Unfortunately, no one seems to be up to this grandiose task.
A FAMOUS GYM of the period was right across from my home. I’ve already talked about it, in the chapter devoted to my gym teachers. I went to it regularly for a few months, together with Arbus, in hopes that we’d toughen up—abs, arms, our intentions in life. The idea was wrong but the place was right. Its cold lighting and the creaking of the plastic-coated floor eliminated any illusion that you might be there to enjoy yourself. This wasn’t a way of letting off steam: gymnasiums concentrate, they compress, they’re buzzing accumulators like the fluorescent ceiling lights. Instead of being released, the energy builds up, and the serial enjoyment remains within the body, the rush of blood that pumps into the muscles makes your head spin. Mechanical gestures repeated twenty or thirty times, rapidly.
The gym was famous for its proprietor and instructor, whose hoarse shouted slogans accompanied us as we did our exercises, almost all of them based on painful, exhausting series of push-ups. But you had to keep going, you couldn’t give up. The slogans were like the ones the Marines used in boot camp: hyperbolic, shouted until there was no voice left.
The one that echoed through the gyms most often was “Man is a beast!!!” Do you remember it? And the instructor, the legendary, hirsute Gabriele Ontani? According to Ontani man was a beast, so it was only right that he should suffer. To gain what? A perfect physique?
NO, suffering was an end in itself.
“Go . . . go . . . go . . . go . . . come on . . . come on . . . come on . . . come on . . . come on, again, go, go! again! go! go! go!” Ontani would shout in a hoarse voice, stepping up the pace of the push-ups still to be done, and culminating with: “Man . . . is . . . A BEAST!!!”
That maxim was the signal that we could stop now, to our relief, massaging our muscles, which had crossed the threshold of pain. Also, remember the clause that supplemented the concept, buffering it and rendering it enigmatic, less preemptory: “Man is a beast . . . and woman . . . is a work of art!”
That rounds out the meaning. This was the secret and our condemnation: we were beasts destined to meet works of art. Outside the gym (where the schedules were rigorously divided up between men and women, back then there was no sexy promiscuity, no intermingling, then the proprietors wised up and the exercise outfits grew skimpier), beyond the confines of the tatami and exercise mats, works of art teemed, just waiting to meet us, to let us admire them. But, I wondered, how are so many beasts going to copulate with so many works of art?
I was seized by a lurking doubt: could it be that . . .
Ontani’s slogan revealed an unbridgeable difference between men and women.
12
NUDITY HAS SOMETHING to do with death. It’s always bound up with death. Not a point of departure, your start as a newborn, Adamitic, but rather a point of arrival. Final destination. Denuding is never a spontaneous act, but rather the consequence of a brusque, convulsive, revelatory movement; even when you take your clothes off to go to sleep, you relive the stark aspect of every discovery, therein included the one that takes place every night, in a bathroom or a bedroom.
WHAT DID THE MURDERERS of the CR/M see, what were they seeing when they looked at the young women they had denuded? What was there underneath, what lay before their eyes, what lay deeper beneath that nudity which by rights ought not to have had anything more to conceal? Two attractive bodies? Two victims of mistreatment and abuse whose nudity was just the most explicit way of saying that they were defenseless? The first thing you do to someone you capture to make it clear to them that they are at their captors’ mercy: you strip them bare. So were those young women now prisoners in a concentration camp as in the imaginary world most beloved of those who had kidnapped them? (The school of Nazi-sadist pornography.) A girl’s naked body throws open a question that has nothing to do with her and everything to do with whoever is looking at her. With how and why they are looking at her. If there is no erotic purpose, then the sight becomes unbearable. If that objective was lacking, therefore, then it was necessary to create it, somehow. After which, hands had to reach out, onto the girl’s body or onto one’s own, one had to take control of a hunk of flesh so that the otherwise unbearable sight of nudity might be transformed into a concrete act, so much the better if that act was brusque, violent, unpleasant, like the act of someone pinching themselves or pricking themselves with a pin to make sure they are truly awake. Looking at a nude girl is like looking at her dead, it’s like looking at her already dead, it’s like looking at her murdered. Suffocated, unbreathing, white, abandoned, inert, that is how a nude girl always looks in any image, be it pornographic, artistic, or domestic, it’s always Ophelia drifting in the current of the river in which she drowned herself: perhaps that is why those who take those pictures sometimes try to obviate the funereal aspect of their nudity by artificially warming it up with vulgar poses, forced smiles accompanying obscene acts with the naïve intent of infusing a little liveliness into those bodies that might as well be laid out in a morgue, into their buttocks, into their breasts, into their belly smeared with semen, it, too, quickly cool. Despite all the efforts of erotic prose and erotic photography, a naked body will never be throbbing . . .
Being a man, what does one do with a woman’s nude body, if it is not the object of love, or fond attention, protection, attraction, or even of perdition?
A MAN MAY MAKE USE of a female body in one of four ways: by paying the woman for her services; by viewing an image of her body, nude or clothed, in still photo or film; by seducing her; or by kidnapping her. Among these four possible modes, which seem to be alternatives to one another, there are actually subtle strands of connection (far more than common sense might be willing to acknowledge) and intermediate conjugations; in some cases, they even coincide, overlapping, especially the last two, seduction and abduction, based on a differing use of force, or rather, a use of differing forces—in the first case psychological, considered to all intents and purposes legitimate (even when it is preponderant over the target of its intent), in the second case physical in nature, which is deemed illegitimate in all cases, and therefore forbidden and sanctioned. The first two modes, in contrast, call for an investment that is purely economic in kind. A man must therefore spend money and energy to obtain his pleasures, to an extent and according to protocols that range from a prudent investment to gallantry to rape, in some cases by way of love, which can however also be adapted to the purpose like any crowbar or burglar’s jimmy.
There was once a fifth possibility, namely matrimony. By marrying a woman and bringing her to your home, you were once able to assure full availability and access to the asset constituted by her body, as if it were an exclusive piece of property. Nowadays, however, this is no longer the case, and a husband is required to start over from scratch every time in order to obtain the consent that was once deeded to him on a permanent basis, intrinsically and in perpetuity, on his wedding day, much like an unlimited usufruct, to be enjoyed at any time, without condition. In traditional matrimony, there coexisted without any evident contradiction aspects of purchase and sale, abuse and exploitation, and simple abduction, in terms of both the facts on the ground and the symbolism in the air. A sixth possibility, facilitated these days by the customs attendant upon youthful amusements, and which might be defined as not merely seductive or abductive but rather inductive, involves battering down any and all inhibitions against sexual consent, by the use of a variously dosed blend of instant courtship, psychophysical constraint, and the use of such substances as alcohol and narcotics. This contemporary mode of courtship is supported by massive social conditioning, as powerful as any ideology and widespread as an advertising campaign, which deems that the sexual offering and performance of a young woman’s body is an obligation and a duty. Which makes our so-called sexual freedom something very similar to sexual oppression, reformulated to new standards that are perhaps even more binding and restrictive. What was once forbidden is now not only licit but obliga
tory. Even the pornographic enjoyment and exploitation of the female body, which until a few years ago was the subject of a commercial transaction, is nowadays given out free of charge, also in obedience to the same diktat, in the form of amateur videos and compromising photos. The diffusion of images of women of all ages taking off their clothes and coupling is now part of an amorous ritual that it is practically impossible for them to refuse, because it forms part of the dowry, the endowment, of that body, whose conveyance, free of charge, to anyone who asks must be total and irrevocable.
In practice, that’s the way it works, even though the laws try frantically to restrict the possession of women’s virtual bodies, no less precious than their physical body, and every bit as eagerly exploited. Overvalued, targeted as the object of morbid curiosity, obsessive attention, drawn and quartered in its anatomical details by the dissecting gaze, stripped of clothing and garbed in desire—and, at the same time, devalued, reduced to an interchangeable zero, a pallid ghost, an off-white blur on the screen with pinkish buttons and a dark triangle and red lips. Money, charm, physical force, emotional extortion, pornography that generates excitement far more than it placates it, obligation to submit always and in any case to desire, captivity, gossip, bullying, and abuse: who can be such a hypocrite that they fail to recognize that the methods men have for obtaining women’s bodies always wind up being the same, conjugated in variants of greater or lesser chivalry or brutality, variously romantic formalized or no-nonsense—as the phrase goes, “wham, bam, thank you, ma’am”? If this is at least somewhat true (just as the claim that it is entirely true is clearly false), then how can you blame those who rush to conclusions, who employ, that is, bruising, overbearing manners? And who take what they want? The whole world, after all, is encouraging them to do so.
THE NUDE BODY VIES for primacy with the face, and deletes it. A nude body, in point of fact, is headless; a body that strips naked or is stripped naked instantly becomes headless; and then if you use force to strip it naked, the face disappears even before the body is completely unclothed. That is why, in pornographic poses, the women being photographed or filmed as they allow themselves to be sodomized or grip various numbers of cocks in their hands have some difficulty in getting their faces to take on the appropriate expression. Because, in point of fact, there is no expression, it doesn’t exist, the face itself ceases to exist, and it would make more sense just to blur it or cut it out entirely with some digital graphics effect, or else put a mask on it, or a hood; which explains why the girls either put on idiot smiles or lick their fingers, feigning arousal, appearing either frightened or pained at the hugeness of the members that loom over or are inside them, or else even remain expressionless: in reality, they have no idea what to do with their faces, because their faces, at that moment—even as all the rest of their body is visible, open, spread-eagled, thrown wide, unhinged—their faces simply don’t exist.
WHEN A MAN’S DEAD BODY is found, it’s almost always fully dressed, when a woman’s dead body is found, it’s most often naked. And if by chance the woman is wearing clothing, then the first thing that is assumed is that she was stripped and then, once murdered, reclothed. A woman’s body must be nude by definition, and a murdered woman’s body all the more so; that reveals how she died and why. Denuded and murdered, murdered and denuded. The two actions are thought to be inseparable, indeed, they practically coincide, to such an extent that it makes one think that anytime a woman’s clothes are taken off, the possibility that she is about to be killed draws closer, either by allusion or in far more concrete terms. It’s a sort of introduction to the topic. Only in death camps were both men and women naked in heaps. In much the same way, in advertising, or movies, in fashion, and now even in operas, it is a female body that is denuded—driving home the point that at the beginning and end of all stories, topping the scale of desires, in the stimulus to and the purpose of every purchase, at the foundation of any exercise of seduction or practice of sexual violence, one will find a nude woman, or parts of her body, her nipples, hips, eyes, buttocks.
WE ENCOUNTER NUDITY at three decisive moments: at birth, in the sex act, and at death. The dead body is naked even when it’s wrapped in a shroud or under the suit in which it’s being buried. Death itself is nothing other than a final form of nudity, replicating in a chilling fashion the nudity of birth. Once expelled from Eden and thrust out willy-nilly into the world, nudity will have lost its splendor and its innocence, it will walk in the shadow of an element of tragedy, so to speak, it will be hemmed in by death. For this reason, and perhaps for this reason alone, nudity is obscene, and hence forbidden. Naturism and nudism are naïve or hypocritical attempts to go back to an origin no longer attainable by canceling that shadow, pretending that there is no secret and no shame, that this custom of wearing clothes is nothing but a foolish convention . . .
ASIDE FROM THE MORGUE, there’s another place where women are unclothed, and that is museums. Hanging on walls or standing in the middle of hallways or sprawled in languid poses, there are countless unclothed young women. Some are beautiful and attractive, there are others who move you to pity in their skinniness, others still buxom and corpulent, painted to take up a great deal of room with their pink flesh.
AND IT ISN’T TRUE that we’re used to it. It isn’t true that the visual and verbal tempest that has been gusting without a moment’s pause for at least forty years has swept away all sensitivity to the subject. There is still a certain shock effect (on me at least), not only at the sight, but even the mere sonic contact with phrases that contain “a nude girl” or “the man was naked,” “she was left naked,” “the bodies lay nude . . .” or “they lay naked on the sand.”
And even the innocent nudity of children strikes the eye and captivates the imagination, and feelings of admiration, excitement, disgust, uproar, and astonishment are all churned together in a single rush of blood to the face when we are faced, unexpectedly or after long yearning, with the nudity of a body, whatever the sex or age.
Nude: in the two vowels of that little word, “my useless head gets lost.”
13
THE ANGUISHED REACTIONS of respectable families when they receive notice of new crimes committed by their children: “Oh no, he’s done it again, the same thing all over again!” And then they latch on to an ancient conviction: “Money can make all problems go away . . .”
THE MONEY IN QUESTION is necessary to hire good lawyers, to offer reparations to the victims, to stave off criminal charges: as long as they have existed, well-to-do brutes have been the beneficiaries of the indulgence or even the complicity of their judges. This age-old pattern suddenly changes in the years during which this story unfolds, and to a considerable degree because of this story. The leading role was played by the press, which still largely called the shots and controlled the weather when it came to public figures and whether they would be praised to the high heavens or nailed to a cross; the newspapers knew how to turn a crime story into a sensational saga, exploiting its violent and morbid content while simultaneously feigning indignation in their denunciations, attracting men and women, who read those broadsheets like flies drawn to honey, the men magnetized, the women scandalized. The CR/M brought together reactionaries and progressives at a single blow. Until this point, rape had been punished within a system that oscillated between harshness and almost wholesale tolerance. Judges seemed uncertain. Then, all at once, privilege was turned upside down, suddenly becoming a disadvantage.
In the campaign that followed the crime and accompanied the trial, what counted was not so much the weight of the sexual conflict (men against women) as that of the class conflict (rich against poor). What really stirred public opinion was the murderers’ social affiliation. A petit bourgeois jacquerie revolted against the supposedly privileged young men and their supporters, while in reality they were revolting against themselves. And it was the death of one of the two victims that magnified the impact of the case. That death, in particular: the isolated vi
lla on the beach, the car trunk. In truth, this had always been the case in traditional judicial practice and conscience: rarely was a rape punished unless the victim was seriously wounded or killed. Only the raped woman’s grave injury or death seemed capable of suddenly awakening consciences, stimulating the courts to issue stern verdicts against the crime committed, punishments that could range up to the death penalty. That meant a case, however, where the more serious offense, murder, ended up absorbing and camouflaging the rape. In the face of the macabre evidence of the corpse, people tended to forget that, before being killed, that body had also been raped. Rape became a moot point. But in this case, the sexual violence and its degeneration into violence, plain and simple, into torture and finally murder, were all considered as a whole, as a horribly coherent and unified process, with preliminary acts that worked their way right through to the final outcome, powering it along, making the whole thing truly unbearable to the consciences of one and all—investigators, relatives, judges, jurors, and public opinion.
For centuries rape had been considered in accordance with a scale of gravity proportional to rank, the social classes to which the rapist and the rape victim belonged. The rape of a servant girl by her master was likely to draw nothing more than a fine; while a tramp who raped the daughter of a prominent family might find himself walking the steps to the scaffold: as if the crime to be punished was first and foremost an assault on the existing social hierarchy. That paradigm was suddenly overturned, in the wake of the calls for political change in those years, and in a sort of Dantean contrappasso, what we might call tit-for-tat, or eye-for-an-eye, it was transformed into its exact opposite, formulated as follows: rape is all the more grievous and abominable when it is inflicted by the “well-to-do” upon “working-class girls.” The bourgeois extraction of the culprits—which had so far protected them from the gravest consequences for their actions, and might yet spare them again (good lawyers, plea bargains, substantial reparations paid to the victims and their families, in other words, the old-school approach mentioned above, “money can take care of everything”)—was now overturned into an aggravating factor. These were no longer just wild young men sowing their oats, they were now ferocious murderers. In the language of organized crime, ci era scappato il morto—there’d been a collateral victim. Specifically, a dead woman. A poor young woman, dead. A young woman, from a poor family, dead. And that upends the old pact, according to which what counts is the social standing of the culprit and that of the victim. It upended it with overpowering thoroughness. The social affiliation of the rapists now made them all the more odious, monstrous, and guilty, since they couldn’t even attempt to invoke the mitigating factors of ignorance or having grown up in a depraved environment: nothing, they had no excuses to cling to. And so, before you knew it, the articles in the crime sections of the popular press had been transformed into declarations of social conscience: and when you give the press an opportunity to whip up a blend of such succulent ingredients . . .
The Catholic School Page 101
