of having to be inducted, sooner or later, into military service.
There, in the barracks, we were going to be obliged to obey.
Orders and commands devoid of sense, such as moving bags from one side of the courtyard to the other, gave a good measure of the concept.
There was nothing more unjust than an order.
Every word of imposition had to be contradicted.
We worshipped and revered anyone who refused to truckle under, who rejected obedience: rebels, revolutionaries, anarchists, conscientious objectors, banditti, cangaceiros, the ones who never keel and never bow their heads.
But we bowed ours.
We obeyed.
We obeyed, at school, at home, on Saturdays with our friends, we obeyed unwritten laws, but we did nothing to undercut their binding force.
I think of myself as an independent kind of guy, and I’m foolishly proud of the fact, but in reality I’ve never done anything else in my life but to obey the rules that are woven around me in an invisible but very stout spiderweb, indeed, at certain points I have clutched them tight, the way you might cling to a safety net, or perhaps I myself was the spider that spun those webs of rules, produced them and walked on them, those webs protected me, if I observed them, and if I chanced to tear them, I would have plunged into the void below.
And in the meantime, how we scorned the obedient ones! Soldiers, monks, functionaries, lackeys, servants (who in reality almost always disobey).
IF YOU UNDERTAKE a brief bibliographic research project nowadays, you will find that the term “obedience” can be found exclusively in religious publications. You obey, or rather you ought to obey, God, and the authorities who represent Him on earth. The Church is the last earthly institution that seriously demands obedience.
A BOURGEOIS EDUCATION CONSISTS of obeying not others but oneself, obeying laws that you impose upon yourself. They teach them to you in your family, that is true, but then you go on respecting them and in the end you wind up preaching them yourself because you have become convinced that there could be nothing better, difficult not to be in agreement with them, not to see that there is no higher form of civilization than that which teaches you to reduce disagreeable occasions to the bare minimum attainable, to spare yourself and other people those occasions. Curse words, yawns, references to feces and urine, arrogance, rudeness, sources of annoyance. On this plane, minor annoyances can be even more deadly than outright evil because, as etiquette tells us, one may be exposed to them repeatedly and on a daily basis, causing us each time a small displeasure that, however, building up little by little over time, in countless instances, can become immense, just as the minor virtues end up being more beneficial than the great ones, given that the former are performed far more often than the latter. The unbroken sting of mosquitoes is, from a statistical point of view, more annoying than the unlikely bite from a lion, and therefore, you should reach for a bottle of insecticide, not a rifle. Numbers trump weight. It is on this sage axiom that the bourgeois education and upbringing is based, so we can hardly complain if it focuses for the most part on minutiae, because its universe is in fact that of mosquitoes and horseflies, not tigers and lions, which, let’s face it, you’ll never once run into in a lifetime. Everyday annoying people, not murderers, call us on the phone. How often in modern bourgeois life does one have an opportunity to display courage? Courage is a virtue that has application in rare and exceptional circumstances. Of nearly all the people I know (and the same goes for myself), I would be unable to say whether they are courageous or cowardly, since I have never once seen them actually put to the test, and I can proceed only by suppositions, with imaginary projections into dramatic scenarios, where they would be required to prove once and for all just who they are, and what they would be capable of, and I’d be basing myself on the attitudes they have displayed in far less significant circumstances, the kind offered by everyday life. You’d have to hypothesize events that normal existence rules out or renders unlikely. There was a time, no doubt, when a man would require some guts to go from Rome to Tivoli, or to cross a river or walk through a forest, nowadays only a victim of truly unfortunate circumstances can actually learn what lies at the bottom of his heart, and there are people who live an entire lifetime without getting that chance. Ignorant of themselves. Therefore the term and the very concept of courage recede toward a milieu out of something like novelistic fancy, turning into a papiermâché creation like the ship in The Black Corsair, or else they’re trivialized in metaphorical phrases of this sort: “It takes some courage to wear that dress to the party!” or else restricted to a very specific context, albeit terribly common, specifically the way certain sick people face up to their disease, depicted as an enemy to be combatted, even more treacherous in that it is internal, whereas perhaps other words might be better suited, such as firmness or patience. When life seems to offer no opportunities to put oneself to the test, then we reproduce them “in vitro,” in a laboratory, or we go out intentionally in search of them: by jumping off a bridge into a gorge hanging from a giant rubber band, etc.
THEREFORE, even if someone is courageous, they have no way of knowing it, and a person himself is the first to be surprised if he finds himself reacting in a resolute manner in the face of an emergency. After surviving it, they look around full of amazement. Was that really me who dove into the water like that . . .? Who responded defiantly to that huge powerful guy and his friends . . .? Well, how about that, I did all right . . . You unexpectedly find that you’re an intrepid, audacious soul, and you might even be impatient to find another opportunity to put these virtues to the test and feel the thrill, the instinctive charge, but the thing is, you don’t know exactly how to make that happen, where and how, so you’re forced to create the conditions intentionally, by taking risks or even putting someone else in danger. It’s hard to tell courage from recklessness, self-destructiveness, or even sheer imbecility, the boundaries aren’t entirely clear. A subtle vein of idiocy wends its way through every undertaking that would otherwise be difficult to accomplish; it’s different from cases in which idiocy is the only discernible motive for one’s actions. That also explains why sometimes it is people who are absolutely stupid that carry out particularly risky deeds, and why in certain groups that commit violent acts, the leader might be a full-blown psychopath, who lacks important elements of executive function and self-control and therefore dares to do things at the thought of which others would quail. I have often wondered whether those who lack inhibitory brakes are mental defectives or superior beings, in short whether they have something more or something less than other people. There is a singular grandeur and an equally profound poverty in a willingness to stop at nothing, no act, no intention. To dare incessantly may sharpen our minds and sling them farther and farther until they plunge into the indistinct mist; once you’ve outstripped conventional limitations, it’s difficult to set others that cannot, in their turn, be surpassed, you move in other words through a boundless field of feasibility, any new initiative becomes obsolete on the spot, a
nd therefore you are obliged to intensify all your mental and physical excesses, you have to strive to do or say titanic, outrageous, monstrous, glorious, infamous challenges, never sufficient, never sufficiently monstrous and glorious. This is exactly what a hero is. This is a hero’s delirium. His ability to produce salvation and violence is bottomless, until eventually the two things come to equal each other: like the tip of Achilles’s spear, which wounds and then heals.
BOURGEOIS MORALITY IS NOT REQUIRED to deal with extraordinary events, and therefore neither does it countenance the qualities required to confront them. The proverb says: you go to the market with coins, not with gold ingots. Courage, therefore, is not contemplated in this book of etiquette. Courtesy, on the other hand, is indeed a virtue no doubt less glorious, along with good manners, discretion, qualities that we employ countless times a day. They affect a far greater number of people around us, with frequency such that they can profoundly alter their lives and ours. Without these traits life descends into pure barbarity. A rude or obnoxious person has a thousand opportunities to embitter us, while a truly evil, vicious person, who might certainly have far more serious and weighty effects upon us, nonetheless has objectively fewer chances to do so. They can do us great harm, this is true, but we need only steer clear of those few occasions and we will be safe. It seemed that there were never any lions lurking around the corner, ready to rend someone limb from limb in the QT, and indeed there couldn’t have been. So what we worried about was how to keep down the mosquitoes. Our education was based on euphemism, attenuation, and accommodation. In conversation, what had to be avoided were vulgarities, of course, but also subjects that tended to overheat the temper, or topics that were too profound and touching. (The purpose of conversation, in fact, is not to clash and argue, but to reassure ourselves that we belong to the same group.) You must never point at the people you’re talking with and never, never mock those with physical defects. At the dinner table, you were not to stretch or yawn or whistle or sing or scratch yourself. When the serving platter arrived, and you must never call for it, you were to serve yourself with moderation and then pass it on. Good manners were exercised in both the things you did and the things you did not do, in speaking but especially in remaining silent. The list of inappropriate words and phrases varied from family to family. At my house, it was considered bad manners to say “Che schifo” (“How disgusting”), and it was an enormous relief, on a trip once with our parents, to discover that there exists a Renaissance villa called Schifanoia, in Ferrara, and we toured it. From that day on, it made no sense for them to forbid us to use such a lofty and cultivated word.
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