15
THE STAGES OF THIS DECLINE were likewise logical. At first, there was only the struggle, a harsh battle for domination. With this end in mind, there is a modification of the Christian precept of renouncing things on one’s own behalf in order to give them instead to others, transforming that precept into renunciation of oneself in favor of oneself: it is the puritan morality that places nonlife as the highest model of life. Thereafter, what is left is only the sacrifice of others. The haters of men begin by detesting their own person, and then go on to detesting others; deep down it is nothing more than a generalization of the same scorn. That is why you must always beware of anyone who says: “I am hard on myself, therefore I have every right to be hard on others.” People who have been severe with themselves ought actually to have learned to be indulgent with others.
BY SHOWING OFF the morality of sacrifice, the middle class at least succeeded in rebutting all accusations of selfishness, of egotism, since the accumulation of wealth took place in exchange for a total depersonalization. The bourgeois spirit showed a capacity for a melancholy acuity in its self-diminution, its belittling of itself, behind the screen of such mediocre qualities as modesty and parsimony. By donning the suit of armor of a sober and anonymous ethics, it meant to protect itself from both the blame of moralists and its inner unrequited restlessness. And yet this latter quality seemed to be impossible to get rid of, a constituent element of the bourgeois spirit which, once it had won its age-old battle, found itself fighting nothing other than itself. During the course of a war that was far more violent than is normally depicted within the gilded picture frame of the Rights of Man, the bourgeoisie eliminated the nobility, staggering on its last legs, and a couple of centuries later finally rid itself as well of the proletariat, armed with an embarrassing ideology that ultimately misfired, leaving it dwindling and defenseless, at least in the West. In the countries where up until just a few years ago the proletariat wielded its magniloquent dictatorship, nowadays not a single voice is raised in defense of the oppressed and the government has passed directly into the hands of profiteers. It was a doctrine whose very aggressiveness made it, in the end, incapable of defending itself. A revolutionary machine is extremely delicate; it has an engine that must always be kept running, warmed up because, once it has stalled, there is no one capable of getting it started again. The ancien régime and communism both collapsed under the weight of their inadequacy. The law of large numbers and the pervasive and proteiform spirit of adaptation acknowledged the middle class’s victory.
And yet the phantom of uncertainty continues to obsess it, to sink its talons into it. The middle class has no real right to complain, seeing that such insecurity was created or at the very least accelerated by the dynamism that the middle class itself introduced into the social fabric, something that the other classes tended to consider unalterable. What can you do if you find yourself at the same time the most conservative and the most frantic component of society?
TASTE CONSISTS OF PUTTING the greatest possible distance between you and your material needs, displaying a detachment from the primary necessities of existence and from those who, by their social position, are conditioned by them. Only that which is free of charge, in fact, is beautiful, decorous, or elegant, where the sole interest is in fact appearing to be disinterested. The only thing, in theory, that can be satisfying is that which satisfies no needs: all the rest is “vulgar.” It is vulgar to want it is vulgar to ask for help it is vulgar to show agitation it is vulgar to summon the waiter it is vulgar to add up the check it is vulgar to eat in haste, every bit as vulgar as it is to chew with your mouth open . . . it is vulgar to say “pleasure to meet you” and it is vulgar to say “buon appetito.” A distinguished person instinctively hates a vulgar person. He will find him repulsive. What happens though is that, in order to ward off all and any suspicions that one might labor under some need, one ends up becoming a slave to another need, and that is to say, the need for distinction: the eternal condemnation to show off one’s superiority. There is no describing the repugnance that the bourgeoisie at every level manifests toward the style expressed by the level immediately inferior to its own. The best way of marking one’s identity is through disgust and phobias. Hairstyles, clothing, furnishings, tastes and predilections when it comes to films, music, food, pronunciations of words, are all systematically caricatured mocked and held in revulsion; we contrast ourselves with that which we fear we might be confused with, taken for, within the context of the bourgeoisie itself, amid the component factions of the same, in a perennial rivalry with one another, far more than with any more distant social strata. The haute bourgeoisie, especially if it has cultural traditions or ambitions, scorns with all its soul the petit bourgeois style but not necessarily the plebeian style, toward which it may show a certain sympathy or even admiration (consider the parodistically “thuggish” manners of certain individuals of elevated social extraction . . .). Although the bourgeois may feel physically threatened by them, like an industrialist in his Jaguar facing off with the workers picketing the factory (sure, sure, I realize, that’s an obsolete image, at least thirty years out of date . . .), he certainly runs no risk of being contaminated by their style. Distinction must not falter even in a state of emergency: a proper lady after a car crash must emerge from the twisted wreckage bloodied but with her clothing perfectly composed, like those suicides who, before leaping off the top floor of their aristocratic palazzi, made sure to fasten the hem of their dress with a safety pin lest they be found, once they smashed down onto the asphalt, in unseemly poses.
For that matter, they don’t teach you at school how to dress and how to furnish your home. Elements of a domestic style that probably no longer exists, whose typical atmosphere was redolent of winter afternoons, formed of musical phrases played on a piano, repeated and interrupted, and then repeated again, the scent of jasmine tea, the buzz of a hair dryer after a succession of baths with loud objections from those left with the cold water at the end . . . records playing behind closed doors, adjoining yet separate worlds, the secrecy of the children’s rooms, of murmuring telephone conversations in the father’s study, the kitchen where a maid, either grim or cheerfully singing, makes a sauce for the boiled beef: all of them extremely close but light-years away from one another. Parsley olive oil garlic bread crumbs capers anchovies . . . mince, squeeze, sift.
Yes, but without domestic help and without a certain number of children engaged in endless quarreling over who gets to use the phone, that atmosphere vanishes, evaporated from the hermetically sealed container of the family apartment.
Taste is sacred, ideas are profane.
IN THE CONCEPT OF DISTINCTION, primacy belongs to the eye. To the “you can see at a glance that . . .” You can see at a glance that . . . she’s a respectable young woman, he’s a young man from a good family. You can see at a glance that . . . business is booming for her husband. You can see at a glance that . . . she studied at one of the better high schools. The signs of prestige are first and foremost visual: it’s from tiny details that you can perceive someone’s status. This need to display and be seen, however, contrasts with another bridgehead of bourgeois style, namely restraint, discretion, where an idea of inviolable intimacy is expressed at its highest degree. But what can you do to ensure that others will have sufficient access to this inaccessibility to recognize it? How can you immodestly show off your modesty? Is there such a thing as brazen discretion? The more accentuated the individualism, the more it demands recognition from others. Unfortunately, the so-called marks of distinction can prove to be dreary marks of an utter lack of distinction. You need only show them off. If done ostentatiously, they lose their value, like a demagnetized compass.
LET ME CITE AN EXAMPLE. My mother’s best friend, Vicki, was an extremely elegant woman and her refinement could be seen everywhere, on her person and in her surroundings, scattered like the finest gold dust. She was a set and costume designer for the theater, her home was a s
plendid cornucopia of objects, fabrics, lamps, and a rainbow of color. According to my mother, no one had a wardrobe like hers, the most refined and at the same time simple, perfect, and rigorous that could be obtained from the couturiers of the time. Vicki affirmed her tastes in an imperious manner.
Then they found cysts in her brain.
She underwent three operations, in Italy and abroad, and they saved her life. But afterward, she was different. That is, her mental and physical facilities remained intact—she spoke and thought clearly, she could move and walk like before. But she had become vulgar. Yes, incredible but true, she had lost every ounce of taste. She bought bric-a-brac and embroidered doilies. She dressed like a shopgirl twenty years her junior. She grew sloppy or garish. Lots of times men would follow her when she left home wearing a tattered T-shirt and a pair of jeans stuck into the high tops of a pair of pointy-toed boots. Over her hair, which she used to have done in a permanent three times a month, she’d jam a woolen cap with a pompom that got filthy over time, a head covering that became famous throughout the quarter, but she refused to stop wearing it. She’d smear a heavy layer of cherry-red lipstick on her mouth and don heavy pendant earrings. She gave away her family furniture and replaced it with pompous designer objects that struck her as more chic, and in particular, the old dining room table was traded in for an enormous slab of glass supported by a crosspiece of chrome-plated tubing. It wasn’t that the things she was doing now were wrong, no, it’s worse, she had merely lost her sense of aesthetics, which had once been the light on the headland of her life.
For that reason, and for that reason alone, in spite of the fact that she was perfectly capable of making decisions about anything else, and she still appeared to be mentally lucid, her children were able to have her declared of unsound mind. She was fifty-six years old. The loss of her personal style, her sloppy way of living and dressing, were sufficient proof that “she was no longer herself.” And the court that issued the decisions was right. By that point, Vicki was another person, a stranger.
Taste is sacred
ideas are profane.
The body is sacred
the mind is profane.
Woman is sacred
man is profane.
Man is a beast
woman is a work of art!
SELF-RESTRAINT, IN FACT, consists of the ability to resist, to master, to tame, to keep from giving in to vulgar or dangerous inclinations. Which can mean that once the levee breaks, there is no bottom, there are no more limits to the actions that take joy in the savage delight of being liberated . . . and by the sheer force of inertia continue their course without hindrance. Into the void. From rigid conformity to outright perversion, the distance is not only short, it can be a single step. You should further consider that pitiless and bullying acts, while they may sorely restrict the freedom of those upon whom they are inflicted, unleash the freedom of the person inflicting them. And they therefore constitute at the same time the maximum level of oppression and the maximum level of liberty, both coercion and unbridled freedom. There is no point in trying to resist the argument: rape and murder are liberatory, if viewed with the eyes of those who commit them. Perfect circularity between these two extremes is attained when those who have been oppressed by violence utilize it in their turn to achieve liberation: the joy of those who suddenly stop obeying, submitting, restraining themselves, being patient—and simply explode. Suffice it to think of the celebration of this turnaround that can be seen in countless revenge films, of which the founding father remains Straw Dogs, where the professor, the civilized man who has been the victim of mistreatment, suddenly reverses the situation by making use of the same violence that was used against him, but amplified tenfold by his frustration and brilliant mind. Malevolent energy concealed behind the screen of good manners.
SO LET IT BE SAID as an introduction to the central theme of this book: why shouldn’t our bourgeoisie, with its frenzy, its thirst for recognition, why shouldn’t it produce criminals? Perhaps it does so in a somewhat more controversial manner, or with a slightly higher dose of remorse, while the lower classes simply produce them without thinking twice. More self-aware = guiltier.
There is no country like Italy, nowhere that criminals are so envied, coddled, pitied, or mythologized . . . taken as paragons, imitated . . . both when they redeem themselves and when they do not redeem themselves. In the first case, they are admired for having been able to complete a courageous internal journey, in the second case for having shown themselves to be tough and pure. Seeing the error of their ways or showing resoluteness . . . both of these attitudes are capable of fabricating compassion or allure, and no doubt, life stories that are more interesting than those of some honest husband or admirable housewife. How many times have I heard absolutely respectable individuals boast of having made friends with a murderer, or several, and in them I could detect a genuine sense of transport, an indubitable enthusiasm, the same you will find in the die-hard sports fan who gets the autograph of a soccer champion, or the young girl with a TV star. Venturing to express doubts about the sense, or at least the advisability of such friendships, only seems to have the opposite effect of reinforcing them.
That’s right, there’s no country like Italy when it comes to taking pity on, mobilizing in favor of, or justifying the actions of some criminal, even if it means climbing towering and intricate conceptual castles of cards. There is not a criminal in Italy, common street criminal or political criminal, armed robber or terrorist, prominent or secondary (provided that the second-rank criminal has spent some time with his first-rank counterparts and can drop their names knowingly), who hasn’t dictated his autobiography, like Silvio Pellico. His version of events, truer than true. Or else he’s written a crime novel, or a noir novel, making good use of his knowledge of technical details in the realm of murder, such as cartridges and slides and bolts and how and when they jam. We may all shudder at the horror of America with its maniacal cult of weapons, where a boy in middle school who forgot to do his homework can just walk into a school and mow down his classmates with an Uzi; but here in Italy, among the many who are violent in their words and yet mild-mannered inoffensive individuals, the very few who actually know how to handle a Browning sidearm create an aura of respect around them, if not an actual halo of legend. Just a few years may go by after some bloody incident, and before you know it a movie, a TV drama, a tell-all book sets out to celebrate the exploits in question, after the TV newscasters have already done their part, churning out specials, panel discussions, in-depth documentaries, live prime-time confessions, chomping hungrily on the flesh and blood of the crime.
16
It’s not the pussy that’s tight, it’s the head!
It’s women’s heads that need to be
stretched . . . It takes character
not compassion, so they understand.
When they’ve finally gone too far
you can get any and every thing from them.
When one of them dies, you just replace her.
I fought, I won, I tore out
all and any feeling from my heart
that might stand in the way of my will.
But if your will is no longer guided
by sentiment, if it is no longer bound by
or fond of anything, what can it want?
It can only be guided by itself
it will be pure will, a wanting to want
that takes things over
only to discard them an instant after
getting them, only to destroy them
and thus keep the will
purified of all individual feelings,
intact, active, and perennially unsatisfied.
True happiness, the great, indescribable happiness
of feeling, and being, above all others,
breaking the laws that others
have bound themselves to respect . . .
having known this supreme happiness gives you the right
&n
bsp; not to be like them, not to think the way they do
not to respect them, and to be able to abuse them whenever you please.
You can have a greater pleasure
from someone who hates you
than someone who loves you.
17
THE ARDOR WITH WHICH WE PURSUE prosperity is equaled only by our terror at having missed the opportunity to achieve it. Damn it, I didn’t buy a house or an apartment when they were dirt cheap, I was reluctant to invest when the stock market was booming, and I only made my mind up to do so a week before the meltdown of Argentine bonds, or Parmalat, of American mortgage-based securities, etc. The bourgeoisie is constantly tempted to speculate, tormented by doubt, unsure whether it’s worth the trouble to take and plant elsewhere, in some safer place, in some more fertile terrain, the seeds of its shifting ambitions. With his impersonal adherence to the role and the status assigned him by destiny and his clan, his ancestry, in ancient times a man could at least forget himself, in part, while it only rarely happens in the mobile bourgeois world that anyone can create such stability and continuity that they can subsume themselves into it entirely, nullifying themselves in it: the individual with his whims and his ambitions always pops his head up eventually. Even first names, once handed down in a family, are now assigned in an arbitrary and fleeting fashion, because there is so little of the past that is now deemed worthy to hand down to our children, and if from time to time that sort of need endures in the form of a singular attachment to some relic or piece of furniture or family custom like spending Christmas or the summer holidays in a given place (which sadly, in Italy at least, you can almost swear has been disfigured and ruined in the meantime by wildcat development and mass tourism, making your stay there unpleasant and comparisons with the past depressing), there is always something weak and ridiculous about such resistance, as if it were a mania, a tic, a reference, which an ounce of realistic wisdom would recommend abandoning, so that you could then at some later date regret it, and yearn for it nostalgically.
The Catholic School Page 67
