“My strength failed me, I could feel my shoulders bowing. They were already slumped, but now they slumped even further, as if my arms were literally about to fall off. The lenses of my eyeglasses were so dirty and smeared with smoke that I couldn’t see a thing. I took off my glasses and burst into tears. As I was wiping off my face, using my own tears, hot and sooty, I heard someone call my name, and I turned around. Not far away stood three outof-focus figures. The words they said to me were out of focus as well. I recognized one of them by his voice. It was my coworker. He came toward me. Yes, that was him. He put a hand on my shoulder, and as he did, he was talking, he was talking to me, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. The roar of the flames had burrowed into my head, it was inside my head now, its crackling covered up every thought, and a damp and dirty smoke enveloped it. He bent over to pick up the empty gas can, unscrewed the cap, sniffed at the mouth, and then dropped it, disconsolately, and kicked it across the ground.
“‘What on earth have you done?’ was the only phrase I managed to discern amid the chaos that was crackling in my mind. I put my glasses back on. My coworker’s face, so close to my own and suddenly crystal clear, was cut clear across by a grimace of incredulity or disgust, and suddenly he looked to me far older, almost decrepit, as if he were my grandfather and I were an incorrigible child. A few yards farther on stood another forest ranger and a firefighter in full gear and regalia. The forest ranger had snapped open the flap of his holster and his hand was resting on his pistol.
“AND SO, in that very same magic instant when I was supposed to become uncatchable, I was caught. I put up no resistance. At my trial, they gave me a light sentence because I had no prior criminal record but, since there was no mistaking how dangerous I was, they kept me behind bars. I believe that was the only way they had of continuing to keep me under observation. The aggravating factors were the sheer vast expanse of the fire that I had set and the danger to human life and limb: in the four days it took to get the flames under control, they’d had to evacuate a campsite to eliminate all risk, and some of the campers had suffered psychological damage on account of the emergency. The prosecution went so far as to maintain I had willfully intended to cause a grave disaster with ensuing loss of human life. That affirmation was rejected by the court but it cast a shadow over the trial. My lawyers pointed out, in vain, that the campsite was four miles from the most extensive front of the raging fire.”
STRANGE THAT IN that one SLM high school class there should have been not one but two students who later became writers: me and Marco Lodoli, who was an earlier beginner and more of a regular producer, and who published a lot of books, building himself a recognizable career, a profession, in a way I was never able to do. Still, the real writer was neither me nor Marco Lodoli, the real writer was Arbus, or at least he could have been. But I have the impression that he considered writing—unless it was strictly necessary, something that happens only rarely—a leisure activity, a waste of time.
When Maldonado was publishing L’Encefalo, that magazine was the only thing to come out of the QT that was anything more than the usual political disquisitions . . . and Arbus would easily have been able to master those topics, the only one among us, perhaps, capable of understanding them and calling them into question. But he wanted nothing to do with literature.
AND THEN I ALSO REMEMBER, during the ceremony at the Devil’s Chair, a young woman wearing a cowl making knots in a rope, and then tossing it in the fire. That was Leda Arbus. In the instant she drew near the flames and her face was illuminated by the glow, if ever so briefly, I thought I recognized that limpid gaze.
5
THE SECOND TIME he came to see me, in my home, he told me without shame and in brief summary what his life had been like from age twenty to age forty. He took a degree in engineering with the highest possible grades. He very quickly abandoned the Nazi-Maoist groups, which by that point in any case were already crumbling under the blows of enmity from without and within. He got married to an anarchist shopgirl, who worked at a store that sold mountain equipment, where he had gone to purchase some hiking boots. The marriage lasted little more than a year. In that period his love of solitary, inaccessible places began to grow. After her initial enthusiasm, his wife refused to go up to the mountains with him anymore, which spelled the end of their marriage. He spent eighteen months in a cabin in the Apennines observing the lives of wolves: he followed them in their travels, he photographed them. In particular, he studied one specimen, a female, who was, however, killed by poachers. During this period of isolation, strange to say, he met another woman, who also had a passionate interest in wolves. The only other human being in the mountains besides him. He came to her rescue at one point, when she was freezing to death. He married her, his second marriage, and this time the marriage lasted five years, even though it was practically never consummated. He became a teaching assistant in the Department of Robotics, and then an associate professor, at the University of Bari, but then he was suspended from his teaching duties after a suspicious episode. At that point he took the civil service exam for a position as a forest ranger and got the job, perhaps the oldest and most highly qualified forest ranger ever hired. After that, the forest fire he set, and then prison. After serving his sentence, he was forbidden from going back to work in the woods, but he did resume teaching in the field of robotics. His second wife left him and a tendency that had previously only been hinted at began to rear its head and become predominant, in time absorbing nearly all his attention and energy.
HE BEGAN REPLYING, by mail, to classified ads that read: “Dame sévère demande élève” (“Stern lady seeks student”), and realized that he tremendously enjoyed the demented correspondence that ensued.
He wasn’t really interested in meeting a woman, he wasn’t looking for a relationship, he only wanted to picture parts of her in his mind, work with his imagination. He dreamed intensely of female buttocks of every size and shape, and how he could spank them.
“With respect to reality, the good thing about fantasies is that you have no need to actually put them into effect . . . worst case, even the most violent and perverse ones, you just jack off to them and be done with it.”
I listened to him raptly.
Then he told me that one day he had groped a woman on the street, in the midst of a knot of pedestrians waiting to cross at a traffic light. She didn’t even notice. And from that day forward, he was unable to stop.
“Grabbing women’s asses in the crowd, you have no idea how many men do it. Discreet men, above suspicion, well-mannered and properly brought up, just like me. Certain women know it, what with having been groped for years, groped the minute a big enough crowd gathers to make it possible for them to do it without being identified. The yearning to touch wins out over any prohibition. I’ve given it a lot of thought, and I’ve tried to figure out why. Deep down, it’s basically something so stupid, but it’s as if the stupidity of that act were in fact the reason to do it, the exciting aspect, doing something as stupid as putting your hand on a woman’s ass, just brush it with your fingers and while you’re doing it, think, ‘I’m touching it, yes, I’m touching it, I’m touching her ass, let’s see whether she even notices,’ which she almost instantly does. See if she starts, if she turns around, if she darts away . . . suddenly lifts her head, swivels her head suddenly . . .
“Then the high point of stupidity and excitement is to touch four or five in a row, passing through a crowd of people with their backs to you, whispering, ‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ and pretending to be in a hurry, so that the contact seems unintentional, or can at least be claimed as such in case an argument breaks out. There are jutting, hard asses, wrapped in tight jeans, or else the skirt of a skinny woman with practically nothing but bones underneath, and that’s exciting too, and it doesn’t really matter if it’s a young girl or an old woman, like I said, it’s such a stupid thing, and there’s a special satisfaction in doing something senseless, a thrill in being at
tracted to something that isn’t attractive, or that’s attractive only because it’s forbidden or because of its name, ‘ass,’ yes, an ‘ass,’ the satisfaction of grabbing and squeezing the ass of a woman who’s a perfect stranger is the same as the thrill when we were kids of repeating the word ‘ass,’ even though your mother had forbidden you to say it, because it was rude. I remember hearing grown-ups use the expression ‘dead hand,’ for someone touching on the sly, ‘dragging the dead hand,’ I understand what it means, of course, but I doubt there could be a less apt and suitable expression: that hand is actually all too alive, it’s like a lopped-off lizard tail moving on its own, though it’s severed from the body . . . if anything it’s the rest of the body that’s dead, but the hand, the hand that’s touching, that’s quite alive, indeed, my whole life, all my heart, my sex organ, my brain are in that hand. I’ve never felt as much life as what pulsated in my hand while it was fondling the ass of a female university student or sliding edgewise into the long, deep cleft between the buttocks of a Cape Verdean cleaning woman . . .
“Pointless to go out looking for the prettiest girl. What a foolish idea! That was the mirage that adolescents chased after: not me. I read about a guy in a brothel who would always choose the prettiest girls and found that he couldn’t really get aroused with them; so he changed strategy; he’d pick a perfectly ordinary whore, neither pretty nor ugly, in fact, preferably ugly, and he’d have her whip him: and then he would get aroused, excited to the moon and stars! I’ve learned that beauty, true beauty, serves as an anesthetic. Beauty is the road to chastity. I could never have anything to do with very beautiful women, and luckily I’ve encountered very few, which isn’t something I regret, in fact, I’m very glad about it. Beauty, in fact, embarrasses, dumbs you down, paralyzes, enchants, and most important of all, there are very few who understand it and appreciate it for what it is, and nothing more. I’m not one of these. But I do understand that beauty is untouchable and the best thing you can do is leave it where you found it. The man rapt in admiration won’t move a finger, he almost can’t breathe. I understood that, not with women, which aren’t really my field of expertise, but with the mountains.”
“I’VE OFTEN FOUND MYSELF incapable of doing my work, carrying out my everyday tasks, enjoying the simplest and most normal interactions with others on account of the obsessions that filled my mind. They’d saturate my mind, holding it hostage, leaving me free only for brief intervals, a few minutes at a time, during which I didn’t even have a chance to start on any real projects because I knew that before long I’d once again be overwhelmed by obscene imagery and desires as foul and filthy as they were puerile and ridiculous, the sort of thing that would only cause me affliction and shame. I felt comfortable only when I sank to the lowest levels. Once I became a miserable wretch and I behaved like a miserable wretch, I realized that I was finally myself, and this gave me a tremendous sense of relief and, at the same time, it tormented me . . .”
THE INCIDENT, then, that put an end to his university career partook of that nature. An insistent, prolonged caress of the ass of a young female student bent over peering into a microscope. Impossible to claim that physical contact was involuntary or accidental. Moreover, there were witnesses.
I was very surprised by Arbus’s confession. When we were classmates back at school he had never, not even once, expressed sexual desires or yearnings. Now this interest, which had turned into a frenzy, was manifesting itself in an intense, spasmodic fashion.
“And I’m chiefly attracted to ugly women,” he reiterated. Maybe that was his real perversion.
WHILE HE WAS TELLING ME about his exploits—which I was unable to entirely dismiss as sad and tawdry, though they undoubtedly were that and more—Arbus kept grinning. Yes, grinning and grinding his teeth. The pockmarks dotting the skin on his face flushed red. He seemed at once giddy and mortified. Probably deep down he was taking pleasure in the degradation of revealing his inner nature to me. It’s an innate mechanism of confession, without which it would never happen at all. I wonder to what extent he was conscious of the fact that those revelations were music to my ears, certainly not celestial harmony, but still, perfectly in tune. With what? With whom? Well, with him, with me, with our whole friendship in which all was crooked, nothing had been straight and smooth, with all the things we had witnessed and taken part in, with our deeply twisted natures, with the relationships everyone at once seeks out and avoids, the ones that they all fear and yet to which they are morbidly attracted. While my friend told me all about the time in his life during which he’d regularly board a city bus, just any old bus, in order to be able to press up against the specific warmth of a pair of flesh-toned pantyhose, I suddenly saw the entire Arbus family before my eyes, starting with Ilaria and running all the way down to the languid Leda, by way of that odd fellow, the father, Lodovico Arbus, professor of mathematical logic, with his wooden walrus, the souvenir of a night spent in a sauna with several pale and bearded giants, and a final roll in the snow, and I couldn’t say where the follies of one ended and the peculiarities of the other began. All of them special, all maniacal. A long, sweet slide into pathology. I remember a screwball movie from the seventies, Fire Sale, directed by and starring Alan Arkin. Arbus’s erotic fixations, my own fixations on the attractive women of his family, his father’s fixations with young philosophers of language with tweed jackets and tousled hair, Ilaria’s aphrodisiacal uneasiness, which also came straight out of a film from the seventies . . . all formed a circle in which everyone desired the wrong thing or the wrong person, or a part of that wrong person, the hair, the buttocks . . . the voice . . . the wooden walrus . . . the fingers performing an arpeggio on a piano keyboard . . . fair flesh spattered with semen . . .
Maybe only a milkman dies with a healthy mind, and maybe not even he.
I UNDERSTOOD THAT ARBUS, as long as he was a kid, had managed to rein in the erratic impulses that surged inside him. His fresh, still intact adolescent energies were even stronger than those impulses, if allied to a sense of duty and his inborn shyness. Once he became a man, however, paradoxically more mature and freer of restraints, and therefore weaker, those impulses had gained the upper hand. In the name of what was he supposed to go on sacrificing them?
The path of liberation, and of his new enslavement to his impulses, might well have begun the day of that profanity written on the desk, his last day of school, the last day he spent with us.
I saw before my eyes, once again, that tall, skinny young man, at once glacial and on edge, who wore the mask of awkwardness and intellectual superiority, and I understood the protracted effort that he had made to control himself. Lust. The demon that I naïvely thought had never yet tested his defenses. Because back then I hadn’t understood that that demon can attack in many ways, above and beyond the pure and innocent imagination that can’t conceive of anything more complicated than sexual intercourse. Even in that unexpected confession of his, a serpent’s tail still whipped, vibrating menacingly. For what reason had Arbus sought me out and come to see me? Was it to tell me those stories, if not to prolong that humiliating pleasure? Nothing could be as morbid as the retailing of a bad habit abandoned: it’s the best way to relive its excitement, blamelessly, a thrill you claim you no longer wish to experience.
“SO IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE?” I asked ironically.
“Well, yes, there is . . .”
“So, tell me the truth,” I asked when Arbus was done with his confessions, “were you the one who set fire to your apartment?”
“No.”
“Then who did?”
“Leda.”
LEDA!
Oh, Leda, Leda, St. Anthony’s fire of my youth. My flesh still burns, there where you never touched me. I never imagined that I would have occasion to think of you again. And revisit my early twenties.
6
THERE WERE TIMES when Leda stared at me, for long minutes on end, but there was something singular about her gaze, she seemed to be look
ing not at me, but at some object that was miles away, or else a portrait of me that had been hung there on my shoulders for her to contemplate in place of my own real face. Those eyes of hers, so lovely, seemed to have been given to her not to look through but rather to astonish anyone who looked at her.
(I was scared at the thought of what must have happened to her to give her those eyes.)
BUT WHAT WAS IT I had had with Leda Arbus? A friendship? A friendship with kisses? An emotional relationship without love, a sexual relationship without sex? Can a boy and a girl be friends? If they can, can they be lovers? If they become lovers, can they remain friends? If they don’t, is it because one of the two decided not to?
WHAT HAPPENED between me and Arbus’s sister can’t really be called a love story or even a friendship—a friendship, for that matter, still being an unusual thing between a young man and a young woman in those days, when there was practically only room for such binding and aggressive feelings as love, desire, devotion, and scorn.
Maybe it wasn’t even a story, but a situation, with two characters between whom certain things could happen. Whether or not they actually did is a matter of chance.
So what happened between me and that girl? From the very first time I went to Arbus’s house, it was clear that there was a bond between me and his sister, that is to say, a bond that already existed, that had been there even before we met. I believe that you would call the thread that appeared between our two persons Destiny, when I saw her seated at the piano, with her back so straight that it actually appeared curved to me, concave, the line of her shoulders thrown back compared with her pelvis, and she turned, and the thread twanged, vibrating between our eyes. Equally marked by destiny was her position with respect to me, which can be summarized in the somewhat lurid definition “my best friend’s sister.”
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