And as he did, he murmured: “There’s nothing I can do about it. But I just want you to know that you’re causing me a great deal of pain through your actions . . .”
And the head-banging continues.
I read once that in England up until the eighteenth century it was customary to pair a scion of the nobility with a son of peasants the same age, to serve as a sort of double, a proxy. A relationship of equivalency between the two boys: since the aristocrat could not be given corporal punishment, whenever he committed some misdeed, the peasant boy was whipped in his stead. And he was dubbed, in fact, the whipping boy. Had the rich boy stolen jam from the kitchen? Then the poor boy got the whipping, and what was the result? That the rich boy, even if he hadn’t tasted the blows of the switch, was thought to suffer from pangs of guilt and sorrow for the blows his poor companion had received. In the case that I described above, it was the parent who chose to take the role of whipping boy for his daughter: he maltreated himself instead of punishing her. The spectacle was a pathetic one, but the self-punishment did achieve the goal of afflicting the guilty party, that is the girl, who in fact became increasingly eccentric over time and finally went completely mad.
In middle school, I had a classmate named Venanzio, one of the very few students at SLM who managed to flunk entirely, and so he transferred to a different school. At his house, his parents went old-school, pounding away, beating him for the slightest shortcoming, until this habit of theirs caused a very singular incident.
He must have been about twelve years old when his mother, infuriated because he had been outside playing, instead of inside studying, gave him a good hard smack, only the latest in a long succession of them, and not a particularly violent one, but it was well aimed. Where? At the seat of his pants. The seat of the pants where, for centuries, the corrective frenzy of schoolteachers and kin had found its target. And Venanzio’s mother had such an extra-fine, well-honed technique that she could have taken on the task of serial-spanking all the kids of the quarter. But the fact is that Venanzio, on that afternoon out and about with the rest of us, had stocked up on firecrackers (left over from the New Year’s celebrations), and at the very moment his mother let fly, the back pocket of his trousers was stuffed full of them.
Miccette is what we call in Rome those little firecrackers an inch and a half or two inches in length, their fuses braided into strings of twenty or so: light that fuse and they go off in rapid succession, making a tremendous racket. Venanzio must have had a hundred or so miccette in his pocket, but his mother didn’t happen to notice the bulge, and she had no time to notice because the minute my friend walked into his home, after the door opened at his knock, his mother, without a word, simply stepped aside and let him walk past her, and then spun around and hit him, with her hand opened wide, like a spatula, right on his ass.
It was the most powerful spanking ever given in all of human history. Upon impact, the miccette all went off at the same time with a roar and Venanzio was propelled forward, rocketing across the room with a spectacular burst of flame that burned his mother’s hand but that especially burned him. It took three weeks in the hospital and then months of ointments and bandages before the burn was entirely healed; it seemed to be incurable, as if the absurd manner in which it had been procured somehow had a negative effect on the normal process of scar formation, and even now Venanzio has an unfortunate reminder between buttock and hip, a sort of round stamp the diameter of a tea saucer, he sometimes tugs down the elastic band of his trunks to show it off at the beach. The flesh there is white and fibrous.
And about that scar he says, ironically but almost with regret, that justice would have been better served if it had been shaped like his mother’s hand.
His mother was so shocked by what happened that she never raised a hand to him again, never employed any other means of correction, and indeed no one in his home ever again dared to so much as scold the boy, who thus grew up wounded but happy, and utterly savage. His manners provoked at the very most a little grumbling, but never any actual sanctions.
When he was older, and the memory of the dramatic event had faded, his father regained the nerve to scold him, or perhaps it was just his personality that, as he aged, had become increasingly choleric. The thing in particular that drove his father crazy was Venanzio’s way of sitting down to meals, which was in fact particularly slovenly, and since he had also grown a sparse beard, whenever he ate, this beard was always spattered with tomato sauce. His father gazed at him, turgid with scorn.
Until he finally couldn’t take it, and blurted out a succession of insults in front of his siblings and mother.
“Venanzio, you’re a filthy pig!” and he’d get up from the table in disgust, tossing aside his napkin.
“Nothing but a fil-thy pig,” he’d carefully enunciate. Then he’d be seized by a realization, and he’d correct himself.
“No . . . you’re not a pig, pigs are useful animals . . . you’re just plain useless, harmful, in fact!”
IT’S A TRUISM THAT, without violating the dictates of fine manners, you can wind up gutting each other in a knife fight. Etiquette frowns upon cleaning your fingernails at the dinner table or spitting on the floor, it cautions against disturbing your neighbor’s afternoon nap, but it makes no mention whatsoever, doesn’t even criticize, the act of stabbing someone. So, take it from me, you’d better not annoy him with loud music, but you can certainly murder him. As I’ve had ample opportunity to learn from my contacts behind bars, it’s possible to be an extremely courteous murderer, a chivalrous strangler, a paid killer and yet positively ceremonious. It’s true that in these cases what’s at stake isn’t etiquette, but rather the divine commandments. But perhaps it’s no accident that when people focus on surface aspects, on the formal boundaries of behavior, a void remains at the center. We naïvely take it for granted that this void will automatically be filled in by the most obvious moral principles, such as thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal. While I have frequently scolded my children for sitting down to a meal with filthy hands, sending them straight off to wash them, I’ve never felt it was necessary to explain to them that you mustn’t murder a person. It struck me as unnecessary, almost offensive to explain to a young mind, in part because children have always seemed to me to be very clear-minded when it comes to morality, indeed, far more rigid than adults. Rarely will a child accept compromises on what is true and what is false, the kind of compromises so often adopted by adults. They want no shadows, no middle ground, no shades of gray. The stubborn child, I believe, is the creature that inspired the evangelical precept “But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil” (Matthew 5:37), and for that matter, there is a childish punctiliousness about all of Christ’s preachings, they are characterized by a deeply infantile intransigence. The fanaticism of innocence, the pure eye, the mouth of truth. The mouths of babes. The Pharisees, in contrast, they are certainly wise, they are adult. Pontius Pilate is too, with his half-measures, such as fustigation, after all, that was an acceptable compromise, wasn’t it?
No, it wasn’t.
That is why it is thought useless to spend time explaining the fundamentals, and why we concentrate instead on details, we specialize. The same thing happens in schools today, where general curricula are no longer studied, but extremely detailed local research projects are carried out instead, on a theme, creating explicative panels, elaborating creative texts, and by the end of elementary school, although the pupils have no idea of where Brescia or the Danube might be, they do know everything about a certain farm that produces organic foods, where they went on a field trip.
SOMETHING TELLS ME that at least one of the murderers sat at the table with perfect posture, elbows tight at his sides . . .
A CRIME like the one I’ve just narrated so concisely was an exceptional event in the QT and, as such, it ought to have stood out in the conscience of the quarter’s inhabitants, so alien was it to their mind-se
t and their shared experience. Ponderation, caution, hard work, prudence, decorum, what did all these things have to do with that monstrosity? Among good people, certain things just don’t happen. The graver and rarer an infraction, the more it ought to encourage the citizens to feel upright, encircling them in an isolating barrier, cordoning them off. The alliance among honest citizens is the sole positive fallout of a crime. The moral reaction that makes it possible to restore the values offended, to recognize them as fundamental and defend them collectively. Instead, that’s not what happened at all. That crime did nothing to bring the inhabitants of the QT into a common point of view, it simply terrorized them and made them suspicious of one another. It actually drove them to doubt themselves, which is the most worrisome schism of them all. Reading the newspapers, as you might gaze down a well where, in the depths, your own image flickers, quivering, dim and shapeless, they thought they could recognize a hidden flaw, a demon stirring at the foundations of that way of life. Instead of being sterilized by a solid, united moral front, the wound grew infected and spread total uncertainty about who had done what, and why, and about who had been, in any case, capable of doing it, willing and ready to do it; in every home, on every street, in every classroom in all the schools, in every group of friends or family, the crime proliferated with a refraction effect that made it infinitely possible, because the elements that went to make it up were in point of fact common and available everywhere you looked—boys and girls, a car and a vacation home, phones ringing, plastic bags, university textbooks to underline, jeans, ice cream. There was no need for any special scenario, no need for urgent motivations nor any particular succession of events, in other words, it wasn’t even particularly necessary to be criminals to commit that kind of crime. The crime was gratuitous, the crime was for sheer dilettantes, which meant it was within reach of anyone. Easy, convenient, no one was ruled out as either a perpetrator or a victim. The indignation of the first few days gave way to a new realization that sent shivers down the spine: the discovery, that is, that the margins of prevention and protection against what had happened were much more slender than anyone had ever dreamed, indeed, those margins simply didn’t exist. They never had. It was pointless to go on expressing pointless astonishment and indignation: it was the very same practical bourgeois spirit that unveiled the fault, just like when a solid professional accountant goes over the ledgers with a fine-tooth comb, recalculates the accounts, and discovers the trick. All it took was a pinch of reasonable understanding to see that an entire life built entirely on reasonable understanding didn’t guarantee a damned thing, in fact, it had thrown open the gates to the very thing it should have warded off: the unreasonable, the demented. Pure horror. An ordinary mistake, starting from which all the subsequent calculations had turned out to be mistaken. Believing that they were immunizing themselves against evil by simply never exposing themselves to it, never even acknowledging the remote possibility of it, they had developed an extremely weak organism, atrophied, incapable of reacting to that which was no longer familiar. Which meant there were no longer (or more accurately, there never had been) any safe places or settings, and the ones that had been deemed safe now revealed themselves to be potentially the most dangerous of all.
An unspeakable consternation began to settle over all those families that had sent their children to the same school as the murderers, a place that they had considered until then as a further special reservation of safety, inside an already well-protected world, as was the QT. And instead of steering them clear of trouble, they had plunged them right into the midst of it. To protect them from contagion, they’d locked them up with a bunch of sick people. The type of panic caused by this revelation manifests itself in the form of the so-called cold sweats. The internal agitation, unable to vent itself, expresses itself as a stiffening and a stale sheen of perspiration that bathes the temples and drips down your back. Everything you’ve done or said or believed until then suddenly appears false. No action can be undertaken, you can neither attack nor defend yourself, all meaning has vanished into thin air. It is no longer a rhetorical expression to say that time stands still.
IT IS SAID THAT AFRICAN VILLAGES, once night has fallen, are besieged, right up to the doors of the houses, by the spirit of the wild. It is as if with darkness the savanna reclaims possession of everything that man has taken away from it by the light of day, in the pitiful illusion that he has conquered that wilderness for good. Human space shrinks, people barricade themselves indoors, leaving everything else to the mercy of dark and menacing forces. The same thing happened in the QT. We only felt safe shut up in our homes, our apartments, in the dining rooms where the rules of family life reigned, a way of life that unfolded at its constant lazy pace, lulled by the humming of the refrigerator and the chirping of the radio, as if nothing could ever alter it; the preparation of meals, sleep, study, the washing of clothes, the ritual, harmless arguments between the generations over the dinner table. Let’s be clear, it’s not as if private life was exempt from drama and tragedy, but those cases were never sufficient to call into question, to throw into crisis the entire system. The death of a father or a daughter who’s been shooting up alone isn’t enough to bring down an entire civilization: a civilization that in the QT, just like in so many other places around the world, continues undisturbed to evolve or decay, but at rhythms that are so slow and with changes that are so subtle that it requires several generations to even register them and metabolize their meaning. Indoors, in other words, things turn slowly, “the silent calm of an aquarium reigns over all.” But between one apartment house and the next, the space proved to be riddled with booby traps. A gust of wind was enough to erase all the rules that had guided our lives, indeed, the very idea that there ever had been such a thing as a law. Immediately outside the private setting of the home, the tree-lined streets, the piazzas, and the wide stretches of road in the QT, which in terms of their decorum and anonymity perfectly matched the domestic interiors, could easily turn every bit as savage as any canyon. A cold wind, perhaps simply a shiver down your back, a strange shadow might materialize without warning within a panorama that remained utterly familiar in every way, in its everday image exempt from the slightest shadow of danger: Bar Tortuga, the photo booth, the scooters parked in front of Giulio Cesare High School, the 38 bus roaring past, heading for Piazza Istria.
WHILE IN A TRENCH DURING WARTIME, you expect to die from one moment to the next, you’re there for that very reason, that’s the right place and the right time to catch a bullet between the eyes, the murder victims of the QT had not even the slightest idea that this day might be their last, as they were hurrying to catch the bus, walking their dog, opening their apartment house door, leaning against a car smoking a cigarette: and many of them didn’t even realize that anyone was about to kill them. There was no reason to expect it, no warning signs, it was an ordinary day.
ON PAPER, the QT is bounded to the west by Via Salaria, to the south by Viale Regina Margherita, on the east by Via Nomentana, and to the north by the Aniene River. But the true boundaries of the QT were marked like those of the city of Sparta, as stated by one of its generals: Sparta stretches as far as my spear will reach.
SO PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO THIS POINT: patience, tolerance, restraint, and prudence are constantly on the verge of being turned upside down and transformed into their opposites, indeed they’re often nothing more than paradoxical manifestations of their exact contrary: calm is merely fury in disguise, tolerance is a “coded” performance of aggression, the domination we impose upon ourselves is no less relentless than the domination we’d gladly impose upon others, if only we could, decorum is a mask we apply to a face devastated by obscene desires, and if you examined it with sufficiently close attention, you’d notice how diabolically the features emerge. So much furor beneath the surface, all that magma boiling under that peaceful crust! Violence announces itself in its most threatening way precisely as repressed violence. The virtues bear subtle traces of th
e delirium out of which they originated, and which might at any instant snatch them back, taking renewed possession of them. If modesty is born of sin, it resembles it as a son resembles the father. Sovereign mastery over one’s feelings, detachment, and self-control, which constitute the principal bourgeois contribution to morality, only increase the inner gap by means of which people can observe and judge themselves as if they were safe on the far shore, on the opposite cliff face, across the yawning gorge, but if you are forced to cross back over, clinging to a dangling rope, at that point the oscillation truly begins to swing wide, the velocity becomes dizzying, and you find yourself catapulted into the void if you release your grip for so much as an instant.
AND SO, in perfect unison, everyone thought the same thing but did not say it, they didn’t dare to openly utter their thoughts, instead they barricaded themselves in their doubt. They preferred to battle alone against nothingness, which in the end drives you to embrace it. There can be no more ferocious form of conformism than the kind that expresses itself in segregated, incubated forms, where everyone thinks the same thing but in private, refraining from communicating those thoughts. When everyone curses the same god in their thoughts. I believe that there was never a time around here in which people did so little talking as in the aftermath of the CR/M; among fathers and mothers and sons and daughters, between husbands and wives, between the sexes, a strange laconicism descended; everyone might have encountered grounds for criticism in everyone else, the right to upbraid one another for faults more or less blindly, but knowing by now that no matter what direction you hurled that stone of blame, even at random, you were bound to hit something (insofar as young, insofar as old, insofar as male or female, insofar as bourgeois, you were certainly implicated and you had a sin to expiate), it was better for everyone to remain silent and when all was said and done it would have been difficult even to establish what exactly was up for discussion, the topic defied analysis. The fear of letting a detail slip out, something that might later be used as evidence against you, meant it was probably best to keep your lips zipped even with the people you trusted: because they in particular might easily become the most fearsome accusers. Truth be told, any aspect of life was already weighty evidence of guilt, sufficient to bring a conviction. Aspects that might at first glance seem positive, for instance, could prove to be red-handed proof. If you were an honest, hardworking father, then you were guilty of absentee distraction. If you’d married well and lived a quiet life, so much the worse. And let’s even talk about your bank account, or cheerful family vacations, all images of respectable conformity that could be turned inside out as so many crushing exhibits of evidence, proof of guilt. A dignified appearance—you could swear that it concealed nasty surprises. And so, in short order, out of convenience, the respectable mask of indignation and wholesale rejection was put back on. The problem was put away and forgotten because of its monstrosity, the declarations of horror became ritual and detached, as if we were talking about a catastrophe fallen from the sky or a disease, an earthquake. “How could it be that such good boys . . .” It sank out of sight, and the surface closed over it.
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