9
THIS STORY INCLUDES OTHER STORIES. It’s inevitable. It branches out or is already full of branches at the moment it begins. It overlaps the way people’s lives do. You can’t say where they begin and where they end, these lives and these people, since it is all, naturally, relationships, triangles, knots, transmissions, intersections, and the beginning is never the beginning because there was always something else before that beginning, just as there will always be something else after it ends. And so in this book you almost can’t glimpse the main story: a forest has grown up around it, a forest of wheres, whens, as ifs, and meanwhiles, and the protagonists have become no longer the young men at the center of the grim events, but many other young men who are every bit as much the protagonists, and their mothers, their sisters, their high school teachers, the guitarists and drummers they used to listen to and the manufacturers of the motorcycles they rode and the architects who designed the buildings these young men lived in and the authors of the books that pushed them to become allies, to become couples, to kill each other, or to break away in search of truth, or isolation to escape it.
THE AMUSEMENT IN THIS STORY LIES in its random nature, but its tragic aspect also lies in its random nature. What is tragedy, after all? That which can’t be put back together, fixed in any way. That which can never find a state of equilibrium, ever, not even after the end has come, with its naïve claim to even up the reckoning: there’s always something left over in tragedy, an unpaid debt, an excess of right and wrong, as there is in amusement, for that matter, which is always based on an unbalancing of oneself toward others, or of others inside oneself. You intrude and you are intruded upon, like in demented laughter, which once it gets started no one can restrain. There’s not much to be done about it: where harmony reigns, no one can get a laugh. That’s why practically no one goes in search of it, harmony, except on drawing paper. This story amuses me and makes me suffer, both, as I tell it. I’d like to get it to attain a state of equilibrium so that I could feel nothing, and let the reader feel only the sensation of it unfolding, like a fabric tumbling to the floor, rustling through the hands of someone in pitch darkness, who tries to grab it: but I know I won’t be able to. The way it goes corresponds to an underlying truth of the facts that I can’t change, no matter how absurd it may be. Even less can I modify the parts that I made up myself. Which parts are those? you might ask me: the ones that don’t sound quite as absurd as the others.
10
AND IT’S CHRISTMAS AGAIN. Like every year, I thought about going to the midnight mass at SLM but then I didn’t. Instead of going to church, I sat up in bed reading a novel by Sven Hassel. Up wide awake until three in the morning reading a paperback. I bought copies of the Hassel books I read at fourteen, back then I stole them from my father: I wanted to see if I still liked them. Today no different than forty years ago. This one I’m reading in the middle of the night is nothing special, Wheels of Terror, but the two I read hungrily on Christmas Eve were fantastic. The Legion of the Damned explains how the main characters, who will reappear in all the other books, wound up in the punishment battalions in the first place: some of them common criminals, expiating their death sentences by fighting desperate battles where the likelihood of getting out alive isn’t all that much better than the narrowly averted gallows, others are opponents of Nazism, others still, like Hassel himself, deserters, while there are some, like the notorious Julius Heide, the Jew-hater (that name has always been for me, since I first read it, the prototype of a Nazi), pro-Hitler fanatics who have somehow managed to fall into disgrace, and are therefore all the more ferocious . . . in other words, a perfect handful of lost men, an outpost of gallows birds and psychopaths and the dregs of society hurtling against the enemy but, at the same time, well aware that they are the worst enemy of all, that evil is on their side, that there could be no more ill-omened ideal than that homeland whose surrender they all devoutly wish for on every page of the book. Fighting literally tooth and nail, they defend their own skin and that of their fellow soldiers, let us say, the less infamous and the more generous ones. Read him, Sven Hassel, read him at age eighteen or at fifty, read his crude masterpiece March Battalion: I realized that I remembered whole passages practically by heart, words that had been impressed in my memory for decades, a sign that the things you read at that age are truly unforgettable.
ALL HELL WAS PROMPTLY let loose about our ears, but in that instant Porta fired and a long flame snaked out toward the nearest T-34. The tank seemed to rear up in an effort to avoid it. It moved forward a short way, then stopped. An answering flame shot skywards from the turret. A man appeared in the opening. He pulled himself half out into the open air and then fell back again, with blue flames licking greedily at his body.
THE RUSSIAN TANKER ENGULFED by the blue flames. The men sentenced to death, detained in Torgau. “I think by now the bedbug must be crushed.” The canister of mastica (aquavit) engraved with the red star. “Then we saw the green cross, the death’s head of the NKVD.” If I compare these clear and lucid memories with the swelling tide of books consumed over recent years, many of them much more interesting and far better written than Hassel’s, I find that, nevertheless, I can’t remember so much as the shadow of a phrase, not even the title of the book . . . in spite of all the dog-ears and underlinings I left in them . . .
Especially formidable are the scenes in which our antiheroes, aboard a tank tearing along in full flight, rumble at top speed through Russian villages, crushing or sweeping aside any obstacle that rears up before them, trampling under the treads Soviet soldiers but also German ones who try in vain to halt their onslaught, waving their arms and asking for help. I remembered them for forty years, and then found them and reread them exactly as I remembered them, the instantaneous vision of the little Russian girl, terrorized, in pajamas and braids, who appears in the tank’s periscope as it’s breaking open her poor house like a walnut shell, because a second later the Tiger that had crushed her with the rest of her family had already driven on, in the roar of the diesel engine and the smoke, punching through a circle of flames, and on into the stained snow.
The scenes of combat between the German Tiger tanks and the terrifying Soviet T-34 counterparts (with the numbers of the aiming mechanism for the turret cannon that dance until they line up . . .) are thrilling. It would be pointless to ask me why I’m so fond, excited, and engaged in these scenes of battle.
Around three thirty in the morning I stopped reading and turned out the light, incendiary bombs and Nazi salutes whirling in my head, and fell asleep, all alone, in the last few hours of the night of Christmas 2012, like the Baby Jesus freshly placed in his manger, he in the hay, me under the quilt I’d bought from Chinese street vendors.
WHEN I WOKE UP, I wondered why I still needed war now, and why I had needed it at age fourteen, why I’d needed its sarcastic inhumanity, which Sven Hassel so loved and portrayed, and to which his readers have thrilled for various generations. Morbidly attracted to the reiterated scenes of violence and dishonor.
Let one scene stand in for them all: when the soldiers of the punishment battalion, at the peak of an orgiastic stay at a brothel on the Black Sea, hang the madame by the neck until dead, having discovered her misdeeds: a fat slut who dangles, lifeless, completely naked, from a flagstaff, until her neck stretches and stretches . . .
(This capo had arranged to deport her girls, and she’d had some of them executed by firing squad . . .)
PORTA TORE DOWN SOME VELVET CURTAINS and ripped off the heavy cord which operated them. Little John snatched up a discarded pair of stockings and tied a gag round the victim’s mouth. One of the Rumanians bound her hands together with a red silk brassière. [. . .] One end of the curtain cord was attached high up on the flagstaff. The other was formed into a loop with a slip knot. [. . .] The loop was placed round Mme. Olga’s neck.
“JUMP,” ordered Little John. Mme. Olga balanced precariously on the edge of the windowsill, all her fat white fle
sh quivering and threatening to unbalance her. “Jump!” roared Little John, for the second time. She jumped at last; or fell; or was pushed. Her body wrapped itself round the flagpole, hanging at the end of the cord. Her double chins seemed to swell up like so many balloons, and then her neck stretched out very long and thin. A silence fell in the upstairs room. Some of us turned away. Some of us leaned out the window and stared with globulous eyes, hypnotized by the horror of that fat white body swaying to and fro at the end of the cord . . .
AND THERE YOU GO, before you even know it, another year has gone by. It’s Christmas, a new Christmas, the Christmas of 2013. Who knows why I spend the holidays immersed in sadistic themes, whether it’s pure chance or a choice. Today is Christmas and, yesterday afternoon, after wrapping the presents and cooking something for the family dinner, I sat down to read an article titled “On Cruelty” by Judith Butler, in the London Review of Books. It’s a review of a book by Jacques Derrida on the death penalty. Without entering into the merits of the points argued by the various authors reviewed in the article, from Nietzsche to Freud and Lacan in his paradoxical essay “Kant avec Sade” (where Lacan claims that Sade is the closest follower of the Kantian categorical imperative, by filling the empty commandment with concrete acts), and then, naturally, Derrida, I gain a powerful impression of the diffuse violence in all aspects and at all levels of crime—obviously—but also of punishment. In short, that a “festive cruelty” can be found in the violation of the law but also in the application of it. Morality can be every bit as violent as those who break its laws: indeed, in order to ensure that the Ten Commandments are respected, almost as much cruelty is deployed as is lavished in the infraction of them in the first place, and at the same time as much suffering as enjoyment is generated. If the suffering of others causes exultation, as is the case when a malefactor is punished, then even the just punishment of the culprit is clearly sexualized. If that culprit is also guilty of a sex crime, as in the case we’re examining, the CR/M, then we have a twofold sexualization of the violence: that committed by the rapists, and that implicit in their incarceration and sentence, which cause widespread enjoyment among the respectable citizens, the hotheads, the feminists, the fathers and heads of household, the newspaper readers, in other words, among everyone, or almost. The pleasure of seeing another person punished, another person suffer (prison is an only slightly more civilized and diffuse way of inflicting suffering, when compared with whippings or mutilations or killings), is not in and of itself different, by the sole fact of its being legitimate. In short, sadism occupies the whole of the stage, in both the first and second acts of crime, from prologue to epilogue, and it warms the hearts of each of the characters in the drama, the guilty parties, the survivors, the judges, the public, the chorus of commentators. Crime, vengeance, and justice are all merged into an indistinct enjoyment, which might culminate and then subside only at the instant when those responsible for the murder cease to live: by means of the death penalty, the implementation of which, in fact, in certain of those countries where it is imposed, can be attended by the relatives of the victims, in a sort of psychic reparation intended at least to compensate for the grief and pain suffered with a form of enjoyment, intense but definitive, experienced in witnessing the death agonies of the culprit; whereas extended incarceration would be a far more diluted delight, though also a longerlasting one. Cruelty can be exhibited, so to speak, naked, or else behind the mask of justice, that is, rationalized and transformed into a moral duty; and hostility against life appears inherent to life itself, entailed in life’s own formation, only presenting itself in different forms, some of which are so pure and abstract that they start to resemble, in fact, laws of necessity. The pleasure principle and the death impulse basically are striving for the same thing. This, then, would be the paradoxical Kantian legacy in Sade and, more in general, in the Sadists, who operate on the basis of a principle that establishes itself well beyond that of pleasure, or the satisfaction of a need: because if the violent sexual impulse goes above and beyond the interests of those who feel it, if it no longer aims to achieve any recognizable gratification but instead acts in an impersonal fashion, if, in other words, it truly is disinterested, then it can be considered an absolute, moral act and can be seconded and implemented almost as if it were a duty or a mission, that is to say, in fact, a categorical imperative. It is therefore not moral behavior that is secretly based on selfish and pathological impulses (an unsurprising unmasking that anyone, after Freud, is capable of carrying out), but rather its ostensible opposite, that is, desire, which acts impersonally, dispassionately, in a disinterested and supraindividual manner, in short, the way one would expect of a pure moral action, whose criteria it matches perfectly and whose profile it ends up fitting. Desire acts against the most elementary interests of both those who experience it and those who are its object. Who is the beneficiary of it, who has a vested interest in it, come to think of it? No one. That is why the sadistic fantasy develops gratuitously, beyond all realism and any calculation of interest, outside the logic of cost and benefit that one ought to consider when committing evil instead of good, and imagines itself being applied to a virtual body that can be tortured and killed ad infinitum, a body capable of withstanding a cascading chain of suffering and humiliation, and which is reborn each time intact, to be tortured and abused, on and on, as in Justine, as in the CR/M: an immortal body.
(In that case, if that’s the way things stand, the thuggish guards in the famous song by Fabrizio De André weren’t seeking “the soul with a thorough beating” in the atheist’s body, but they were seeking his body, the immortal depths of his body, a body capable of allowing unlimited violence to be inflicted upon it . . .)
I WAS SHAKEN FOR A LONG TIME by the reading of that article. The fact that sadistic topics, that my morbid interest in the scandal of violence should reemerge with the approach of religious holidays is, I believe, pure random chance but, perhaps, not entirely without its root causes: the man-God whose birthday we commemorate today will die on the cross just a few months later, his legs shattered and his shoulders racked and his arms yanked out of their sockets. And so it goes, starting over again from scratch every year.
On Christmas Eve, in the midst of the ceremony of gift-giving (usually, I give a great many gifts and receive very few: it’s a law I can never quite resign myself to), I consider abandoning relatives and children to hurry over to the midnight mass at SLM: it’s probably the last chance I’ll have to witness it and describe it, since I’m hoping to finish this book sometime during the new year, but in the end, I don’t go. Nor will I finish the book, come to that. I think and think about it, but I don’t go.
I TRY TO MAKE UP for that on the morning of the twenty-fifth by going to Sant’Agnese. Maybe I’ll find Father Edoardo there, the priest who blessed my apartment not once but twice. Before leaving, I checked the timing of the services on the parish’s online website, and I chose the last mass of the morning, at eleven o’clock. I search for a parking spot around Piazza Annibaliano, taking care not to let my gaze stray to the metro station, a blight and an eyesore that might give the last and decisive blow to my mood, already teetering precariously, and then I drive up Via Bressanone with my eyes turned obstinately to my left, toward the gently sloping hill with the basilica and the baptistery, restful sight, balm for my soul. After a fruitless search, I end up parking my car with all four wheels perched on the median dividing the service lane running along Via Nomentana from the central flow of traffic. It’s a rude and uncivil act of parking, I know that inwardly. I sidestep the main entrance to the basilica from Via Nomentana, where two beggars have taken up position, and I turn down the little side street alongside Sant’Agnese, crowded with people who like me are hurrying to get to the service in time and others who are walking the other way after attending the previous mass.
And in front of Sant’Agnese, in fact, there is a considerable throng of the faithful entering and exiting the church. Bells are r
inging, variously deep and piercing notes, everyone is exchanging hugs. Well, I certainly never expected such throngs and such fervor, such a pitch of festivity. Inside the church, full as I’ve never seen it before, there is a general clamor, voices and the cries of children, exchanges of greetings, the wailing of more than one newborn. Those who attended the mass that had just ended showed no intention of leaving. Can I say that I, too, was happy in this situation? But “happiness” isn’t the right word: from the depths of my grim darkness I feel a weight lift. Maybe I can lay the boulder I’m hauling down for a moment and rest before lifting it back onto my shoulder and setting off again, to carry it aimlessly to and fro. That might be why I’m happy to sit down in an empty chair, next to a family that has occupied an entire pew: the parents on either side, young, serious, but cheerful, and three children between them, who don’t seem at all bored or unhappy at having been brought to church instead of to the park. Looking around, I’m positively struck by the assortment of humanity that is preparing to attend mass. There are also many non-Italian women, with scarves over their heads, nearly all of them in their early forties, but worn and tired, eyes red as if they’d just stood up from a floor after scrubbing it with lye. They clasp their hands in their laps. As the mass begins, people are still exchanging greetings and farewells and hugs and grandparents are steering their little ones to the front row to gaze at the manger scene, where last night, at midnight, I imagine, the Christ Child was given pride of place. The priest officiating, however, is not Father Edoardo, but a powerfully built man of the cloth who reveals, the instant he opens his mouth, the usual accent, with no attempt to conceal the cadence, if anything, in fact, seemingly accentuated as if to proclaim a working-class extraction, unpretentious, as for that matter, are the things he says. The service begins with “Adeste Fideles” (Oh Come, All Ye Faithful), the lyrics to which appear at number eleven in the program, and it is an excellent idea to start with a song, as if a theatrical trick, allowing the audience time to get settled, covering up the noise of those leaving the church and those who (“Excuse me, excuse me . . .”) are still finding a place to sit. If they are unable to find a seat, they remain standing in the side aisles. Before the first two verses of this Christmas carol with the lilt of an Irish ballad have been sung, I find myself joining the chorus, at the top of my lungs.
The Catholic School Page 133
