“Natum videte—regem angelorum” . . . Come and behold him, Born the King of Angels . . .
Even if I haven’t crossed myself, even if I don’t pray and I don’t take communion, can I still sing, or not? It’s so simple, anyone ought to be able to do it. (I’m reminded of the words of the oblate at the church of Santa Francesca Romana: “In order to participate you need only believe in God . . . or maybe you don’t even need that.”)
The mass unfolds with its singsong rhythm, which corresponds to the way the faithful rise to their feet and sit down again, like a wave in a stadium. A number of elderly readers follow one another up to the microphone to enunciate select passages on the topic of the Annunciation, I struggle a little to keep up and I make use of the sheet of paper to find my way. Words like a buzzing, a murmuring, beneficent no doubt, but practically incomprehensible, where there is talk of angels, a great deal of talk of angels . . . of the holy arm of the Lord bared before the nations . . . they say how beautiful on the mountains are the feet of the Messenger of Peace, but what a daring image, practically surreal . . . the image of the lovely feet of He who announces salvation. Isaiah, St. Paul, Epistle to the Hebrews . . . until we reach the Gospel according to John, and there, not even if I follow along line by line on the paper (1:1–18) am I able to penetrate beyond the sound of those words, heard and repeated so many times before: the Word, the shadows . . . the Word made flesh, the glory, the fullness. That is the stunning manner in which John begins his Gospel.
The priest’s homily does its best to meet the faithful halfway, reassuring them, confirming the difficulty of those words. His own words have the rough effect of a bucketful of water tossed onto glowing embers.
“After a reading like this, you might as well just phone home and let them know: listen, I’m not going to be there for lunch . . .” Then he smiles to let us know that he’s exaggerating, “. . . because here we’d have things to talk about until dinner . . . in fact, till long after dinner, before we’d even come up with a single clear idea!”
All I seem able to retain from that Gospel is a phrase that occurs close to the end of the passage: “No man hath seen God at any time.”
The homily continues without any particular interest. The priest skates along through a succession of commonplaces, every once in a while warming up with a patch of dialect (“Dovremmo sta’ contenti, no? che Iddio ce vole tanto bbene”; We should be happy, shouldn’t we? that God loves us so well) the thin ice of those topics. But the atmosphere in the church, all the same, is so full of light and harmony that no word could either perfect it or ruin it. I glance over at the children in the next pew, sitting between their parents, their silhouettes so attentive, their noses straight and their eyes glistening, as they listen, as they nod: Can it be that I am the only one subject to distraction? The only one who really doesn’t understand?
When I emerge from this strange and in any case pleasant state of torpor, the moment for the Credo has suddenly arrived, and everyone in the church takes up the words at the top of their lungs. A chorus of rhythmic affirmations. I’m seized by a profound sense of uneasiness: I know it by heart, from my childhood, but I don’t want to recite it with others, that would be a deception, this isn’t a damned song, it’s a declaration, and in any case I’d be committing perjury by saying “credo”—I believe; but I don’t feel like remaining silent, either, while all around me proclaim their faith, article by article: so I slip between the chairs, behind the columns, and make my way to the exit.
. . . begotten, not made,
being of one substance with the Father . . .
I wait for the pledge of faith to be completed, and then I leave.
OUTSIDE THERE IS ONLY ONE PRIEST, dressed in white. He has his back to me. I walk by him and he turns his head ever so slightly and he acknowledges me, lifting his eyes from the smartphone on which he’d been busily tapping out a text.
“Good morning,” we say to each other, almost in unison, after which he adds, with a smile, “. . . and Merry Christmas to you!”
“Certainly, thank you, and Merry Christmas to you, too . . .”
He’s lost weight, his hair is whiter, his eyes are bright: yes, it’s Father Edoardo. It was he I had so hoped would be saying mass, but instead he was out here, perhaps catching his breath after the ten o’clock service. Officiating is tiring. I immediately move a few steps away, as if I’d been burned by that brief interaction. Before heading off to the café near the basketball courts to get an espresso, I look at my watch: I held out in Sant’Agnese for twenty-five minutes. Technically my presence at the Christmas mass wasn’t valid, that’s the way we used to say it when I was a kid, because if you didn’t stay to hear the Our Father at mass it was as if you hadn’t gone. Father Edoardo is just finishing his text, using a single finger, then he sends it with a final touch: as he does it, closing the case of his phone, he smiles faintly to himself.
LAST NIGHT I RECEIVED AS GIFTS a shirt and a pair of socks bought at Paris, the shop just above Piazza Verbano. Then I received on my smartphone a photograph that provides a thorough illustration of the spirit of the city where I live and of its inhabitants. The photo frames a balcony on an apartment house on the outskirts of town. For the holidays, someone has installed a message, hanging off the railing, in large luminous letters:
MERRY CHRISTMAS MY ROSY ASS
The most concise possible response to season’s greetings in this time of economic crisis.
When I got home from Sant’Agnese—which is, as you’ll remember, the church of St. Agnes—I transcribed the hymn that you will read in the next chapter.
11
THE LEGEND OF ST. AGNES
They say it all happened when she was a girl,
in fact, a young girl, in the earliest years of her adolescence,
still too much of a child to be engaged or married but already ardently
filled with the love of Christ, wherefore at the request to prostrate herself
in adoration of idols, disavowing the true faith, the young Agnes
replied with a terse refusal. And even though she was drawn out
and tempted with great cunning by a judge, who variously blandished her with
honeyed words, or threatened her, warning of atrocious torment,
she remained firm in her choice and went so far as to offer up
her body to be tortured, with absolutely no fear.
At that point the pitiless prosecutor said to himself:
“If it strikes her as easy to tolerate the pain
because she holds her own life in no high esteem,
perhaps she’ll be sorry to lose something even more precious to her:
her virginity. So I’ll have her tossed into a brothel
until, eventually, she’ll repent and implore Minerva’s forgiveness,
the virgin whom she, in spite of the fact that she herself is a virgin, she nonetheless
stubbornly continues to scorn. The men will flock from all directions
to see the brothel’s newest acquisition, they’ll come to blows
to get first shot at this new toy . . .”
“Christ won’t allow it,” Agnes thought, “Christ
won’t forget us, Christ won’t abandon us. He defends
those who keep themselves chaste and won’t allow the sacred body,
kept intact, to be violated. Bathe your sword in my blood
but you won’t sully my body with lust!”
And she announced her proud intention. The magistrate had her placed
on the Via Nomentana, at the crossroads
with a dusty country track
where the passersby could see her, nude, as if she were there
to sell herself: but the crowd avoided looking at her, they all
cast their eyes down or turned their backs
as if repelled by her innocence. Only one wretched oaf
failed to respect the sacred aura she emanated
and dared to t
urn his insolent gaze on the young woman,
he let a lascivious gaze linger upon her
and immediately a bolt fell from heaven that blinded him.
He rolled in the dust, both eyes gone.
His friends hurried in vain to his aid: he was dead.
In the meantime, the virgin triumphed, still chaste
after her first day as a harlot. Not even the street,
not even the brothel had contaminated her. Her virginity
had won the duel. For this she thanked her Lord.
Asked by the friends of the thunderstruck oaf, she began
to pray to God that He might restore the young man’s sight and life,
until the young man’s soul returned to his body
and his lifeless eyes glowed once again with light.
But this was only the first step on the path to heaven.
Soon Agnes was given an opportunity to climb the second step,
so great was the bloodthirsty frenzy exciting her adversary.
“I’m losing the battle,” he mused. “All my efforts
against this virgin are proving vain . . . And so, hurry,
soldier, unsheathe your sword and carry out the orders
of our emperor!” the magistrate commanded.
When Agnes saw the grim figure
looming above her, his sword unsheathed, her happiness
suddenly swelled. “I rejoice to see this man
armed, barbaric, ferocious, ready to take my life, rather
than some sweet-scented young man come to destroy my honor.
This murderous lover is certainly the one I like best! So I confess.
I’ll meet him halfway, welcoming his desires, and I’ll extinguish
his hot lust for death by giving him my own.
I’ll welcome the full length of his sword
into my breast, I’ll lure it in. I, bride of no man but Christ,
will leap the width of the gulf of shadows and find myself right in heaven.
Open to me the doors once locked against the children of the earth!”
With these words, she prepared her neck, bowing her head, to receive
the impending wound. The executioner’s hand granted her wish,
lopping off her head at a single blow, so that death
came instantly, forestalling pain.
Her soul, disincarnate, now floats surrounded by angels
along a glittering path . . . she is amazed to see
the world beneath her feet and, as she continues to climb, distant now,
all those shadows . . . and she laughs at the sight of the
solar orbit, and the countless universes spinning intertwined . . .
the life of all things, the welter of circumstances, all the vanities
that the world chases after, kings, tyrants, empires, high offices and honors
puffed up with stupid pride, gold and silver piled up
in fury, by every means, and the splendor of the palaces, the richly
embroidered garments, the rage, the fear, the oaths, the risks,
the long-drawn-out sorrows and the all-too-brief joys, the smoky ember
of rancor that dirties all hope, all human decorum . . .
and finally, far worse than any other ills on earth,
the dirty clouds of disbelief. All this Agnes
trod underfoot as with her heel she crushed the head of the serpent
that poisons everything, who now no longer dares to rear his head,
now that the virgin has cast him down to hell.
And God encircles your head with two glorious crowns
in place of the nuptial crown you never wore . . .
Oh, blessed virgin, oh, new glory added to the heaven
you now inhabit, you whom the Father allowed
to render chaste a den of iniquity, turn your glowing
gaze upon us, fill our hearts,
make us pure with the ray that emanates from your face
or with the touch of your immaculate foot!
12
THE STORY I’M ABOUT TO TELL NOW will clarify (or perhaps further confuse) the dynamic of an episode described many pages back in this story.
Until some time ago, I was a teacher, working in the maximum-security wing (MS) of Rebibbia Prison in Rome, where Mafiosi and Camorristi are among the inmates. That wing is isolated from the rest of the penitentiary. As a number of my colleagues maintain—and in fact they work year after year to keep their assignments to that wing—those are great classes to teach, in fact, they’re better than the others, it’s an objective fact, the students are, on average, better disciplined and more eager than in the wing where common criminals are locked up, full of out-of-control young men and demented mad dogs of every ethnic persuasion: of course they are, the people in the MS wing are solid, straight-ahead folks, who respect hierarchies, and in their midst the simple fact of having a college degree assures you a certain traditional type of respect, that has evaporated everywhere else in Italian society. A teacher, of whatever gender, is still “someone”: maybe deep down, that’s not really true, and their modest salaries tend to lower their standing down to the threshold of the ridiculous, but at least in their explicit demeanor, the students of the MS, with their legacy of ceremonious manners, still give every sign of holding old-fashioned views, and they comport themselves with a courtesy that may well be contrived, but what courtesy isn’t, after all?
What with the tireless demeaning of external niceties, in Italy, we’ve all been plunged into the inferno of authentic feelings. Which, most of the time, are as authentic as a hock of spit or a fart.
NOW, IN THE MS, among the many unusual students, there was one who was more unusual than the rest, even though in many ways he was perhaps typical, categorical. Diminutive in stature, elderly, though probably not as old as his appearance might have suggested, bespectacled, with an almost incomprehensible way of speaking, both because of the thick dialect and because of his raucous voice, he kept insisting that we had to write a book together, he and I. He asked me about it at the end of practically every class I taught: “Allora, prufesso’, quann’è c”o scrivimm’ chist’ libro? Ch’agg’a fa’, tutt’ i’ solo?” (All right then, Professor, when are we going to write this book? What, do I have to do it all alone?) “Excuse me, what did you say?” And he’d say it all over again, with his singsong drawl.
This man was known as Prince, or the Prince, sometimes with, sometimes without the definite article. His plan, inspired by the crackpot idea of righting the wrongs that he felt had been done to him, and with the mirage of earning a mountain of cash, was to write a sort of response to Roberto Saviano’s formidable bestseller Gomorrah, which, to hear my student tell it (and he was named in the pages of that book, by given name and surname, as the perpetrator of odious murders, that is, the very reason for his being incarcerated, and therefore, my student), was riddled with falsehoods, and so it was imperative that the truth be established at the earliest possible opportunity. My student, then, hoped to undertake what was once known as a counterinvestigation, by the light of his own firsthand experiences, and publish an Anti-Gomorrah, a Counter-Gomorrah, a Gomorrah à rebours, turned inside out like a glove, narrated from the point of view of the Camorristi. And he wanted me to be his mentor, his editor or ghostwriter. “Che ne dice, prufesso’? Ce finimmo anch’ nuie, primm’n classifica?” (What do you think about it, Professor? Do you think we’ll wind up at the top of the bestseller list, too?)
A subtler motivation that I later gave some thought (and about which I’m still thinking as I write this book of mine, all mine, nearly all mine) was that the student in MS claimed to hold a sort of copyright on the crimes he was involved in and guilty of. An author’s copyright in the narrow, legal sense of the term.
“Inzomma, chill’ i mmuorti l’agge fatt’io . . . iooo, colle mani mie . . . e li quattrini se l’ha dda fa’ qualcun altro?” After all, I killed those men myself, with my ow
n hands . . . and now someone else is going to make money off it?
“Well, I guess that . . .”
“Ma pecché?” But why?
Among my Camorristi students, this expression was widely used, at once disconsolate and mocking, when confronted with the absurdity of life: “Ma pecché?” A question destined inevitably to fall into the void, to be greeted with silence, the great universal vacuum devoid of explanations, and yet it had to be asked, both hands pressed together almost as if praying, then rocked up and down, all the while turning the corners of the mouth down in a grimace of almost amused disgust. “No, I ask you: ma pecché . . .?”
ANTI-GOMORRAH, or Gomorrah Unchained, in the end, was never written by the odd couple formed by the vindictive student and his all-too-clever Italian teacher, so it never skyrocketed to the top of the bestseller lists, either. I’d dismiss the thought that he might have gone ahead and written the book alone, or with the contribution of some other man of letters, though you never know, and it might be on the verge of being published . . .
I’m not going to bother to explain here, with what patience and evasive maneuvers, dully, I managed to let the matter drop, each time the book we were supposed to write together came up, changing the topic relentlessly. Since he is an intelligent person, he understood and in his turn, slowly, stopped asking. But every now and then, as if he were still trying to tempt me toward his project, showing me all the wonderful material I’d be missing out on by not giving him a hand with his book, he would relish telling me some never-before-heard criminal episode that could have made the book succulent and even edifying.
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