Second note: in the list drawn up by my son, there’s not a single Italian film.
AN EXPRESSION that was used back then in political argumentation was the “weld point.” Perhaps because of its metallic connotation and the sensation that it sprayed sparks. The clanging sound of a metal workshop, but it also had echoes of wartime, of operative language. Tactics and strategy, application and execution of orders. Both Marxism and Fascist rhetoric loved steel.
They imagined, they predicted, they devoutly wished for weld points between material interests, between antagonistic groups, between concepts, between levels of command, between theses about literature and revolution.
For at least a decade, at the dead center of which we can place the culminating events of this episode, Italy was enveloped in the billowing smoke of conspiracies. Secret plots, military coups planned or aborted or reconsidered, mysterious explosions, bloodbaths, murders and reprisals, intelligence services variously sound and hacked, national and foreign, threatening letters killings espionage subversive plots betrayals and ambushes and conspiracies settled soupily over the nation like a dense cloud, no one could see anything, to the point that the best way of moving forward was to just not give a damn, the way we adolescents all did, while the grown-ups obsessed over it, racking their brains about why a certain bomb had been set off and who had planted it and at whose orders. For those who had no blood on their hands, who neither shot anyone nor was shot, who clubbed no one with heavy metal bars nor was clubbed, those were fantastic years. And the smoke-filled air appeared crystalline to them.
AT THE TIME, it was impossible for me to talk about the time. I was in it up to my neck. The losses left me speechless, the conquests filled me with elation: both conditions make any comment superfluous.
The year 1975 was the year of the elections: may I venture to say, the most eagerly awaited, the most grimly feared elections in Italy, since 1948? Of course, I can say so, and even if that weren’t true, they’d still be the most important elections in history because they marked the first time that I was able to vote. The first time that eighteen-year-olds voted, and they were only able to vote by a whisker, because it was only a few weeks before the elections that adulthood was lowered from twenty-one to eighteen, and from one day to the next, to our astonishment, we were no longer minors. At school, the effect of that change made itself felt in the form of a small but significant detail, namely, we could sign our own excuses for being absent, instead of having to get them signed, with a written explanation, by our parents. They ought to have been abolished entirely, for us eighteen-year-olds, what did those old formulations even mean anymore: “for health reasons,” “for family obligations”? The members of Collective M of Giulio Cesare High School immediately took advantage of the opportunity to write in the excuse box on the form such provocative and yet realistic phrases as: “She didn’t feel much like going, so she stayed in bed,” or else: “On account of heavy precipitation,” “Because the spring day promised to be beautiful,” and underneath that, your very own signature, to be displayed diligently to the first-period teacher, who of course had no desire to engage in discussions of first principles that would only expose them to the ridicule of everyone in the class, unified in their opinion, and of Collective M, which spoke as one, and so the teacher limited himself or herself to accepting that buffoonery and, grumbling under his or her breath, transcribing on the ledger the name of the self-excused student.
The things that our teachers, both priests and non-priests, let us get away with back then! How many times they completely overlooked the most insolent of provocations, because they understood that resistance, fighting the point to a standstill, meant going against the times, making themselves ridiculous, “handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500” (the famous line from Apocalypse Now, which would come out shortly thereafter).
The fact remained that the old formulation “for family obligations” still had its delicious charm, and it was fun to trot it out to justify a day’s absence, the kind of absence that has no explanation save for the unwillingness to get out of bed. Mysterious formulation, all-inclusive justification! It would appear that in Italy, adducing the “family” is the one sure way of justifying any behavior or shortcoming, from absenteeism to outright corruption, from tax evasion to bloody vendetta.
BUT TO COME BACK to the elections: that was supposed to be the year of the Communists. The Communist Party was by far the leading party in Turin, Naples, Venice, in Emilia and in Tuscany. In certain cities, two thirds of the population voted Communist. The Communists even picked up votes in the ranks of the classes that communism had historically declared its determination to abolish, and perhaps those classes voted that way out of a subconscious desire to contribute to their own destruction and finally eliminate the mark of distinction that in other historic phases they had striven ruthlessly to attain. There was a bourgeoisie that defended tooth and nail the prerogatives acquired and a bourgeoisie that fought, at least to hear them tell it, against the regime that had hitherto always protected, coddled, spoiled, and cherished them. These two souls of the bourgeoisie, mirror images of each other, would soon come to a final reckoning. And that final reckoning was expected to come with these elections. When I talked, socialized, argued, made friends, made love, or went to the movies it was almost exclusively with Communists. Of various varieties and degrees, some of them authentic Communists, some less so, and a few who were unquestionable fakes, but all of them red, members of the PCI, the FGCI, Lotta Continua, Manifesto, PSIUP, Marxist-Leninists, anarcho-Communists (as we members of Collective M proclaimed ourselves), renegades of the extraparliamentary world, Trotskyites, adherents to the First, the Second, the Third, and the Fourth International, Socialists even farther to the left than the Communists themselves, and a vast number of so-called gruppettari, members of grouplets whose political militancy made explicit reference to movements that there is not enough space here to mention, so frequent were their schisms and reconciliations and breakaways and fragmentations, by the end of which there were increasingly extremist and sectarian formations. The only one that I’ll cite, if only for its exemplary name, and because the older sister of my first girlfriend was a militant in its ranks, was Serve the People. I, too, was a Communist to all intents and purposes, I was one even if maybe I wasn’t one, I hadn’t been before and I wouldn’t be afterward, I was one even though the ideas of communism failed to persuade me back then any more than they do now, that is to say, almost not at all, and their practical applications actually disgusted me, to the point that I could much more readily say that I’m an anti-Communist than a Communist. So how can an anti-Communist proclaim himself to be a Communist, and act and vote and even wade into brawls, feeling himself wholly to be one, and I mean sincerely, with full conviction—so I ask myself, how can that be? My sole anchor of salvation and my one way of scuttling out from the dilemma of that contradiction was, in any case, to proclaim that I was opposed to Stalin—whom I considered a criminal even then and have ever since, and one of the worst criminals ever to have existed on the face of the earth—and against the Stalinists, and in that way I managed to carve out a virtuous little niche for myself in that ocean of bloodthirsty events and behaviors. All the same, I already know that, no matter how hard I try, no matter how I explain it away, I’ll never be able to understand and justify the contradiction that deep down still drives me, even now that I’ve stopped rooting for one side, now that I’ve even given up voting, the contradiction that still sometimes drives me to take the positions of a free-market gentleman, and on other occasions unleashes within me the delight of being implacably, coldly Marxist. A disenchanted bard of the status quo ready to turn into an equally disenchanted analyst of man’s exploitation of his fellow man. How can that be? And yet it most assuredly is. For that matter, I exist, there’s no doubt about it. And I sway, back and forth. I hardly think I’m alone in this.
Perhaps the fact that I sway can be attributed to the profession of wr
iting, which tends to make me adopt different positions from case to case, different ways of looking at things. It’s a collateral effect of this calling. Or else, perhaps, I chose this line of work precisely in order to afford myself the luxury of swaying, in order to encourage it, so that I could impersonate first this person, then that one, that idea . . .
Savor pineapple
And dine on pheasant
No future for you, bourgeois,
So hold on to the present!
WHEN, DURING MY SCHOOL DAYS, and later at the university, I was a militant—albeit one with a great many uncertainties—in what was then described as the “extraparliamentary left,” or at least I rooted for them, seeing that as a militant I really didn’t do much at all, I was deeply struck by their leaders and deputies and their attitude, copied from the models of historic revolutionaries, although it was shrunk to the appropriate student protest scale, with an added touch that was, shall we say, typical of the period, which couldn’t have existed in the time of the Soviet revolution or the time of the Italian partisans. Almost all of them posed as inexorable executors of a political mandate that history had placed in their hands. In a highly affected manner, they were cutting and ruthless, and what’s more, ruthless in words. I’d like to describe one of them.
TALL, GOOD-LOOKING, with fine hair already starting to thin and a thick blond mustache. Charming, vicious. Swollen with contempt. Peremptory. The peremptory manner is perhaps the principal characteristic of revolutionaries at every level. The last time that I saw him, that I saw him in action, I mean to say, on the street (now he shows up on TV to offer sarcastic comments on current events: he’s old and wrinkled and smiles a great deal more than he used to, still full of allure), was during the demonstration in which Giorgiana Masi was killed: May 12, 1977. He was carrying a Beretta MAB rifle under his duster coat. He was running back and forth along the Lungotevere, the Tiber riverfront, and his coat would flutter, eloquently revealing, rather than concealing, that manageable and rather inaccurate submachine gun which was a regulation weapon of the Italian army. A weapon that, a couple of years later, I would handle myself during my military training in Taranto, firing off bursts of gunfire at a floating target fifty yards from the waterline. I couldn’t say now whether those who changed their viewpoint are worse or better than those who remain unchanged.
ASIDE FROM A FEW genuine intellectuals who actually verged on erudition, and a substrate of uneducated cannon fodder, the extremist ideologies of the period recruited their militants from a semi-intelligentsia: students and the self-taught, semi-intellectuals, the scholastically cultured of the seventies, people who were ignorant but not entirely, or else cultivated but with enormous gaps, perhaps specialized in a narrow sector, say, “Celtic myths,” and ignorant of everything else, possibly the most unstable and dangerous breed, that is, the species of the ignoramus who has read a few books, because those books, air-dropped into the void, have landed with a tremendous uproar. Better, far better, far less harmful, in that case, though these days rare and hard to find, would be total ignorance . . . the truth is that certain books land like a massive boulder on weak minds, or anxious minds, starving, thirsting, far too eagerly, for the truth. Thus engendering fanatical infatuations, generating ironclad convictions, as confident as they are unfounded, fomenting murderous certainties. Instead of broadening horizons, they narrow them to a core of miraculous answers . . .
These days it’s trendy to ask: What book changed your life? Well, seriously, I’m afraid that those who had their lives really changed by one book, by that book, it’s most likely because they’ve failed to read many others. And that one book, in all likelihood, would be Mein Kampf.
IT WAS A TIME and a way of life that were so chaotic and violent that even in the most trivial and day-to-day matters, even in our amusements, in the passing kerfuffles, in the thoughts and plans of high school students, we constantly and unfailingly veered close to murder. Yeah, that’s right, murder—rub out, liquidate, eliminate, or teach a lesson that, given the tools with which that lesson was being taught, might easily turn out to be the last lesson of them all. That eventuality was there, ever present, alongside the chitchat and normal activities, such as playing soccer or doing crossword puzzles. A group of students would meet up at a schoolmate’s home to discuss political matters, nothing more or less than the typical afternoon spent working on a paper about the Cuban revolution or Russian futurism, and after a mid-afternoon snack, the talk would turn to plans to shoot a journalist. Instead of eagerly discussing Mayakovsky’s broken verse or the price of sugarcane, in a brisk half hour they’d come to terms on a murder. From summary lists jotted down in felt-tip pen, names were drawn, pretty much interchangeable, of the people whose lives it seemed fair and just to take. The motives for doing so seemed obvious, and whatever reasoning might be involved led to them in a few simple moves: any obstacle that loomed up along the way simply had to be moved aside, and if the obstacle was a human being, well, that obstacle had to be removed. That removal would also serve an exemplary purpose, a warning to anyone who might get it into their head to meddle or interfere. It all was supposed to seem like an inexorable political deduction. The less time passed between the handing down of the sentence and the corresponding execution, the greater the exemplary effect, until the impression was that the reprisal simply took place automatically: you publish an article, and the next morning you could already expect to be shot at the bus stop, or the minute you got in your car, even before you turned the key in the ignition.
AT THE TIME, two opposing conceptions were facing off, in every field of human endeavor, but almost no one had the hardheaded stubbornness to align themselves definitively with one side or the other, while practically everyone wound up mingling their views or alternating them, on a case-by-case basis. These two opposing theories could be summarized as follows: “The path to happiness entails returning to a state of nature” and “The path that most limits suffering lies in the ability to transcend the state of nature.” The two major philosophers who had theorized these two points of view had lived respectively two and a half and three and a half centuries ago, which meant that their ideas had taken a hell of a long time to come to the final and decisive clash, you might say, perfectly matched, with equal strength. In the meantime, nature herself had already started to go crazy, with forests and waters being poisoned and dying, yet her followers had tried everything imaginable to restore harmony with her, stripping bare naked, living in the woods, fucking like rabbits, developing a new appreciation for ignorance and naïveté and the plow, just as technology was getting ready to integrate our vital functions one organ at a time, and the majority of mankind had already begun to live in a setting where there was not so much as a blade of grass that hadn’t been grown artificially, a chicken or a mushroom that hadn’t been grown in a battery, surrounded by a high barrier of virtual images.
The two doctrines faced off, in the fullness of their strength and yet, at the same time, at the height of their crisis, feverish, aggressive, spasming convulsively . . .
WHAT WAS ONCE DONE without discussion now has to be thrashed out, negotiated, and revoked if the negotiations fail. The rules change constantly, continually transforming and intersecting, coexisting; take, for example, the laws of love: we tell each other everything, each of us has his or her own life, if you betray me I’ll leave you, I’ll kill myself, you can fuck anyone you want, as you long as you don’t French-kiss them. How was an amorous awareness formed in the first place? Through song lyrics, advertising sketches, psychoanalytical commonplaces, which ended up establishing a pugnacious everyday religion with its commandments and its ethics, that is, its desires, which demanded obedience like the articles of faith of some new fundamentalism. The same thing, more or less, happened with politics and morality. For example, I grew up with a moral sense that was as compelling as it was uncertain, fumbling in the dark, and I always had to wait for the waves of remorse in order to ascertain whether what I had do
ne was wrong. Unfortunately, however, there is no equivalent feeling to confirm that I’ve done the right thing. And what was the typical venue for this hybridizing? The family. A blend of periods and styles, fragmented and reassembled, the venue for tenderness and anger and indifference, a genuine hotel (and yes, it is, it is!) where travelers of all ages stop and stay.
Up till then the way things worked had been:
the husband earns the bread
the wife spreads butter on it
the children eat it. The butter
on my bread wasn’t spread by my mother
but by young ladies paid to do so, nannies
or housekeepers: and if occasionally it turned out to be
my mother who spread the butter herself
in the first person, this constituted
a special occasion, a great
and unconditional act of love.
The Catholic School Page 78
