AFTER THAT NIGHT, I pursued Lou, in vain, with phone calls and stopping by her home unannounced. One time I even went upstairs, but her parents were there and it was dinnertime, and I was invited to stay and eat, and I saw a domestic version of the shameless young woman I liked so much that I had compared her to Joan of Arc, as she helped her mother to make mozzarella and prosciutto bruschetta for dinner, whereupon I very politely declined the invitation. Another time I rang their doorbell and they buzzed me up over the intercom. Lou wasn’t there, I found a girlfriend of hers who was lying on the floor and drawing, and this girl’s face was puffy because the night before she had slept on Feniglia Beach, with the hood of her K-Way windbreaker tied down as tight as possible, but not tight enough to keep the mosquitoes from savaging the part of her face that had been left exposed, from her eyebrows to her lips. She was scrawling and doodling on large pressboard sheets, erotic drawings that struck me as awkward and unattractive, even though I confess I couldn’t devote overmuch attention to them, distracted as I was by her face covered with bug bites, and by her breasts, which I could see in their entirety through the loose neckline of her tank top: a pair of pallid cones with pink tips. “Will Lou be back?” I asked her. “Maybe,” she replied, and went on drawing messy but oversized cocks all over the cardboard. No other relatives of Lou were at home. From those fleeting impressions I felt certain that she was the girl who had fucked seven men in seven days, but actually, it could easily have been someone else: that type of girl was pretty much interchangeable in those days. The asshole from Milan, on the other hand, was one of Lou’s ex-boyfriends, as I later learned, the head of the enforcement wing of a political group. He’d smashed in plenty of heads in his time, swinging a Hazet 38 wrench.
I never saw Lou again. Wait, that’s not quite right. Once I saw her zipping past Piazza Istria on a large motorcycle. She was wearing an extremely short, gauzy white dress. Her legs were bronzed and she was wearing sandals.
ALL THESE THINGS I saw or thought or remembered as I drove down the road toward Poli, on Easter Sunday, the clanking of the oversized wrenches, the gray brain matter spilling out of a split skull, Lou’s tiny blond pudendum and the blacker-than-black pudenda that the African women continued flashing with the fluttering hems of their short skirts, doing what a poet of that period (years of the avant-garde, years of extremism and of stories variously tragic and amusing) referred to as “taking the beast out for a breath of fresh air” (Victor Cavallo, R.I.P.).
2
IF YOU BELIEVE THAT VIOLENCE is a strictly male prerogative, then it is also the most significant indicator of virility. It was used very widely among youth groups, especially if they were politicized: both on the right and the left, those who were willing to use their fists were admired by men, desired by girls and women. Violence was a means of simplification, an interpretive key to reality that, while it might be crude was nonetheless eloquent, as one might well say of the notorious Hazet wrenches . . .
VARIOUS PROBLEMS derive from this cult of virility. The leading one is this: by hypermasculinizing the models emulated and taking one’s heroes to a practically parodistic level of aggression, we end up in a situation where nearly all real men fall short of the ideal. Real men, in this case, remain a scant minority.
A second problem of these so-called virile qualities is that, even if it were Hercules who made use of them, they are bound to slip sooner or later into the realm of abuse and excess. Rationality becomes cold indifference, calm becomes an inability to communicate, concision becomes aphasia, strength becomes a destructive frenzy, and independence becomes isolation. To have backbone in this case means becoming incapable of adapting. Virility taken as a whole proves to be a form of obtuseness. By using the same faculties that allow him heroically to vanquish monsters and free men from many plagues and blights, Hercules also slaughters his wife and children. Why? It is as if strength, once unleashed, becomes incapable of making distinctions.
FOR THAT MATTER, it would appear that men manage to feel truly close to other men only when they are fighting. In the shared heat of combat. What is it about peace that doesn’t work? Are we certain that sports, that is, the most widespread surrogate for outright combat, is sufficient to create a spirit of camaraderie, or does it not rather run the risk of exhausting that spirit in the attainment of mediocre objectives—a trophy on the shelf in the bar, next to the liqueurs and the digestifs?
Are there equivalents to war? Political militancy? The scouts? Serving some cause? Boxing? Criminal delinquency?
Violence is by no means synonymous with force or strength. It may be an aspect of it, or a projection. Violent people are often weak, deep down, and the violence that they field is a disproportionate reaction and a sort of compensation for their own weakness. As if they were afraid—once they abandoned their bellicose posture—that they might cease to exist. A man who runs the risk of vanishing once his rage attenuates, loses its punch . . . I can state that I’ve seen the same thing in prison: men forced to maintain their pose as a tough guy because, if that aggressive image were to waver for even the briefest of intervals, then all at once the effort that had gone into creating it and making it credible in the eyes of the other men would instantly be undermined and rendered pointless.
VIOLENCE HAS BEEN FOR A LONG TIME the best and fastest-acting technique for making the world acknowledge the masculinity of those who wield it. Using your fists, fighting a duel, etc. There is, however, a decisive difference and a sharp shift between the old days and the present day: male aggressiveness ritually unleashed men against each other, in an attempt to reinforce a hierarchy that had been called into question; what remained indisputable was their supremacy over women. When that, too, began to be called into question, then violence was deflected from rivals and turned almost entirely against this new source of disorder.
CERTAIN MEN DEMAND OBEDIENCE from women by subjugating them; other men may try to do so and fail, while still others allow themselves to be dominated, unable to prevent it, or even because they enjoy it. Men who kill women belong to all these categories of man: they kill them because they dominate them or they kill them because they are unable to dominate them or they kill them because they can no longer stand to feel that they have been dominated.
It’s one of the most cutting paradoxes of the CR/M: the only way of getting the better of two harmless girls is to kill them.
If there are few men truly capable of subjugating and manipulating as they please, there are, however, a great many others who cherish that aspiration, or who indirectly take various advantages from the brutal dominion exercised by those former few. This is what sociologists call the “patriarchal dividend,” whereby, even without bullying women in the first person, I can still cash in the small share of power that every man enjoys, thanks to the subjugation of women implemented by others; the subordination that was created by other men. To put it in the simplest of terms, I have no need to use violence against any individual woman because there’s already someone willing to do it for all men, that is, who arranges to establish an oppressive regime that the individual man can blame while simultaneously, in point of fact, benefitting from it.
A very few of them act like “real men,” that is, by treating women roughly, forcing them back into line, showing them who’s in charge, but all the other men, saying nothing about it, or even hypocritically criticizing the brutality of those few “real men,” enjoy the benefits of this positional dividend ensured by the initiative of those few. Something similar exists in the relationship between pacifistic Western societies and the armed minorities who defend their privileges on the boundaries of the world, often camouflaged as peace missions: the pacifists are often indignant about the warlike approaches taken by the armed minorities, unwilling to recognize, out of either candor or bad conscience, that the latter are quite often protecting the interests of the former.
For that matter, it is difficult to imagine that as massive and pervasive a state of inequality as exists b
etween the sexes could be perpetuated without the use of violence. Not an official, institutional violence, but rather a lurking, petty, potential violence, low intensity yet systematic, a sort of guerrilla warfare, a death by ten thousand cuts . . . Its capacity for oppression may even be greater than that of the explicit domination exercised by men in traditional societies. This is a regime perennially being placed at risk: a stable hierarchy between the sexes would have no need to avail itself of a continual campaign of intimidation. Which only goes to show just how far it is from being a “natural” state of affairs . . .
(Acknowledged and respected hierarchies do not exacerbate conflicts between individuals; quite to the contrary, they reduce them to a minimum.)
In the period when this story unfolds, women’s demands for independence were understood as an undermining of the social foundations, against which immediate steps had to be taken, without delay.
There were those who had the impression that men were surrendering. Not all of them, but a fair number, perhaps even the majority. Tired, weary, on the defensive. They were simply making too many concessions to women’s demands. They were softening, beating a hasty retreat without daring to object. What was needed was someone to stand up, hold their head high, and put the female rebels and organizers on behalf of women’s rights back in their places. By so doing, they would be riding to the rescue of the entire male gender, now forced into a state of crisis, which meant they would also be benefitting those males who lacked the courage to lift a finger against the rising tide of women’s demands, those unmanned men who were going to allow all women to crush them underfoot, to a greater and greater extent every day, starting with their own. In short, what was needed was someone willing to take responsibility for doing the “dirty work” in the name of all those men who rejected the idea or chose not to know about it. This meant wildcat corps of fighters, irregular troops, ready to use guerrilla techniques and brutal demonstrative acts of violence and terror, acts which those who weren’t directly involved could conveniently disavow, at least in words; like the sort of thing that happens in those political movements where a party that acts strictly within legal guidelines and recognizes the seated government is, de facto, flanked by a clandestine structure that carries out and targets violent initiatives in such a way that the official party can distance itself, paying lip service to an indignant condemnation, while in point of fact the two distinct versions of the same political movement, one parliamentary version, another terrorist version, march side by side. One of the two parts negotiates, while the other carries out terror attacks and acts of sabotage. One part undertakes in a clandestine fashion what the other part will publicly stigmatize.
The demonstrative act by very definition is the reprisal.
This counteroffensive against women’s liberation needed to get under way before matters could move too far forward, get too far out of hand. Before it was too late. The problem is that it was already too late. And the two dynamics continued to develop, each on its own: women continued to emancipate themselves, and certain men continued to come up with violent ways of preventing that, symbolically punishing certain women according to the strategy employed by the terrorist groups of those years: Strike one of them to educate a hundred. Strike one of these women to educate a hundred.
BY A CAPRICIOUS LAW OF HISTORY, the most revolutionary experiments, the radical shifts, the pivots, the turning points, the exemplary new developments almost never take place in the most advanced and civilized countries, where progress has taken place in a gradual and constant manner, but instead in those countries where archaic structures and customs persist. When these structures and customs sense the pressure of innovative demands or suddenly come into contact with them, like the lava from a volcano suddenly plunging into ice-cold water, they form an extremely volatile and dangerous cocktail that can lead to spectacular reactions, explosions, sprays, uprisings, and the creation of never-before-seen forms that solidify instantly. In less advanced countries, the new and the old face off with a radicalism and a ferocity unknown elsewhere, because they are both “too much”: the old is too old, the new is too new, and neither the one nor the other would actually be suited to the times we live in now, while the insecurity of each one’s position induces them to turn to the cruelest and most ruthless means to defend and implement them. In the end, what may happen is that the new is drowned in blood, or that tradition is uprooted as if it had never existed at all, but before we reach either of these potential solutions, we will see many hybrid, monstrous crystallizations, where these various aspects coexist, intertwined and compressed, as if in volcanic rock. Against the background of epochal tumult, uprisings that can last as long as the human equivalent of a geological era, and which mark the submerging of entire societies accompanied by the rise of new ones, what remains are individual cases, representing this clash among the seismic faults of the time, while the personal stories are the gems set in the sedimentary layers. That is how an entire historical epoch can be compressed into a single day.
IF WE WISH TO CONSIDER the CR/M from this point of view, it is in fact nothing more than a marginal episode of reprisal in the larger context of a global war, unfolding on a front of lesser importance, in a nation and in a society whose customs and ways of life are backward with respect to other nations in the Western bloc, but where, for that very reason, radical experiments are being carried out on the planes of politics, morality, religion, relations between the sexes—experiments out of which the country would eventually emerge, changed from top to bottom. The one thing, then, that was to remain virtually unaltered for forty years, i.e., until the present-day crisis, would be its economic structure; this tells us a great deal about the political wing that, at least on paper, viewed change in the nation’s economic structure as crucial to a reformation of the rest of society: we are, of course, talking about the left. This political formation would experience the paradoxical fate of exercising an extremely powerful influence upon nearly all aspects of Italian society, helping to transform them, indeed, to overturn them entirely: lifestyle, language, music, clothing, religious faith, eros, film-making, while at the same time leaving intact the only aspect that it had set out determined to overthrow.
The duopoly was organized as follows: the Christian Democrats were awarded political and economic power, while the left got everything else, that is, the movies, the books, the professors, the painters, the humorists, the cultural programming on TV—what the very founder of communism himself would have dismissed scornfully as “superstructure.”
IN THE COURSE of the hostilities unleashed by the emancipation of women, diplomacy had failed in every effort at reconciliation, and for those who bemoaned the sunset of the old order, no option remained other than total, open warfare between the sexes, with the traditional entourage of retaliations and exemplary intimidations. Roughly a quarter of a century from the end of the second millennium, someone made a drastic decision: take no prisoners. The same thing was happening in the realm of politics: the radicalization of the clash. In Italy at the time, there existed practically no conflicts on the basis of nationality or race or religion: the struggle was narrow, and therefore all the more ferocious, restricted as it was to the twin fronts of class and the sexes. The CR/M took place almost simultaneously with the first proposals for the abolition of the legal acceptance of honor killings (the delitto d’onore would not be deleted from Italy’s jurisprudence until 1981!), in the year following the national referendum to allow the introduction of divorce, and the same year in which Italy reformed its family law—the equivalent in terms of lifestyle of the abolition of servitude of the glebe.
Those were years in which the importance of sex (talking about it, claiming the right to it, doing it or not doing it, rebelling against the laws that had governed it for centuries or else defending those laws strenuously, transforming it into a symbol of liberation or oppression) ballooned drastically. In a country like Italy, the impact arrived all at once, while in other
Western countries the changes had been gradual, there had been a progressive accommodation of this new obsession.
Only in Italy could a film have been conceived and made, and been considered to be credible and specific, under the frivolous form of comedy, as was Vedo nudo (I See Naked, with Nino Manfredi and Sylva Koscina).
SOME SOCIAL POSITIONS, as soon as they’re endangered even slightly, at the slightest pressure or criticism, are overwhelmed with fear of a vertical collapse, fear that they might cease to exist, since they rule out in advance any possibility of transformation. And so, once women’s emancipation began, not a few men decided that the only possibility left to males in their dealings with women was to continue to oppress them, but in an even more severe fashion. If the domination of women is an essential attribute of masculinity, it is vital to its essence not to moderate that domination, every bit as much as to refuse to give it up entirely: to do so would be more than an abdication; it would be authentic gender suicide. By renouncing his claim to conduct such domination, a male becomes useless, peripheral, devoid of purpose, a sort of drone; the minute he stops controlling and oppressing women, the male plunges into a ravine of insecurity and solitude, where he realizes that he is redundant, marginal with respect to the continuity of life personified by woman: a biological episode, a bizarre hiccup, whose function is rapidly forgotten. An instant after releasing his grip, he begins his slow drift toward the end, the way a large predator that has lost its claws and becomes tame is immediately overwhelmed by the animals he used to hunt. A law of statistics tells us that a weakened male is more vulnerable than the average female. A sick man, unemployed, impotent, separated, and without a chance of seeing his children, or who has to leap through hoops to do so, with monthly alimony payments that are pushing him to the edge of bankruptcy, depressed, confused, mobbed, is more fragile than any woman. Once they’ve started down this slippery slope, men have no more hope, since they are less well equipped than women to face up to difficulties: accustomed as they are to delegating their own material survival, incapable of caring not only for others, but first and foremost for themselves.
The Catholic School Page 106
