AND FROM THE POINT OF VIEW of the literary generation? I think it over . . . and all of a sudden, I have a flash, the doubt occurs to me that practically no great Italian writer has ever been born in the middle of a century, so that they would have been about fifty when their century was coming to an end. Never once, in eight hundred years of Italian literature . . . Could that be?
This brilliant thought occurs while I’m teaching a lesson in prison (in fact), and I’m dying to check it out immediately: and so I set my class of convicts an exercise in analyzing the parts of speech in a sentence, and while they struggle with the task, I sit down and leaf through an old textbook on the history of Italian literature to check out my hypothesis.
Here we are, Manzoni, certainly, 1785 . . . Ludovico Ariosto, 1474 . . . Parini, 1729 . . . Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Leopardi, it goes without saying . . . and Moravia, Montale . . . Ungaretti, Calvino, Fenoglio, Dino Campana, Foscolo, no need to check . . . Let’s take a look at others I’m less sure about. Guinizzelli: between 1230 and 1240. Machiavelli: 1469. Let’s try Giovan Battista Marino . . . exactly a century later, 1569. Giambattista Vico: 1668. Pirandello: 1867. They were thirty years old, or younger, when their century turned.
. . . Galilei? 1564. Guicciardini? 1483 . . . Nievo, 1831. Carducci, 1808. Goldoni, 1707 . . .
Hmmm, let’s try with the author of Pinocchio, Carlo Collodi, I haven’t the slightest idea of when he might have been born . . . no good here, either, 1826. I would have thought later.
I leaf furiously through the history of Italian literature, opening here and there at random.
Giovanni Battista Guarini . . . 1538. Jacopone da TodiLuigi Settembrini, 1813. Ruzante, 1496, with a question mark.
I start looking for specific names.
Metastasio? 1698.
Pico della Mirandola? 1463.
Lapo Giannino one knows when he was born or when he died.
Pomponazzi? 1462.
Fuck, I can’t find a single one born in the fifties of any century!
Rummaging through patriots, prolific authors, sonneteers, novelists, not a single one! There could be Savonarola, but can we really consider him a writer? And the lesser authors, Arrigo Boito (1842), Guido Gozzano (1883), Grazia Deledda (who is hardly a minor figure, she won the Nobel Prize), 1871 . . . Carlo Gozzi (1720) . . . Let’s try Aleardo Aleardi . . . he’s not in the book (I’ll check later, at home, on Google: 1812).
Among the greats, there’s only Tasso (born in Sorrento, March 11, 1544) who comes close, and perhaps it’s no accident that this teetering between two ages is what drove him mad . . . and then, by a hair, Italo Svevo, 1861, misses belonging to the decade that I’m seeking, but he’s a unique, isolated, misunderstood author . . . he had to wait until he was old, a very old man, to . . .
In the end, I find my man: it’s Pascoli. Giovanni Pascoli, born in San Mauro di Romagna, on December 31, 1855! A century and a year before me.
(If you like, Marco Polo, too: Venice, September 15, 1254.)
It wasn’t easy to predict what could come, whether for better or worse, out of a generation whose ears had been filled with such sounds and lyrics as (untranslatably) precipitevolissimevolmente, quel motivetto che ti piace tanto, tu sei simpatica, tango delle capinere, tipitipitipso col calipso, violino zigano, ma le gambe, ho un sassolino nella scarpa, ahi!, abat-jour, and Nicola Arigliano’s discouraging venti chilometri al giorno.
For that matter, at this point in the new millennium, that generation ought to have shown the best and the worst it had to offer.
HISTORY (whether we spell it with a capital or a lower-case “h”) in any case, begins in a school run by priests on Via Nomentana, which at the time was a relatively outlying area considering that, just a few minutes of traffic farther out, once you’d left the populated settlement of Montesacro behind you, you found yourself in the open countryside. Via Nomentana, lined with pine trees and therefore shrouded in perennial shade, wound on through fields inundated with light, climbing and dropping as, every Wednesday afternoon, or else on Mondays, or Tuesdays, or Thursdays, depending on your age and the class section you were in, at 2:30 p.m., aboard a school bus, a certain number of students from the SLM Religious Institute were taken to the playing fields for a couple hours of physical education. What was primarily meant by physical education was chasing one another back and forth across dusty red fields, kicking up clouds of the stuff that, during periods of drought, were thick enough to screen the runners from sight, as they chased after an old leather soccer ball, dry and hard, which almost always seemed to be retrieved only to be sent sailing toward the opposite side of the field. Except for a few skilled soloists, who managed to keep the ball between their feet for a few seconds, the others, including yours truly, immediately rid themselves of the ball with a sharp forward kick, lofting it through the air like in rugby. The game as it is played today, with its spiderweb of passing in all directions, was unknown to us.
WHEN I FOUND my old quiz booklet Take Your Tests, with the scores written in pencil on the last page, I was able to gauge the abyss that separated me and Arbus. I had an IQ of 118, while Arbus was 27 points ahead of me, with an intelligence quotient of 145. And what did he do with all those extra points? Nothing, it seems to me. Have you read Arbus’s name in any newspapers, in any professional journals? What did he invent, how has he distinguished himself? When you’re already very intelligent, maybe there’s no point to becoming even smarter. That surplus, it would almost seem, is designed to be frittered away along the way. And come to think of it: what have I achieved, with the score I managed to rack up?
Intelligence isn’t useful in the slightest. I’ve come to that conclusion after spending a lifetime hearing people tell me that I’m intelligent. The real meaning behind those declarations, variously charged with affection, admiration, envy, love, pity, scorn, and even hatred, consisted of a “but,” and it rested on that adversative conjunction, suspending the phrase and filling it with unknown elements, “You’re intelligent, but . . .,” “. . . too bad that . . .,” and anyone could fill those ellipses with a conclusion at will: too bad that you’re lazy, you’re cold and remote, you’re so uneven, arrogant, spoiled, too bad that you lack the balls, that you squander your opportunities, you meander, you don’t know what to do with that intelligence, you don’t know how to communicate it, to share it, to put it to good use, concentrate it, donate it, that fucking intelligence of yours . . .! In other words, why don’t you take your intelligence and stick it up your ass! Now, if this is what happened, or at least in part what happened to me, only partly a dropout, then we can just imagine how things went for Arbus!
He truly was a wasted genius.
What happened to him was not so much that his intelligence was recognized, as that it was charged as a crime. He was accused from dawn to dusk every day of being intelligent. Whatever his test scores, his teachers never tired of pestering him, insisting that he could do more, even more, much much more. “Someone with a brain like yours, eh . . .!?” His mother seemed to scorn his gift, overabundant but useless, seeing that it wasn’t accompanied by such basic virtues as good looks and charm. On the rare occasions that he was willing to speak, after the initial burst of astonishment on all sides, his classmates couldn’t wait for him to shut up again, since the things he said immediately demonstrated the paucity and stupidity of all the things they had said and thought: his statements then either provoked surprise or weren’t understood in the slightest, making his classmates either fall silent or laugh, which are our instinctive reactions in the face of all forms of greatness. Whether it was brimming over with admiration or contempt, the way that we, his classmates, invariably reacted after Arbus had had his say amounted to this: “The egghead has spoken!”
“WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO, hit myself in the head so the other guys won’t feel so stupid?”
SPEAKING OF IQS, by the way: I don’t remember whether I’ve mentioned him in the preceding pages, and if so, probably in passing
, but we did have a classmate who was an idiot, a real idiot, Crasta, also known as Kraus, or Three-Toed Sloth, whom I ought to mention. During lessons, he had a habit of cleaning the inside of his ears with the cap of his ballpoint pen. He’d alternate the top of the cap and the sharp edge of the clip that held the pen to the shirt pocket, to clean out the really stubborn chunks of earwax. It was pretty disgusting. Until one fine day, while Kraus was turning and twisting the cap in his ear, we never did figure out just how, the pen got stuck in there, first the whole thing, then just the cap, and it couldn’t be extracted, no matter how hard we tried to pull it, till we were afraid we’d hurt him. So he had to be taken off to the emergency room.
NO ONE EVER PAID the slightest attention to Kraus, but it’s precisely with this existence devoid of any particular details or interest that God was setting us a problem, placing us all face-to-face with an insoluble enigma. Who was Kraus? Why was he in the world? The enigma of Kraus remained one in part because, in fact, no one had bothered to delve into it, explain it; its solution attracted no one, and our classmate appeared so nondescript and insignificant, and his personality so weak and superficial, that it would have been a waste of time even to suppose that he concealed anything profound in his depths, anything to look for.
IN OTHER WORDS, his life must have a significance of some kind, but it isn’t visible to the untutored eye. It’s pretty nondescript, like a worm or a rock along a trail, the kind of thing you’re not sure whether to crush underfoot or kick into the woods or just leave there, after all, it makes no difference, it amounts to nothing, there’s no point in savaging it or pitying it . . . But if the Creator, who assigns such importance to each component of the universe, even the tiniest and lowliest particle, and who blows His vital spirit every day into the universe to preserve it, surely ought to have tried harder with Kraus, then He ought to have told us loud and clear that this was a boy like any other, and not, say, a stone or an insect or I don’t know what else.
8
AT SLM, the Italian teacher, Giovanni Vilfredo Cosmo, constituted a unique case. Tall, gangly, slightly stooped, he frequently wore red pullovers and checked jackets. He had a smile, or rather a grin, stamped permanently on his wrinkled face; it didn’t seem to be due to anything in particular, except the protruding and smoke-yellowed set of teeth that his negroid lips struggled to contain, reminiscent of an actor who was popular in those years, the star, after costarring in lots of other movies, of the extremely violent and delirious western Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia—Warren Oates. Aside from his sarcastic smirk—which never, however, expressed his true feelings, if anything, it concealed them, tucking them away behind the armor of his encyclopedic culture—Cosmo gave the impression that he was mocking the priests, us students, his lay colleagues and his religious ones, and ultimately himself, as well. He never dropped that cheerfully disenchanted attitude and was the only one who seemed capable of maintaining it even around the headmaster, whose arrival in class for the ritual lectures or the distribution of report cards he was accustomed to hail with bows and hyperbole, like a courtier greeting the passage of the Sun King. “Boys, please welcome in a manner befitting Himself, the incarnation, both in his physical and in his symbolic body, of the power that towers above us all. Up, up, on your feet!” and we would all rise and stand in an equally solemn fashion, though with faint smiles on our lips. “Don’t make fun, teacher, please don’t mock . . . they won’t understand,” the headmaster always retorted, flattered but also a little intimidated by and worried about Cosmo. Irony is a double-edged sword, and in his presence the headmaster realized that he lacked any exclusive rights to it. “Good heavens! I’m deadly serious!” our teacher would continue his skirmishing. “We all are here, aren’t we, boys?” and meanwhile, with a gesture, like the director of a symphony orchestra, he’d have us sit again. The only thing he actually treated seriously was his profession, that of a high school literature teacher, however much everyone might continue to proclaim their astonishment and puzzle over why such a brilliant man could ever have wound up on the payroll of a private school, instead of occupying an endowed chair at some university, or some other prestigious position. With the mind he possessed, the very idea that he’d spend his days lecturing to a room full of apathetic pampered brats about Arcadia, correcting with strokes of a red ballpoint pen the twisted syntax of essays about a day at the beach or Dante’s Count Ugolino. “Pausing in his savage meal, the sinner raised His mouth . . .”: for the past thirty years he had done nothing other than to unfurl those immortal lines and comment upon them to audiences that might vary in level, but which were always and inevitably unworthy. He’d never moved on: Why not? What is that had blocked him there, stranded at SLM, like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island? We should point out that he never seemed discontented or frustrated, truth be told. Given his great worth and illustrious reputation, which in turn reflected favorably on the school, there was a persistent rumor that the priests paid him a salary almost twice what any of the other teachers earned. What’s more, they allowed him to cluster his classes in the first few days of the week so that he was free to zip around in his Lamborghini, attending jazz concerts; he was in fact a respected and widely recognized expert on jazz. He possessed, actually, one of the most complete and valuable private jazz record collections, and word was that he was a first-class percussionist, an implacable rhythm machine, or had been before arthritis took the drumsticks out of his hands, useful now at the very most for turning the almost impalpable pages of an old edition of the Divine Comedy, tattered and dog-eared from years of lessons. Always the same lessons. The golden, featherlight burden of literature. The ritual office of scholastic repetition. There were others who would hint darkly at some very grave incident that had taken place when Cosmo was still young, something that had forced him, so to speak, to withdraw from the world, like a sort of latter-day Fra Cristoforo; but instead of in a monastery, he had locked himself up in the modernist fortress of SLM, mortifying himself in the humiliating role of anonymous high school teacher, safe from the temptation of undertaking a brilliant literary or academic career. Except about jazz, he’d never been willing to write a line of his own, at least that anyone knew of or that had been published; nor had we learned the nature of the terrible sin of Cosmo’s youth that he was laboring to expiate.
I owe him a great deal, far too much. If I write books, I owe that to him, and I think the same could be said for the other writer who emerged from that class, Marco Lodoli. Not that we didn’t already have a passion deep inside us when we were assigned Cosmo as a teacher our first year of high school: but it was only when we met Cosmo that that passion found the recognition and nourishment that it required. The libraries of books we had at home, bookshelves lining wood-paneled walls, suddenly came to life, and Cosmo made sure to add the pinch of salt of a myriad of titles our parents could never have thought of while they were assembling what they reckoned to be the necessary array of books for the apartment of a family of educated professionals (both our fathers were engineers, Lodoli’s and my own), considering the aesthetic effect, the spines bound in morocco leather, the prestigious collections of classics purchased wholesale, and which filled entire shelves in their orderly array. There is nothing that can offer such a restful and powerful visual rhythm as a collection of Loeb classics. Things were slightly different for Arbus. He already had a genius-level academic at home, at least theoretically, since in fact his father was never there. Music, his sister the pianist, etc., completed the intellectual array. And then, as I have explained more than once, it was unlikely to think of Arbus being swayed by anyone’s allure. I mean to say, of any flesh-and-blood human being. And there can be no doubt that a teacher exerts his authority in the form of an allure, his fascination as a conductor of impulses: the allure of the things he says, of his eyes as they sweep the classroom in search of other eyes, of the natural gestures that accompany a reading or an explanation, and then there’s the timbre of the voice. Cosmo, trut
h be told, didn’t have an especially lovely voice, in fact, quite the contrary: it came from the depths of his throat and sometimes squeaked into a strident, overexcited pitch, like an owl’s cry, and then dropped back down to grave and somber tones, which almost made the windowpanes rattle. Perhaps it was precisely this continual and quite theatrical oscillation, and his vivid and vigorous activity, that kept us glued to his lessons, or at least, I should speak for myself, because other classmates, for example Scarnicchi, who by no accident was also known as the Dormouse, would sleep through Cosmo’s classes the same way they did with De Laurentiis or Brother Gildo and just as they would have done with Gas&Svampa if the blows from the wooden pointer hadn’t kept them awake and alert. Arbus was extremely focused and attentive, he listened to and evaluated the concepts, ignoring everything else, indifferent to the pantomime and the seduction. As if he were able to pass unscathed through the aura of emotions until he reached the core of the formulations. And he recognized that, in effect, many of the concepts expressed by Cosmo were indeed interesting and deserving of examination and in-depth exploration. But he certainly wasn’t captivated by him. And he immediately dropped everything that would normally be classed under the heading of “personal opinions.” Arbus detested “personal opinions” in general, and in particular those purveyed by teachers. He’d confided that fact in me alone. “Do we really have to sit here listening to his likes and dislikes?” he would ask, polishing his glasses with the tail of his shirt, untucked from his trousers. “Plus, also, exactly what does beautiful or ugly mean? True or false? Explained like that, or perhaps we should say, not explained, it means very little, this is idle chitchat, not teaching, phrases tossed out then and there by an individual who is clearly concealing problems of some kind.” He was thinking about the emotional tirades of poor De Laurentiis, the soliloquies of Mr. Golgotha, the irritated and slightly hysterical retorts of Brother Gildo, who whenever one of us, either out of a scrupulous desire to understand or a devious wish to annoy, raised a hand and said they hadn’t clearly understood a certain passage, never had anything to say, other than to repeat, enunciating clearly, every single word that he had just uttered, never altering so much as a comma, exactly like a student who has learned a chunk of the book by heart.
The Catholic School Page 80
