A citizen always pays his tribute at least twice. It’s a fixed double or triple taxation.
(Mmm, let’s see in my case . . . apartment burgled and ransacked, car and mopeds stolen or vandalized, an unknown number of digital devices and cell phones stolen from my children and therefore necessarily replaced by me, at my expense, as well as bags “with everything in them,” that is, ID, cash, house keys . . . just to cite the most significant items: there, I believe that over the past several years I’ve turned over to the criminal element at least the same amount as I have paid to the state in the form of taxes and fines. And I’ve never been reimbursed a cent by either of those two institutions. At least the state, though, however unreliably, does provide me with some minimal services.)
THE GREATEST UNRUFFLED TRANQUILLITY in taking someone else’s life can be found in someone who has little interest in safeguarding his own. This attitude is sometimes called courage. In the heart of any hero, a contempt for danger. If there is a desire for suffering and death, it is attained by inflicting suffering and death upon others. A murderer causes death while waiting to experience it in person. Friends of Death, friends in Death. In the letters that Angelo and his accomplice exchanged after the CR/M, we can detect the presence, all-powerful and morbid, of this bond of the Negative.
THE SPECTACLE OF DEATH isn’t offered to the one dying, but to the one who survives. In the first place, the murderers, certainly, who enjoy an early screening of it, but also strangers. Before they leave the scene of the crime, it is to strangers that a murderer consigns the bodies of his victims. After which, so to speak, he “has nothing more to do with it,” he can move on to other things. The message has been sent, and it may take some time; but as far as being delivered, it will eventually be delivered. The meaning of the death of the two girls (yes, two: the one who was alive was virtually dead) was entrusted to a public decipherment. It constituted the genuine bond, the authentic challenge of the whole story. Murderers vs. society: that turned out to be the interesting axis, the girls, raped and murdered, didn’t really count for much in the final analysis; they were the short end of the triangle, and this immediately became clear both to the one who survived, who was never capable as long as she lived of doing anything other than to mumble out her bereft helplessness, and to those who took up her cause—indignant public opinion, feminists, newspaper op-ed writers. A great many hastened to suffer and level accusations on her behalf, in her name, well aware that her personal suffering was unquestionably profound but still, little in comparison with the collective drama orchestrated by that infamous crime. What had the murderers been trying to say? Practically nothing to their victims, but a great deal to everyone else. A great deal of what?
The truth is that if the victims have no appeal, no one pays any attention to them. It’s sad to say it, but that’s the way it is. Youth, working-class origins, homeliness, and naïveté only serve to emphasize how brutal were those who inflicted their savagery on these nondescript facial features, but they constitute nothing interesting in and of themselves. Those are just preliminary facts that tend to refocus the attention on the perpetrators. Out of ten parts of curiosity aroused by the event, nine belong to the murderers.
14
It wasn’t hard to kill.
It wasn’t hard to find someone to kill.
It wasn’t hard to find a good reason to kill someone.
Any reason would do. It wasn’t hard at all.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN a little boy and a young man is that while the former may wish to kill someone, the latter can do it. An adolescent finds himself suddenly capable of acting out violent fantasies that have hitherto been, necessarily, strictly innocuous. This power, never before experienced, confers a new meaning to the sentiment of hatred. Your impulses have now become potentially murderous. They, too, so to speak, have come of age. The destruction of the other, so longed mulled and longed for, so long that it has turned into a sort of consolatory singsong (I’m going to kill him . . . I’ll kill him . . . I’ll kill him), emerges from the world of fairy tales and becomes a concrete possibility. Childish cruelty is finally given the tools to vent its frustrations.
Violent attitudes may be due to an inability to adapt, to compromise, to bring a little hypocrisy to bear in order to resolve conflicts. Like schizophrenics, adolescents are often unable to accept compromises concerning what’s true and what’s false, what’s right and what’s wrong, their morality rejects commonsense solutions, temporary stopgaps. Looking out for one’s own best interests, smoothing out problems, avoiding the worst outcomes, not exacerbating contrasts—all these things constitute, to their mind, hypocritical conduct.
(Arbus, for example, was like this. Implacable. His sarcastic laughter submerged any attempt at reconciliation . . .)
But who in all honesty could seriously say what the thoughts of an adolescent are? The personal, profound thoughts? We didn’t feel real, but made up of emptiness, air, we had no consistency, we didn’t have a home, because the home we lived in was our parents’ home, we weren’t children but we weren’t grown-ups, either, no one liked us, no one wanted us, no one came looking for us. The sensation was that everyone wanted girls, their parents spoiled them, the teachers at school coddled them, we’d never heard of a girl flunking a course, a girl who got three Ds? They’d help her out because “she was just going through a rough spot,” a boy with two Cs, well, he would flunk “because he hasn’t lifted a finger all year long.”
We didn’t have the slightest idea of what we would become, and for that matter, we weren’t particularly interested, it made no difference to us, after all, we were nobody.
The only thing that seemed real to us were the things we did that were wrong, that were bad. That was what mattered. Suddenly everyone snapped to attention. Then they noticed us. We all at once became important.
Violence gives rise to behavior that seems real because it prompts negative consequences. The positive aspects are more elusive, they’re only noticed much later and no one really takes them into account; negativity generates immediate responses, clear-cut reactions. Rage and pain are tangible. If nothing happens after we pass that way, if everything remains the same as before, it means that we count for nothing. To ensure that you notice my absence, I’m willing to pay any price, I don’t mind in the slightest the fact that you might consider me a piece of shit. A thousand times better to be a piece of shit than to go unnoticed.
WHEN YOU’RE ALIVE and there’s a dead man next to you, you rejoice. You can still do all the things that he no longer can. A person who’s kicked the bucket is no longer a person, he’s no longer anything. Things are always better for the living than the dead.
FROM THE POINT OF VIEW of an individual’s self-interest, being very aggressive, ostentatiously aggressive, constitutes a disadvantage. An incessant aggressiveness arouses in one’s surroundings reactions of much greater intensity than a single individual is capable of deploying, however bellicose they might be. The life stories of the perpetrators of the CR/M tell us that from their misdeeds, they obtained nothing more than a grim, difficult life, made up of prison time and time on the run. They may not have paid with their lives, but they certainly wasted their lives. In exchange for what?
One of them died of a heroin overdose at age forty after serving in the Foreign Legion; another escaped from prison, was caught, then was released, only to be sent back to prison for good after killing again.
It’s clear, in short, that they acted against their own self-interest, not only destroying the lives of others, about which they cared little, but also the lives that you might have supposed were dearest to their hearts, their own.
What strange kind of superman complex leads someone to live a subhuman life? Those who do evil do so because they believe they’ve been victims of that evil in the past, or else they expect that soon they’ll be subjected to it. He believes that he’s already paid in advance for the crimes he commits. Those who have suffered want to exact vengeance
, those who haven’t yet suffered want to make sure they shoot first. It’s rare to find someone who deep down in his heart is truly convinced that he’s going to enjoy impunity. Whereas there are a great many who, albeit indirectly, inflict today what they suffered yesterday. Unfortunately, the vendetta almost never strikes the actual culprits of the harm done, instead, most of the time, it just strikes other innocent peers. A vendetta is always imprecise and transferrable, the wrong suffered is often imaginary.
VIOLENCE CAN BE UNLEASHED for any number of reasons, for a single obscure motive. For the CR/M, we might list a series of factors a page long. Loss of values, herd mentality, superiority complex, fanaticism, widespread atmosphere of violence, ideological scorn, sociopathy, spirit of revenge. In more or less the same conditions as Angelo & Co., at the time, there must have been at least ten thousand other people in Rome, in our school alone, more or less, we all started out from the same basis, so did that mean that we were all destined to become murderers?
HUMAN CRUELTY RARELY BURSTS forth in a rage, in an instant, in an “eruption of uncontrollable passion.” On the contrary, it is bound up with planning and cool calculation. The CR/M is a perfect example of this, though, over the long term, the plans devised by the murderers might have been clumsily thrown together, contradictory, ineptly framed, or merely idiotic, but that in no sense takes away from their methodical spirit. There may be madness to your method, but it doesn’t mean it’s not still a method. If you set aside the brutal aspects of his modus operandi, the torturer still behaves in a scrupulous, Chinese fashion, and it is this coolness, bound up with his so-called beastly acts, that leaves us speechless.
In order to kidnap someone, you have to study their daily routines, their movements, their habits, then you come up with a plan, and you put it into operation. Although the newspapers, in their distinctive moralizing and indignant style, like to say so, very rarely is bestial cruelty actually blind. Quite the contrary, it is shrewd, appraising, and farsighted, and what makes it more powerful is the element of calculation, the premeditation, even a certain prudence, all prerogatives not of instinct but of reason. Nothing mindless about it, then. Certain types of torture require dedication and hard work to even imagine them, and cold blood to put them into effect. Nothing blind about it: it takes the meticulous devotion of a surgeon, the patience of a sniper. It requires creativity and commitment to dream up new ways to destroy your fellow human beings. The worst crimes are actually carried out in an almost total lack of emotion, thanks to a dead calm in the heart, in the soundproof room. In a film that came out that very same year, which I can remember frame by frame, Max von Sydow played a contract assassin. He remained perfectly detached as he carried out his assassinations, and that’s why they paid him. In his spare time, he painted lead toy soldiers.
BEASTLY CRUELTY: rarely is a term used so inappropriately. What we call beastly in a human being in no way corresponds to any aspect of a wild animal; indeed, it is the opposite, a purely human characteristic, so that, when a man behaves in a way that we are accustomed to calling “beastly,” we ought rather to say that he has behaved in a distinctly human fashion.
WHEN I SPEAK ABOUT REASON, I’m talking about the faculty of committing the most clamorous of errors while attributing a motivation to them. Reason has very little to do with intelligence, which can almost entirely be tracked down in the realm of instinct. The plans developed by the reason of murderers are almost inevitably absurd lucubrations: that does not mean they don’t apply a certain method to their madness. I have always given this interpretation to Goya’s famous etching: it’s not the sleep of reason that produces monsters, but rather the dream of reason (sueño in Spanish can mean either thing). That is to say, its plans, its projects.
IN REALITY, there is no reason the CR/M should have been able to happen; neither the actions of the torturers and murderers nor those of the victims help in any way to shed light on the logic of the events as something that came about as a result of causes in view of objectives. Objectives, in fact, are entirely lacking, and from the outset. What did the girls want, exactly? Whatever it could have been: friendship, amusement, fun, and perhaps even a boyfriend? But what is even less evident is this: What did Angelo and his accomplices want? Did they want what they finally got? And what on earth was that?
THE THEORY OF INVOLUNTARY EXCESS explains nothing, with its references to an orgy that “ended badly,” “got out of hand” (a theory that was recklessly set forth by the counsel for the defense)—the unexpected outcome of a violent game.
That situation was not generated by a specific cause nor by an order of causes; nor do I believe that it was planned out the way it actually played out, so twisted and incongruous is it in the comings and goings of its protagonists, its perpetrators; you might just say that that situation at a certain point came about, that those events occurred, the decision made in that villa by the sea wasn’t for those events to occur in this or that manner; rather, the decision was made to go along with them, to let them happen, literally to execute them, and once they were inside this internal sequence of causation, in its way unstoppable, to carry them to completion (which, despite the acrobatic argumentations of the counsel for the defense, could have no conceivable outcome but the deaths of the girls). What happened in the villa at Monte Circeo is unmistakable proof that, when everything is possible, everything, inevitably, happens.
(IF YOU CAN DO IT, then you must do it, and you have the right to do it.)
THAT WAY OF THINKING AND ACTING cannot be reproduced, because it is devoid of logic. More than having a crude syntax, it obeys no syntax whatsoever. Impossible to deduce a plan from the confused tangle of actions that unfolded in that villa and afterward, not even if you change the chronological order, in the hypothesis that the pieces of the story might have been assembled in the wrong order. It’s no good, the brainteaser has no solution. Once it makes its debut, violence frees itself of the reasons that brought it there. Like the Red Death in Poe’s famous story, once it’s inside, it’s inside, and it no longer needs a mask.
15
TODAY, SUNDAY, too late for mass at SLM, I brush along the wall on Via Parenzo—the wall my father jumped over to beat it through the fields to escape a Nazi roundup, the very same wall against which our anti-hero Angelo, I read somewhere, once hurled a Molotov cocktail, in retaliation for a bad grade, even though among the many more-or-less legendary episodes concerning his bad-to-the-bone evil, many of them cultivated by none other than him, this one might be an interpolation, because in point of fact things actually were burned along that wall, and I myself remember taking part in some of those burnings, specifically, the bonfires of assignment books and diaries at the end of the school year. On the last day of school, the minute we walked out the front door, we’d pile up our assignment books at the foot of the enclosure wall, sprinkle them with gasoline, and set fire to them. Then, and only then, could we really say that school was out for good. With that bonfire we’d leave behind us a year of our lives, and we all burned our assignment books (Jacovitti assignment books, Peanuts assignment books, Gran Prix Racing assignment books, B.C. assignment books—and so on), both the ones who were doing well at school, like me, and the donkeys who waited anxiously for test results to be posted so they’d know whether they’d flunked the year entirely, or which and how many subjects they were going to have to brush up on during the summer and retake at the beginning of the next school year, but none of that mattered, there was the same identical flame of joy in us all, and when those real flames began to leap high and a billowing cloud of black smoke and an asphyxiating stench filled the air, we would do a sort of dance, inciting the flames to leap higher, like Jimi Hendrix setting fire to his guitar. I don’t know, perhaps this ceremony had a certain violent, Nazi aspect, reminiscent of the notorious bonfires of forbidden books, or else it might have been an Indian or anarchist or hippie catharsis, whatever the case, it was lovely to watch those pages burn, with their essays and lessons assigned f
or further study, pages and numbers of exercises and examinations and reviews and research topics. Seldom have I ever felt such pure joy.
People say that to keep from suffocating under the burden of the past, a person ought to burn the residue: dry leaves, long-since useless documents, old newspapers, or else they should simply watch a candle burning, calmly observe the wax as it melts.
And breathe.
AN EMPTY SUNDAY. Empty like this quarter, where the first thirty years of my life unfolded.
Everything appears placid, peaceful, even a little too peaceful, fixed in a timeless mediocrity. The perfect theater in which to have nothing happen at all.
And so I ask myself why this thing happened here of all places; why in this quarter of Rome and not somewhere else? Why would so many killings have occurred, so many murders have been committed, and so eagerly, in the streets around Piazza Istria and down the tree-lined boulevard of Corso Trieste? The fact that this was a quarter devoid of any particular identity might perhaps have made it the ideal terrain, a sort of neutral ground upon which to test the highest possible level of political violence that could be attained without necessarily breaking into a full-fledged civil war. Because in Italy, in the seventies, no matter what the veterans of those battles might say in order to justify the crimes they committed, laying the blame on the “climate of the time” or “that epoch,” there was no war. There really was no war. It would be interesting to understand why on earth they were so certain that there actually had been: they truly were convinced of it, and they were at no loss for words to construct that illusion. It was all in their head, the war. Can you call something a war if it is recognized as such only by those who fought in it, but not by the rest of the population? Is the person who declares a war also in charge of the meaning, the modalities, and the objectives of that war? All the same, this war invented by its own warriors did leave a considerable number of corpses on the ground, and not all of them had agreed to take part, indeed, some of them didn’t even realize that they had anything to defend themselves against, there was no visible trenchworks dug into the middle of Corso Trieste, everyone else was minding their own business, heading home from work, going downstairs to buy the newspaper, like the gentlemen with their impeccably coiffed hair tucked under the checkered flat caps that I saw strolling slowly through the quarter this morning, without the slightest notion that they’d been sentenced to death. Rome wasn’t exactly Sarajevo. It’s no easy matter to dodge the sniper’s bullets when you don’t even know you’re under siege, when you wind up in the crosshairs of those who are playing at War of the Worlds—if you happen to cross Paul Street in the middle of an armed struggle.
The Catholic School Page 85
