BUT NOW LET’S GO BACK to the office on Piazza Bologna where Cassio has been assigned to protect the personal safety of one of those old walking fossils, and I’m using the term in a technical sense, without a hint of malice, who formed the backbone of the neo-Fascist movement and its leadership, backing up the affable mustached mask of their national leader, Giorgio Almirante. When they heard him make his calm and unruffled arguments on television, on political talk shows in the lead-up to elections, even the viewers who were opposed to his party had to admit: “Still, you have to say, he’s a good speaker.” In reality he was by no means either calm or reasonable, and even less so were the other officials of the Italian Social Movement, the Movimento Sociale Italiano, or MSI, which was often pronounced like the English word “miss”: men with an unmistakable appearance, who were determined to emphasize their difference from the run of the mill by, so to speak, wearing that difference, the way you might pin a badge or a button to your lapel. They were often fat and powerfully built or else, to the contrary, skinny and ascetic, like sad knights, always rather funereal, as was, for example, my grandfather. The man who got out of the party-issue car, and whom Cassio escorted into the chapter office, was bald and wore a slightly shiny black turtleneck, with a pinstriped double-breasted jacket over it, and he concealed his eyes behind a pair of dark glasses—dark but not impenetrably so, very much like the headmaster at SLM. To Cassio and the other young men, among whom it appears that Angelo, too, was present, he limited himself to offering a ritual encouragement, out of context to the setting in which it was delivered: a semideserted street, a quarter that was minding its own business, no attack, no ambush, no enemy on the horizon . . .
“Bravo, comrades, bravo! Hearts striving upward!” Whereupon the young men snapped into a straight-armed salute, and so did Cassio, a little late.
Sensing the agitation swirling around him, Cassio was astonished to find he was inwardly so cold and detached.
“Weird: I should be having goose bumps. I can see that the others are excited, on edge, ready for anything. And I love them, my fellow Fascist comrades. And I can feel that I, too, am ready to do something. But is this it?”
What good is a single act if there is no physical result?
“To be afraid but manage to control that fear without effort makes me feel grown up, a little more of a man . . . but I don’t know what to do with these few extra inches, if they don’t take me any closer to what I truly desire.”
It’s reasonably easy to understand when you’re playing rugby: you have twenty yards to the goalpost, or ten, or just a few short steps, before you’re knocked backward by a long kick into touch. There, at least, the object is clear, you know where the line runs.
“But what is it I want, what is the goal I’m seeking? What am I looking for? Fascism? My father is a Fascist, my grandfather is a Fascist, sure, both of them . . . they know what they believe in, but I . . . I’m just a guy looking for an opportunity.”
11
SO CASSIO DECIDED TO DEDICATE himself to criminal pursuits, under the guise of his political faith. It was a faith that allowed a criminal sideline, indeed, that identified illegal activity as an appropriate and necessary means of carrying on the struggle, if not its actual objective. And then there was the thrill of taking up arms, the courage necessary to do so: those things could perfectly well be pursued for their own sake, divorced from any specific objectives. The Majuri family, well-to-do, vacationed at Cap d’Antibes, and there, through certain right-wing extremists, Cassio was introduced to members of the Marseille underworld. After a few test runs, in the course of which he proved himself to be reliable and punctual, he became a regular narcotics courier: he transported heroin and made plenty of money. Theoretically he ought to have put that money at the disposal of his political activity; the earnings from the drug trafficking were supposed to be plowed back into the purchase of weapons, to finance training camps, for travel abroad, to pay the utility bills of the lairs used for meetings or to store guns and bombs, as well as the fees of the lawyers to represent Fascist comrades whose families couldn’t pay for them. They weren’t all rich, in fact, there were quite a few comrades who came from the working class. Guys like Angelo and Majuri and the Legionnaire and the so-called pariolini were well known, but they didn’t make up the mass of the movement: many militants came from the poorer outskirts of town. But Majuri started to develop a taste for that money; he soon discovered that he preferred pocketing it instead of devoting it to the cause; even worse, he started to believe he could get away with pilfering small quantities of heroin from the shipments he was delivering; he kept that surplus for himself and resold it. Seeing that the shipments were huge, he fooled himself into believing that the amounts he was stealing hadn’t been noticed. But they were. His employers, though, said nothing, waiting to see what else he might get up to. Still, sensing that his bosses were keeping an eye on him, and noticing that along with the narcotics shipments, there were also reports being sent concerning certain Italian, French, and Spanish militants, Cassio thought it would be a smart move to make copies of them and conceal them, so that he could use them in case matters came to a head. Little did he suspect that, instead of protecting him, these sneaky moves were only accelerating the decision to eliminate him.
All the while, he went on with his life as a young Roman, in accordance with the standards of the time in the milieu of the right wing. He played rugby, he made sure he was seen in the right places in his gleaming new automobile, he did his best to appear self-confident, to put on the appropriate tone. The money from trafficking and peddling heroin and cocaine came in handy in this. His behavior became increasingly arrogant. He paid prostitutes to avoid going through the effort of courtship and the risk of rejection from girls his age. So they decided they could strike at him from that angle. They realized that they’d need to find a girl to bait the trap to catch Cassio. By now, the decision had been made: he had to die. In those circles, no one even dreams of trying to reform a guy like that. You get rid of him and be done with it. But first they needed to find out where he had hidden his copies of the compromising documents. Angelo and his men got ready to lay a trap. Since Majuri had expressed interest in the sister of a student at SLM, whom he had spotted one day outside school, they convinced the girl to take part in the deception. The girl was named, it seems, Perdìta, which is a strange name but seemed perfect for her, that is, for a lost girl, a girl on the road to perdition. She was fifteen years old. They had persuaded Cassio Majuri that they would bring the girl to his apartment, for a gang rape. He suggested a day when his family was traveling and the apartment would be empty. For certain gang rapes, Angelo and some of his friends would later be tried and convicted: but we’ll never know how many they had carried out before the one at Monte Circeo, much less who was involved. In any case they were nearly all SLM students or alumni.
Dealing and consuming narcotics, marching in the honor guard at the funerals of dead comrades, violent retaliatory missions, kidnappings, variously real or with the complicity of the victim, handling weapons, breaking his relatives’ hearts, living a double life, black flags, rugby, rape, and the occasional euphoric reading of this or that manifesto: that is the circuit Cassio Majuri plunged into, and it was there, in the end, that he met his death.
Perdìta was taken by car to Cassio’s apartment building. Probably under the effect of illegal substances. It wasn’t clear whether she was supposed to act as if she were a willing participant or pretend to have been forced unwillingly into the group sex. Cassio had told the others not to bother bringing weapons because he already had his father’s hunting shotgun in the house, and armed with that, they’d easily be able to force the girl to comply with their wishes. He greeted them, already naked, in his parents’ bed, the shotgun within reach. This was the first time he’d taken part in this kind of orgy. He’d been told the way these things worked: the girls were forced to undress at gunpoint or else by starting to strangle them to overcome
their resistance, forced to drink alcohol, to take the members of the various males in their mouths, in turn, and then they were raped and sodomized. Last of all, threatened at gunpoint to make sure they told no one. The thought of what was about to happen filled Majuri’s mind to the point that there was no room for doubt or suspicion. Nor did it occur to him that, if a girl like Perdìta had caught his eye, he might consider approaching her by more conventional means. Even though there was something at the bottom of Cassio’s heart that didn’t entirely rule out the idea that he might even be able to fall in love with a girl like Perdìta, he was willing to rape her just to avoid the humiliation of a potential rejection. He was getting ready to rape a girl he might have been able to love, under normal conditions. But there are no normal conditions, they don’t exist. Everything is always an exceptional case. Cassio suspected nothing when they rang his doorbell. He stripped naked and ran to his parents’ bed, where he’d already laid out the shotgun, loaded. He wanted to make sure that the muscles he’d developed playing rugby were on full display.
PERDÌTA DIDN’T UNDERSTAND what was about to happen. They had shown her some pistols and that aroused her curiosity rather than frightening her. Some of the gang remained in the car downstairs to wait. A couple of others went upstairs with her in the elevator. The door to the Majuri apartment was left ajar. Three of them went in, Perdìta and two young men. As soon as they were inside, one of them grabbed her and twisted her arm behind her back, clapping a hand over her mouth. She laughed as she felt that hand almost suffocate her, because she assumed this was just make-believe. “Stop laughing, you idiot!” said the one who was holding on to her. “Come on ahead!” they could hear Cassio’s voice from a room at the end of the hallway. And they did. They opened the door and saw Cassio in the bed, naked, with his legs under the sheets. He pulled the sheets aside to make it clear just how aroused he already was. “What’s her name?” he asked the one who was holding the girl. “Let her talk, I want to hear it from her.” The guy took his hand off her mouth. “Go on, tell him.” “Why do you want to know? What’s it matter to you?” Perdìta retorted. Cassio was struck by the girl’s brashness and his visible arousal immediately began to subside. He wanted to say a tough guy’s phrase of some sort, but his voice came out quavering: “Oh, no reason . . . just that, before getting started, it might be better to know it.” “Getting started with what?” asked the girl, but the guy holding her put his hand over her mouth and gave her a shove, and she whined in response, because this time the guy had hurt her for real. She tried to wriggle free. Cassio Majuri wasn’t sure about what to do next. He felt like fucking that girl, and right away, but he didn’t want her to be hurt, or at least not too badly. “Hey,” he called to his friend, “take it easy . . .” and then, “come here, we’re not going to hurt you,” to the girl. All of a sudden, he felt awkward about being naked while the other three were fully dressed. He felt a little ridiculous. And defenseless. His arousal had vanished completely by now. In the meantime, his other friend had walked over to the bed and had taken the shotgun. “There’s no need for that,” said Cassio, but the look in the eyes of the one who had taken the shotgun told him otherwise, and namely, that that shotgun did need to be used. Majuri’s brain had never been lightning fast, and even in that situation it took him a while to put together that look, his own weakness at having let himself be caught naked as a worm while the others were fully dressed, wearing shoes and hats and leather gloves, the odd reason why his old friends, with whom he’d interacted so infrequently in recent months, should have decided to involve him in this kind of orgy, entirely new to him, and the fact that the girl he wanted to fuck and his other friend who was holding her tight, with his hand over her mouth, had in the meantime retreated to the door and had now backed away through it, vanishing into the hallway. At this point he felt as if he could see before him, as if they were the answer to all those peculiarities, the two bundles wrapped up with packing tape, that is, the portion of the last shipment of heroin that he’d scraped off before delivering it, and the hole in the wall behind the metal cabinet down in the garage where he had hidden them, and the stacks of cash that the sale of that shit would bring in, and the foul mood that would come over the person who learned about all this through the lateral channels that twist and wind like capillaries through the criminal underworld, perfusing it with information, and that’s when a flash of awareness opened up a path inside him. Another fraction of a second of painful concentration ensured that Majuri’s mind, a weak mind perched inside a powerful, healthy body—two entities that were both destined before long to be dissolved one from the other—was able to stitch together all the singular aspects of that story, but as he glimpsed all these various connections, his father’s double-barreled shotgun had already completed a 180-degree rotation and was now pointed against his hairless, muscular chest, in fact, was almost grazing it, and had burst into flame with a roar, punching a gaping hole through it. And so it happened that Cassio was able to put together in a single point, microscopic but extremely dense and heavy as lead, all the salient elements of the last dangerous year of his life, at the exact instant that that life ceased to exist. He had just enough time to regret that laziness and to make a resolution to be smarter and more careful in the future—only he’d never have a future in which to keep that resolution, because he was already dying. He also had enough time to ponder the fact that the girl had never told him her name, and that he was therefore dying without knowing it, and without having fucked her, in fact, without even having a chance to run his fingers over her flesh, and during the rapid expansion of the globe of flame that charred the edges of the gash that had just frighteningly torn open in his chest, that is to say, the chief piece of evidence that would later lead his death to be filed away as a classic case of suicide, he even managed to formulate a doubt as to whether or not she was in cahoots with his murderers.
That point was to remain an unanswered question mark.
HEY, DO YOU REMEMBER those rugby jerseys made of rough fabric with horizontal green and white stripes, purple and white, yellow and violet . . .? In London, Lillywhites was a legendary address for well-to-do young Italians, they lusted after those jerseys, both as an emblem of strength and because of the way they always looked rumpled, down-at-the-heels. They lent themselves to both interpretations and these two aspects, from being opposites at first, soon merged into a single entity, which was after all the perfect figure of corresponding quality, at once full of energy and precarious, bullying and vacillating, feminine and virile, powerful but very fragile: youth.
The torsos of the adolescents that those jerseys would wind up adorning with horizontal stripes, were, in fact, eminently vital and yet transitory, placed in great danger—so easy to wound, riddle with holes, crush . . .
Young Fascists wore them with the collar pulled up, while the lefty comrades wore them unironed, and probably unwashed, never washed or almost never, using them as pajamas or letting their girlfriends wear them after sex or under a jacket purchased at the flea market.
12
IKNOW WHO’S CONCEALED under the name of Perdìta. Now I know. I first learned it several months ago. That is, since Arbus has come back to inhabit my life. All those that I had kicked out or who had packed their bags on their own account have come back. A few years ago, historians coined the expression “the past that doesn’t pass” to describe those stalled situations where a people or a nation (in particular, Germany) are incapable of processing great catastrophes, war, guilt, war crimes either committed by or against those unable to get beyond them. Meanwhile, in psychotherapy a technique has become common, the subject of endless dispute and controversy, namely the use of “recovered memories,” because in fact it aims explicitly at bringing to surface memories buried in the subconscious, especially concerning sex abuse suffered in childhood. Authentic abuse, or the product of outside suggestion? That is, created by the very same therapy that should do nothing more than recover them?
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nbsp; I don’t know to what I owe this backwash of so much material, such a wealth of lived experience. It was Arbus who first triggered the process, no doubt about that. But who, in turn, triggered Arbus?
He told me the last time we saw each other. There was no need of it. Maybe he thought that he needed to complete a picture. Out of the blue, he just started telling me the story of Cassio Majuri, a story I did not know: Cassio was too much older for me to remember him at SLM. And the only way you might find out the story of his tragic death would be by reading Angelo’s unabridged confessions, something I never fully did, they’re as long as the Mahabharata. But the story of Cassio was interesting in any case, and it caught me up. I found it deeply disturbing. The fake rape and suicide . . . I listened without understanding why Arbus was telling me about it, and this was just the source of further uneasiness. The corpse of a young man lying in a bloodstained bed, with a shotgun lying next to it. I couldn’t imagine that Arbus would finish his account by revealing Perdìta’s identity.
The Catholic School Page 154
