AND YET, even here in the QT, there is the usual widespread deterioration and decay of Rome. Dumpsters overflowing, never emptied. Cars nonchalantly double- and even triple-parked. People walking dogs that, thighs a-tremble, defecate in front of apartment house doors, testers of mini-motorcycles built in garages or other remote-controlled devices (NB: these aren’t kids, these are men in their fifties), and then graffiti artists, “writers” or “taggers” are the terms used in Italian, in other words those jerk-offs who defile walls with their monotonous scrawls, the kind of work that some alumnus of the DAMS school or former member of parliament from the Communist Refoundation Party (but why? why? why did I vote for you?) stubbornly insists on defending as an artistic manifestation or symptom of “the malaise of the young.”
It isn’t clear why graffiti on the walls of the city should have been identified as an expression of a youthful malaise any more than letting dogs shit on sidewalks should be seen as an expression of a malaise of the elderly.
NOWADAYS, at first glance, neither your clothing nor the car you drive nor the language you speak reveal your social affiliation. It’s all fluid, blurred, indistinct. From time to time, because of my slovenly attire, I’m taken for a homeless person. I see it from the way people look at me, how they address me . . . then I need only don a jacket and shave properly, and the way they feel about me is reversed. These are fleeting, provisional impressions.
One’s home had remained perhaps the last unmistakable marker to define a style, a bourgeois aesthetic, a bourgeoisie that in its behavior, its manner of dressing and speaking and even in its political orientation (with the invention of the so-called left-wing bourgeoisie) had almost entirely abandoned the cult of distinction, which it had been carefully observing for at least a couple of centuries now. The new bourgeois generation of those years (my generation) was born under the sign of white socks and dark blue sandals with eyelets and real leather soles, and within just a few years, had grown up ragtag, informal, promiscuous, free, potty-mouthed, and filthy.
THE ONLY CURIOSITY MY FATHER ever expressed when I returned home after studying at a classmate’s home, or from a birthday party, was: “What was the house like?” or “What was the apartment like?” and I never knew how to answer.
“What’s their apartment like?”
“I don’t know! It’s an apartment . . . sure, it’s nice . . . I guess!” since at the age of twelve you weren’t exactly blown away by the fact that a home had three full bathrooms, and you’re not tempted to poke around in the apartment’s hallway in search of the laundry room. I had no way of knowing that to my father that question was tantamount to asking the profession or the income of my friend’s parents, replacing the old snobbish query: “Who are their people?”
These are all things that I understood only much later . . . Only when I was in my early thirties, in the aftermath of a home renovation, did I begin to grasp the meaning of such evocative terms as “winter garden,” which to me carried echoes of a Russian novel, a piece of stage direction in Chekhov, a lyrical expression like the roses that bloom out of season, “late roses filled with early snow,” or the beach in winter, “a concept that the mind doesn’t consider.”
PERHAPS THE ONLY ACCESSORY a residence could possess that made any difference to us was a swimming pool. Ah, the pool. Whoever had a pool, private or open to all the tenants of the apartment building, also had a great many not entirely disinterested friends. Toward May that friendship tends to stir and quicken, in June it begins to glow, and in July and August it explodes, a renewed fondness toward those with access to and use of a swimming pool.
It was in fact at the side of the swimming pool at Via Appennini 34 (I’d managed to get in there thanks to I no longer remember which personal contact), newly filled with water for the summer season, that one fine day in June I happened to notice a slender blond girl: she was on her own, reading a book, stretched out on her tummy, legs bent at the knee, lolling in the sun. At first glance I didn’t recognize her, not even when I took a second and then a third glance, but someone told me that she was Leda Arbus, my classmate’s sister. For real? Leda Arbus? Oh, of course. The faded bikini almost blended into the pallor of the flesh. With one hand she was pressing her hair against the back of her neck, to keep it from spilling over her shoulders, with the other she was bracing up her chin, elbow pressed against the cement. It looked like a very uncomfortable position. When I’d seen her at the Arbus home she was, of course, fully dressed. Now she was almost naked. The comparison troubled me. So I steered clear of her, intentionally ignoring her.
THE BOURGEOISIE ALWAYS WANTS to interact with life using the formal form of address, in Italian the “lei,” keeping interactions on a stiff, remote basis, never reducing the distance by so much as a fraction of an inch, interacting with a world populated by functions and ghosts, professional figures and silhouettes, beings with a title but never a name. They’d rather address blood and betrayal and disease in the formal, address death and ask it: “Pardon me, sir, I’m sure you’ll understand, in your line of work, but would you be so good as to come back again at a later date, let’s say, in a couple of years, or ideally, in ten or so?” At all costs, preserve a certain detachment, which may sound, variously, serious or ironic, shy or arrogant, and in any case springs from the need to maintain control over the darker forces, avoiding contamination, sterilizing, refrigerating. And if the given name, the first name, ever surfaces in regular use, it’s only to mark a social distance, in addressing a social inferior (the fruit vendor, Luigi, Bartolo, Natale, the housecleaner whose surname you’ve never uttered, and who will always remain Amalia, Amalia and nothing more, Aurora, Rosi, Bice, Corazón, Tania, Svetlana . . .). My father was known only as “l’Ingegnere”—the Engineer. “Ingegnere” had become his real name, the appellation used to distinguish him from other people, and when he died most of the people attending his funeral at the Church of Sant’Agnese thought, “L’Ingegnere is dead,” l’Ing. Carlo, or rather, Carlo Ingegnere, like Chauncey Gardiner, Chance the Gardner in the film, and they kept saying to me, while choking back tears: “What a good, kind person l’Ingegnere was . . .” When I dictated the death announcement over the phone, I naïvely told them Carlo Albinati, leaving off the professional prefix, L’Ing.—L’Ing. Carlo Albinati—and oh, how pissed off my grandmother was! She said that we had dishonored my father’s memory. Without the cloak of that L’Ing., he must have flown up to heaven naked as a worm, blushing in shame.
ASPIRING TO “DISTINCTION” as a fundamental value, the bourgeoisie wishes to be recognized by society and therefore break away from it, marking an unbridgeable boundary. In colloquial language this took the form of the negative locution “not to dare.” Don’t you dare stick your nose into my business. How dare you. Don’t you dare use such manners—such a tone of voice, such language . . .
In order to cross that thin line and enter into the territory, the home, the business of others (a line for which we nowadays use the pallid English term “privacy”), it is in fact necessary to obtain permission, which the good bourgeois issues only with the greatest parsimony and mistrust. Normally he will hunker down defensively behind that line. The spirit of the façade, the so-called decorum, far more than a hypocritical fiction, actually means that beyond that impeccable appearance, no one has the right to venture. Even the subject feels unauthorized to enter his own inviolable thoughts, to be, so to speak, indiscreet with himself. More than concealing, the mask protects. It does not serve to deceive, that is, to pretend to be someone else, but rather to keep others from knowing who you really are. The only statement made toward the outside world will be your economic standing, and it is well known that money has no personality, money doesn’t lie but then again, it doesn’t tell the truth either, money says nothing and that is why members of the middle class often appear interchangeable, anonymous, just as the inhabitants of the QT were, and remain today.
DISCRETION CONSISTS OF KEEPING ourselves distant from knowl
edge. Choosing not to delve deep, not to ask questions, not to know anything more than our interlocutor has deliberately decided to tell us, indeed, in certain cases, not even wanting to hear that much. Nothing, I don’t want to know anything. Sweetheart, please, don’t say another word. Words serve no purpose . . . The delicacy with which one holds oneself aloof from the intimate sphere of one’s neighbor can sometimes verge on indifference, which for that matter is the feeling one often comes to after facing difficulties and privations. If I fully sacrifice my curiosity about others, if I become accustomed to mortifying that curiosity as a rule, it is likely that, little by little, others will cease to interest me. The life of another person, enclosed in his most secret thoughts, will slip out of my reach. If one insists on asking nothing, one winds up having nothing more to say. Those who are accustomed not to ask, also soon stop replying. If, moreover, such discretion seems motivated by the determination not to wound others, not to trouble them, if you look more closely you will find that that discretion actually serves to avoid being hurt oneself. Protecting oneself from potentially disagreeable truths. Those who are discreet do in fact avoid a bunch of problems and disappointments, whereas the indiscreet are always at risk of being caught up and dragged into trouble. You can be indiscreet and show a lack of respect even toward yourself, revealing too openly, out of recklessness or a love of sincerity, things that it might well be best for others not to know about you. That is an even more foolish and serious sin: the intrusiveness of those who are determined at all costs to tell you things that are their business, not yours.
ON THE WHOLE, we tend to overestimate the weight of the gaze that rests upon us. Out of insecurity or vanity, we believe that other people have nothing better to do with their time than to study and judge us, while most of the time we actually go, by and large, unnoticed. The sheer mass of expectations, concerns, and self-referential thoughts that make a man or a woman tremble when they make their entrance into a crowded room and feel every eye in the place focused upon them is normally out of proportion to the interest they actually stir.
13
THERE IS A CURIOUS FACT about the bourgeoisie.
If you study history, the bourgeoisie always seems to be in the process of being born.
In fact, every new age seems to inaugurate the rise of the bourgeoisie.
During the reign of Octavian Augustus, it seems that the bourgeoisie was beginning its rise. In the Middle Ages, historians claim, the bourgeoisie came into existence, in the Renaissance it enjoyed a rebirth, the eighteenth century was the century of the bourgeoisie, and so was the nineteenth century, in other words this darn bourgeoisie was always there, developing, elbowing its way, pushing ahead with its values and its interests . . .
(In prison, a student of mine, who had been in the Red Brigades, claimed that even during the Stone Age, the bourgeoisie was already exploiting the proletariat—right there, in the caves.)
The bourgeoisie holds the record for hatred and scorn aroused in those belonging to other classes, and that is understandable, but what is truly sensational is the depth of the hatred prompted within its own class: the most livid tirades against the bourgeois spirit have been conceived, written, and psalmodied during rallies, in hails of invective, and at demonstrations, by members of the bourgeoisie. Perhaps that is because it is the bourgeois themselves who are the first to be disappointed or disgusted by the prosperity that they themselves attain. It is an aspect, a particular but not contradictory declension of the very insatiability and intense desire for social promotion. When people get rich, they ought to become happier, and yet they seem to experience a singular whiplash that drives them to scorn what they once yearned for. Since there are limits to one’s capacity for self-deception, once you have obtained what you lusted after with all your heart, and once you have convinced yourself that it was this, the very thing you most desired, there arises a profound disappointment that might have psychological or metaphysical causes, or else simply chronological ones, since one almost invariably achieves one’s desires a long time after first setting them, that is, far too late: you can finally afford to acquire something you’ve dreamed of only when the fact of owning it is no longer so important or prestigious, and others have already ensured that that ownership is no longer exclusive. If the fetish of the seventies, the fur coat, is something that all women possess, then the matron who doesn’t own one will feel like a cripple, an amputee, for not having one, while the matron who owns one will take no pleasure in the fact.
We often would like objects but can’t afford them. We’ll be able to afford them when they are no longer so desirable.
With the rise in the level of education, the level of discontentment rises as well. With the increase in prosperity, dissatisfaction rises in your throat.
In other words, those who accumulate material goods may subsequently be disappointed by them, ultimately finding that they detest them or hold them in contempt. If it is not the bourgeois who feels repugnance toward them, it may perhaps be his children. One oscillates between the obsessive yearning for possession and the more or less sincere condemnation of the perverse effects that enrichment itself has caused: in us, in the environment, in the nation, on earth. Everyone wants to be more comfortable and yet everyone complains about being more comfortable, since greater comfort has brought these things with it: exasperated levels of individualism, amorality, inner emptiness, consumerism, abandonment of values, the death of the spirit of community, a leveling of tastes, pollution, a flavorless life, an even greater dissatisfaction. The possessions first sought after and subsequently obtained, at the cost of great effort and even greater compromises, suddenly look foolish, repulsive, detestable. In American movies, the rich executive who’s living high on the hog suddenly realizes that his life is deeply inauthentic. It is always from the heart of Hollywood that the attack is launched against Hollywood. Because, and this is an important point, it is culture itself that produces both the frenzy for possession and its harshest critique, and occasionally it is the very people who are drowning in money who proclaim for all to hear that they are disgusted by money: and that stance is not, or it is not merely, hypocrisy. Attraction and repugnance may perhaps represent two aspects of the same vital impulse, which is made up of spasmodic tensions. The sensation that prosperity is a will-o’-the-wisp that fails to warm life up is more profound than we can concede to what definitively appears to be classic false consciousness: to think one thing and in the meantime do the opposite. This schism forms the bourgeois consciousness from the very outset, a conscience whose values are easy to mock, as writers, artists, singers and songwriters, prophets and religious leaders, moralists, and satirical authors have done for centuries, and with them many left-wing orators and politicians, but even more often their right-wing counterparts, who need only utter three phrases of invective against the vices and contradictions and softness of the bourgeois in order to inflame the street . . . the morality of shopkeepers . . . their cowardice, the way they live off the flesh of others . . . the devout hypocrisy . . . the famous formulation “warriors against merchants” . . .
vecchia piccola borghesia little old bourgeoisie
per piccina che tu sia small though you may be
non so dire se fai più rabbia I can’t say if you prompt more anger
pena schifo o malinconia pity disgust or melancholy
THE BOURGEOISIE HAS ALWAYS BEEN the polemical idol of itself. Even the entry in the Encyclopaedia (a cultural institution whose origin and conception is due to the bourgeois spirit), which you might expect to be supremely neutral, positively quivers with a certain irony, if not ill-concealed contempt, in the definition that it gives.
Here it is.
Mental and emotional characteristics: reluctance, repulsion, jealousy, hostility, aridity, spiritual distress. A skeptical, dubious, diffident, grimy, greedy, cowardly man.
His sole and exclusive interest: to do business deals, buy land and houses, sell them, found profitable companies
, be a leader in his profession, advance in a career in public administration, so as to emancipate himself once and for all from the sense of social inferiority toward the nobility and the rich, emphasizing his distance from the lower classes. Merchants, bankers, jurists, notaries, businessmen, and lawyers.
Abandonment of chivalrous ideals and feelings.
Underlying secularism blended with religious conservatism. Religious fervor, when present, lukewarm: what you might call Sunday religion.
Deep down, the bourgeois has always been averse to religion, even when he formally submitted to it. From a certain moment on, he found himself allied with it only because he considered it the last bulwark of the threatened vestiges of traditional life. Accustomed to reason and quibble about every aspect of the world that concerns him (business, law, rights, education), the bourgeois winds up demanding a reckoning from the faith he once professed without further discussion. “I’m starting litigation with God,” so to speak, he’s suing Him, he’s demanding an explanation for His way of operating, he moves his way of thought toward God like a chess piece on the board. He tends to build himself his own doctrine and shape it according to his own needs. He doesn’t submit to the precepts of humility; accustomed as he is to the well-pondered calculation of his best interests, he is repelled by the idea of an Almighty Providence that dominates him. And so the last chance of maintaining a certain religious spirit is to lay claim to a Christianity without death, without Providence, without sin, without religion.
The Catholic School Page 63
