Class

by Francesco Pacifico

  “Well, you seem like you might be the owner, if I may…” Gustavo Tullio feels his eye sockets turning to marble and tries to tone down the decorous language, but now he finds himself unable to look Fofi in the eyes or to look at anything in particular. “You’ve got the music turned all the way up here, and you’re yapping away, and well, you know, some customers come here to kind of, collect their thoughts and, how do I put it, be among books, but then there’s this guy here, this guy who’s acting like he’s at home by himself…I don’t know, I think it’s pretty weird…”

  He gets up, grabs his gym bag and puts the legal pad and the planner back into the briefcase, a gesture born of confusion. “You want to collect your thoughts, sir?” Fofi says without missing a beat. “Go to a church, then. This is a café.”

  The reference to a church, random but potent, makes Tullio feel dumb and exposed. He heads toward the exit, thinking that Fofi must know about the two of them somehow, like Jesus predicting Peter’s denial. He’s almost out the door, and he hasn’t looked back to figure out how Ludovica has reacted to this exchange. He hopes that this, here and now, will finally terminate their relationship. Praise the Lord! But before he can make his escape, Fofi nails it a second time: “Your coffee’s on the house, sir,” he says with cold politeness, forcing Tullio to respond with a whimpering, Pavlovian “Thanks!” Back on the street, he feels uncomfortable, sliced in half, reset, restored, saved. “My nonsense will make me a saint!” he moans as he unlocks the handlebars of his bike.

  —

  HE BLOCKS HER on Skype. He tries to spend more time talking to his children. He trips over their neglected guitar, knocks on Esther’s door, and tells her to turn down her music. He’s ashamed he hasn’t been able to yield, hasn’t told her that he liked her rap. Without the online chats, he feels that the life he’s allotted between work and sleep amounts to driving around in circles near the church, looking for a parking spot after he’s dropped off Maria, or Maria and the children. He survives these half-hour-long challenges, these feats of strength, by listening to contrarian radio shows whose commentators discuss racist politicians in northern Italy or the latest skirmish with Gaddafi, or some starlet’s new leaked sex tape, or a sadder starlet’s full-on career move into porn.

  But then one day, after work, he’s surprised to see her at his gym, on the step machine. She grips the padded handles tightly, moving them in sync with her steps. In a haze, he realizes that her presence here is a miracle: her back and her precious ass, finely contoured in her tight track pants, her back sweating under a white t-shirt that dangles just above the two cheeks of her ass, which take turns flexing. All he can do is accept this prophesy, this prophesy in the shape of her grand head of hair tied up with a black hair band he recognizes. He concludes without a doubt that it’s her when he sees her jaw move, a generic gesture that nonetheless feels intimate, and he decides that he won’t approach. Tullius in shorts is not a great spectacle, with his white wristband and his new white sneakers. Going over to her means accepting what she’s chosen for them both.

  Tullio climbs onto a stationary bike at the opposite end of the room. He aims a thought in her direction, hoping, somehow, that it will reach her. “You won’t do my family any harm.”

  You see her reflection in the mirrored wall. You see her back, the black sports bra under her t-shirt, her sweaty hands on the handlebars, submissive, resentful, explicit. You go over and apologize for making a fool of yourself at Librici.

  Ludovica looks down at the hand you’ve just placed on her shoulder, and you begin talking before you can make eye contact. “I have to apologize. I looked like such an idiot,” you say.

  “No, not at all.”

  “I’m such a dumb ass.”

  “No, not at all. My mother called you ‘that gentleman’—you really looked the part!”

  They don’t talk about the Skype block.

  “No, really, I was pathetic.”

  “No, honestly, it worked wonders. Basically, I haven’t said anything, and neither has my mom, but she talked to my father, she told me, and now Fofi has stopped blasting all that Italian seventies music in the café. Mom definitely talked to Dad.”

  “What about you?”

  “Well, I’m supposed to just stay at the bar, but when it’s a slow day I help him out with the books. Being a woman is heavy shit; there’s always, you know, there’s this thing in the way—the fact that he wants to sleep with me.”

  “Being a man is heavy shit, too,” you add for no reason.

  “Being a woman is worse, though.”

  “Well but are they paying you? Have they started paying you again?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What about your father?”

  The two of you sit on a padded bench near the swimming pool, drowning in the romantic smell of chlorine.

  “I know it’s the most ridiculous thing ever to have joined your gym, but…It’s impossible, everything is impossible. I don’t have anything anymore. Lorenzo left for New York again, and when he comes back…I’ve changed the locks.”

  And it’s here, Gustavo Tullio, damned Gustavo Tullio, that you enter the darkness, and it’s here that I abandon you, if I can, because I can’t stand this: I don’t know why I have to know these things. I don’t know what notion of truth this is.

  Gustavo Tullio claimed me as his at scout camp the summer I turned fourteen. He took me the way the hacendero takes a farmer’s daughter—through the recommendation of a man he trusts.

  He was the king of our reparto, the twelve- to fifteen-year-old scouts. His animal name was Resourceful Lion Cub. He was the chief of the Hawks, he played guitar. He even managed to make morning prayer look cool with his earnest, heartfelt style—very sessuale. Tullio signed his letters “Gusty72,” spoke to teachers and counselors with a confidence and an intimacy that seemed impossible, was an expert in tying knots. He wore a trendy red Moncler vest that had been passed down to him from his brother, lilac sweaters from Best Company, ripped jeans with Naj Oleari flower patches on the sides. He was a gran gallo: he’d already dunked his cookie, as the boys used to say back then, with a girl who was two years older than him, a legendary feat accomplished the previous summer, when he’d stayed in Rome while his parents were down by the shore.

  Keen Porcupine, aka Franchino, deputy chief of Tullio’s squadron, was the one who made the recommendation. He spent his first day dragging logs over to the wide field in the middle of the camp, where every squadron—the two all-male ones and the two all-female ones—was to build a pile dwelling topped with a large tent. But this was just a pretext for his real mission: an inspection of the two female squadrons. We watched him as he approached with his Esprit sweatpants cut off at the thighs, watched him press down on his stomach to keep it from showing through his London U t-shirt with the anxiety of the former fat kid he was.

  He was doing reconnaissance for the Black Feet Tribe. The news was that a new third-year had joined the group the previous fall—the second deputy of the Ducks squadron—a coy, modest girl with a good singing voice who had visited and befriended popular Silvia when she’d been hospitalized with Ewing’s sarcoma. Silvia had called this girl—Daria, me—a nun, though she also claimed that I’d been caught fingering myself in the bathroom: an odd but compelling diptych. So here I was, a red-haired beauty in the making, or as one of the boys had put it, una sfitinzia arrapation, a chick worthy of a boner, in the Milanese/English-inflected paninari slang of the time. Very original, they’d said, e con davanzale doc, a certified rack.

  That summer, I was one of the campers who would get to take part in the totem ceremony and I would have to endure the night rites, a mysterious and esoteric set of rituals. Franchino told everybody in the Black Feet Tribe, who organized the trials, that any trials I faced would have to have the effect of making me feel more slutty—bottana—so that I could change [my] life forever, and hopefully end up blowing someone.

  The totem ceremony was an orgy of trials—some o
f them violent, some of them sleazy, some of them truly disgusting—at the end of which the third-years would get their own animal names, their own special nicknames, and membership in the Black Feet Tribe. Some of the trials involved stripping and cold showers; in others, campers had to face their fears (spiders, hours alone in the woods) or cover themselves in mud or garbage.

  The Black Feet, who supervised the trials, were an informal organization whose hierarchy paralleled that of the counselors and who ranged in age from fifteen-year-old fourth-years to teachers in their twenties. The faux- or quasi-torture that defined the totem nights had little to do with the educational principles espoused by Catholic scautismo—they were in fact opposite tendencies, impossible to reconcile—so the outcome was an authentically Fascist education, an echo of the old days of castor oil and public humiliation. But it was hardly aberrant: the counselors who ruled the camp were Black Feet members, too, which meant that none of this was an aberration. It was almost an official event…it would have been, but for the camp priest, who stayed in his tent so as not to give the proceedings his blessing. He tried his best to sleep as the children’s screams echoed through the forest.

  My parents had pulled me out of my previous group after it was revealed that the thirty-five-year-old leader had been spending a lot of his time hugging seventeen-year-old girls in their sleep. No one knew if he’d had sex with any of these girls (as it turned out, he hadn’t), but still, this was too much. The new group’s headquarters were in Viale Regina Margherita, a rich neighborhood near the Policlinico Hospital. This group had retained its links with the right-wing terrorism of the late seventies, and its vibe was distinctly Fascist.

  We bestowed fake nicknames on one another before the real ones were announced—I later learned that the fake name Keen Porcupine had chosen for me was Sorca Madonna. Sorca literally meant “rat,” and also “an extremely sexy woman.” Some implications were more risqué: as a play on words, the name sounded even worse if you substituted P for S, turning it into Porca, as the combination of Pig and Mary was a typical and forbidden slur word. The fake nickname was the first thing about me that got Tullio’s attention. “You’re right,” Gusty said with great deliberation “She has appeared here just like a Madonna.”

  (Tullius was morally complex. He dressed the part of the paninaro, and he watched Drive In, the dumb, trendy comedy show that everyone was into, where they all got their English/Milanese slang, their paninaro style. The right-wing comedians on the show popularized that look of preppy leisure. But Tullius also had a spiritual streak. When he joined up he began to conform at once to the scout group’s Fascist style and started using the Roman salute as a form of camaraderie. Soon enough, he’d shapeshift again and become a leftist, though this also only lasted a few years.)

  Me, I had blossomed that summer. In the city I was all about Closed capris and Superga sneakers, like all the other girls. And like all the other girls, I looked bland and repressed, pristine in my fuchsia sweaters. I was a church girl, even though my mother hadn’t been one. I never disobeyed orders—I was always boring—but when I showed up to camp I had Silvia’s clothes with me. She was in recovery and wouldn’t be coming at all that summer, and she didn’t want the clothes to go unused. So I made them my own: the short cutoffs rolled up at the top of the thighs, the baggy white tees that made me look bountiful and tender and softened my features. I kept the sleeves rolled up, too, and revealed my gentle shoulders, which gave way to arms scratched up from helping out with construction in the neighborhood, from carrying wood and rope during long afternoons. My knees were grazed, my shins were bruised, and I had scabs and small burns from spilling boiling water on myself. I’d tie back my red hair with a thin piece of rope, and someone would usually stick in a flower or a blade of grass. Right after I got to camp, a female counselor (the girlfriend of the brother of a Fascist who died in prison) offered me a hazy omen: “This summer at camp, you’ll rock their world.”

  I was always ashamed of my round face, here, but now it was finally in fashion. On the third day, Gusty and Franchino showed up together at the site of the Ducks squadron’s new home, then still under construction. They said they’d come to help us build the pile dwelling. The smell of burnt grass, which appeared around this time every year, wasn’t there that summer. It rained almost every day. Nature was pregnant and green, and our shorts were always smudged and wet. The first couple nights we’d slept in a damp tent; our kidneys hurt and our eyes were heavy. Everyone wore shorts: the homely girls and the cute girls, the fat girls and the thin girls. Keen Porcupine and Resourceful Lion Cub, guitar around his shoulder, entertained us by making fun of the wet spots on our butt cheeks. “You’re soaked through, girls. For Pete’s sake, reghiuleit”—an English-sounding thing that meant “get your shit together.” “Did you sleep in a swamp,” Franchino added, “or are you just happy to see us?”

  “Why the Christopher are you out here turkeying us instead of building your own pile dwellings?” said our squadron leader in that weird slang, which makes less and less sense as time goes by. Chesty, with thin eyes and long, straight chestnut hair, she was the only girl who could put up with them. (She helped take care of Silvia, her ill friend, but she’s the one who will die first, in her thirties, from a disease similar to the one she helped Silvia conquer.)

  “You mean you don’t appreciate our prezijon knots? No? Should we take off, Tullius?”

  “Ingratitiud,” said Tullio. He was a sensitive paninaro. His dark leg hair protruded from under his short, pale jeans and commanded respect, even if the legs themselves weren’t quite straight. He was tall and brawny enough that he was a little too big to be considered slim (his stomach bulged out after meals), his hair was dirty blond and curly, and he had an adorable flat nose, which had inspired the Lion Cub name. The ends of our ropes were all frayed, so he pulled open his Opinel clasp knife, trimmed each end with a sharp cut, burned the ends with his Zippo. He cleaned his knife on the soles of his Timberlands before folding it up in his pocket. Franchino kept joking as I watched Tullio, the Lion Cub, stack the logs in neat groups of three.

  Franchino wasn’t trying to pretend not to stare at my round shoulders, my large-ish thighs, my big and pointy breasts. My ass had just taken shape, suddenly. I was fourteen and hadn’t done more than kiss a boy. I touched myself, though not often, and only climaxed in my sleep. I wore Sylvia’s Stan Smiths with short socks, the white of the sneakers smudged green and brown. I longed to be a sfitinzia.

  That morning I’d gotten another burn on my shin when I slammed into a pot of boiling water. My white t-shirt looked like milk pouring out from under my freckled neck. I wore a light green bra and had big green froglike eyes that people had finally started to notice under my bulging forehead. I had my hair in a ponytail to keep my face exposed.

  I now knew everything about my looks, and I was starting to accept that people liked me. When Franchino had had enough of staring at me, he helped Tullio tie up the first three logs, the triangular structure of the first tepee. They raised it with great exaggeration.

  They teased us as they finished the knot for the second tepee. At morning assembly, the camp counselors had announced that someone had taken a dump behind a bush near the fire pit, instead of in the wooden latrines. This person had cleaned him- or herself up using wax paper from a pack of prosciutto. The counselors had mocked the unknown perpetrator, invited the person responsible to turn him- or herself in.

  Franco: “You ask me, it’s a woman.”

  Gustavo: “No, please, get that thought out of my head. Girls, please tell me it wasn’t any of you.”

  Franco: “ ‘My dear,’ the man said while they were in the middle of anal, ‘where’s that prosciutto smell coming from?’ ”

  Our squadron leader laughed.

  We watched them lift the four tepee structures, one after another, with great skill. We couldn’t have done it ourselves, and thanks to them, we got two weeks of dry sleep and pain-free kidneys.

/>   Architecture was the camp’s real lesson, its presiding force. Architecture helped us make sense of what would otherwise have been a virgin green field and a spring and a stream. Instead the landscapes were quickly organized, mapped, regulated: the sleeping area for the kids; the service area where the counselors handed us food from the pantry tent and equipment from the equipment tent; the counselors’ sleeping area, with small single tents; and the huge wooden structure where every morning the associations’ flags were raised. That year, architecture was more crucial than ever: because it was always raining, the tents and the wooden structures had to be perfect. The sporting events were canceled as were the craft workshops, so we spent a lot of time in our pile dwellings three meters above the earth, which meant that everything had to be tight and secure: the wooden base, the ropes, the log ladder that led up to where we slept. We spent hours chatting in tents three meters above the earth, mostly in ours, and sometimes in the big group tent where we discussed our individual moral goals for the camp and for the upcoming school year.

  After the pile dwelling structure was set, with the three teepees connected by four long logs, the boys added more logs and then mounted the structure and laid down the floorboards, which they also secured with rope. They then mounted the tent on top and threw the ropes down to the ground, so that we could nail them into the earth with pegs. Finally they picked up the guitar and began to sing a Vasco Rossi song.

  One of us dunked tea bags in metal mugs; another played the cymbals. As Gustavo sang he made eye contact with me. “Sing a harmony to the refrain,” he told me before the refrain started. When he sang the lyrics “I love you, don’t change the subject,” he glanced at my tits. I touched my belly.

  —

  IN THE DAYS that followed, we would meet to practice harmonies for other songs. We’d meet after lunch during the afternoon break. He wanted to teach me some guitar, too, to figure out harmonies for the songs we’d sing around the fire in the evenings. “When two voices harmonize…on thirds and fifths, let’s say, it’s like one of them is vibrating in the other.” When he was alone with me there was no English slang, no Milanese accent. Four days after we first sang together, we were sitting on a rock in a hidden recess by the stream. He began to sniff my neck. “This is good sweat,” he explained. “At camp you produce a ton of good smells. City sweat stinks; it’s neurotic sweat, ugly sweat.” The next afternoon, it was pouring, and we were sitting in some squadron’s tent with a group of cool kids, discussing sex stuff. I was sitting with my legs crossed, very rigid, and he must have guessed that I was tense. “You’ve got bad sweat today. Are you nervous?” I wasn’t letting him touch me, and I wasn’t letting him kiss me, but we both knew that he was circling around the subject.