But Cosmo understood that what Arbus was talking about wasn’t the kind of nitpicking that the smartest kid in class engaged in on a whim, but rather a very specific cognitive system. And he did his best to explain to him that literature couldn’t be subjected to that system by its own specific nature. Whoever found themselves talking about it or interpreting it could not hope to avail themselves of clear and certain laws. And so one is forced to remain in the field of detestable “opinions.” Something that’s changeable, wobbly, not entirely subject to verification.
“And you know something, Arbus? In the final analysis, that a certain poem pleases you or doesn’t please you is something that no can determine in advance, just as they can’t force you to like it or keep you from liking it. No one can hinder your pleasure or transmute your dislike into anything else but a false consciousness. Do you understand that, Arbus? And the rest of you scamps and scoundrels, do you understand that?”
He often called us that, scamps and scoundrels.
Terminology with a delightful hint of desuetude, nowadays.
I confess, this thing that Cosmo said sometime around 1973, I only finally grasped around 2013, very recently, in the time, that is, since I have lulled myself into thinking that I’ve not only grasped the true meaning of the term “false consciousness,” in general, but also that I’ve identified what constitutes my own false consciousness, where it resides, what it is, in other words, what is so irremediably false in me, because it is generated by the anxiety to cover over what can only be covered over, in fact, with a lie. Forget about literature, it is only an exemplum or a field of application of this mode of proceeding: it is the glove that covers the hand, it’s not the hand itself, it’s a delightful artificial hand, made of hides skillfully tanned and stitched to fit an ideal hand. We’re not talking about literature here, but rather any pleasurable or elevating or mortifying or dolorous experience of ours . . .
I don’t know whether or not Arbus ever understood it. Perhaps he grasped it instantly, because his prodigious intelligence was capable of accommodating paradoxes, or perhaps he still roams this world (wherever he may be: O, brother, where art thou?) devoid of this understanding. A prisoner of his own limitations, boundaries that were erected by a mind too powerful to surrender, to allow itself to be overwhelmed by superfluous elements. Pleasure is invariably superfluous, puerile, and hence unacceptable. Cosmo’s wisdom lay not in his erudition, disproportionate for a high school teacher, but rather in the fact that he had chosen to lay down his arms. That he had unbuckled his suit of armor: the armor of his sarcasm, which he exercised so frequently, but not to the point of making him inhuman. In this (but only in this, let me be clear) he resembled somewhat Courbet, the pornographic artist who taught phys ed at Giulio Cesare High School.
I believe that each of us has been given a Cosmo in his life, in the canonical role of teacher, or else athletic coach, uncle, poker player, tramp, manicurist, busker, therapist, big brother, an older brother even if he happens to be younger, and their influence has been decisive, for better or for worse. The Cosmo that you happen to run into is responsible for nothing other than to have made us become what we already were.
9
IREALIZED ALL OF THIS much more clearly when I changed schools. They told me that Cosmo made a sarcastic comment about my decision. “Bravo, Albinati! He screwed up big time.” I couldn’t say whether, buried deep in this hasty, acid, and from a certain point of view irrefutable wisecrack there might not have been a hint of regret, seeing that at a single fell swoop, the teacher had lost two of his finest students: a genuine disciple, yours truly, and the multifaceted brilliance of Arbus, whom he couldn’t perhaps claim as a follower, but it was certainly better to have him in your class than kids like Three-Toed Sloth or the perverted d’Avenia or rebels without a cause like Chiodi or Jervi. In the case of my super-gifted classmate, Arbus, Cosmo at least could grasp his frenzy to leave the school, to be done once and for all, and in haste, with that cycle that had proved so mortifying for him. My decision was more controversial, and could be viewed as a betrayal, an abjuration. One that had been leveled directly at him. It was, after all, Cosmo I was turning my back on, not the priests and holy mass and the swimming pool, or, say, Gas&Svampa. Cosmo was the teacher I was disavowing. What’s more, I had chosen a delicate moment, I was leaving just when things were getting good: Cosmo had been patiently revving his engine for two years of high school, waiting to launch himself on the modern authors, the ones who were closest to us, when the Italian curriculum would turn incandescent for an apprentice man-of-letters like me, from Leopardi to the Romantics and on up to Baudelaire’s flowers of evil and the Surrealists . . . and just then, of all times, I was turning to go. But maybe he really didn’t care all that much: he’d had bright students before me and he’d have others after me. In the meantime, he still had Lodoli to talk to about poetry, Rummo with his uncrushable seriousness, young believer that he was, the miniaturistic zeal of Zipoli, Modiano’s good cheer, Picchiatello’s tics to keep under control, and a few others to usher respectably over the finish line. That was the role that Cosmo had chosen for himself: ferryman.
IT’S A SHAME that the notes I took at school have been lost. Especially those stunning summaries and outlines of philosophy and Italian under the protection of whose array, as if beneath the shields of a Roman tortoise formation, we took our final exams, marching forward in serried ranks, grinding through one author after another and leaving the field behind us littered with them: Schleiermacher, Jacobi, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Feuerbach . . .
Official sheets of graph paper teeming with concepts and notions, as dense and heavy as honeycombs fresh from the hive. The ramifications of the square brackets that multiplied and proliferated, forming funnel diagrams.
They were handed over to the girls who took their final exams the year after we did at Giulio Cesare. They wound up being sold between the pages, overloaded with underlinings, of textbooks on the used-book stands.
But a few years ago, something popped out of the second volume of Sapegno’s Compendium of the History of Italian Literature, which had surfaced in a cellar carrel that had to be cleared out in the aftermath of a death in the family, several little pages ripped out of the heart of a notebook and folded in half, with notes that hadn’t been jotted down, but rather painstakingly copied, in the handwriting I had as a teenager: slanting to the right, in an effort at regularity and a display of character. Rereading those notes, I realized that they were copied from notes taken by none other than Arbus during Cosmo’s lessons on Machiavelli—he had let me borrow them afterward, so that I could copy them for myself.
The block-print heading, likewise leaning at close to a forty-five-degree angle, read: THE PRINCE.
No easy matter, at first glance, and without going back to check, to say which of those concepts, numbered progressively, belonged to the original text, or to what extent they might instead be Cosmo’s own thoughts, or even whether Arbus might have added something of his own, in his processing of them. Like a fairy tale when you tell it to a little child, the concepts are formulated in an ever-changing fashion, until they’re no longer even the same ideas, and their paternity becomes hopelessly muddled. They become public domain. Recopying them below, forty years later, I can hardly withstand the temptation to modify them and add a few things of my own, a dozen or so lines scattered here and there, but for one specific reason: it may be an impression induced by all the time I’ve been neck-deep in the story, but some of the observations of Machiavelli-Cosmo-Arbus are reminiscent of the murder that this book is based on.
1.If you are going to insult someone, then you might as well do it in a serious fashion; because he will be able to take revenge for minor insults, but grave or mortal ones, he will not. In the CR/M (as in many other crimes and murders, for that matter), it is only by eliminating the victims, only by “snuffing them out” (this is the eloquent verb used by Mac.), that we can avoid being prosecuted for them. Death m
akes those who have suffered a wrong incapable of paying it back in the same tender. As Stalin liked to say, after issuing orders to liquidate someone: “No man, no problem.”
2.It is by no means true that time heals all wounds; quite the contrary, more often than not, time makes things worse.
3a.Every man’s natural desire is to acquire, not to lose; to increase, not to diminish; to grow, not to decay. Possession is the unmistakable end that everyone seeks; in various fashions. There are, however, things and even persons whose possession can only be secured (or the illusion of whose possession can only be secured) in one way: by destroying them. Like the spendthrifts in Dante’s Inferno, who celebrate their patrimony by squandering it, they are owners only when, in fact, they cease to own. For them, destruction becomes a radical form of possession. It is nothing more than an even cruder variant on Oscar Wilde’s famous line: Each man kills the thing he loves. Each man possesses that which he annihilates, and so, a man is rich only in that which he squanders and devastates.
3b.You possess only that which you are free, at any time and on the slightest whim, to spend, give away, disown, or destroy. Any limitation on your free will to make those choices or perform those actions is a limitation on your genuine ownership.
4.One’s patrimony outlives one’s paternity, survives the father. It represents proof of the durability of the legacy of blood. Therefore, men mourn the loss of it far more bitterly than they ever will that of their parent.
5.Love depends upon the one who loves; fear depends upon the one who strikes it into the heart. Love cannot be aroused by us; fear can. We can far more easily arouse fear in someone than we can make them fall in love.
6.Chiron, the preceptor, is half man and half horse. Why that half-beast in the preceptor?
7a.What you truly are deep down, you cannot change; what you merely appear, you can when needed transform, modify, adjust, if the situation so requires.
7b.Truly being what you seem to be may prove risky or even pernicious.
8.There is more life, more hatred, more thirst for vengeance than you’d ever suspect by considering the “tranquil” and “peaceful” existence of humanity: a teeming mass of violent and senseless and filthy desires is concealed beneath that scab.
9.Like archers, you must aim beyond the targets that you mean to hit.
10.It is easy to persuade a people, much harder to keep them firm in that persuasion.
11.Some never stumble along the way only because they fly above the path.
12.Like certain diseases: which would be easy to cure when they’re hard to identify, and then become easy to diagnose but, by now, impossible to cure. (The irremediable contradiction beyond knowledge and action.)
13.While philosophers and priests cannot do it, artists will be required to “speak well of evil.” (If, that is, “of evil one can rightly speak well.”)
14.Acts of violence must all be done at once; kindnesses a few at a time.
15.It’s easy to make the people your friend if they wish nothing more than to allow themselves to be oppressed; it is easy to oppress the people by giving them the impression that you are not oppressing them.
16a.There are sins; but they are never the same as the sins you accuse yourself of.
16b.People willingly accuse themselves of any and all sins, except the ones they’ve actually committed.
17.Slow acquisitions, lightning losses.
18.Referring to invisible entities, and precisely because they are concealed in the depths and rarely verifiable, among all human qualities, the most external and the easiest to simulate is religiosity; that is why it runs the risk of seeming hypocritical even when it is authentic. And so it comes naturally to mistrust priests in general and devout Catholics.
19.To be armed is to be gratified. A weapon expands your consciousness and enhances the physical and mental dimensions of he who holds it in his grip. A weapon multiplies his possibilities. All at once, he can become rich, be revered and feared, rectify that which strikes him as wrong, reach that which is distant, put an end to stories that have been dragging on for too long, and settle accounts once and for all. Those who have ever leveled a firearm have experienced sensations that the unarmed man can’t begin to imagine.
20.You engender hatred both with bad deeds, that much is obvious, and with good deeds, Machiavelli opines. At the opposite extreme, I conclude, you can gain gratitude and love both by doing good and by doing evil. That’s right, even by doing evil you can win love, perhaps even in a more profound and visceral fashion. We are, in fact, disproportionately grateful to those who do harm to our enemies. And sometimes we’re even grateful to those who do harm directly to us. Thank you! Thank you for having mistreated us, humiliated us, kept us in chains, submissive and degraded. If only this weren’t considered a pathology, but a common disposition of the human soul, just think how many forms of behavior that are apparently inexplicable would instead become as clear as daylight!
21.What is offensive is not so much the fact of dying but the way in which you die.
22.You invent an enemy to fight him, defeat him, and become great, or at least feel you are great.
23.Arms are sacred only when they become your last hope.
24.If everyone starts telling you the truth to your face, it means you are no longer respected.
25.In Italy there is never any shortage of material to give shape to, in fact, there’s an overabundance. It would take centuries to work through it all, taking on its various challenges. The problem is that a great deal of this material already has a shape, and it’s a mediocre one at best; and the rest of the material yet to be given a shape is so horrible, in and of itself, that you’re afraid of giving it one. That is why writers wind up talking about nothing at all; or if they do talk about anything, they don’t rise above the level of idle chitchat. They lack the courage to give shape to what is formless: and what they find already clumsily expressed in clichés and commonplaces, they prefer to leave as they found it, or at the very most, they simply reinforce it. The only contribution writers bring to bear is a surplus of formal vehemence, which almost never even dreams of delving into the substance of the thing. And in the meantime, the mountain of material continues to grow and grow . . .
10
DO YOU SEE THIS RED?” asked Cosmo, plucking at his usual sweater. “Well, they were convinced that that’s the way my sympathies tended. Which is why they feared me and they respected me. They hadn’t understood a damned thing. But that misunderstanding happened to come in handy for them and for me. I maintained my Olympian detachment from the rest, and they could show the world how open-minded they were, how liberal they were, to have a Communist teacher in their ranks. A Communist, but a first-class teacher. Without ever openly using the term ‘Communist,’ at SLM they boasted that they had a left-wing teacher who served as a counterweight to the right-wing teachers. It’s the same thing that happened at the major bourgeois newspapers: they’d include articles in their op-ed sections by some writer or other who’d launch a ferocious attack on the bourgeois system. The truth is that in Italy, anticommunism never had an easy go of it because, deep down, more or less everyone admires the Communists, even those who fear them and hate them. And so they made use of my youthful transgressions to invent a character who doesn’t exist, Cosmo the Red. Everyday open-mindedness is such a scant commodity that all you need to do is express half an uncommon idea, no, a quarter of an uncommon idea, and you’ll promptly be taken for a subversive intellectual. Using this yardstick, Plato, Nietzsche, and Leopardi would be taken for Communists. Intelligence in and of itself is subversive. That’s why I don’t mind that they continue to think the wrong thing of me. It means that they respect me, they fear me, and they consider me to be precious. A school’s teaching faculty is like a soccer team: every position has to be covered. Here at SLM, I’m the left wing, lightning fast, versatile, unpredictable. But it is their preconceptions that demand this of me. Catholicism demands com
pleteness, it feels it must be inclusive, herd opposites together, close the circle. Embrace, always embrace. Its most powerful symbol is the colonnade of St. Peter’s Square. And I, in my red sweater, am easy to spot in that enormous square . . . It’s him! Yes, that’s him, they say, the Communist! And they strike up a hymn of thanks.”
He’s different, which means he’s someone like us . . . one of us . . .
THIS IS WHAT Cosmo revealed to me in a dream that I had about a month ago. Perhaps it’s a reverberation from the work I’m doing on this book and the mnemonic effort that is transmuted into oblique inventions. In actual fact, I don’t believe that Cosmo ever said anything nearly so explicit, or if he did, it wasn’t to me. Maybe he didn’t even think these things. In the dream, we were in a rowboat, just he and I, in the middle of a volcanic lake with steep, wooded sides, it might have been Lake Nemi. I was fore, rowing, and he was aft, reasoning aloud, recounting, with a bemused tone. At a certain point I noticed that there was several inches of water in the bottom of the boat. “Don’t worry,” he told me, “we can always walk.” Walk where? I thought to myself, walk on water, like Jesus? And I burst out laughing. As if he’d read my mind, Cosmo nodded, baring his yellow teeth in a broad goofy Warren Oates smirk, which this time wasn’t a bit ironic, just sweet, gentle, faintly melancholy. From the lakeshore came the rustling of reeds. A light breeze was blowing. The boat sank lower and lower in the water and by now my elbows were getting wet as I rowed, the oarlocks were underwater, the oars were four-fifths wet. “Jerusalem! Jerusalem!” Cosmo said, pointing toward the shore. “Where? Where?” “Down there.” But all I could see was a cabin with fishing nets hanging out in front, tossing in the evening breeze. He took off his sweater, thinking I might be cold, and told me: “You put it on. I’m sure it will fit you perfectly.”
The Catholic School Page 81
