There was a time when you were supposed to repress these things, repress them—period. But nowadays?
I REMEMBER THAT, before I simply stopped attending, the phrase I liked best in the holy mass was “Kyrie eleison.”
Kyrie eleison . . .
Christe eleison . . .
Kyrie eleison . . .
It was the sound that appealed to me.
When it began to say “Lord, have mercy” and “Christ, have mercy,” it was then that the litany lost its allure for me. It became whiny, when we understood what it meant. Then I got lost. And no formulation in Greek was ever capable of taking me back there.
“I CONFESS TO ALMIGHTY GOD and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.”
Even after the Confiteor was translated into and recited in Italian, when I was a boy I loved to pound my chest three times repeating the word: colpa, colpa, colpa. Fault, fault, fault. It was such a theatrical gesture. I didn’t feel guilty of a thing, but I still pounded hard, fist clenched, colpa, colpa, colpa . . . until I felt genuine pain, for a genuine fault. There was no need to know which fault. The authentic confession goes well beyond the specific sins: one time it will be one sin, the next time it will be another, what difference does it make?
I TRULY DON’T KNOW what is worse: whether it’s worse to believe and later discover that you have believed in vain (but that’s impossible, since after life there is nothing, our consciousness will be null and void, whether you were wrong or you were right), or rather not to have believed, and in the end discover, too late, that He exists.
16
IT WAS ONE OF THOSE WEEKS in the mountains, those ski holidays known as settimane bianche, “white weeks,” that SLM organized in the Dolomites, at Lavarone. I remember a massive, unlovely hotel outside the town, on the side of the mountain, about which I must have previously written elsewhere. Aside from skiing—a sport that I’ve never loved, and at which I’ve never been very good, since I could successfully take curves only in one direction—I do remember with pleasure or heartache the ferocious tournaments of Ping-Pong, the soccer goals kicked in fresh snow, the evening projections of edifying films (that’s right, that’s exactly what I wrote about, how The Miracle of Marcelino led me and the other overexcited children to the verge of a nervous breakdown, like a horror flick, which is after all what it was: a Catholic horror flick), and I remember the teeming and festive refectory and the ruddy cheeks and the sealskin ski boots and the coughing. The evening before the races, the older kids and the talented skiers (therefore, not me, though I looked on in fascination, as if I were in the cabinet of Doctor Faustus) were applying and reapplying wax to the bottoms of their skis, tips pointing at the floor, in the large gloomy storage area under the hotel. The faces brightened by the cold and by the flames over which they were heating the blocks of ski wax. I remember the loving care lavished on the Kneissls, the Rossignols, the Atomics, the Völkls, and the Heads. I have specific memories of the tiniest details, and approximate overall memories of the rest.
Toward the end of the winter vacation, just a couple of days short of my return home, I got sick, with a fever. It’s a classic for little kids to get sick while away from home on trips. “Let’s hope he doesn’t get sick,” people say about a little kid before he heads off to camp, a week on horseback, the WWF center, the educational field trip, the tennis camp in the Apennines. I’ve never understood whether this facility for getting sick is caused by excitement, fear of new things, disruptions to routine, changes in climate, or changes in what they eat and where they sleep . . . by the effervescence of a different lifestyle than the usual. Children are creatures of habit, much more than old people. The classic outcome of disruption: the flu or bronchitis. Maybe I’d just been wet after countless tumbles in the snow and, when I went back to the hotel run by priests, I’d climbed into bed without changing into something dry, and had dropped straight off to sleep. When I woke up for dinner, my back hurt, and so did my legs and every bone in my body, and I was trembling. At dinner I didn’t feel like eating anything, not even the soup. “Your eyes are glistening,” a priest told me. “Come over here,” and he put his hand on my forehead.
He had a big hand.
“Jesus, you’re burning up!”
This priest wasn’t from SLM, but a different religious school in Italy, so he wasn’t a teacher or professor of ours, but by now we knew him well, seeing as how he’d been with us since the beginning of our holidays at Lavarone. We’d found him already there when we got off the long-distance bus from Rome. He was friendly, kind, quick to laugh, and joked with everyone, but it was clear that he was also greatly respected. He had freckles and fine, thinning fair hair, and a pair of frameless glasses, the kind where you can’t quite figure out how the lenses manage to stay on. He was called Father Marenzio. I couldn’t say whether he was a supervisor or exactly what his position might have been. For sure, he counted for something in the organization of that week in the mountains: he was the one who had decided many specific details, from the calendar of the Ping-Pong tournament to the operation of the medicine and liquor cabinet, and it was he who called the start in the timed downhill races, which we had done in the few preceding days to work up to the race finals. I had fallen midway down, because of my usual problem with handling right-hand curves, which meant my race time hadn’t been taken into account. After all, I never would have taken part in the downhill race in any case.
“You’d better get to sleep right away, otherwise you’ll just wear yourself out,” said Father Marenzio, and at a gesture from him I got up from the long refectory table. A number of my friends said good night. Arbus wasn’t there, they never sent him up for the week in the mountains. “Come,” said the priest, and he extended his big hand, I put my hand in his, and it vanished in his outsized grasp, then we headed off down the long hallway that ran the length of the hotel like a subterranean tunnel. We fetched up in the end at the small office with the first-aid cabinet. Made of wood and glass, it was fastened with a padlock that had a long, tall, narrow shackle (in fact, these are the details that I remember as if they were utterly indelible: the glass panes of the cabinet, and behind them the little curtains concealing the vials containing the medicines, that extremely long padlock whose shackle extended upward through four hasps). He found a thermometer and gave it a few vigorous shakes. In the meantime, he’d sat me down on a bench.
“Let’s take your temperature.”
I took the thermometer and, after pulling aside the neck of the sweater and the collar of my shirt, I was about to lower it down into the hollow of my armpit, when Marenzio shook his head.
“No, not there.”
I immediately pulled the thin glass tube back out and sat there, baffled. A feverish shiver ran through me and I was afraid I’d drop the thermometer. My mouth was dry.
Marenzio pointed to my crotch.
“Down there is better,” he said, “you’ll get a more reliable reading.”
I don’t know what kind of a face I made, but the priest just broke into laughter and plucked the thermometer out of my fingers. “You don’t have to be ashamed. You’re a sick boy. We just need to take your temperature, see how high the fever is. Shall I turn around and look the other way?” And he turned to look at a depiction of the blessed founder that hung over his desk, with a little dry sprig from an olive tree tucked into the frame. He kept his big freckly hands clasped behind his back, under the sash that held his tunic at the waist, tapping his fingers against his palms.
“Ready?” and he handed me the thermometer with the tips of his fingers. “But don’t take an hour now, eh!” and he laughed again.
I unbuttoned my pants hastily and stuck the thermometer right into the fold between my underwear and one of my thighs. It was piping hot and sweaty in there.
I buttoned up my trousers again,
and he turned around to look at me.
“Oh, good. In five minutes, we’ll know everything.”
He held out his hand to caress my face. His hand seemed cold to me, and big. His caress ended when he had tucked my long locks of hair behind my ears. “Eh, you know, it’s about time . . .”
And with two fingers, he imitated a pair of scissors.
“Snip!”
I HAD A FEVER OF 103. When I opened my eyes again, they were puffy. I was in pajamas, lying on my back, in our six-bed bunk room, and at the foot of my bed sat Father Marenzio. He looked at me, with a smile on his face, an arm resting on the side of the bed. He said: “Well, what are we going to do?” I tried to put a half smile on my face, in a vague apology. A child who gets sick in the mountains is just trouble. It doesn’t seem to me that he had given me any medicine. I had no cough now, no stomachache, just a fever. But he had made me herbal tea. I remember that I was forced to drink it, with the priest lifting the rim of the mug and me gulping it down to keep from suffocating. It was scalding hot and it reeked of rotten grass. The other five beds around me were empty. My classmates were downstairs playing or watching the usual black-and-white film, about some heroic feat of mountaineering, or else The Ten Commandments. In the big bunk room, Father Marenzio had switched on only the little light above the sink. His face was backlit, therefore, dark, but I could see that he was smiling, and every now and then, the gleam of his eyeglasses. I could hear his voice speaking to me, but from a distance, muffled.
“Keep your hands on top of the blankets . . .”
I pulled them out. They were damp, because I’d been holding them wedged into my steaming hot crotch, inside by pajama bottoms, to protect me.
“There, good boy . . . good boy . . .”
Maybe there were other “good boys” uttered by Father Marenzio, but they reached my ears fainter and fainter. He had taken one of my hands.
I don’t know why I thought that in the meantime Moses’s beard and hair must have turned white and grown disproportionately, and that he will never reach the Promised Land: he’ll glimpse it from afar, and then he’ll die. “You’re very hot,” said Father Marenzio, holding my wrist, “but you needn’t worry.” I told him, “Thank you,” the way my mother had taught me: always say thank you. “Tomorrow you’ll be all better, wait and see.”
He looked at the watch on his wrist, and his eyeglasses gleamed, and also his fine blond hair, pushed back on his rosy cranium. “But now your classmates are about to come upstairs, and they’ll have to turn on the light, they’ll make a noise and they’ll wake you up, they’ll bother you.” To tell the truth, at that point the pain had almost subsided and the blazing fever was putting me into a passive but not disagreeable state of mind. The bed had turned soft again. Soon, Barnetta, Zarattini, and the others would come back upstairs into the bunk room. Especially Stefano Jervi, who slept in the bed next to mine—I’d be happy to see him, before falling asleep, and to hear him tell with his usual arrogance about his plans to win the slalom race. He was a young champion. He had a brand-new pair of skis, yellow with a purple lightning bolt running the length of them, and magnificent ski boots, with hooks that snapped shut, unlike mine, which had extremely long laces that were a lot of work to tie. “I want to say hello to them,” I murmured to Father Marenzio, running my tongue over my dry lips. He went over to the sink, rinsed the glass that stood under the mirror, filled it with water from the tap, and brought it to me. “Drink.” I needed to drink a great deal, he said. “That’s not a very good idea, for you to see them, you know that? You could infect them all.” He laughed silently. “And then tomorrow we’d have six boys in bed with the flu, instead of just one!”
FATHER MARENZIO WAS BIG AND STRONG and he carried me easily in his arms. I had my arms around his neck and my head rested on his shoulder. My slippers were dangling from the tips of my feet. I’ve always found shameful an object like slippers: their shape, their function, those tawdry colors. The priest’s shoulder was cool and my eyes began to droop and shut. Once again, I was dreaming of Moses with whirlwinds of fire carving the Ten Commandments, one after the other, etching the letters into stone, and Moses angrily shattering the tablets, hurling them at the idolaters. The blast of heat I felt was that of a sandy desert being beaten by the wind, and once again my mouth was dry. I don’t know if I would have had the courage to continue forward, or whether I, too, would have mutinied to return to the land of Egypt. “Let’s turn back, let’s go home . . .” We climbed a flight of stairs. Moses’s staff was coming alive, transforming into a serpent. The serpent was slithering, and it curled up in the water under the stilt house. There was water under the desert, so much concealed water; once upon a time, the desert had bloomed with all that water, there had been huge buildings with stairs and terraces and gardens and fountains. The water pitchers were overbrimming and cool. The serpent spat out a spray of water from its mouth. We rested in the shade of a room with the shutters pulled to, the sun had bronzed us and wearied us, and our games had exhausted us, the sheets were white and cool . . . the sweat on my forehead dried off on the fabric of Father Marenzio’s tunic. He alone insisted on wearing his tunic even up there in the mountains. The other religious were all wearing checkered shirts and heavy sweaters. The serpent breathed in the shadows and a naked woman listened to him, then followed him. “Eat this apple. There’s nothing wrong with doing it.” There’s nothing wrong . . . there’s nothing wrong . . . and she obeyed him. I felt every bit as obedient. It took no effort to obtain my obedience. My right slipper fell off my foot and Father Marenzio bent over patiently to pick it up, while I clung to his neck, then he stood up, and we looked into each other’s eyes. He smiled at me. He was strong and calm, and determined. His eyes were full of love. “You know that you’re as light as a feather?” he asked. He didn’t slide the slipper back onto my foot, but held it tight in his fist. He was crushing it. “An angel’s feather, maybe,” and he laughed merrily.
If there was an angel between us, that was him, actually. Father Marenzio. The guardian angel who watches over each of us. Who guides you in the darkness, who teaches you who you are, and in the end who flies down and saves you. Your luminous shadow against the wall, even your name, finally clarified. Edoardo . . . guardian of all that is good. That goodness, always threatened. Some want to steal it, others intend to destroy it. “Edoardo, come on, wake up . . .” but I kept my eyes half shut. The light in the attic hallway was turned off, and the floorboards beneath Father Marenzio’s feet were creaking with every step. “Here we are,” he said.
HE HAD PUT ME IN HIS BED. On the little side table, there were books and a water pitcher. A faint light came in through the curtains on the window, perhaps moonlight glinting off the snow. He wanted to check my temperature again, to see if the fever had gotten any worse, and this time he did it himself. He lifted the rough brown blanket and pulled down my pajama bottoms. I cooperated, lifting my back so that the elastic band could slide under my bottom, and I spread one leg, my right leg. I thought he wanted to slide the thermometer in there. Father Marenzio did slide it in, and narrowed my leg. The thermometer stood up straight. Not even my mother had ever done that, I don’t think. I had always done it on my own, ever since I was a little boy. Then he covered me back up, with just the sheet, and together we waited five minutes, then ten.
“WHAT A HANDSOME BOY YOU ARE . . .” said Father Marenzio, caressing me. “You really are beautiful . . .” and I could see his face close to mine. He’d moved the chair over next to the bed. He was smiling at me. “You’re so handsome . . . so kind . . .” His freckles had lit up on his face, and behind the lenses his large light-colored eyes glistened with emotion. After pulling the thermometer out of my crotch, he hadn’t told me whether my temperature had risen any higher, to me it seemed as if it had, but that wasn’t important right now. I imagined Jervi at that moment, snoring with all the others, in our big bunk room. He was dreaming about tomorrow’s downhill race. And, of course, he was dreaming
about winning. I fell asleep for a while and then woke back up. The great big angel standing at heaven’s gate held a flaming sword, but instead of turning people away, he was waving them in with his sword. I drew close, full of curiosity, even if the light that poured out of the gate, and from the sword, and from the angel, was blinding me. But I still wanted to enter. “Wait, wait.” Padre Marenzio rubbed his face and his eyes behind the lenses, “Wait,” he said, panting, “wait!” and when he started caressing my face and neck again, I felt his large hand was wet. And this contact gave me pleasure. I told him I liked it. And then he wetted his handkerchief under the faucet of the sink in the room, wrung it out, and applied it, folded and refolded, to my forehead. “God bless you,” he was saying, “God works miracles . . . on this earth.”
I believe that at this point it was the middle of the night. And that it went on like that until daybreak.
17
ARBUS HAS GONE MISSING AGAIN. Maybe he sensed that he was done with me. The following week I made an appointment with Paris’s elderly widow to get her to tell me the details of the proletarian expropriation at the shop on Piazza Verbano. She’d been there that day.
But I mustn’t let myself be distracted from the mass, this time, I want to stay until the end of the service. I want to listen and participate. This Christmas mass has to work, it has to be valid, this time, at least this one. The clock strikes midnight.
The Catholic School Page 158
