Behold, the clock strikes midnight, He is born. He is born. I lack faith. I’ve never found it. To be honest, I’ve never made any great effort to search for it. I certainly haven’t wrung my soul to save it. I assumed it would come on its own, faith, strike me without warning, like an illness or a lottery winning, but clearly that’s not the case. It takes preparation, you have to lure it in, like some unwary prey, the way you’d seduce a girl, or make a show of being willing to be seduced by it, preyed upon by it. Am I ready now? Is this the moment? Is this? How many moments present themselves in life? Or is there just one, to be seized, now or never? Does it bloom only once, like the plant murdered by my classmate Jervi? And when it dies, do the tears shed by whoever loved that wonderful unique flower serve to water something, help it grow?
How Svampa sobbed over that withered stalk!
You damned faggot of a priest, are you finally going to succeed in stirring my emotions?
Even walls built to protect can collapse and kill us, even the steps built for our comfort and ease can be lethal. That’s what I had read among the thousands of thoughts that Cosmo had stored up in his notebooks. What good had they done? And good to whom? Perhaps to him? Why had he died without being willing to communicate them to anyone? What did you die for, my old literature teacher? Your resurrection is a distant mirage. Your body will be stolen away. I knew very well what no one asked me. If they had asked me, I would no longer have known it. My thoughts wandered among the images of bygone times and the times still to come, while awaiting the reawakening.
THE CONGREGATION LINED UP to take communion. Not all the Rummos went up. The elderly Eleonora remained kneeling in her pew. She watched the others. The young woman with her son in her arms, when her time came to stand in front of Don Salari, opened her mouth and let him place the wafer on her tongue. The little boy tried to do as his mother had done, but it faded into a long yawn, whereupon he shut his eyes and fell asleep. The elderly priest seemed to smile at the youngster, abandoning his customary severity. The grimace engraved in his furrowed brow could, in fact, take on various meanings. I’d have liked to join the line. That night seemed inexhaustible: as soon as the line started to shorten and seemed to be on the verge of dissolving, someone always joined it, someone who had waited till the last minute to leave their pew and join the line, the way experienced travelers do at an airport departure gate, to avoid needlessly spending time standing. Perhaps everyone in the SLM church took communion, except for Eleonora Rummo and me. Don Salari gave himself communion last of all. He popped the wafer into his mouth as if it were a treat, and his mouth vanished with the whole wafer.
IT WAS LATE BY NOW, the middle of the night. In the black sky, thunderclouds followed one after the other. The sky loured dark and heavy over the church’s modern, copper-sheathed roof. The rain poured down. The cross flamed.
In each of us, reason acts slowly, while sentiment can be triggered in the blink of an eye: fear, love, resentment, cheerfulness all spray upward and then evaporate. Desires burn up in moments. Whereas in my friend Arbus, as a boy, the exact opposite happened: his intellect was lightning-quick, his heart was slow. But once it was set in motion . . .
The memory of Arbus and his sister, Leda, suddenly stopped obsessing me and became clear and simple. Perdìta was me, I was Perdìta, the small pale flame that glows on the night table, the sky-blue cloak, the downcast eyes full of sadness, the bare feet.
We don’t understand other people. We may not have the patience necessary to do so. We judge them overhastily, awkwardly, there is so much left that we do not know, so much left to suffer and enjoy, while we’re stranded here, in number, in time, in dimensions, in the confinement of a single mind.
We ought to work more on uncertainty, turn it to our favor, that’s right, work for uncertain results. If what we are looking for should never make itself known, that would mean that it doesn’t exist or that we’re unworthy of finding it. But instead, it does sometimes appear, and its very rarity cancels all equivocation.
ONE SONG AFTER THE OTHER, the Christmas mass at SLM was drawing to its close. And my heart finally overflowed with joy.
September 29, 1975–September 29, 2015
Author’s Note
The Catholic School is based on events that actually happened, events to which, in part, I was a direct eyewitness. Working from those actual events, I’ve intertwined episodes and characters with varying percentages of fiction: some are concocted out of whole cloth, others owe a considerable debt to things that actually took place, to people who exist or once did. I had no hesitation in mixing the true, the allegedly true, the fictional but plausible, and the true but implausible; I freely interbred memory and imagination. The same character who narrates the story in the first person singular may well differ to some extent from the author cited on the cover.
Just to be clear, in my reporting on the crimes in question, I made use of police reports, deposition transcripts, wiretaps, interviews, and legal verdicts concerning the protagonists of those crimes, cutting and stitching where I thought necessary and omitting or replacing certain names, for the most part because they would have sown confusion or stirred up pointless and tiresome controversy. This book makes no claim to any accurate historical reconstruction or to propose an alternative version of events: if anything, it hopes to restore an atmosphere free of rhetorical contamination. The only episode in which I’ve wandered freely away from the official version of the events I took as my model—developing in my own fashion several confessions that at the time were deemed unreliable by the investigators—is the death of Cassio Majuri, behind which name lies concealed a controversial case of murder: and I did so strictly for reasons of narrative expediency, for which I take full responsibility. The contents of human life and human lives is what literature shapes for its own specific purposes, and it tends not to be overtender in its treatment.
If, in my handling of personal truths, I have caused any shame and suffering, I neither suffer nor feel shame at the thought, unless the result is judged to be mediocre, in which case I feel I owe an apology to those who have fallen victim to my reckless inadequacy. To my readers first and foremost.
The list of texts and people who can claim credit, small or large, for this book would be endless. Nine out of every ten lines in The Catholic School owe a debt to some outside contribution—whether conceded, gifted outright, or pilfered. To paraphrase the lines of a poet friend, if I were to return that which is not mine, I’d have nothing left.
Among the many debts I owe to those who helped me to revise such a long text, I will limit myself here to mentioning the generous advice of Margherita Loy and the punctual severity of my daughter Adelaide, who also helped me to transcribe the parts of the book that I wrote by hand. To them, and to all those who worked professionally on this volume, my gratitude.
The Catholic School would never have been conceived, written, rewritten, and—most important of all—finished, if I hadn’t had Francesca d’Aloja at my side.
Translator’s Note
To a translator, the well-known line “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there” rings with a special resonance. Translation is a quasi-industrial process, taking semifinished “foreign” products and buffing and polishing them into a new and “legible” form. The choke points in this manufacturing process are the stubbornly foreign concepts, the ones without a web of known cultural references. Just as we have a hard time extracting ancient humor, with its sly winks and puns, from, say, Greek Old Comedy, likewise does a translator struggle not to overexplain a text’s nostalgic references to an earlier period of a foreign culture: a popular singer who committed suicide backstage at the Sanremo Song Festival, or a national craze for a racing game played on beach sand with oversized marbles. No “untranslatable words,” perhaps, but many “untranslatable worlds.”
The word “foreign” is itself a translator’s conundrum: How would you translate it? If an Italian in an Italian book uses the
word, how would that translate in English? “Non-Italian?” Or do we use “foreign”? Alfonso Cuarón, in his Oscar acceptance speech for the Best Foreign Language Film Award for Roma, slyly pointed to this paradox when he said, “I grew up watching foreign-language films and learning so much from them and being inspired, films like Citizen Kane, Jaws, Rashomon, The Godfather, and Breathless.”
When Don DeLillo wrote Libra, he wasn’t writing about an “American” political murder, with its ensuing conspiracy theories and fever dreams. He was writing about a global story, the most powerful man on earth brought down by the nephew-in-law of a Soviet colonel. Not so for this story set in the Italian 1970s.
The case at the heart of The Catholic School is one that still resonates in the minds of Italians. The kidnapping-rape-murder at Monte Circeo was as much as or more than the sum of its parts. What we Americans mostly know about Italy in the 1970s is the Red Brigades, a terrifying, shadowy left-wing terror cell that kidnapped and murdered Aldo Moro, former prime minister and party chief. What we know less about is the neo-Fascist nemesis to the Italian revolutionary left, committing murders and bombings in what amounted to a barely controlled civil war, with the tacit approval of the Catholic Church, the “renegade” Italian intelligence services, and their CIA big brothers. Literally, the Red and the Black: Marxist-Leninist Red and neo-Fascist Black.
All this in the midst of the eruption of a “nostalgic” wave of toxic violence and masculinity, on both sides of the political spectrum. As Albinati himself puts it, groups of men rape women to keep from killing each other. In the past, in a foreign country, they may do things differently, but there are enough universal similarities to make this complex and breathtakingly savage exploration of male dysfunction an absorbing read.
About the Translator
Antony Shugaar is a writer and translator. He is the author of Coast to Coast and I Lie for a Living, and the coauthor, with the late Gianni Guadalupi, of Discovering America and Latitude Zero.
The Catholic School
Edoardo Albinati is a novelist and screenwriter. His novel The Catholic School won the 2016 Premio Strega. He lives in Rome, where he has worked as a teacher in Rebibbia prison since 1994.
First published 2019 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
This electronic edition first published 2019 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-5098-5630-5
Copyright © 2016 by Rizzoli/RCS Libri S.p.A., Milano
Translation copyright © 2019 by Antony Shugaar
Main image jacket photograph by Peter Lippmann from the fine art series Nobel Rot. Added wasps © Shutterstock
Originally published in Italian in 2016 by Rizzoli, Italy, as La scuola cattolica
The right of Edoardo Albinati to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Visit www.picador.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.
The Catholic School Page 159
