“I DREAMED THAT I was leaving home. My mother was standing in the doorway, wearing an apron. Actually, she hasn’t worn an apron once in her life. Twisting and rumpling the apron in her hands, she was begging me not to leave. I didn’t answer her, and I just turned my back, in fact, I turned on my heels, and I headed off down a long hill, paying no mind to her pleas. I could hear her as she kept calling my name, her voice broken with sobs. Then, when I reached the bottom of the hill, I heard her voice, murmuring in irritation: “Fine, then, go to hell!” and I just couldn’t understand how I could still hear her at such a great distance. By now I had left, I was starting a new life, but I couldn’t say whether I was happy or sad. The first fact of this new life was a tryst with a woman. She was much older than me. She let me get in her car so she could take me home with her. I accepted willingly. But she seemed confused, she couldn’t remember where she was, she’d take wrong turns and I was starting to get annoyed, “Can it be, does she really not know where she lives?” I thought to myself, and I asked her to let me out of the car. Turning suddenly stern, almost vicious, she told me no. “No, I won’t let you out of the car,” and yet she pulled over and braked to a halt, as if inviting me to try, in other words, just daring me to get out. I tried to pull the door handle, but it was frozen in place. “And now kiss me,” the woman said. I gave her a good hard look for the first time: she was pretty, heavily made up, about thirty years old, but she had a deranged look in her eyes. Without any further discussion, I kissed her, and I had the sensation that she was dissolving in my arms, softening all over, turning almost liquid, and it was a very unpleasant sensation, her mouth was hot and gooey . . . and her face, her whole body was gooey and shapeless. I reached out to touch her breast, to find out if it was gooey too . . .
“After that, I don’t remember what happens in the dream, but I do find myself making love with her. I have no idea how we got to this point and how it could have happened. All I know is that she doesn’t want to, she starts screaming that she doesn’t want to. ‘Stop it, stop it! I’m still a virgin!’ she shouts, in desperation, and at that point I want to tell her that I’m a virgin too, but instead I say to her, in a menacing voice: ‘I don’t care! I’ll show you! I’m the one who decides!’ She struggles loose, but I still have a grip on her. The strange thing is that, even though I force her, I don’t actually have to make any effort, I don’t have to tie her up or beat her, and the thing that’s stranger still is that while I’m making love with her, I turn my back on her, as if I didn’t want to see her. I don’t know how, but I raped her with my back to her . . . and I could hear her whimper. I didn’t get a glimpse of my genitalia or hers, I didn’t even know where they were. It was a horrible thing.”
IN CONCLUSION, I would say that there never was a person as thrifty as Arbus. Not even Zipoli, our classmate who used a single notebook for all his subjects, was quite such a penny-pincher. He had never asked the world for anything for himself but enough food to keep him on his feet, a pair of trousers and a T-shirt to wear, books to read, and a pair of eyeglasses. No joy, no tramping and hoboing on the far side of the stream, never a glorious drunken spree. At least, that’s what we thought.
7
ARBUS HAD ALREADY DISCOVERED the fact for himself, but his father, with an act that was rare for the time and exemplary, made his homosexuality known with a public announcement. Without prompting from anyone, he wrote an open letter to the most widely read evening newspaper in Rome. It was read with astonishment by one and all, it was carried by other newspapers, and it began a “debate,” as the phrase went at the time, on the subject. Which wasn’t exactly homosexuality: there had always been lesbians and queers, and as such they had always been singled out, parodied, ghettoized, coddled, beaten bloody or else considered “very amusing” or “very sensitive,” depending on the situation. But also left alone, inasmuch as they were distinctly different. In my own, private opinion, they were far freer then than they are now, but perhaps that’s true for all of us. Such a curious phenomenon, liberty: on paper, it has increased, but in concrete, everyday terms, it’s only shrunk. Lots of homosexuals occupied prominent posts in the world of culture, as writers, directors, art critics, and so on. One line of the transmission of knowledge and creativity had always worked in this way, and it had worked very well. But the case of Lodovico Arbus, who belonged to that world, albeit as an academic and not as an artist, was more controversial: that is, the case of a married man with children who, having already lived half of his life, now chose to reveal that he was and, deep down in the core of his existence, always had been a homosexual; and he now resolved from that day forth to behave in accordance with his true nature, without forcing it or concealing it anymore. His wife, his children, these were the product of a sacrifice or sheer confusion. Professor Arbus’s manifesto shook public opinion, pushing it toward an array of reactions, which we can easily imagine without having to list them here. Those who lived through those times can picture them to themselves; those who didn’t live through them because they were too young or not yet born would just be wasting their time studying ways and customs that vanished so suddenly you’d think they really had been just so many castles in thin air. We should in any case mention two opposing attitudes that transcended the merely sexual aspect: either to consider Lodovico Arbus an honest and courageous man, or to consider him a cowardly egotist. He was either recognized for his sincerity in his self-revelation or deplored as a hypocrite for having been willing to conceal his true nature till then. The problem with a double life begins, in fact, when you stop living it. And each of the two parts of that life demand to be acknowledged, at the expense of the other.
LODOVICO ARBUS LEFT the apartment in Montesacro, taking with him only a few suits, some documents, and his personal effects. A short while later, a fire broke out in the apartment that half-destroyed it, including the professor’s library, and the bedrooms of my classmate and his sister, Leda, who luckily both survived the blaze: she was sleeping over at a girlfriend’s house that night, the smoke woke Arbus up, and he saved himself and his mother, Ilaria. The cause of the fire was never determined. Normally if you’re asleep, you die of asphyxiation. Perhaps Arbus was just never a very deep sleeper. His brain never shut off, not even when he was sleeping. Ilaria Arbus struggled to recover from those misadventures. Everyone took it for granted that she had always known her husband’s authentic proclivities. She, too, was therefore showered with accusations of hypocrisy and silent rhetorical questions of this sort: “How could she tolerate . . .?” “. . . right under her nose . . .?”
I SAID THAT ARBUS was already aware of the professor’s true nature. I don’t think he cared very much about the fact that he had been sired by a man who, even as he possessed Arbus’s mother, was dreaming of wrapping his arms around a muscular young man, instead. The resulting spurt of semen had brought him into the world all the same, and the same could be said for his pretty sister. Two irrevocable episodes concerning which any judgments or comments remained purely scholastic. Once I had heard him set forth a theory, dating back to antiquity, that paternity was a wind that scatters spores where they chance to fall. He had delivered this little speech in class, during the hour of religion, sowing concern and dismay, along with the morbid interest of Mr. Golgotha, who had immediately taken the opportunity to offer a Christian version of that parable: the wind in question was, in fact, God. A sacred wind. The Holy Spirit.
Nor had the duplicity of his father’s life apparently scandalized him to any degree, independently of whether Lodovico’s lovers were male or female, a secondary issue in light of the oath of faithfulness that both spouses had sworn. My friend had never displayed amorous propensities in any direction, and he remained quite neutral when it came to those of other people. The only aspects that I believe wounded him were the physical abandonment of the family residence on the part of the professor, the absence of his hat, no longer hanging in the front hall, and of his leather satchel from the swaybacked armch
air next to his desk, the fact that he no longer heard, through the wall, the voice of his father, who would talk on the telephone, in the evenings, to his assistants, instructing them, in an unruffled monotonous drone: those phrases broken by silences during which the professor listened to his interlocutors, limiting himself to the occasional murmur of assent, perhaps my friend regretted the loss of those things. They proved that his father was capable of some attention.
Some of Lodovico Arbus’s possessions, however, remained in the apartment, either because of the haste with which he left or else because they were of no interest to the professor or else because, quite to the contrary, it was his precise intention that they remain where he left them, as if they were testamentary bequests to the family life that he was bidding farewell for good. Among these, there was one strange object to which he had previously seemed quite attached, something he had been given, at least according to him, at the end of a series of lectures that he had delivered in Oslo. It was a sort of imaginary animal carved out of light wood, midway between a bear and a walrus, about sixteen inches tall, smooth, practically without limbs. Beginning from its vast set of teeth, it was impossible to say if it was funny or menacing, like a demon ready to come to life the minute an ancient spell was uttered. While the professor talked on the phone, he would rest a hand on the animal’s head. And he’d caress it, he’d give it little taps, tenderly.
Now it enjoyed pride of place in the empty office as if it were its new and exclusive inhabitant. One of the few times that I went to Arbus’s house after his father had packed his bags and cleared out, I had the impression that Arbus glared at that odd knickknack with a look of pure hatred.
Then, however, all these things and all these fantasies burned in the fire.
8
DID IT EVER HAPPEN TO ME?
Yes.
Yes and no.
It happened in a hotel in Barcelona, many years ago.
The man was kindly, gentle, and bald.
I was young and handsome.
We had struck up a spontaneous friendship.
It happened at one of these seminars for writers brought together for a few days from different countries.
Together we laughed and joked about our colleagues and many other things.
English sped up the pace of conversation.
Late at night, after the usual excessive drinking, he asked me to come up with him to his room.
We went up the stairs.
The wall-to-wall carpeting, muffled, slightly wobbly footsteps, the procession of doors, each like all the others . . .
For a few more minutes of conversation.
We sit down on the sofa and we drink three or four little bottles from the minibar.
We go on laughing about . . . and about . . . and about . . .
We’re astonished at what good friends we’ve already become.
We agree on everything.
Then he turns serious, he leans toward me, and he kisses me, and I accept his kiss.
I don’t know why I accept it.
Can I say that I was expecting it?
Yes, I was expecting it.
Not that I was expecting exactly that, but I was expecting something, a lunge.
He had a raspy tongue.
He holds his hand against my neck and I hold my hand against his neck too, where he still has some hair, sparse and thinning.
I told him that I’d expected we’d end up kissing, but only at that point did it dawn on me that I was kissing a man.
Not a woman but a man.
Exactly, a man and not a woman.
A man I wasn’t even attracted to.
So why was I kissing him?
(I’d later ask myself that question many times.)
I recoiled from the kiss.
He tried to lean close again and press his lips against mine, and I did something that a girl had once done to me, to block my kisses: without turning my head, I slipped my right hand with the palm turned outward between his mouth and mine.
If you wish, it might be an easy barrier to overcome, but at the same time, discouraging and exciting.
He couldn’t figure out whether I was rejecting him because I didn’t like him, or anyway not well enough to continue with the kissing and go beyond that.
So, if the writer I met in Barcelona had been handsome and if I’d liked him, would I have continued?
Would I have continued? Deep inside, I thought that it wasn’t that I didn’t like him, it was that I didn’t like men.
There, I had gotten confused.
I was getting this all wrong.
It’s men, handsome and homely, that I’m not attracted to.
I reiterated the concept to myself.
But I didn’t tell him.
Maybe it would have been better for him to know it, that I wasn’t rejecting him personally, but I still didn’t say it to him.
He was saddened, but that didn’t stop him from being polite.
He ceased his advances almost immediately and replaced them with an invitation, which sounded almost like a plea, indeed, a lament: stay and sleep here anyway, with me.
Where would I sleep?
Here, in the bed with me, I won’t try to touch you.
I swear . . .
His imploring voice trembled with desire and I finally saw him for what he really was.
A typical middle-aged English queer.
Honestly queer and understandably aroused.
That was the situation, and I had allowed it to come to this.
I could have stopped things sooner.
So what was I, then?
What did I want?
If I wasn’t queer, then what?
I told him no.
You don’t want to?
I can’t.
No way on earth, I thought to myself.
Fifteen minutes later, I was leaving his room.
With an idiotic giggle on my lips.
In reality, this had already happened once before, a long time ago.
When I was very young, when I was very young and reckless.
9
WHAT WAS IT THAT DROVE THEM? Was it libido? It was the libido that in the city spreads and dusts all things, that you can’t tell from friendship, business, jealousy, murder, fast cars—oh, but it wasn’t even libido anymore, it was just a frenzied desire for fun, for adventure—but not even that, it wasn’t a thirst for affairs and adventures—it was the collapse of the castle of clouds, too heavy to hang in the sky any longer, it was the exterminating angel sent by God to punish us, it was the folly of the angels, the destruction that cannot find so much as a moment of respite, can’t stop, must keep punishing and punishing, it must punish sins where it finds them, or transform innocence into guilt so that it can punish it. There, that was the libido.
ANGELO: never was there a more suitable name. Angel: you might think that an angel is good, you have a guardian angel, to whom you turn your prayers before you lay you down; by a perverse misunderstanding, possibly deriving from the popular image of the little creatures that flutter overhead in devotional paintings, unaware that these are a Christianized version of pagan cupids, namely those adorable curly-haired putti, which are actually sexual symbols, when a child—deplorably—dies, or when many die all at once (a few years ago, for example, in the collapse of a nursery school), we console ourselves by saying that they’ve become angels and now they’re looking down on us from heaven; people even make commemorative streamers that they display at soccer stadiums; forgetting the punitive aspect of that winged demon, the descent to earth of the exterminating angel, and Michael with his flaming sword expelling our progenitors from Eden, and all the other times that an angel has brought us desolation and death, rather than consoling us over desolation and death. In reality, the angel is an executioner, a mere extension of the divine will, a reflection of its light, and often terrifying. And so, in the case at hand, Angelo could not be a more appropriate name.
The protago
nists of the CR/M fostered a strong sense of friendship, brotherhood, and camaraderie. They were ready to stand up to the siege, together, shoulder to shoulder. What siege, from whom? The siege of the Communists. They saw Communists everywhere; even their parents, devout Catholics, were taken for Communists in spite of themselves. It’s quite something to see a family raise a child to respect certain values without dreaming he might someday use them as a cork dartboard.
In declaring the principle of brotherhood, however, they forgot to point out its origin as a defensive and offensive alliance, which is to say, fundamentally, a careful distinction between an “us” and a “them.” Universal brotherhood is an oxymoron or an abstraction whose meaning contradicts how human groups are actually structured; in the real world, there are a great many brotherhoods, and they are, by and large, permanently at odds with one another, not surprising since this is what they were founded for in the first place: to defend one’s brothers. It is no accident that the sentiment of fraternity, or brotherhood, originates in particular during wartime, at the front, in the trenches, as poets and writers have taught us: that’s right, our brothers are our fellow fighters, the ones we’re willing to shed our blood for . . .
Therefore, you might think that the highest level of enmity is to be found among groups of males battling one another. And yet that’s not the case at all: among male factions fighting one another to the first blood, if not the last (for example, the hooligans that root for certain soccer teams), there are a hundred times greater levels of similarity than difference. In fact, they often acknowledge one another reciprocally in a sort of brawling symmetry—when a soccer ultra dies, the ultras of the other teams pay him honor. The real gulf is between a band of men and a group of women; even more sharply accentuated, the distance between a band of men and one woman. Disparities of gender and number. Maximum asymmetry. The most widely separated points possible, the opposite colors on the spectrum.
The Catholic School Page 96
