This explains the gratuitous brutality that often accompanies and completes sexual violence, once it has guaranteed the rapist the attainment of his minimal or apparent objective, that is, to force the victim into coitus: if that was the true purpose of rape, then why the fists, the blows, the cigarettes crushed out on the flesh, the objects jammed into the vagina and anus, and the torture and abuse that can lead to death?
Hating the frenzied need to do it, hating doing it, hating the woman you do it with, the woman who is forced to do it, while you do it and after you’re done, hating the body that is the cause and at the same time the target of the depravity, hating yourself: the sum of all this hatred is crushing.
Perhaps that is how I manage to grasp one of the paradoxical points of the Sonata, namely that the only way to keep from killing women is to stop going to bed with them: abolishing the occasion for contact and therefore the friction between the sexes, the root of the reciprocal disgust and the engine driving a violence that is otherwise unstoppable. The chastity preached by the now elderly Tolstoy, a chastity that he never actually put into practice. I’m not actually sure that the prescription works in the real world, as opposed to on paper or in vows or in prayers (“. . . lead us not into temptation . . .”), not only because even its proponent lacked the strength of will to apply it, limiting himself to a description of the deplorable effects caused by a failure to observe that chastity. Husbands who sexually oppress their wives, or who cultivate their most depraved tendencies in order to squeeze a few drops of pleasure out of them, men who pervert their women and themselves in order to gratify a frenzy that lasts only a few instants but then, shortly thereafter, rears its ugly head again, only intensified. There can never be liberty and equality between man and woman as long as sex is involved . . . Maybe the old Russian writer had a point . . .
A DESIRE WITHOUT A SPECIFIC OBJECT, blind, furious, the desire for a woman, but not a woman in particular, just any woman, the body of any woman, the nude body of a woman, a nude portion of the body of any woman at all . . . a detail, hypnotic and mysterious the way that only details can be, enlargements under a magnifying glass, the close-up, grainy image of a piece of anatomy concealed between the thighs, under the armpits, in the recesses where the limbs are attached and where they form folds, mucous layers, membranes, something that glistens, moistly . . . that protrudes, extends from the body . . . or that burrows into it in depth, like a sinkhole.
Even in the most episodic encounter, an intense experience, unconsciously desperate, like a battle between beasts in the depths of a forest. A violent surge, a tense frenzy, the chilliest indifference to the personality the rights the faculties of the individual, no respect for limits, a vindictive bitterness the minute one has satiated one’s lusts, often followed by disgust and then by a renewed frenzy, the frenzy to be elsewhere, a dulling, a sense of solitude, or the melancholy desire for solitude.
As soon as the excitement subsides, animosity hostility and coldness take its place.
In its very pantomime, in its outward appearance, the sex act possesses a dangerous affinity with the act of murder: a man penetrating a woman seems to be establishing a relationship no different than that between a murderer and his victim. This similarity of posture makes it easy to confuse or substitute the one thing with the other. This mimicry may act powerfully upon a weak or troubled intellect. And especially on someone who is untouched by such feelings as tenderness or love. Those are emotions that cause a person to recoil, after once experiencing it, from the diabolical resemblance. If, however, you are immune to them, coitus is restored to its deathly surgical blatancy, as if it were taking place under the glare of the lights in an operating room or a morgue.
. . . AND COPULATION WAS ORIGINALLY not the happy and willing joining of the two sexes, but instead a violent act to which the woman submitted because she was weaker than the male. Only with the passage of time, a great deal of time, centuries or millennia, did that brutal embrace start to lose its markedly offensive character and begin to be enjoyed by the female, as the male’s blind and exclusive drive toward the woman’s sex organs began to spread over the entire surface of her body, the painful blows became tender caresses, the penetration lost its aggressive intent. And yet, like a subconscious memory, a trace remains of the primitive assault and the struggle and the abuse, indelible, it cannot be eliminated from the encounter between a man and a woman, even in those suffused in the gentlest sweetness.
IN THE ELIMINATION OF WOMEN, impure by nature or by garb, there is an overwhelming obsession with purity. It starts with prostitutes, habitual and, in a certain sense, designated victims for those who nurture this sort of frenzy, but then it continues, extending a moralizing edict to all women, in whatever walk of life or class, who can in any case be tagged as prostitutes, de facto or potential, or even unconscious prostitutes, that is, unaware that they are prostitutes by the simple fact of belonging to the female sex.
A cynical proverb says that a woman’s best way of avoiding rape is to submit to it. From a logical and descriptive point of view, in fact, consent would have the power of eliminating violence on the spot: without coercion, how can you talk about rape? Whether this witticism hits its target or is merely awful and inappropriate, it is unquestionably false. If we took the absurd argument to its logical conclusion and assumed that a woman agreed to consent in accordance with a calculation of this kind, the rapist would instantly cease to go along. What he is looking for in that coitus, in fact, is nothing other than domination, which is not a means to an end but the end itself. Depriving him of that domination with a stratagem would serve no purpose whatsoever, and indeed it often only stokes to new heights the rage that impels the rapist. These are people who pay little attention to paradoxes and who have never read Oscar Wilde. The logic by which in order to reduce thefts we need only hand over our possessions to the thief can only be said to work in a philosophy class, the same kind of class where they teach that arrows stand still in midair, that a respectable man must not lie, even if that means telling a murderer where his intended victim is hiding, that being dead is preferable to being alive, or else that it’s the same thing, that a barber cannot shave himself, that I cannot state that I am lying, that not all things that are not black are not crows, or all nonblack objects are not-crows, that if I replace all the parts in my car I have to wonder if that is still my car, that a donkey will starve to death rather than choosing between two equal stacks of hay, and so on. How much does a brick weigh if it weighs three pounds plus half a brick? Well, only Polyphemus was stupid enough to believe that his enemy was Nobody. These reasonings, at once logical and absurd, warm my heart because they take me straight back to our high school desks. We were tireless, ferocious hunters of contradictions . . . and of mysterious meanings concealed beneath the most ordinary objects. I remember the immense pleasure it gave me to get to know Freud. Suddenly the world proliferated, beneath every single thing there was another, and beneath that, yet another . . .
I hardly need tell you that it was Arbus who introduced me.
THIS PROLIFERATION OF PARALOGISMS is due to the singular status of sexual violence as a crime. Rape, in fact, is the only crime that in order to be considered as such requires its victim to resist. If the victim doesn’t resist, then all of a sudden it ceases to be a crime. No one would call into question an attempted murder just because the intended victim had failed to put up a fight.
REJECTING THE SENTIMENTAL AND SICKLY sweet versions of the encounter between man and woman, the various saccharine endearments, either corrupted by the search for reciprocal pleasure or else stale and stagnant in the convention of endless engagements and pseudoconjugal cohabitations and compromises in exchange for a few crumbs. Instead of all this inconclusive buffoonery—rape. The perpetrators of the CR/M had done nothing other than go straight to the heart of the matter. Everyone else was beating around the bush, they had plunged in the knife. The blade had sliced through the soft butter of rules, family ceremonies
, and scholastic hypocrisies based on study intelligence good behavior cooperation personal maturity God the Madonna etc., all fine things laid out in order to conceal a very simple truth, that if you want something you only need to go and take it—provided you’re strong enough to do it. All the chitchat was there strictly to discourage the cowards, to muddle people’s ideas about ends and means, minimizing the former and selecting among the latter only the licit ones, which are notoriously far less efficacious. Violence, either a little violence or a huge amount of violence all at once, could make things clear, put them back in order. Violence is immediate, concrete power, all the rest is just the gossip and chitchat of priests . . .
Every woman is a stranger, a deep
and narrow well. She is put into the world
to increase the number of men and the amount of their treachery.
8
THERE ARE TWO MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE WAYS of rejecting the female body: keep it far from oneself by means of chastity, or else seize it by force. In both cases, what is preferred to any real intimacy with the woman is a safer, deep down more masculine, interaction with one’s own gender. You cannot lower yourself to interact with women on the path chosen by them. To accept the rules of courtship, seduction, the frivolous game of love, makes a man effeminate: the brusque manners of either chastity or rape keep him intact.
A REAL MAN ought to be insensible or indifferent to pleasure. Pleasure is something strictly for debauchees, or simpering little girls, just like sentiments. The most famous playboys of the world said that love is for housekeepers. If the essence of the female organism lies in its pathicity, in its extraordinary readiness to experience pleasure and pain, an openminded man can set out to explore this abyss of extreme sensations, using a woman’s body as a laboratory: if he cannot or will not provoke the former, he can always provoke the latter. If a woman is insatiable for pleasure, she certainly will likewise be insatiable for pain. It is her receptive nature that disposes her to this.
Virgins tortured and murdered are subjected to a kind of pain that in the natural order of things they ought to experience only in childbirth: and that pain is replaced with a sterile and derisive suffering.
CHASTITY—SEXUAL PROMISCUITY DEVOID of emotional involvement—rape: there’s a fine thread that connects these three very different attitudes toward women: at the very least, the fact that all three resolve the problem of intimacy with a woman. How? By deleting it. Intimacy is liquidated, negated from the very outset, either within the practice of sex or by keeping oneself at arm’s length from it. In their interactions with the feminine, there are a far greater number of points of contact than there are differences among a chaste man, a womanizer, and a rapist. It is the one who lives in a middle ground who finds himself in trouble: for example, the married man. He is expected to establish and maintain a relationship, otherwise what did he get married for? If even he can’t attain it with his spouse, then it means that this question of intimacy is a pure myth, yet another invention of Romanticism and its fanatical poets. Those who steer clear of it (priests, homosexuals, Casanovas, whoremongers, rapists) are doing nothing more than to acknowledge this impossibility and ready countermeasures. (The female body negated by those who desire it, those who mistreat it, those who reject it.) Chastity is a very particular variation on sexual brutality. Perhaps the most refined form of physical violence. Refined because bloodless and because an individual inflicts it upon himself, freely, which by our moral standards has something heroic about it, and deserves the respect we attribute to those who sacrifice themselves. The appreciation of what is difficult rather than what is easy. Discipline.
A FEW DAYS AGO, I visited Fossanova Abbey with my daughter, who was suffering the pangs of unhappy love. On a late August afternoon, at three o’clock, there was no one but us, and on the front door of the church hung a sign that said open, but the door was still locked. We walked around the abbey. My daughter was sad, tormented. I tried to lift her spirits but I didn’t say much, I didn’t have much to say, since there is nothing more inexplicable than the feelings she was experiencing and that I too, reflexively, was feeling, and there’s practically nothing that can alleviate them. So-called sensible remarks are even less useful. We were told that the abbey would open at four o’clock and, since we hadn’t eaten lunch, we ordered something to eat at a refreshment stand that, in perfect counterpoint to the abbey, looked closed but was actually open. It wasn’t hot out, clouds were sailing past overhead, borne across the sky by a brisk wind, and the tall trees were tossing their leaves: these delightful sights and sounds might allay her pain at least a little. But my daughter’s pretty face remained sullen and her mind full of dark thoughts.
Around three thirty, the place started to liven up. Two couples of tourists arrived, waiting like us for the abbey to reopen and then, a few at a time, appearing from around a corner of the collection of houses surrounding the abbey, came a line of young priests, many of them with cameras on shoulder straps. In the end, we counted a dozen or so, in little clusters of two or three at a time: they’d collect and then scatter, wandering around the massive block of the abbey, snapping photos, chatting in low voices. From their appearance and from the occasional phrase picked up here and there, I understood that they were Americans: ranging in age from eighteen to twenty-five, aside from a couple of older ones and the dean of the group, probably in his early fifties. They were all slender in their black tunics and with ash-blond or reddish or chestnut hair, worn short but not too short, I’d have to guess cut by a skilled barber, a careful job. One of them, extremely young and not very different in his facial features and physique from a girl, was already thinning around the temples, his fine angelic hair destined to fall, his enormous clear eyes set far apart like in Orthodox icons. A young St. Paul, I thought, or else an Alexei Karamazov, Alyosha, perhaps very weak, or maybe very strong, who could say. Only time would tell.
“YOU SEE, Margherita, what their life is like? How different from ours? You can imagine a few centuries ago, when everyone’s destiny was different, each from the other. A vocation or a trade or the simple fact that you carried a certain name would point you down a path marked in advance. Lives were all different. There were a thousand uniforms that whoever wore them never took off. A sailor, a money changer, a soldier, a prince, a priest—they all led lives that had practically nothing in common. Someone might spend twenty years away from home, and there was nothing surprising or strange about it. Nowadays they’re the only ones left who are different, who wear a uniform. And they chose it themselves, all on their own. The single life, no family, and yet by no means free. And if by chance it starts to resemble the lives of others, then it’s all over.
“If they keep faith with their pledge, they’ll never have a wife, they’ll never have children. They’ll never be able to find themselves in a situation like this one, you and me, right here, a father and a daughter out on a day trip. They’ll always be with one another, and soon they’ll no longer be young, and the people they’ll be in touch with will be the people who come to tell them their woes, to confess their sins, to pray, to have their newborn children baptized. They’ll be able to help them and give them advice, and they can even love them, but they’ll never be able to kiss them and touch them, and if they do, then they’re filthy pigs. They’ll sleep their whole lives in a single bed. Just think! Their whole lives!”
I sensed that as I spoke I was growing emotional. And I was full of admiration and compassion for those young priests, whom I also found beautiful, pleasing to look at. My daughter turned to look at me, trying to understand why on earth, after so much silence, or only brief consolatory or exhortatory phrases addressed to her, I had suddenly become so eloquent, inspired by the chastity of young American priests. Her eyes studied me, slightly astonished but also, for the first time since I had swung by to pick her up in my car and take her away from the site of her emotional affliction, for the first time she had been distracted from the center of gravity of her sorrows
. It was as if I were telling her that, deep down, those sorrows were a privilege, when compared with the emotional sterility induced in those young men in black tunics, one of whom might perfectly well have become my daughter’s boyfriend, an ideal boyfriend . . . indeed, I thought, if only one of these reliable and serious young Americans would take her, if only she were free to fall in love with one of these boys before us who, I went on to imagine, would certainly be intelligent and kind and probably very affectionate . . .
I’d be delighted to invite a young man like that to come have lunch with me and her and speak to him and listen to him speak. But he would have to be just like them, so different from their contemporaries, but at once the same as all the free, unmarried young men of the world. Which is impossible.
I fantasized for about a minute, rapt, about the idea of a couple formed by my daughter and one of those young men in tunics.
But she wasn’t free, and neither were they.
I MUST HAVE WRITTEN this five hundred pages ago, but I’ll write it again right here: in the protagonists of the CR/M, there is a projection in paroxysmal terms of the problem of the entirely male identity of SLM, of its teachers, religious or not, and its students. During classtime, that place truly became Mount Athos.
The Catholic School Page 111
