“Agricultural studies?”
Prezzemolo nodded, proudly. He traveled frequently in Africa for his job. Well, I said ironically to myself, just like Rimbaud, who gives up his delirious poetry and goes off to traffic in weapons and slaves.
Whereas, just to clear up the reason we had both been summoned there that afternoon, I asked him: “So, you have, here at school . . .?”
“My daughter. She’s sixteen.”
“Ah! I have a daughter, too.”
“Really? What class is she in?”
“What class is yours in?”
“No, tell me about yours, first.”
We exchanged details about family and school. We complained a little, but without too much emphasis, just to follow the thread, about the usual topics: the headmistress, a bit of a church lady, a few of the ditzier teachers, too much homework, too little, and so on. But it was obvious that what Numa cared most about was his favorite topic, so I returned to that.
“So tell me about your daughter, Numa . . . Are you contented with her, tell me?”
Contented? He was a happy man.
“Well, yes, we’re very lucky,” he replied, his eyes gleaming. If he had managed to get past his time at L’Encefalo and his verse, deployed like the folds of an accordion, credit was surely due to his love for that child, which sixteen years after her arrival in this world only seemed to continue to grow. Ah, yes, it’s love, that’s the turning point, it’s love, the path, love is all you need, just like the famous song says. And a father’s love for his daughter, all the more so.
“She doesn’t give us any problems . . . she’s a serious girl . . . and she plays the cello.”
“Stella!” I exclaimed. Little star, an affectionate expression that my grandmother often used, frequently modified, in the idiom of northern Italy, into “stellassa.” I don’t know why that word sprung to my lips at that very moment, instead of just saying “Good girl!” or “Congratulations!” but Prezzemolo was struck because as it turned out, that was indeed his much-beloved daughter’s name: Stella.
I decided that, more than a traditional family name, it was an homage to the goddess Ishtar. And I also decided that life is full of replays and coincidences.
I STOP TO MEDITATE about the fate of the poets who at a certain point quit writing and publishing: and I review them in my mind . . .
One of them runs an extremely refined Asian restaurant, another has retired to live in his parents’ house, which is available because they’re now dead, near Tricase, in the Salento, and he makes a living by renting out the top floor of that villa by the sea. Yet another, who was very good and promising as a young poet, I’d go so far as to describe him as brilliant, is said to still be writing, wonderful things, but he won’t let anyone read them. He doesn’t want to. He’s not interested.
I heard that Maldonado died in 2012. He had been ill for some time. The pat phrase people use when they want to say that someone has cancer. This piece of news made me think back to a morning I spent at the municipal office, on Piazza Gimma, which I spoke about at the beginning of this chapter: holding my little number, waiting for my turn at the window to renew my expired identity card. It must have been four or five years ago. Meaning that it was before Maldonado died. Since I expected a long line, I had brought a book to read; I looked up at the luminous display: it informed me that there were nine other citizens ahead of me, and I calculated that I would have to wait about twenty minutes, assuming the line clicked forward at a constant and regular pace—which is, of course, something that never actually happens, because it either takes half an hour to take care of a single, complicated case or else, quite the opposite, the numbers start to sail past with a beep, 122 . . . 123 . . . 124 . . . 125, meaning that someone had kept pressing the button of the machine that issued tickets, and had taken a handful, only to give up and leave. I sat down and in a few seconds I was immersed in my reading, lost in my book.
HOW FREQUENTLY he grew irritated with his own rigidity, which kept him from extending himself to reach the simplest sentiments that were offered to him in a glance by anyone who didn’t yet know him.
It was impossible for him to free himself from those fixations and those emotions that possessed and occupied him to the point of expelling or replacing all other thoughts, as weak and pointless, to such an extent that there were days at the end of which, finding himself almost mechanically summarizing the events as he prepared to go to bed and then trying, in vain, to get to sleep, it seemed to him that he had lived nothing other than that feverish and monotonous excitement . . .
I HAD BEEN READING for no more than a minute and I was already forced to stop, as if I were stuffed, and I lifted my eyes from the book and rubbed them. I wasn’t really sure I had understood what I had read and, as often happens, I confused the thoughts I had found on the page with my own, thoughts that had previously occurred to me or thoughts yet to come.
A “feverish and monotonous excitement” . . . wasn’t that after all the same thing that I had been living since time out of mind? And even now, in that waiting room, what else was I feeling if not that? With a neurotic gesture I stuck a hand into my jacket pocket to get the numbered ticket I had put in there just a short moment before. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t in the other pocket, either. I got to my feet to rummage in my trouser pockets, in the right one my fingers touched something that proved to be the receipt for an espresso, and then finally I found in my left trouser pocket the numbered stub, I checked it again, it was still 129, as if I’d been seized by the doubt that I might have reversed the numbers, maybe it had been 192, what the hell, no, it was really 129, and at that moment the sound of an amplified carillon alerted the room that 121 had just clicked onto the display, I could safely sit back down. But just to make sure, and to avoid having to perform once again that shameful operation of rummaging through all my pockets, I kept the numbered slip in my hand, deciding I’d use it as a bookmark. I went back to my reading, even though a voice behind me, raucous and disagreeable, was annoying. Someone was talking and laughing on a cell phone, without the slightest consideration that they might be bothering other people. I tried to ignore that voice and resumed my reading. I’ve only managed now, and just barely, and at age fifty, to grasp what my more illustrious colleagues conceived freely and wrote at age twenty-two or twenty-three: dazzling, incandescent concepts, stupendously fluid connections, images that stood out clearly.
I STILL LULL MYSELF in the childish desire that suddenly it should be possible to reconcile all the incompatibilities; the ones that I feel within me, overwhelming, and between myself and the others, for now, incurable . . . And since this dream, the minute it appears, vanishes again, I feel as if I am the unhappiest person in the world, and naturally I exaggerate in feeling this way and in demonstrating those feelings to those who are close to me, I exaggerate in my affliction, and in this lies my principal vanity: because I know perfectly well that the points of view of human beings are far too disparate for there to be any hope of rebalancing their divergence, and yet I feel these points of view inside me, as vivid and inescapable as thorns . . .
THE MOST ANNOYING THORN, though, at that moment, was the voice of the individual sitting behind me. He continued talking on the phone, in a raucous, stentorian voice, and it seemed as if he offered his interlocutor no opportunity to reply, save for extremely brief pauses. In other words, a monologue. And a fairly agitated one, seeing that his exclamations and his laughter made all the other people awaiting their turn, including me, lurch and sway. In these waiting rooms, the rows of chairs are arranged backrest-to-backrest, and every burst of laughter from this stranger made me sway back and forth. Irritated now, rather than turn around and start an argument, I stood up to move to another seat, and as I did I felt sure I had recognized the old avant-garde activist from L’Encefalo in the shrunken figure of that disturber of the peace, just from a glance at his back. Already his voice and his sarcastic snickering had stirred some memory inside me . . . but
the final confirmation that it was really him came as I walked around him. He didn’t notice me, caught up as he was in his phone call. His long, stringy hair, his yellow-tinged face, the rotting teeth that he revealed when he laughed before delivering each sarcastic wisecrack.
“Imbeciles! Ha, ha! They’re nothing but a bunch of miserable imbeciles! We should feel pity . . .!”
“Ha, ha, but how stupid can a man of some wit turn out to be . . .!”
“A solution is always within reach, never forget that . . .!”
In spite of the fact that his physical appearance was that of a fossil in comparison with the original animal, yes, I imagine that that was Maldonado, that off-putting client of the municipal office, George Ares Maldonado, one of the most brilliant minds that I encountered in the first part of my life, a star of the first order in the QT. His eyes were more bulging than ever, and the only thing that remained unchanged about him were the orthopedic-style shoes, buffed to a gleam, and his little round eyeglasses.
About Maldonado (may he rest in peace) I want to mention this one last thing: that he sent the contributors to his magazine to the Gallery of Modern Art, with the order to stand and concentrate on a certain painting (Inner Landscape, 10:30 a.m. by Julius Evola) and, in that painting, to focus on a specific area, convinced that that form and that color had the power to influence their minds: for example, curing them of individualism. Prezzemolo insists that that system worked on him.
1
I’VE HAD ONLY ONE Fascist friend in my life, one I made friends with even though I knew he was a Fascist, and not in spite of the fact that he was one, but perhaps precisely because he was one. He was a Fascist from head to toe and right out to the ends of his hair, which, by the way, was very lovely: he had long, silky black hair.
He was tall and charismatic, like an actor, the way you imagine an actor ought to be, and yet faintly awkward, or at least so it seemed to me, though this slight embarrassment as he moved his long legs and arms only seemed to make him even more graceful. He was Milanese, and in those years the young Milanese Fascists were quite different from their Roman counterparts, who were generally cruder. His was a fascism that sprang from an aesthetic matrix, and it culminated and took form in the ritualized violence of the martial arts; my friend was quite an ace, at the very highest levels, and in fact he might even have been a national champion in Italy in his category.
My friendship with him was of that very particular type that may not exist anymore, for all I know, in its specific form, and that is, an exclusively, rigorously summer-based relationship. Massimiliano was, in fact, a “beach” friend, as we used to say back then, which explains my connection with someone from Milan, the temporary suspension of the reciprocal prejudices that would surely have prevented the development of a friendship if we had lived in the same city—and what’s more, the very special parenthesis that is opened during the holidays, when you experience adventures and emotions that have, so to speak, a predetermined half-life, that are bound to vanish come September, that are submerged, like a beach under a stormy sea, or that go into hibernation only to reawaken the following year, in a seasonal cycle that at least until the age of eighteen constitutes the natural punctuation of one’s existence.
It was in fact during this gilded interval, this suspension, bewildered by the whir of locusts and sunlight dazzling on water, that my friendship was born, nay, let me say it, my adoration for this impossibly handsome Milanese karateka with the cutting speech and the perfect teeth. Even though several important parts of me (the Roman part, skeptical, the leftist part, egalitarian, the logical part, intolerant of rhetorical proclamations) remained mistrustful of him and from time to time felt irritated by his theories and the stories he told, which always verged on the absurd, both in terms of their content and the hyperbolic way in which he retailed them, lips clamped in a leering grin, the greater part of me was still bent happily toward him, willing if not actually eager to sit and listen to his bullshit and admire the prohibited blows he would strike, without warning, into the air as he twirled through the garden of his villa at Punta Ala, and literally enchanted when, as if to counterbalance his violent passions and displays of force, he would devote himself to the other discipline in which he was surprisingly skilled, and had a very delicate touch: the art of the classical guitarist.
Massimiliano owned a couple of spectacular instruments, always polished to a high sheen and invariably perfectly tuned, a Ramirez like the one owned by the great Segovia, whom he venerated, and a second guitar built especially for him by a luthier in Cremona, red and shiny with dark striations, made of rosewood: perhaps the entire guitar was made of that wood with its mysterious name—palissandro in Italian—or perhaps only the finishing touches were. “You see? It has a missing shoulder,” Max would explain, showing me the cutaway in the soundboard that allowed him to reach the frets for the highest notes. “It’s my crippled girl . . . my little cripple . . .” he said, caressing the guitar’s curves, and then concluding, “. . . by Zeus!” which was his favorite interjection.
“SORRY, but I have to ask this, how can you do karate and also play guitar? Doesn’t that ruin your hands?”
Max’s knuckles, in fact, were covered with calluses, as if he really did nothing all day but shatter stacks of boards with a ritual cry and a sharp blow, as seen in karate demonstrations on TV, as an object lesson of the lethal mixture of force + technique + concentration, which is, if you will, the quintessence and the supreme objective of the quest of the genuine Fascist, the fighting Fascist, the Fascist warrior, in other words, someone just like what Max was and so strongly yearned to be. He had devoted the same maniacal discipline to his guitar studies, practicing until he became a full maestro. And so, hands capable of devastating everything in sight, like in a Bruce Lee movie, but also of plucking exceedingly delicate sounds from “his little crippled girl,” his guitar with its asymmetrical silhouette. On account of the “missing shoulder,” the guitar’s shape was faintly reminiscent of that of electric guitars. But woe betide anyone who dared to ask him: “Have you ever owned an electric guitar?” the kind of idle curiosity that was as commonplace as it was justifiable among seventeen-year-olds, but which to Max was worse than spitting in his face. Max, however, master of self-control that he was, limited himself to reacting with a faint grimace of disappointment. What he felt was not scorn, but rather astonishment, a sincere astonishment that someone like me, intelligent and sensitive, could ever have stumbled into the traps of the period, the cloaca of ordinary tastes, the great misunderstanding of youth, like any ordinary kid, in other words, listening to pop, and rock ’n’ roll . . . and who, in their ignorance, when they hear mention of a guitar, imagine Gibsons or Fender Stratocasters.
Well, he wasn’t the first and he wouldn’t be the last to think that about me. Over time, I have seen numerous replays of this interest on the part of people who considered me to be a step, just a single step away from enlightenment, from salvation: What? You of all people, so intelligent and curious, you don’t understand? How could you fail to grasp this? I was always just a single step short of taking that decisive move to sweep away the slag of illusion that still dimmed my eyes.
And who were these individuals, who so devoutly wished me to convert, who had already in their minds enrolled me into the ranks of their little army? Well, first of all, of course, Massimiliano himself, the karateka guitarist, and then an esoteric intellectual (Maldonado), a couple of intransigent philosophers, political militants of differing orientation, and perhaps a priest or two. People who had made a great effort to scratch away the gleaming paint on the uneasy young man: underneath, however, there was nothing, or at least, there wasn’t what they’d hoped to find. I disappointed them all, or actually, in order, I led them on, disappointed them, and in the end, eluded them entirely.
Maybe at first Max thought that he’d met in me his twin, a peer, a kindred spirit, a mirror soul, in part because there, at Punta Ala, in any ordinary summer of the s
eventies, you could find two-bit Fascists and oversized Fascists by the dozens, but they were generally the classic pampered brats with upturned collars on their polo shirts, who did nothing more active than to speak ill of those lazy layabouts in the factories who were always on strike, and then pretty little blondes with fabulous bodies who’d been weaned on arrogance, but there was no one who, like Max, preserved his privilege, convinced that he descended from a superior order, the social equivalent of a cosmic hierarchy. Max was stunned to learn that someone like me, who from the very first meeting had openly declared that he was a “Communist,” just to make that point clear, should be so familiar with and even enthusiastic about that dandyistic and aristocratic coterie that was at the time an exclusive appanage of the right wing, for example Drieu la Rochelle, with the array of provocative phrases like the ones Jacques Rigaut so artfully launched (“Every Rolls-Royce that I see prolongs my life by a quarter of an hour”), that fragile and self-destructive fanaticism, the negative consciousness . . . and a few years later he would offer his congratulations at the sight of me perusing the works of Nietzsche and Heidegger . . . How could my friend, a virtuoso at flying kicks and guitar arpeggios, not fool himself into thinking that behind my ideological declaration (“Me? I’m a Communist.”) there lay concealed a secret faith of opposite polarity, a faith long dissimulated by someone who, without even realizing it, actually nurtured it: that is, by Zeus, by me?
When I asked him if he had ever owned an electric guitar, he said nothing, only hunched over his Ramirez and struck up the most heartbreaking guitar piece I had ever heard.
After a few slow, scattered individual notes, he began an insistent arpeggio. The melody was hard to recognize, so suffocatingly did the tremulous accompaniment envelop it. It had been written specifically to bring a lump to your throat and that was exactly the effect it was having on me. There was something endlessly agonizing about those notes repeated to the verge of the spasmodic, in tight sequence; it moved off, it came back, piercing, increasingly shrill, then wandered away again, but without ever offering the slightest abeyance. I couldn’t seem to breathe while Max played that piece: no room had been left for me to breathe in. It struck me as eternal, even if it only lasted for a few minutes. “Una Limosna por el Amor de Dios.”
The Catholic School Page 90
