SINCE I WAS A BOY, I always felt this way. And since I still do, and I feel it deeply, I believe it’s true. Look, it’s simple. The presence of a woman next to a man is an event. Something happens between them, whether it happens or it doesn’t. Even if there is no contact, it’s as if there had been contact and, in point of fact, as if there were, even if it was an invisible contact, even if not on the physical plane. I’ve always felt this thing in the strongest imaginable way.
4
IN THE FOLLOWING DREAM (“The Vigilante of the QT”) there is a blend of an unrequited lust, the piercing yen to go into action after so many ritualistic complaints, a parodistic myth of chivalry, the need to administer exemplary punishments in a way that will ensure that the populace understands and rises up in rebellion, but rebellion against whom? Against itself, that’s obvious, because it is the populace that without noticing it has been oppressing the populace, in this intolerable battle we wage of each against all, all against all . . .
I IMAGINE AND PLAN with maniacal care, snickering as I conceive the scene in my mind, donning a mask and mounting my scooter, and then zooming up and down, back and forth through the QT with the mission of punishing the motorists who have double-parked their cars: the ones who, wanting to go grab a before-dinner drink in one of the bars along Corso Trieste and do some shopping, taking their own sweet time, just leave their car there and off they go, for example, abandoning it at the intersection with Viale Gorizia, heading down toward Piazza Istria, and with Via Topino, on the way back up. The inanity or the sadism of the joker who chose to redesign the traffic flow of the QT, alongside the rude indifference of the owners of double-parked Smart cars, ensures that every hour of the day small but decisive traffic jams form, through which the city buses are unable to pass: now, listen carefully, this isn’t a traffic jam created by hundreds of vehicles, not a bit of it, all it takes is a couple of cars trying to turn off Viale Gorizia and onto Corso Trieste, another couple that need to turn left onto Via Topino (and that is the only point, incredibly! the one and only point where the extremely long central median, useful only as a place to let your dog take a piss, offers a gap so you can change direction), there, all it takes is four cars plus the usual Smart car double-parked and any of the countless city buses, route 80 or 88, stuck behind the Smart car, and traffic is paralyzed.
And so I, possibly with an accomplice behind me on my scooter, though I might be able to do it on my own, if I were fast enough and careful not to tip over or let myself be caught by the enraged motorists and pounded to a pulp, once I’d carefully obscured the license plate of my scooter and my identity with a full-face helmet or a ski mask (certainly, it would be better and more appropriate to wear a suitable uniform, with a flowing cape, the mask of the Avenger of the QT), armed with a can of indelible spray paint (at first I’d thought of using a screwdriver, but I thought it over and the risk of hitting the pavement if the screwdriver happened to catch on a door handle or a side mirror is really too great), so, tricked out like that, I’d patrol up and down along Corso Trieste, using my can of spray paint to mark the cars parked incompetently. All of them. Without once releasing my finger from the spray-paint button, in five seconds I’d paint five or six cars, one after the other. I’d do it once, twice, for a week, for a month in a row, reckoning an average of twenty motorists punished every day, always miraculously avoiding capture. I’d be pursued in all likelihood by hulking irate citizens, by screaming matrons, who would show up at that exact moment, ready to retrieve their vehicles after taking their own sweet time about it, only to see their cars given a flying paint job by this masked guy on a scooter, maybe, at first, in the first few days of my vendetta, without a clue as to why I’d ruined their paint job, assuming that it was a random act of hooliganism, carried out by a young criminal, while instead it was in fact a just and exemplary punishment behind which lurks a middle-aged man, so that in the course of a week it would become clear, to the entire QT and to the city, just what those defacements meant, regular and systematic, it would become clear, that is, that these are targeted punishments, by no means arbitrary, which isn’t hooliganism but the exact opposite, it’s justice, it’s an archaic yet elevated form of justice that, since none of the authorities delegated to deal with it (traffic cops, municipal police, normally otherwise occupied in ticketing scooters that cause no hindrance to traffic whatsoever) seem willing to mete it out, it’s up to me to take it into my own reluctant, but in the end decisive, hands of a private citizen sick of suffering abuse and mistreatment. I know perfectly well that it’s only a short step from there to Charles Bronson or else Falling Down, and in fact I can’t rule out a further escalation. The next target would be Rome’s dog owners, the ones who refuse to clean up after their pets—smerdatori. I still don’t know how I would punish them. But these are people who take their dog out and bring it home after smearing the sidewalks with its excrement. I’ve never stepped in so many different dog shits of every shape and color as since I’ve come back to live in the QT. Next would be graffiti taggers, even if they’re hard to catch, those miserable jerk-offs, while they trace out their monotonous logos: SFAZ and SMUARK.
5
THE DECISION TO COME BACK to live in this quarter provoked a landslide in time, a seismic shift. As I walk along, the same wind pushes me that blew back then. If I look down now, to sidestep the plentiful dog turds, I have a pair of stained and shapeless Clarks desert boots on my feet, which lightly leap over the puddles. My step has become lithe and carefree. That’s how I walk, good-looking, twenty-two years old.
THE TERRITORY OF THE QT was marked by a series of challenges.
This piazza belongs to me, that street is one that we conquered, there you’d be advised not to set foot. Mark the boundaries of your own living space and expand it through an array of provocations. Spitting, threatening, graffiti, posters, swinging chains.
In ethology, it’s called “spacing,” in bullfighting, “querencia.”
Knuckleheads
make no noise
if you use a club
IN PARTICULAR the graffiti on the walls indicated that the space had been violated by interlopers at the same time courageous and cowardly: there can be nothing more futile, and therefore heroic, than going in the night to scrawl a few insults that your enemies will find under their noses at breakfast.
Every day, it was necessary to update the map of territorial control with new data. Woe betide those who wander into the wrong zone, thinking it’s still safe! Like in any war, the greatest number of casualties was caused by disinformation.
What remained above and beyond any dispute was the domain of the Fascists, their stronghold and outpost, Piazza Trasimeno, that is, the little opening in the thoroughfare created by the left-leaning curve that Corso Trieste hints at as it passes in front of Giulio Cesare High School, only to continue to climb toward Via Nomentana. That piece of territory (nothing more than a little tree-lined excuse for a piazza) seemed to have been assigned from time out of mind to the Fascists and it served as their base or presidio, on the opposite side from the high school, where Bar Tortuga still stands. There the sidewalk is broad and deep, and perfectly suited to the tables out in front of the bar and the scooters parked in their rows, and there’s also a photo booth. The little strip of photographic paper, with four pictures one atop the other . . . which, a couple of minutes after the glare of the flash, drips into the exterior slot . . . and then just sits there drying, if you’re not too curious to be willing to wait. The result: eyes invariably wide open, dazzled by the flash of light. Inevitably, the face of a terrorist, with or without a mustache. For at least twenty years, on all of my IDs I always had the photo of a terrorist. And like me, thousands of other young men and women.
I find nothing quite so amusing as the idea that entire generations that set out from the QT have been recognized at the borders of half the world, from Checkpoint Charlie to the Khyber Pass, by displaying a passport photo taken at the little photo booth in f
ront of Bar Tortuga. The flashes of their wide-eyed faces have left the customs officers of every nation scratching their heads. They’ve always pulled me aside for further examination, even at border crossings where others were simply waved through without a second glance.
I emanate pulsations that engender suspicions.
In the QT, the boundary lines were modified in accordance with a shifting field of forces. The expansions took place promptly the minute the adversary loosened his control over the territory, scattering the garrison that he exerted, the patrolling on scooters, the activity of putting up posters. In terms of political clashes, playing with home team advantage meant you could make up for the possible disparity in strength and numbers. As was once the case with soccer teams, which were mainly unbeatable in their own stadiums, the ones who were fighting on their own territory, even if they were outnumbered, almost always won. But at this point, the singular characteristic of the QT emerged: it didn’t belong in any stable fashion to anyone. It was to all intents and purposes a no-man’s-land, a neutral field. Day after day, anyone could seize a slice of it and declare it their own; but that declaration and the possession that went with it never managed to take on a definitive character.
The war being waged in the QT was a war of position. A single night, and the enemy lines had shifted without you knowing it. When you woke up, just like Vittorio Gassman and Alberto Sordi in the film La grande Guerra (The Great War), you found yourself surrounded by the enemy.
6
The yearning is great
there is no pussy
I grab my dick
feeling tired and wussy
Aside from dirty poems, what still remains in my head after years of school, years of Catholic school, after a lifetime spent in a Catholic country, listening to radio stations with the rosary recited in a singsong by nuns and TV news shows where the pope appears punctually every evening, greeting, saying benedictions, smiling, admonishing, expressing regret or rejoicing, hoping that the war will end soon and that all violence will soon cease (over the course of my own lifespan I have had six popes who spoke to me, looking out from a TV screen, they were speaking to everyone, and I was there too, among all of them: John XXIII, about whom all I can remember was the collective sadness when he died, Paul VI with his quavering voice and the appeals he launched that went unnoticed, the falling star of Pope Luciani, Wojtyla in his various phases, the magnificent and much vituperated German pastor Ratzinger, and now Pope Francis . . .), landing in a distant airport, pushing his way through the crowd in his armor-plated automobile, washing the feet of young black children . . .
And in fact, what I am left with are those iterative clauses, the Christ Who wins, the Christ Who forgives, the Christ Who saves, the Christ Who restores to life, the Christ Who accompanies and consoles us . . . the sermon that I feel like I’ve been listening to since before I was born, unchanging, a sort of whisper diffusing from the grate of a confessional or the grillwork of a loudspeaker, always raucous, hoarse, perhaps as a result of a tireless preaching and preaching . . . patiently, almost dully, in the presence of an audience formed of one or two or two hundred or two hundred thousand faithful, it makes no difference, and even now that it’s Sunday morning and I’m driving with the radio on there are, in fact, on the Third Network, those extremely learned biblical exegetes who, with the psalmodizing voice mentioned above, interpret passages of Holy Scripture. More than explaining them, they seal them into hermetic formulas overbrimming with tremor and enthusiasm, humble enthusiasm swollen with faith and doubts, enthusiasm for a mystery that refuses to yield to any attempt to unveil it, not even the most intelligent and dashing and impassioned . . . “It is the enigma of the love of God,” they say, or else, “It is the love for the enigma of God” or “It is the enigma of the God of love . . .”
For the umpteenth time today, they announce that they are ready to listen, and they suggest that we follow suit, we, the radio audience, we too should stand ready to listen. Ready to listen is the key phrase. It is necessary to know how to listen to the word, listen to your neighbor, to others, listen to God, listen to Him especially when He does not speak, listen to silence, listen to the silence inside of us . . . Listening to those plummy voices, often colored by a foreign accent or intonation that falters on such Italian words of Greek origin as “pneuma” or “càrisma” (with the accent on the first a), “paracleto,” “parusia,” I am lulled, enchanted, and in the meantime the panorama flows away on either side of the car.
MY SKEPTICISM TOWARD PREACHERS of any kind comes from a film I saw, in fact, at SLM, at the legendary film forum organized by Brother Barnaba, namely The Ballad of Cable Hogue by Sam Peckinpah, him again, the director of Straw Dogs: and it’s a humorous and blasphemous scene, in which the Rev. Joshua Duncan Sloane, played by David Warner, a filthy and deranged preacher, invites a young woman to pray with him, lifting both arms to the sky, and she, her eyes filled with tears for the death of her beloved, lifts her arms to the sky, and as she does, the pastor, from behind, slips his hands into her dress and squeezes her breasts.
ONCE, the oblate of a church in the center of Rome (Santa Francesca Romana) asked me and F. if we were interested in taking part in a session of reading and interpretation of passages from Holy Scripture. The monks who were running the session were learned and levelheaded, and by intercession of the oblate we could get permission to observe. The idea interested me but I doubted I possessed the prerequisites, first and foremost, genuine faith. The readings would take place within a monastic community. And I, who haven’t taken communion since I was fourteen . . .
“But what’s necessary to take part? I don’t know if I . . . if we . . . are up to it,” I objected, dubiously.
“Well, it doesn’t take much . . . you only have to believe in God.”
In fact, I thought, maybe that’s the problem.
The oblate looked me in the eyes. His were light blue and bloodshot.
“Actually,” he added with a smile, which you could see more in those bloodshot eyes than in his mouth, twisted in an ironic smirk, “you don’t even have to believe in God.” Then he gave us a wink. “Who knows, maybe that comes later.”
WE’VE COME BACK TO THAT CHURCH because today is the feast day of the saint in question and tomorrow F. is going to be admitted to the hospital. We went there to pray. Just what good that praying will do isn’t clear to me, but as in many similar cases, it’s the sort of thing that it is better to do than to waste time wondering about why one might do it. At the end of the service, after going to see the imprints left by St. Peter’s kneecaps on the basalt paving stones of the Via Sacra when he knelt down to pray as Simon Magus was levitating in midair, a hundred feet off the ground (F. insisted on placing her hands in the hollows of those two dark imprints), through a providential intervention of the oblate, we were allowed to slip into the sacristy, where the prelates were doffing their vestments after officiating the mass for St. Frances of Rome, and we were able to find a moment of time to address a hasty prayer to the Virgin Mary that is housed in there, the oldest Virgin Mary in the world, to her sweet broad face made of wax, with asymmetrical eyes. It’s one of the few images before which I’ve ever felt the presence or at least a spark of the sacred, which is something quite distinct from aesthetic appreciation, indeed, it is in direct opposition to it. The others are: the Madonna dell’Orto in Venice, the niches of the Buddhas destroyed in Bamiyan, Gethsemani, Dante’s grave in Ravenna, the Alyscamps in Arles, the Mithraeum beneath Santo Stefano Rotondo, places where I think I’ve done something like praying, spontaneously, without having a clear idea of to whom and why, and asking or promising what.
In the meantime, while we were looking at the Virgin and She was looking at us, with her sweet, almost cross-eyed gaze, Simon Magus, the braggart, was released by the devils who had lifted him high into the air, and he plunged downward, smashing onto the pavement.
7
LET’S ALSO SAY THAT THE STORY of the CR/M tucked away
in this book wasn’t the only story. Alongside a given account and intertwined with it there are others, which branch out in every direction, like in a family tree, you can never say where one ends and the next one begins, so closely connected are they, origins and filiations. All around the CR/M there grows a dense forest of perverse and criminal ramifications. Not all of them bloody, none of them venial. Some of these appendices are invented, others are legendary, others still so obscure that there’s not a person now alive who knows what really happened, or else they do know but they can’t prove it, or they could prove it but are afraid to. Forty years later, there are very few around who saw with their own eyes and heard with their own ears.
The Catholic School Page 152
