For instance, the time that he had shot his eldest son, then seventeen, in the legs because he was hanging out with disreputable individuals, tangled up with drug dealing: an exemplary act, from his point of view, which had been meant to show that, of the many crimes he might have committed, trafficking in narcotics was not and could not be one of them, by his very ideology. Or the miraculous episode of a five-story building thrown up in complete violation of code overnight. Or else the stakeout mounted by a gang of paid assassins, come all the way from Smyrna, on the Anatolian coast, to surveil a modest villa near Bacoli, actually inhabited by two old women, the owners of a dry cleaner and now retired, the Montesano sisters, upright citizens, well known in the quarter, and not at all the debt-riddled drug dealer that the Turks had come to kill.
And then there was a varied body of anecdotes involving former soccer players from SSC Napoli, open-sea speedboats, five sisters, all of them sluts, shipping containers full of immigrants, perfectly counterfeited Rolex watches, street sweepers paid faithfully by the city government for thirty years without ever having held a broom in their hands, and then little by little he’d work his way up to episodes of violent crime: woundings and murders planned, committed, misfired, called off, or carried out by mistake or in too much of a hurry. La prescia, ah, la prescia, haste ruins everything, my student would sigh, with no idea that Franz Kafka was convinced of the same thing.
(But the deadly sin Kafka speaks of isn’t haste, it’s impatience.)
UNTIL ONE FINE DAY, during the cigarette break between lessons, Prince made a fleeting reference to a side business in fireworks. The Camorra was even interested in such leisure-time pursuits as fireworks: making them, warehousing them, peddling them, and setting them off at parties and festivals. For that matter, these were objects that belonged to the same family as guns and bombs. My student, however, had exited the business after a certain point in time.
“For me, they’re practically bullshit” (author’s note: from here on in, for the reader’s convenience, I’ll just report the Prince’s statements in proper Italian, instead of dialect). “That is, I mean, fireworks themselves, per se: really, just complete bullshit.”
“Why? I like them!”
“Oh, you do? Well, good for you, good for you. I don’t. Those blasts, those explosions . . .”
“You ought to be used to them . . .”
“You never get used to them. They get on my nerves. They make my eyelids quiver, and then they just won’t stop. I’ve got delicate nerves, actually. And I don’t like chaos.”
“You’d never think you come from where you come from . . .”
“I think you might be misunderstanding. I’m not talking about the schiamazzo, the ruckus and voices. The confusion is something else, and it’s much more serious: you hear from a distance those shots and those blasts, and who can say whether it’s someone involved in serious business, or if it’s just for fun?”
“Ah . . . now I get it.”
“I don’t have anything against having fun. But in that case, go fishing, if you’re looking for enjoyment, or get a dog. Take a woman to bed, I don’t know. Don’t go around blowing up everything in sight. That’s stuff that’s made to kill people. And sometimes it does.”
“By accident . . .”
“What accidents are you talking about! By stupidity. You know how much gunpowder there is in a Bomba Maradona? Enough to knock down an apartment building. Ten kilos!”
“Boom!”
“You sure are being funny today, Professor.”
“Oh, come on, I just felt like kidding around . . .”
“But people get hurt. And they get hurt for no good reason . . . no benefit to anyone. That’s what I can’t stand.”
I understood his line of reasoning because I had heard it many times before, in prison, in particular in the maximum-security wing. It was an argument that was Machiavellian in its purity, one that you find distilled to a similar degree of purity only in certain implacable pages of the great Florentine political analyst or distilled into the famous saying that’s variously attributed to Talleyrand or Fouché, concerning the deplorable execution of the Duke of Enghien with Napoleon’s approval: “It was worse than a crime, it was a mistake.” That which legitimizes an act, or makes it deplorable, is strictly its efficacy with respect to the chosen objectives, whatever they may be. If it is successful, it is good. If it fails, it is bad. If it serves a purpose, it’s beneficial. Otherwise, it’s harmful. It’s a flat, simple morality, which instead of corresponding to a complex table of values, obeys one and one alone: self-interest, results. Blowing up ten kilos of plastic explosive, unless it’s under the car of a business rival—can anyone tell me what the hell good that does? To celebrate what? Blasting powder is supposed to destroy something, otherwise it’s just plain buffoonery. Once an operation has been completed the way it’s supposed to, in and of itself, it becomes a positive thing. In other words, shooting guns, blowing up explosives, these are serious matters and need to be done with care and judgment, with the objective of wounding and killing.
I was following his line of reasoning but I took care not to give him the impression that I agreed with it.
“Then I gave up the whole thing after an accident. That’s right, it was thirty years ago. I never wanted to hear a thing about fireworks, rockets, and roman candles after that. I lost so damned much money . . .” And he made a gesture, imitating a bonfire that burns a pile of cash to a crisp. “It ain’t as if I lost an eye or a finger . . . a hell of a lot of money is what I lost!”
Once again, we were talking about matters economic . . . transparent and hard as fine crystal. You can lose a hand if you’re involved in a business deal, but you can’t lose money, otherwise what kind of a deal are we talking about here? So, not Machiavelli, then, but maybe Bentham, or Adam Smith . . .?
“A whole warehouse blew sky high . . . and the explosions lasted for the rest of the night. We could see it from a distance, flaming, screeching . . . not even the fire department could get close to it, with all those rockets sailing through the air!”
In spite of the scorn he’d originally manifested toward firework displays, he couldn’t keep from smiling.
“But where was this warehouse, in the countryside?”
He gave me a wink. “Well, you’ll never guess . . .” he said, waving his hands in the air and winking first one eye, then the other.
And then a curious thing happened, odd but not all that uncommon, and typical of inmates, even the shrewdest and wisest ones: the perverse love of storytelling got the better of discretion and caution. What the Camorrista revealed to me quavered with a tone of pride and defiance: all the supposed rationality of criminal activity gave way with a thump to the pleasure of having put together a scheme so astounding that it almost seemed like a practical joke, and to the delight of explaining it to an outsider, running the risks that went with that.
“Ah, you won’t believe it . . . forget about the countryside! We’d put the warehouse on top of the loony bin! Now, that’s some crazy shit, am I right or am I right?” And he started laughing in a guttural fashion. “Ka, ka, ka . . .”
A series of hacking coughs is what his laughter sounded like, or the noise you make when, deep in your throat, you collect a gob of phlegm in preparation to spit it out. Two or three inmates stepped closer to us, clinging to the thin plumes of smoke rising from their cigarettes. Unlike his Neapolitan compatriots, and their famed cheery character, it was fairly rare for the Prince to show any sign of hilarity.
“The crazy house, the loony bin, ka, ka! That one was truly crazy!” he went on, beating the pun to death.
“You mean that the fireworks . . .”
“Yes, yes, the fireworks . . . and what fireworks! Real bombs, rocket ships, space missiles . . . Katyushas . . . ka, ka, ka!”
“. . . were where, again?” I asked, determined to get a clearer explanation. “What do you mean . . . by the crazy house?”
“What
do I mean? What do I mean . . .” and the others around us started laughing too. It must have been a well-known story, this one with the loony bin and the fireworks. One of the new arrivals slapped me on the shoulder.
“The insane asylum!”
In collusion with a number of corrupt male nurses and correctional guards, my student and his gang had used as a factory and warehouse for illegal fireworks the structures on the roof of an old criminal insane asylum. As absurd as that choice might sound at first, it was perfect in its way: no one ever went up on the roof of the insane asylum, the washhouses had been abandoned for years, and you could work there in blessed peace, and what’s more, undisturbed, carrying material in and out: a building contractor based in the area, and also under the Prince’s control, had obtained a regular permit and contract to clear the roof of asbestos: water tanks, plumbing, roofing, corrugated panels, and so on.
“It was all legal! It was all legitimate! Ka, ka, ka . . .”
And the amazing thing is that all this madness had taken place, as the Prince had said, in the “loony bin,” with the real loonies and the alleged loonies and the serial stranglers and the paranoids and the ones who believed they were Satan, the illegal structures and the Bin Laden bombs and Maradona bombs all together in the insane asylum, one floor above another, like in some satirical short story.
Maybe that’s why the Prince had thought of it in the first place, this ramshackle piece of madness, the idea of setting up the fireworks factory there.
In spite of the fact that the story was amusing, the umpteenth episode of a paradoxical reversal of the proper order of things (just like the time that the Carabinieri discovered, by their surveillance films, that certain Mafiosi were regularly meeting in the offices of the Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino Commemorative Association . . .), I still felt a sense of discomfort, a powerful, creeping, growing sense of uneasiness, which was not however due to the usual twisted use of a government institution, it was not due to any misgivings of that sort, I haven’t had any such worries for a long time now, or else I sift through them very painstakingly before letting them prey on me, before I start expressing vacuous and hypocritical pangs of indignation, and after all, there in prison, you have a genuine professional obligation to set them aside, between parentheses . . . what the hell, even as I chuckled along while listening to the story of the Prince’s fireworks factory (“ka, ka . . . ka!”), deep in my heart, in fact, even farther down, in my stomach, I felt a twinge of cold and fear for something slithering out of the past straight toward me, slyly, treacherously, like a bleeding creature whose limbs have been lopped off. It continued inching along, yes, right toward me . . .
“Then I went out of business, and that was that . . . all because of that asshole.”
The shiver traveled out to my hands. I could feel them tingle. My voice spoke of its own will.
“Whose fault . . . who . . . all because of which asshole?”
The answer to that question was already present, just lurking behind the scenes of my consciousness, which was refusing to allow it in, to let that name make its appearance onstage, even though it was pressing, pushing, to be uttered. The name was there, and it was pressing dolorously on the membrane of my awareness. That name, forgotten for years, and yet familiar, surprising how well known, the way an old pencil case from school days discovered in the cellar might have been: you remember that, don’t you? you used it every blessed day for years, you opened it a million times and dropped it on the floor and picked it back up . . . before retiring it. And yet it remained yours, and yours alone. Forever. I stammered, in a faint voice: “Who . . . who was this asshole, excu-scuse me? And why was he an asshole?”
The Prince was no longer snickering and he had resumed his usual ferocious expression. Grim, disgusted.
“Because he managed to blow himself up with the whole warehouse!”
His lips curled into a grimace of contempt for such boundless idiocy.
I asked for no clarifications about how the accident had unfolded. From that instant on, I had no doubt that he was talking about Stefano Maria Jervi, my old classmate from my days at SLM, the precocious youngster, the adolescent sultan with the flaming eyes. Jervi, the brother of the stunningly beautiful Romina, identified, once he was nothing more than a corpse, as a militant of the UGC, the Unità di Guerriglia Comunista—the Communist Guerrilla Unit.
“The criminal insane asylum of Aversa . . .” I murmured, pensively, while I was reminded of an episode that might have dated back to the last year of middle school, or even my sophomore year of high school, when all of us, I, Jervi, Arbus, Pik, Rummo, Regazzoni, and everyone else, would have been sixteen.
AT ONE O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON, when we got out of school, on Via Nomentana, there was a young blonde astride a motorcycle. I remember that pressed between her legs was a Ducati Scrambler with a yellow gas tank and a tall spreading set of handlebars, really an oafish motorcycle for a girl, and such a pretty girl. I was standing next to Stefano when she spotted him and waved at him, I couldn’t say exactly why but it was immediately clear that she was waving specifically at Jervi out of the dozens of youngsters who were shoving and bumping against one another in their haste to leave school: rather than simply leaving at the end of the day’s lessons, we seemed to be trying to stage a mass prison escape. Stefano recognized her and went straight over to her, striding briskly, and then when he reached her he hauled back and gave her a smack on the face, hard and sharp, the kind you see in the movies and the commercials of the time, the ones shot in unnatural, pumped-up colors, he knocked the motorcyclist’s long blond hair to one side, and I had the impression that her locks floated in the air in slow motion. Again, as if in a movie, like, say, Carnal Knowledge, I, playing the role of the friend (Art Garfunkel), clapped my hand over my mouth, paralyzed by my astonishment. Without saying a word, he, Jervi (Jack Nicholson), turned and stalked off down Via Nomentana, while the girl bowed her head and covered her face with both hands, out of pain or shame, and presumably burst into tears, because I could see her petite shoulders covered with her long blond hair shaking and lurching.
“STEFANO . . . THIRTY YEARS AGO . . .” I murmured, forgetting entirely where I was at that instant and in the company of whom: in a cell in the maximum-security wing of Rebibbia Prison, surrounded by foot soldiers of dangerous Mafia-type organized crime families, that is, my fond students. I was too caught up in the memory of the students that we had been back then. The young woman that Jervi had slapped had attracted me for countless reasons: because she was beautiful, because she owned and drove a motorcycle, in those days an almost exclusively male appanage, because she was in tears, because she wore purple pants, snug at the top and wide at the bottom, because Jervi had hurt her, and because Jervi had certainly kissed her and fondled her.
“How do you know it was at Aversa?”
The Prince’s tone of voice as he spoke to me now had changed. It was inquisitive now, I would say.
THE BLOND GIRL HAD TO BE AIDED, comforted, and I was the one to do it, inasmuch as I was a reader of hundreds of novels and fotonovelas, devouring Grand Hotel and TV movies, one of the clearest and most agile minds of SLM, a classmate of Jervi, the guy who had hit her, and I therefore had every right to weigh in, this was obvious to me, and I acted almost without thinking: I had to make up for the harm done by my classmate, so I moved toward her.
“I just made a wild guess,” I replied to the Prince. “Is it or isn’t it the most famous criminal insane asylum in Italy?”
The other convicts nodded.
“Certainly . . . of course it is. Aversa. A nasty place.”
“A nasty, nasty place . . .”
“You can go in . . . but you won’t necessarily come back out.”
“ARE YOU OKAY? What happened?” I had asked the girl on the motorcycle, who didn’t answer. “Can I do anything for you?”
It goes without saying that a girl who lets herself be slapped around like that just loves rough guy
s and tends to feel little regard for those who instead go out of their way to be caring and kind, if she doesn’t actually feel utter contempt for them: that’s one of the many unjust laws that govern relations between the sexes. Hence my eagerness to help her hadn’t been the right move: for that matter, there wouldn’t have been any right move for me to make. And yet I persisted.
“Did he hurt you?”
She took her hands off her face and I was able to get a better look at her. The smack had reddened one of her cheeks and swollen her upper lip, which already must have been naturally turgid and arched. Her light blue eyes had deep dark circles around them, and were full of tears. She had freckles. The way the old songs say, something worth giving up living for, right then and there.
“Don’t interfere,” she replied, brusquely.
By the transitive property typical of morbid passivity, just as she delighted in letting herself suffer Jervi’s abuse, likewise I delighted in letting myself be treated the same by her. Which stoked my thirst for further humiliations.
“No, that’s exactly what I intend to do,” I told her, with a frivolous spitefulness on the verge of homosexual hysteria.
It’s strange how the instantaneous attraction that I felt toward that very beautiful girl, an unmistakable sign of my heterosexuality, led me to behave like an impudent little faggot, instead of revealing me in all my virility. I have noticed that feminine seduction has this effect on me.
“Get out of my hair, you have nothing to do with this.” Then she looked at me a little more closely and from her scowling face there emerged a cruel half smile. “Get out of here, kid . . .”
I took a step backwards as if I was the one who had taken the slap.
Still half-smiling and half-crying as well, she stood up over the seat and gave a powerful kick to the starter, then another, and then yet another, even sharper, until finally the Ducati responded.
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