Nothing is more powerful than the longing to embrace a negative destiny, I mean to say, totally negative.
HOW IS IT THAT THIS WORKS? The way it works is that we seek out experience even though we know it’s unpleasant because, if it is we who are seeking it and provoking it, the pain it causes will be far less than if that experience were to catch us off guard, or because it might even be able to be turned into a pleasure, or even better, into the sovereign conceit of being masters of the event, having produced it intentionally, instead of depending upon it as slaves. Pointless to await tremulously for violence to be unleashed when it can be we ourselves who activate it. Pointless to wait for the courtship of a girl to give its results when it can simply be decided in advance with the use of force. You will feel like masters of your own life, masters of your own destiny, while you plunge into the evil that the others all hasten to avoid when it originates with their peers, or to repress within themselves. If there is pain in the world, and it seems that there is and there must be, then anyone who can afford to decide how much pain, and when, and how, and who will suffer it, will feel themselves to be divinely gratified, in contrast with those who find themselves unexpectedly experiencing it, with no way of exercising any choice in the matter.
Along with goodness, but perhaps even more exemplary than it, there exists nothing more sovereign and gratuitous than evil savagery, which one exercises even against one’s own best interests or even one’s personal wellbeing and safety, even when you’re certain that it will provoke retaliation; when you’re sure that you will be punished for what you have done. If that evil savagery often appears stupid or mad, that’s because it has no good reasons outside itself. Let’s say that it depends on nothing other than a mood . . . a propensity, an inclination . . . just as there are people who love cats, who can’t do without a cat, stroking a cat, talking sweetly to a cat . . .
THEY KNEW NO GREATER SOURCE of amusement than to relish the favors they’d extorted, savoring the reluctance with which they were yielded up. What does it take to receive a pleasure or a kindness from someone who loves you? Far more satisfying if the person who is forced to offer it actually hates you, or fears you, and is disgusted by their own cowardice. Forcing people to act contrary to their own nature is the utmost proof of power.
SINCE THEY WERE BASICALLY mediocre individuals, the dream of the young men of the CR/M was to strike fear into others. Since they were incapable of being truly powerful or noble or authoritative, nothing remained to them but to become pitiless. Sowing terror not in whole populaces, as in the old days of Sargon of Akkad or Genghis Khan or the times of more recent dictators, whom they venerated, but instead among a few underage dirty-blond women, girls to whom they show their implacable cruelty. Their eyes grew bloodshot at the sight of the weak. It is a singular thing that almost invariably those who have adhered to the doctrine of the superman have been unremarkable individuals, among the least gifted from every point of view, people of mediocre intellect, not particularly manly and even less courageous or, practically—you might say, to use their own categories—Übermenschen. It is a characteristic of the last century that it produced in so many petty, grimy men such a frenzy to make themselves at least somewhat noteworthy through their evil. Before then, evil might boast a certain magnificence, incarnating itself in monumental figures, but then it crumbled into a porridge of widespread white-collar sadism, the work of routine torturers, petit bourgeois monsters or serial killers who exercise their capacity for oppression upon increasingly defenseless targets, within reach, whom they could terrorize and murder with the least outlay of effort. The desire and then the pleasure of feeling themselves to be the cause of terror must have seriously obsessed the young men of the CR/M, and others like them, who failed to carry through only because the jaws of their inhibitory brakes had caught them just in time.
. . . What I can’t obtain from them with love and in friendship
I can always take from them by force.
TO HUMILIATE AND CRUSH the two young women served this exact purpose. As confirmation of a belief that can be fully grasped only by spilling blood, otherwise it remains vague, abstract, namely that the life of any single individual is worthless, has no value, serves no purpose, can be eliminated without upsetting the equilibrium of the world, without causing even the slightest shift of the needle, and all the more so if the existence of the individuals in question seems, so to speak, a matter of random chance: beings devoid of any notable personality, special qualities, as are in fact most individuals, and as were those two young women. An abundance of blood. Blood is the one element that is excessive by its very nature. A single drop is always too much, much too much. The fact that under normal conditions its circulation takes place in a closed circuit, inside invisible vessels, ensures that when it suddenly does emerge and spray in all directions, or drip, or ooze, it seems like an unstanchable flood, a river in spate.
I wanted there to be someone who needed me.
I wanted there to be someone who was afraid of me.
I wanted there to be someone who remembered me
for the good things they had seen me do
or for the bad things I had done to them.
I wanted to live more but I didn’t know how.
I wanted to leave an indelible mark on someone.
I wanted them to talk about me for a long time.
I wanted someone to cry on account of me.
1
IT’S LIKE IN PLATO’S DIALOGUES. Socrates speaks and all the others do is confirm what he said: “By Zeus, that’s certainly correct!”
TO EVERY QUESTION ASKED, sooner or later an answer is given. Months or years may pass and the person who answers may not be the same one of whom the question was asked. Or else the reply may even self-generate, as in Asimov’s blasphemous short story about universal entropy, “Nightfall,” which made such a big impression on me when I was a boy, and which, as some of you may recall, ends with “Fiat lux”—“Let there be light”—uttered into nothingness.
Words serve no purpose other than to restart the world.
There was a period of time when my surname was well known in the QT, or at least to its mailman, when my father’s company was still up and running and a considerable volume of mail was delivered there daily. That must be the reason, around the middle of the nineties, when the Albinati & Bro. construction company had been sold off for years and the ashes of its last managing director were resting in Flaminio Cemetery, an envelope with my name on it and the simple address “Quartiere Trieste, Rome” was able to be delivered to the doorman in the apartment building where the company had once had its offices. The doorman held on to it for me.
It was from Massimiliano, my friend from Punta Ala. That’s right, him, Max, the Fascist guitarist. The only young man I could have given myself to, the way a woman gives herself to a man, and I use this antiquated verb because it exactly matches my state of mind at the time. I believe, in fact, that Max was the only man I was ever attracted to, first and foremost for his stunning beauty. I had thought of him, I confess, in those terms as well, though without nurturing any specific desires, just remembering his lithe, perfect body, mourning his unexpected disappearance, and then, finally, forgetting him entirely, with the whole baggage of things that went with him, his sword, his guitar, the long enchanted afternoons spent admiring his displays and listening to the vast loads of bullshit he spewed. A phenomenon that never happened a second time.
I read his letter in astonishment, due both to the span of time that had elapsed since the last time we’d seen each other, more than twenty years earlier, and to the discovery that Max knew how to write, and wrote well. From certain clues, such as his use of tenses, I had the impression that a first draft had been tossed off just after the events in question, but then left there, unmailed, and then finally taken back up and revised or else rewritten from scratch. And also, moreover, that this new version was due, I might say, to a certain literary ambition, that is to s
ay, Max’s story hoped to go beyond the objective of communicating something to me, his old friend from the summer. Or maybe I’m wrong about that, maybe he really had only meant to reach out to me, but to show me something that transcended the mere exposition of the facts, of events; something more important still about himself and about his inclinations: to prove to me, that is, that he was capable of captivating with words, by ordering them in a row; capable of captivating me. That is primarily what knowing how to write consists of: and it has an allure completely different from knowing how to talk or dance or sing or play an instrument, that is to say, it’s an indirect, discrete attraction, one that is released slowly, as if it’s a colorless mortar that you need to leave in place for several days so that it can set.
MY FRIEND, I heard from the Marinuccis that you came looking for me in Punta Ala. Yes, I know, you shouldn’t be astonished or angry, it was many years ago, it’s true, it took me all this time before I reached out to you again. I needed to wait until both of my parents died before I could do it. They died not yet old, my father at age fifty-nine, of a heart attack, my mother not long after, she didn’t cross the finish line of sixty either: it took less than two months from the diagnosis of a very widespread tumor to the day she passed away. They were divorced and I don’t think they saw each other again even once after they signed the papers: my father in Switzerland, she in our big house in Milan, all alone. Maybe it will strike you as absurd that I should get back in touch after all this time to tell you about them, seeing that I don’t believe you ever met “il papi” in person, and you may remember what I thought of my “mamma,” Vera. Did you ever once hear her open her mouth and speak? Say something, I mean a logical discourse, string together a sentence with any meaning to it, I mean to say? When you came to visit me, did she ever address you with anything more than those desperate smiles of hers, with that mouth, those perfect, white teeth . . . why, of course, certainly . . . “with a mouth like that, you can say whatever you want.”
The two of them are the two missing pieces of the story, and I’ll start from there because now I really have been left all alone. I have no one above me, at my side, or beneath me, and I say that the last item is a good thing because I doubt that I would have been capable of raising children, considering the haphazard job that they did raising me. I never married, then, nor will I ever in the future. I’m a lawyer by profession and I work mainly for a large religious organization that reaches out to laymen. Its objective is the construction of a truly Christian society in which every community, small or large, and at whatever level, is bound by the same ties of faith; and this starts with the family, as is right and self-evident, rising up through the workplace, the office, the various professions, leisure time, the arts, various sports: in order to make it clear that laymen, and not just priests, can contribute to a widespread and fine-grained evangelization, exactly like the circulation and diffusion of blood in our bodies. In my law office, I work on the legal aspects of this undertaking, but I can say that I subscribe in whole to the overall plan. Perhaps the only way to keep the whole world from collapsing under the weight of the lack of faith.
I can imagine the first question you would ask me if we were to meet. No, I no longer practice martial arts (even though I might still be able to surprise you with some of my moves, because physically I haven’t changed a bit, the same as I was, could it be a miracle . . .?) and I gave up the guitar, and I no longer listen to records either, because they just distracted me. They would instill agitation and vague, elusive feelings: an inexplicable sadness. Do you remember my favorite guitar, my little crippled girl? Well, I gave it to a music school for children. Blind children. In exchange for the promise that they would treat it with consideration. No doubt, with all the hands it’s passed through, it must be a wreck by now . . . But oh, don’t think for a second that I’ve become a pious soul! A latter-day St. Francis or, even worse, a Communist! In fact, in that donation there was actually a hint of the sadistic and the sublime: that is, the idea that from that moment on, whoever laid their hands on the crippled girl would themselves also be missing something, could hear her but never see her. Construct an image of her by touching her, taking her in their arms, caressing her . . . feel her vibrate in their hands and ears, without ever tarnishing her with their eyes.
A kind of suffering, in other words, or else an even purer sensation, I couldn’t say.
It was easy to get rid of that guitar, love ends the way it begins, and little does it matter that in the meantime there were (I did the numbers) ten thousand hours of practice, more or less. Every day, at least three hours, for ten years . . . and then from one day to the next I stopped. No more music. All these changes started in Punta Ala, on the last day of vacation that summer, but I might as well say the last day of my life. It took some time before I could figure out what had happened and what was still happening, but then it dawned on me, and that’s what I want to explain to you, in part because I can imagine the bullshit that Signor Marinucci might have told you, or anyone else. Poor man: when I came back to get Melville, I saw his eyes glittering with a ferocious curiosity, typical of those who feed their curiosity with the misadventures of others. The last thing I ever would have done was to satisfy that curiosity. And his wife, who made the gallant gesture of trying to give me back the money from the August rent, or maybe she actually wanted to pay it back. That certainly wasn’t why I came back, I just wanted to pick up the cat. I know that when you went there you discovered that that wasn’t my house. We rented it, like so many others do. I couldn’t say why I lied to you and told you that it was ours: it corresponded better to the image that I wanted you to have of me, of us, and my ideals of that time, really, everything. You see, Edoardo, I loved you and I respected you more than perhaps you could ever have imagined. And I wanted to make an impression on you: a powerful, indelible impression. You seemed like a young man made of wax upon whom I needed to impress my form; and therefore I had to have a clear, sharply defined one, at the cost of constructing it with a lie or two. But it’s time I started picking up the pieces and putting them back in place.
The things you already know or that someone might have told you about this story, sweep them all aside.
My father was almost always in Switzerland for problems with his work. By now, even at home, we referred to him as “the Swiss.” He had dealings with banks, and I never knew if it was strictly on the up and up. Most likely, there was no need to actually break the law. The borderline with the laws is a movable one, undulating, which entails curves in its outline to leave room for business deals and the men who know how to get around things. The laws step aside as they go by. And if, as I’m guessing, the Marinuccis told you that he was sick, and that his condition had suddenly worsened, the reason we had had to leave without warning that summer (it was 1973, right? I’m not sure, even now), well, I just want you to know that it wasn’t true. Until the day that, many years later, he was cut down by that heart attack while he was leaning on the railing of his chalet, smoking a cigarillo and enjoying the view of the enfilade of lakes in the Engadine valley, half-covered with iridescent ice, “il papi” was as healthy as a horse. Clear-minded, energetic, full of life, brutal, never a wasted shot. Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving, moving his mind, that is. That was exactly why he wanted nothing more to do with my mother. And it was for that very same reason that you never saw and never would have seen him there at Punta Ala, with us: he stayed up there in the mountains, where the air was cool, moving his funds around with a phone call, to avoid the boredom of his needlessly gorgeous wife and his fanatical son, and having to take them out in a boat to get away from the summer heat, the island of Elba on the horizon, unattainable. There’s nothing like a woman’s beauty that can wear out a man who married her for that and that alone.
So, that night, the call that came in from Switzerland conveyed no news about a sick man on his deathbed; there was no clinic, no doctor with a voice taut with concern; it was a husband standin
g solidly on his own two feet, informing his wife of his irrevocable decision to divorce her, a classic and wellcodified boilerplate format for that sort of message, I believe. Which could also have been done in Italy, there was the new law, in fact, the boundary had been shifted just that margin to leave individuals free to do as they pleased. Another margin of space for their own fine thoughts, their personal wishes. My mother’s reaction was every bit as classic. Do you remember her—Vera? I’m sure you do. Now that she is dead, and she’s no longer my mother, just as I am no longer her son, our ties of flesh have dissolved and I feel I have the right to talk about her as I would of any ordinary woman—well, can I tell you that she was pretty impressive? All you need to do is take a look at an old picture, in case your memory is faulty. Dazzling. Something midway between Jacqueline Bisset (everyone told her the same thing, back then, the minute she took off her sunglasses, “what a stunning resemblance!”) and anyone you might choose among the statuesque beauties that when we were boys always seemed to marry a succession of famous men, oh, I don’t know, Barbara Bach, Britt Ekland, Elke Sommer, I just remember all those k’s and those heavily made-up eyes in the photos in the fan magazines: light blue, violet, or green, like my mamma’s eyes. Not just open: wide open, agape. Enormous bright eyes. Now that she’s gone, I’m fond of her memory, I think of her, I miss her, I even come close to tears: back then I hated her, nothing more. I scorned her, just as I believe my father did. It was a duty to scorn her. While Vera listened to the verdict being issued over the phone by the Swiss, no differently than he might have dictated any ordinary banking operation, from time to time she would pull the receiver away from her ear and press it against her forehead, as if she were trying to make my father’s words go straight into her brain, and I understood what was happening without having to listen to a single phrase: it was obvious, it was natural that the moment of truth had finally come. I’d been waiting for it since I was a boy, that is, since the day I had realized I’d never have any siblings, and the reason . . .
The Catholic School Page 125
