I ALSO KNOW THE EXACT DAY my friendship with Max ended. It wasn’t when he tried to cut off the tail of his cat with a swipe of the katana, because he actually didn’t succeed, Melville (the name of the cat) was too fast, the long sword sliced through the air without striking its target, or perhaps it was Max who intentionally missed, but he wanted me to believe that he had tried. To make fun of me, to send a shiver of horror through me . . . Poor old Melville! He’d come close, it was matter of millimeters in any case, hundredths of a second.
It wasn’t when I saw his mother out walking with a silk scarf wrapped around her head, big dark glasses, a glass of vodka in one hand, white bell-bottom pants, a devastating tan, tottering, a ravaged thirty-five-year-old woman, weeping with large teardrops dripping out from beneath the glasses frames the width of her palm, while Max murmured a single word between lips stretched in an icy smile of indifference, “whore,” just that word, “what a complete whore, by Zeus!” transforming the comment into a comparative evaluation of his mother as opposed to all the other women in the world. Could it be that she was any more or less of a whore than any other woman? There were plenty of other women like Max’s mother in that vacation spot for the well-to-do, truth be told. Spectacular beauties with their hair pulled back into ponytails, sandals with heels, ranging from the elegant to the vulgar, eyes wide open in a perennial and neurotic search for something, anything, clothing, money, sex, psychopharmaceuticals, cocktails, an oasis of peace and quiet or someone to yank them out of that dependency and set them down elsewhere; but most of all, bronzed, tanned, bronzed atop their flesh but also, so to speak, under the skin, down to the bottommost layers, practically to the bone, bronzed with the relentless aid of little folding mirrors to be held patiently under the chin, which women’s magazines handed out as marketing gimmicks (or maybe I’m wrong there, the fad of shrink-wrapped premiums and gifts with magazines is something that only started a few years later).
“The glare of the dying sun sweetly embraces / all those lovely little cocksucking faces,” I heard a lifeguard-poet of Punta Ala declaim to himself, under his breath, as he walked from beach umbrella to beach umbrella, lowering them for the day, while all before us heaved, oily and blinding, the swells tinged golden by the sunset, and a procession of women waist-deep in the water went past, backlit silhouettes, dutifully walking parallel to the beach to tone up their thighs; and I’ve held them in my memory, those women and the inspired words of the umbrella attendant and lifeguard, but I’m not a hundred percent certain that right now, in this exact instant, hendecasyllabic verses aren’t spontaneously forming in my head . . . “The glare of the dying sun sweetly embraces . . .”
The tears that dripped for no clear reason, incessantly, from Max’s mother’s emerald eyes and the drops that were pearling the drinking glass clenched tight between enameled fingernails, and the vulgar phrases murmured in her direction by her son as he rattled off arpeggios, playing pieces by Barrios and Llobet, did nothing to push me further away from that family so visibly devastated by the lack of ideals or the overabundance of ideals that were simply too elevated and abstract, and therefore unattainable, and therefore destined inevitably to failure and betrayal, leaving the field wide open for tawdry, demeaning forms of behavior; quite the opposite, I felt even closer to Massimiliano’s heart, more of a friend, more closely tied to him: the things that distanced me from him, in fact, only brought me closer to him.
Among other things, knowing as he did my political persuasions, however wanly expressed and defended, he met me halfway (a fairly common attitude among the militants of the far right, who have always suffered a sort of paradoxical envy and admiration for the myths, symbols, rituals, heroes, ways of life, inventions, and to put it in a single word, the success, at least among the young, of the left—I remember that a right-wing leader once confessed that the finest political song ever written, and he said it grimly, with death in his heart, he had to admit, was “Bandiera Rossa”—because on the right, in spite of all their efforts, they had never managed to come up with anything of the sort, a song that was anything near as powerful, combative, and popular . . .), Max proved to be benevolent and curious toward the ideas and the novelties that were being introduced by the left-wing movements—and well, no doubt, it was thanks to the left that young women walked around without bras and enjoyed considerable freedom, and it had to be said that if it had been left up to the traditionalists of his political affiliation, they’d still all be wearing starched collars and getting engaged with little glasses of sweet liqueur in the fancy parlor, with the future in-laws.
If, in other words, our generation could have its fun and then suffer the vituperation of Max’s comrades, Max himself knew full well that that fun was only thanks to his adversaries.
And that is why he told me about the time he ventured into the opposing camp, like a secret agent on a mission to winkle out the enemy’s secrets, like an infiltrator who studies the behaviors and moves of his antagonist, passionately and diligently, until he knows them like the back of his hand, more or less consciously admiring them, and even putting them into practice or, in any case, yearning to do so . . .
Particularly memorable was his account of how he attended the Parco Lambro Festival, the year before this story unfolded, a so-called youth assembly that had marked an era because it was perhaps the first time that radical political movements, new sexual mores, and drugs had all fused together: the first music festival in Italy where people gathered, did drugs, had sex, listened to music and played it themselves with guitars flutes tambourines and bongo drums, all while protesting against the powers that be, all at the same time.
“THERE WERE TENTS . . . tents . . . lots of tents . . . in one tent full of naked people, they were giving massages, in another they were doing yoga, standing on their heads . . . and then there were little groups sitting around bonfires, they were trying to roast something that was dripping grease into the fire, sausages, I think, stuck on spits . . . but they just wouldn’t cook, or they’d burn . . . and stands with big bowls full of macrobiotic junk, yes, the whole place was filthy, by Zeus . . . and groups doing improvisational theater, cringe-making, with extremely skinny young men, bare-chested, with bow ties around their necks and their faces painted, and girls, half-naked themselves, their tits bouncing. And then there was the stage with a bunch of long-haired hippies up there who were playing music and flailing around . . . and a constant refrain of political statements through a megaphone, the booths where you could sign petitions against this and against that . . . and political discussions, sausages for sale, people dancing in circles . . . and the girls, yes, the girls.
“Girls dressed in short gauzy tunics cinched at the waist with a belt, who’d look you straight in the eye, their kohl-rimmed eyes steady as they hiked or fluttered the hem of their tunic to show you their pussy, inviting you to fuck them. For real, trust me. As if it weren’t explicit enough to expose themselves like that, some of them would crook their finger to invite you closer, ‘Come here,’ ‘Come on over and see me’ . . . lots of them homely or just so-so, but some of them pretty and a few truly beautiful . . . who seemed the most relaxed of all, stretched out on mats in the dust, who if you ask me must themselves have fucked, in the three days of the festival, at least a dozen young men each, or more, twenty? thirty? Some of them retiring to the privacy of a pup tent, others letting themselves be mounted right there, in the open, from in front and from the rear, where everyone could watch, though everyone was half asleep or high on drugs, and there in the darkness . . . but I swear to you I saw them, by Zeus, yes, and I didn’t just see them! In the dark, their white thighs . . .”
Max claimed he had fucked three girls that night he went to the Parco Lambro, that every time he had come inside them, that they had told him, “Come inside me,” and that they liked doing it, or rather, they liked the fact that they were being fucked, though it wasn’t as if they liked it all that much while they were doing it, in other words, they didn�
��t have orgasms, they never had orgasms, and in fact that wasn’t the reason they were letting themselves be fucked in the first place. “So then why?” I asked, simultaneously excited and curious, and also envious, because Max had been where I would have preferred to be myself; he, the Knight Templar, the crusader, filled with scorn and superiority, had ventured into enemy territory to fuck the infidel wenches.
“How am I supposed to know? To feel they were free, I guess. Shouldn’t you be the one to explain it to me?”
“Search me . . . maybe it’s because you’re so handsome, Max.”
He opened his eyes wide.
“Me, handsome . . . what the fuck are you talking about?”
Max reacted by blushing because, deep down, even though he was as handsome as the noonday sun, with the physique of an athlete and the myth of the superman, he was still a shy young man, and he was embarrassed to have anyone pay him a compliment. What’s more, a man who pays another man a physical compliment . . . is always somewhat suspect. Max pretended to lash out with a swivel kick, but stopped his foot just a few inches short of my throat.
“Those girls, my friend, were letting anyone fuck them at all. By Zeus!”
Then he went inside to get his sword. It’s as if he wanted to show off the beauty that he denied existed, at least in words. He whipped off his T-shirt and in the middle of his backyard he started doing his routines. In fact, he possessed a perfect physique, and I was captivated by the sight. And as he went through his maneuvers and routines, chopping the air with horizontal and vertical swoops of the sword, which he brought up short after having lopped off imaginary hands and arms, Max’s long smooth hair danced whipping around his head.
IN THE END, the idea of Max that remains strongest for me is that of the teacher, the maestro. Of the teachers that he had had, and to whom he was devoted, and of the teacher that he would have already liked to be, at not even eighteen years of age, because the thing that mattered most to him was that, the transmission of a specific body of knowledge, but only to those who deserved it, only to those who showed themselves to be worthy of receiving it. By Zeus. For that reason, our friendship was doomed to end: I was squandering his gifts with my distraction. I remember him with the guitar in his arms, in that position, so harmonious, because it gives the impression that the player and his instrument are somehow all one, something I always envied: to handle an artificial extension of the body that at once completes and identifies you for what you’re truly capable of, like in old portraits—a lance, a paintbrush, a sheet of parchment, a spyglass, even a miserable plow, as long as it renders the act significant and worthwhile. How many lessons he gave me, in just a few summer months, my friend the Fascist guitarist!
“Do you know, Edoardo, what a rasgueado is?”
“No . . . but please . . . let me hear it.”
And he released his right hand in a progressive movement, faster and faster, fanning his fingers over the strings in a burst, one at a time, each fingernail striking the strings separately, five sharp blows just like an opening fan.
TO CHECK OUT what Max told me forty years ago, I went and watched some film clips about the Parco Lambro Festival. Well, no doubt about it, it was nuts. From the descriptions Max gave me, one detail is faithful, just how skinny many of the participants were: the young men with their emaciated physiques, shirtless, wearing hip-hugging, high-waisted jeans, their hair concentrated on head and face, and only at the center, like a bush, of their underdeveloped chests; the girls, on the other hand, with their jeans slicing into their hips, and also super-skimpy bikinis, just tiny triangles of fabric. They all look like they’re hungry, like the main problem at that gathering was food. And in fact, there’s a scene where some members of the organization were going around armed with crowbars, in order to go and retrieve a number of frozen chickens that someone had stolen (pardon me: expropriated) to then sell at the food stands.
It was practically only the men who danced naked: then there’s a red-head, with extremely long hair, a very particular type, completely fried, and more than dancing, she’s swaying, wobbling, barely making her small pointy breasts bounce. In the collective nude scenes, it’s remarkable that the ones who take their clothes off are almost exclusively extremely pale young women, while the males are dark, with a dark forest of pubic hair from which emerges, shriveled, a wan, pale penis . . .
And then there is a yellowish dog walking around and among the people lying on the ground or squatting in the dirt.
Lots and lots of overalls, frequently worn with nothing underneath—overalls, perhaps the only item of apparel that, with the possible exception of car mechanics and gas station attendants and one famous TV chef, have once and for all been set aside, never again to come back into fashion, thank heavens.
Concerning women’s bodies and how they appear to have changed over the course of the years, seeing the documentary about the Parco Lambro Festival reminded me of an instructive exchange I overheard on Via di Santa Costanza, a couple of weeks ago, between two office clerks who were eating a panino on their lunch break.
FIRST OFFICE CLERK: Have you noticed? In the old days, pussies were hairy, tits were smaller and saggy, but with bigger nipples.
SECOND OFFICE CLERK: What is that supposed to mean? . . . That’s just what they show you on those porn websites. Women are no different than they were thirty years ago, it’s their image that’s different. They shave their pussies, otherwise they would be hairy. And they work on their nipples with Photoshop, while their tits are just surgically enlarged.
FIRST OFFICE CLERK: I’d heard that it was a matter of nutrition.
SECOND OFFICE CLERK: What about nutrition? So what?
FIRST OFFICE CLERK: The fact that girls have bigger tits these days. A couple of inches bigger, they say.
As I listened to them, I too wondered the same thing: yeah, I guess, maybe the second, wise office clerk has a point when he says that these are cosmetic and technological effects, but still, as the first clerk pointed out, you really do get the impression, as you look at those images from the seventies, that that race of men and women, boys and girls, with all their specific qualities, is now extinct. That it’s vanished, no longer exists. Aside from the details or styles dictated by fashion, it’s their bodies, their faces, their hair, their colors that no longer exist, even their tans or their pallors are no longer the same, and those images, dating back after all just a few decades, are farther from us today than the daguerreotypes of the 1800s.
In any case, I saw no signs in the vintage footage of the Parco Lambro Festival of the alluring sirens that Max claimed he had fucked.
HOW IS IT that our friendship ended, then? I’ll tell you soon. But first, a brief intermission.
2
IWAS HOLDING TWO FINGERS deep inside her pussy, until my fingertips were shriveled and wrinkly, the way they are if you spend too much time in a hot bath.
I spent a whole month of August with one or two fingers permanently inserted in my girlfriend’s pussy, my first girlfriend, that is, the girl I’d asked to be my girlfriend, and who had accepted.
The Olympics were on, and we’d watch TV in the afternoons, spread out on sofas, with other kids, our age and younger, and even little children, and while we watched I’d keep my forefinger and middle finger in her pussy until the skin on my fingertips wrinkled up.
What was I trying to find inside her?
What did she expect from that penetration, which the first time, perhaps, had been exciting or interesting, for its novelty, if nothing else?
Every so often, I’d move my fingers a little.
As if checking to see if anything had changed.
In and out, all the way.
Or else I’d widen my fingers, like a pair of scissors, feeling that the wet walls, when strained, would widen in turn, but only slightly, and I encountered resistance.
I’m not at all sure that she liked this, and if I turned to look at her, shifting my eyes away from the screen, I’d noti
ce that her large dark eyes fixed on the TV were glistening, the mouth hanging half-open, lips swollen, her slightly buck teeth, like those of a bunny rabbit, glistening as well, but then that was my girlfriend’s customary expression, slightly vague, vaguely stunned, hard to say, it might have been something entirely independent of the fingers that at that moment I held deep inside her.
It was an exploration, and I had no idea where it might take me.
In order to prevent the other little kids sitting around us from noticing what we were doing (now that I think back, I’m sure that they knew exactly what we were doing, considering how long we did it, they had to have realized and might even have seen), she held a T-shirt or a beach towel in her lap, and underneath my hand worked away, undisturbed, between her skinny bronzed fifteen-year-old thighs. Of course, that length of fabric was there for one reason alone, to conceal my maneuvers, otherwise why else would it be there?
Another expedient was to keep her thighs closed, her knees pressed together, which ought in theory to have blocked all access, while ensuring that everyone else assumed there was no way I was trying any such thing, while in fact I was able to do it all the same, with an unnatural twisting of my arm and my wrist.
And so I tried to pry apart, at least a little bit, her slender bowed thighs, because my wrist started to hurt a little after a while, what with being twisted back, but she wouldn’t budge an inch: fingers inside, all right, but only with the thighs clamped tight.
The Catholic School Page 91
