THE WARS FOUGHT BETWEEN CITIES, nations, social classes, guilds, and economic competitors may experience, if not actually periods of peace, at least truces or phases of dormancy; the war, on the other hand, that has never known a single moment of quiet is the war between the sexes. It has been fought on a daily basis at every level for hundreds of thousands of years, from the cave to the tent to the palaces of the royal courts, on almost every occasion in life: when you’re born, when you eat, when you get married, whether you’re on your feet or flat on your back, at the market, at school, in bed, in the kitchen, when you’re writing and painting but also when you’re praying and sacrificing. And then in the courtrooms and the army ranks, and when those armies break and run through the streets of a village being sacked and plundered. That war never stops to take a breath. It often, however, goes unnoticed, passing unobserved, unrecorded because it’s reduced to a particular aspect, a secondary effect of the wars that will, instead, be mentioned in history books, with dates and everything else. Within the context of any armed conflict, there will always be a subchapter dedicated to the war against women, the specific treatment reserved for them, a sort of war within the war, that sees the men on both sides allied against them, or at least in agreement on one point: whoever wins gets to rape the women of whoever loses, and if the fortunes of war seem to ebb and flow, then they’ll just take turns. In the Bible and in the brothels of Bangkok, on TV and in the churches and mosques and synagogues, at the family dining table or in the assault of spermatozoa dancing in a uterus, a permanent and unstoppable conflict is under way, in spite of all the treaties and armistices that seem to establish fixed points, conquests acknowledged and tacitly accepted, new limitations placed upon the sheer power of one sex over the other, or of certain individuals over other individuals, including those of the same sex, seeing that the outcomes of the war between the sexes are reflected in the hierarchies internal to each: depending on his ability to subjugate females, a male will also subjugate other males. While the woman who, in her turn, captures males instead of allowing herself to be captured will earn a status of excellence and become the object of a singular form of respect mingled with desire. It is curious, in fact, to note how a woman’s respectability, based on her capacity for seduction (this is true, for example, of actresses, of great beauties, of femme fatales, the most successful women of the twentieth century), is subject to a sort of double standard: she is all the more admired the more she is morally questionable.
WE CAN’T SAY WHETHER this is a hot war or a cold war, consisting as it does of a myriad of episodes, some of them nearly harmless skirmishes, others extremely grave crimes.
A war with plenty of blood spilled in circumscribed episodes which are, however, for that very reason, exemplary. And the blood always belongs to women. While many women may make men spit blood, metaphorically speaking, some men make women spit blood, but in actual terms, and those women are the wives and girlfriends who are sick and tired of them, the ex-wives, the adulterous wives, or even just women they’ve lusted after but who have turned them down, or women who said okay, unaware that they were saying it to a sadist, or else women abducted and murdered at the height of a bout of sexual violence; that’s just limiting the blood to the murders, even if the greatest volume of it consists, drop by drop, of the blood that oozes from the faces of women beaten by family members and spouses, within their homes. Their blood spurts out, staining in a continuous flow the statistics of this low-intensity world war. Or perhaps it’s a planetary outbreak of guerrilla warfare, whose singular feature is that the guerrillas are the ones who hold power, not the ones who are fighting that power. They represent a sort of armed vanguard of that power. The bloodshed is too widely scattered across the landscape for a line of combat to be identified, in fact, the problem is that the contenders are almost never separated by a border, a trenchworks, a wall, or a barbed-wire fence. And so, a decisive battle will never take place.
WOMEN, after all, they’re used to bleeding . . .
THE FIRST CULTURAL INITIATIVE I took part in was the foundation of an art gallery in Rome. It must have been 1978 or thereabouts. The founders were painters, the ones with the strongest interest in establishing a gallery where they could exhibit, and with them poets and writers, plus a few other characters of the sort that orbit around artistic groups, the kind of people that, even after you’ve known them for years, you keep wondering exactly what it is they do with their lives: but they’re even more distinctive elements of the milieu than the writers or the painters. Among the artists there were several who will make other appearances later in this story: Giuseppe Salvatori, Felice Levini, Santo Spatola, Antonio Capaccio, Rodolfo Cecafumo, Piero Pizzi Cannella . . . The gallery took its name from Via Sant’Agata dei Goti, in the Monti district. Sant’Agata—St. Agatha—became our heroine and our patron saint, as well as the patron saint of bell-founders: that’s because her breasts, when they were sliced off during her martyrdom and set upon a tray, were in fact reminiscent of two bells, two small flesh bells, because of their youthful, unripe, perfect shape.
Perhaps the most perfect prototype of torture inflicted on the female body.
IT IS RISKY TO DO WITHOUT WOMEN, very risky. Only small sectarian communities are able to do it. It is hard for men to give them up, and not only for sexual reasons, but for the fundamental role that they play as conflict mediators; and for the precious fact that they represent, in any case, the lowermost layer of society. Women are in fact the most exploited of the exploited. Poor men are willing to put up with counting for nothing as long as there is someone who counts for less than them, that is, their women. That is why the ones who most greatly fear women’s emancipation are poor men: if they were to be bypassed by their women, then they truly would find themselves on the lowest rung of the social ladder. This is the sole point at which the males of different classes can find a paradoxical convergence of interests: any social order is acceptable, as long as there is someone in the end to place underfoot. Traditionalist societies, where women have no rights at all, are based on this principle. That is what women are good for, to make the lowest of men feel like they’re the masters of something or someone. Rich men sometimes manage to oppress rich women, since they have no difficulty oppressing poor men and poor women. These two latter categories are likewise oppressed by the rich women. So the poor men have no option but to oppress poor women, while the poor women have no one left to oppress (perhaps their children, but that doesn’t last long, and nowadays they can’t even do that anymore). From time to time, poor men can mistreat rich women, using violence against them, robbing them and raping them. Poor men, for that matter, do the same with poor women, with the sole difference that the take is more meager. Rich men and rich women can oppress each other reciprocally, for example, making their spouse miserable with their toxic lives together or by taking them to the cleaners in their divorce settlements. For a rich man to rape a poor woman is in the nature of the social order, as is the rape of the rich woman by the poor man; rapes within the same class form part of power dynamics between the sexes, not between the classes.
RAPE AS APPROPRIATION (when I rape a woman I make her mine) or as vandalism (I rape a woman who belongs to another man): in either case, it is a conflict over the possession of something, either in order to obtain her for oneself or else to deprive someone else of her. The satisfaction of the second of the two instincts provokes even greater pleasure: more than obtaining the thing, one rejoices in making it impossible for others to enjoy it from now on. In many places around the world, a raped woman is destined to be cast out, marginalized: expropriated of her own identity, she can no longer give it to others.
RAPE IS A STAPLE PRODUCT like flour, salt, glue, or muriatic acid. Men who feel frustrated and impotent use violent sex to reclaim their masculinity, while men who hold power use it for yet another confirmation of the fact. The ones who have been given little and who have been overlooked develop a need for self-affirmation that they are read
y to satisfy by making use of violence if need be; the ones who have been given a great deal and who have been spoiled by abundance expect to perpetuate their privilege at any and all costs, and they are willing to use violence to confirm the fact. The former are vindictive over what they don’t possess, the second are eager to show off what they have. People who have been humiliated and overlooked are no more and no less dangerous than those who have been treated to every comfort and attention. The murderers of the CR/M had very few reasons to rape and kill the two young women. The psychology of the murderer is the psychology of anyone, of the everyman.
A personality that is by no means special, indeed, rather common, if we consider common—and they are—such characteristics as being cynical, manipulative, egocentric, not to experience feelings of guilt, to think only of the present, which corresponds to a human type that is by no means extraordinary, indeed, quite the contrary, an everyman, an authentic pillar of contemporary society. He really can be anyone, a colleague at your office, a clerk at the bank, a student of law or engineering, the guy sitting at the next table over in a restaurant or in the row behind you at the movie theater. Not a monster you can recognize from a distance, like an ogre or a werewolf, but an absolutely ordinary individual, nondescript, anonymous. So insignificant that he could pass entirely unnoticed. Maybe a neighbor who even seemed courteous, or at the least harmless, or who never attracted any attention. If that’s the way things are, there is no way to protect yourself, and that is what’s scariest . . . and it’s not just the women who are afraid, but also the men, because if the monster really is such an ordinary type, they are forced to look at themselves in the mirror and worry.
Corresponding to the few actual murderers, there is a corresponding multitude of armchair criminals who mentally rape and strangle their victims. Often wholly unconscious that they’re even entertaining these fantasies.
MANY HAVE A HARD TIME RECOGNIZING that they possess something only because that same thing is denied others: that they can feel pleasure only at the cost of someone else suffering. It’s mathematical: if there is abundance here, it means that there is scarcity there. Everything that we have we took, and at this very moment we are taking it from someone else. To a substantial extent, the amusements of a part of mankind are made possible by the suffering and misery of the rest. For the most part, this misery is concealed from the view of those who enjoy the better lives: privilege in fact consists of the possibility of pushing away those whose suffering permits their enjoyment: exclusive mansions and country clubs are built expressly to separate the two human categories, leaving outside the most numerous and enclosing behind impenetrable barriers the fortunate few. Sexual abuse, in contrast, brutally puts the person who’s enjoying the privilege in direct contact with the one suffering to provide him with enjoyment. In a forced embrace, the one who is enhanced by the privilege is locked together with the one who is diminished by it. In contrast with the case of the children who make soccer balls, who are on the far side of the globe stitching leather while we dribble the finished soccer balls at our country club on the banks of the Tiber, in rape there is no shield or distance. Of all the many ways of exercising power, it is the most direct.
5
SO LET’S GRANT that they thought the girls were dead. If one of them hadn’t turned out to be alive, by mistake, and hadn’t knocked on the car trunk, what would they have done with the bodies, how would they have gotten rid of them? It’s not all that easy to get rid of two corpses. Even the Mafiosi have their problems with it, and they have to make use of procedures straight out of horror films. But even if they had succeeded, and had gotten off scot-free, and there had been no report of the CR/M, if there simply had been no CR/M, with the villa at the beach cleaned up and the two girls vanished like so many others (in that same year, twenty-five other young woman disappeared, and nothing more was ever heard of them), the matter would have ended there, or else the young men would have tried it again, sooner or later, they would have continued to abduct and rape and eventually murder young women (having already murdered two, from that point on they might as well murder them all, each time, it’s hard to turn back once you’ve started down that path), and the police would have caught them the next time, or else the time after that. After how many different cases would they have caught them? Especially considering that they were so reckless and bold, in scattering their path with clues and displaying utter indifference, as if they felt certain they would get away with it; or, quite the contrary, actually hoped that they’d be caught. I could—and perhaps I should—work on this hypothesis of impunity. Move the dates later. Imagine a longer career as sexual delinquents and homicidal maniacs. But what actually happened is more than enough.
IF AT THE CULMINATION of a Greek drama or a biblical tragedy, someone doesn’t kill their brother or father or mother, they’ll go out and kill someone else’s brother or father or mother. Once you’ve averted domestic violence, the impulse to kill spills out into the outside world, toward your enemies. If we don’t have a woman of our own to kill, or if by this point we’re so indifferent to her that we no longer even feel the desire to kill her, to possess her and kill her, to kill her in order no longer to feel obliged to possess her, well, then, there are countless women out there to take it out on. It wouldn’t be strange in the slightest if one of the protagonists of the CR/M, instead of killing the girls they took out to Monte Circeo, had instead decided to murder his mother. I ought to check out whether they had sisters at home.
EVEN WHEN IT TAKES PLACE in a secluded location, and there’s no one other than the perpetrator or perpetrators and the victim of the rape, a rape always has a demonstrative aspect, the quality of a lesson being taught. It is laid out as a theorem, indeed, it is self-explanatory, it explains itself in its execution. Its paradoxical pedagogy is aimed at the victim then and there and at all those others who will learn of it in the aftermath: the woman, it’s unnecessary to explain just why, but with an accent of contempt aimed at her male relatives, fathers, brothers, husbands, who have failed at their responsibility for protection and custodianship, and therefore to other men, to ensure that they learn that there’s a brusque and disrespectful way of treating women. There is nothing quite like violence to set forth a thesis, to illustrate a theory, to lay claim to a right. By ravaging someone (the Italian word is “scempio”), you set an example (and in fact, scempio is derived from exemplum, the Latin root of example, exemplary).
I COPY DOWN HERE a few notes jotted on the title page of the philosophy textbook that had belonged to Arbus, inherited by me, seeing that he was skipping the rest of the year. I still own it, torn and falling apart though it is, and I occasionally leaf through it, studying the works of some author or other: the juicy old textbook by Eustachio Paolo Lamanna, Manuale di storia della filosofia ad uso delle scuole. Arbus’s handwriting is minute and precise. I couldn’t say whether these ideas are original with him or borrowed from some philosopher; or whether that even makes any difference, after all.
Everything that causes change is violent.
Nothing that is violent is lasting.
Violent change destroys, on the one hand, and on the other, it creates.
Violent change never knows in advance what it’s going to create.
That which is frightening and repugnant isn’t necessarily false.
The truth often is.
Rereading these apodictic declarations, written by a seventeen-year-old forty years ago, I am tempted to say that, crude and categorical though they may be, they’re nonetheless more interesting than all the chatter you hear grown men spouting these days, every night, on TV. I am beginning to think that the so-called buonismo, a sort of Pollyanna-ish bleeding-heart optimism, is this: to refuse on principle that the truth can ever be unpleasant or painful, and in order to avoid that risk, take refuge in the shade of a comforting lie. The ways in which reality can be adjusted, bringing it into touch with a vision in which conflicts either don’t exist or can in any ca
se be reconciled, are essentially rhetorical in nature, it’s a question of language and careful selection and recomposition of the data to be strung together in the way you talk about it, so that every time you run the risk of finding yourself face-to-face with an inconvenient or unpopular truth, you can always detour in some other direction . . . When this zigzagging progress becomes truly unbearable and the contradictions or the persiflage reveals itself for what it is, nude and crude, then one invokes the inalienable right to produce them. Once unmasked, lies can always be recycled as utopias or noble ideals. The protest against those who insist on demanding the truth and not a fairy tale then becomes: “But you can’t try to keep us from dreaming . . .!” “It’s your fault that things always remain the same!” When faced with this ultimate argument, any possibility of critical reasoning vanishes, it becomes pointless to specify, “No, that’s not how it is,” since they know perfectly well that that’s not how it is. That’s not how it is, embè? So what? We can hope that someday it will be!
(Embè? The term is a formulation that defies any reply. If the sages of the Middle Ages had ever come face-to-face with it, it would have offered them a perfect opportunity for a theological disputation. Although carrying much of the same baggage, it isn’t as grim and aggressive as the American equivalent, “So what?” Instead it’s disarming, surrounded by its philosophical aura. Embè? clearly states, in just two syllables, that all distinctions are vain. All criticisms and objections are childish. F.V. described having been forced to install a gate at the far end of her yard in Trevignano, which led to a small pier on the lake, because, every single day, people would tie up to her pier and disembark, and with baskets, tablecloths, and bottles, they’d sit down unhurriedly for a meal in her garden. She’s old, she lives alone, but the hundredth time that it happened, she finally mustered the nerve to walk the length of the garden and go to tell the intruders, in her unmistakable gravelly voice: “Ex-cuse me, but you’re on my pro-per-ty . . .”
The Catholic School Page 109
