I reached at once what I conceived the proper length for my intended poema length of about one hundred lines. It is, in fact, a hundred and eight. ("The Philosophy of Composition")

Contemporaneity, flowing and transitory, "low," present-this "life without beginning or end" was a subject of representation only in the low genres. Most importantly, it was the basic subject matter in that broadest and richest of realms, the common people's creative culture of laughter. In the aforementioned work I tried to indicate the enormous influence exercised by this realm-in the ancient world as well as the Middle Ages-on the birth and formation of novelistic language. It was equally significant for all other historical factors in the novelistic genre, during their emergence and early formation. Precisely here, in popular laughter, the authentic folkloric roots of the novel are to be sought. The present, contemporary life as such, "I myself" and "my contemporaries," "my time"-all these concepts were originally the objects of ambivalent laughter, at the same time cheerful and annihilating. It is precisely here that a fundamentally new attitude toward language and toward the word is generated. Alongside direct representation-laughing at living realitythere flourish parody and travesty of all high genres and of all lofty models embodied in national myth. The "absolute past" of gods, demigods and heroes is here, in parodies and even more so in travesties, "contemporized": it is brought low, represented on a plane equal with contemporary life, in an everyday environment, in the low language of contemporaneity.

[...]

Precisely what is this novelistic spirit in these serio-comical genres, and on what basis do we claim them as the first step in the development of the novel? It is this: contemporary reality serves as their subject, and-even more important-it is the starting point for understanding, evaluating and formulating such genres. For the first time, the subject of serious literary representation (although, it is true, at the same time comical) is portrayed without any distance, on the level of contemporary reality, in a zone of direct and even crude contact. Even where the past or myth serves as the subject of representation in these genres there is no epic distance, and contemporary reality provides the point of view. Of special significance in this process of demolishing distance is the comical origin of these genres: they derive from folklore (popular laughter). It is precisely laughter that destroys the epic, and in general destroys any hierarchical (distancing and valorized) distance. As a distanced image a subject cannot be comical; to be made comical, it must be brought close. Everything that makes us laugh is close at hand, all comical creativity works in a zone of maximal proximity. Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it. Laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it. Laughter is a vital factor in laying down that prerequisite for fearlessness without which it would be impossible to approach the world realistically. As it draws an object to itself and makes it familiar, laughter delivers the object into the fearless hands of investigative experiment-both scientific and artisticand into the hands of free experimental fantasy. Familiarization of the world through laughter and popular speech is an extremely important and indispensable step in making possible free, scientifically knowable and artistically realistic creativity in European civilization.

The plane of comic (humorous) representation is a specific plane in its spatial as well as its temporal aspect. Here the role of memory is minimal; in the comic world there is nothing for memory and tradition to do. One ridicules in order to forget. This is the zone of maximally familiar and crude contact; laughter means abuse, and abuse could lead to blows. Basically this is uncrowning, that is, the removal of an object from the distanced plane, the destruction of epic distance, an assault on and destruction of the distanced plane in general. In this plane (the plane of laughter) one can disrespectfully walk around whole objects; therefore, the back and rear portion of an object (and also its innards, not normally accessible for viewing) assume a special importance. The object is broken apart, laid bare (its hierarchical ornamentation is removed): the naked object is ridiculous; its "empty" clothing, stripped and separated from its person, is also ridiculous. What takes place is a comical operation of dismemberment. ("Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel" in The Dialogic Imagination)

When I was a young writer, I was jealous of the writers who had their own cities. Of Jorge Luis Borges who had Buenos Aires and always wrote about this fabulous city. Of Fyodor Dostoevsky who had Saint Petersburg. Of Lawrence Durrell who had Alexandria. Of course, James Joyce invented, in a way, a fabulous Dublin. I had in mind, by writing, to appropriate my own city. If I couldn’t find an interesting real city, I should invent it. So, in a way I recreated Bucharest, and, in another way, I invented it. If you come to Bucharest, you will very soon realize that it has little to do with its image in my novels. I’ve invented much of it. I tried to create a coherent image of, as I call it in my novel, “the saddest city in the world”, a city full of ruins, a city full of images of the old glory which is no more. I made Bucharest in my own image, in my own personality. I tried to transform it into some sort of alter ego or a twin brother. I projected myself on the very eclectic architecture of this city, which has several layers of history and architecture.

[...]

Now we’ve arrived at the problem of how I write and this, in my opinion, is very interesting because I don’t know any other writer who does that. I write by hand, without any plan, without a synopsis. My way of writing is a pure and continuous inspiration. Let’s say, today I’m in the middle of a novel and I have to write one page or two like every day. What I do is, I read the page I wrote on the previous day and I try to write in the same key, like a musician. On each and every page I have the chance to change everything, to change the meaning and the course of the novel. 

It’s madness to write like that, without knowing what you’re going to put on the next page. It’s like using a 3D printer to make a car, not by assembling all its parts, but by making the lights at the front of the car first, then the windscreen, then the seats, then the engine, everything up to the back of the car instead of making everything at once. I have to have enormous faith in what my mind can do because otherwise you cannot write like this. It’s writing like a poet, not like a prose writer. 

Of course, when you write this way you can fail very, very easily because on each and every page you have to decide your book’s trajectory. It’s as if there are crossroads everywhere, all demanding a decision. But here is the trick: it’s not you who decides but your mind. Your mind knows better than you do what it is going to do and where it wants to go. It’s like a horse running a race: the jockey doesn’t win the race – the race is won by the horse. The jockey should be very small, very light, and should only touch the horse in very few places. The ideal would be that the jockey doesn’t touch the horse at all, that he just flies above it. It’s your horse, your mind that wins the race, not you. You are the small person that guides the horse, nothing else.

So, I usually let my mind work. I do not touch my book but let it flow in every direction, wherever it wants to go. I’m only the portal, the medium, nothing but the voice of someone inside, and it is this person who actually dictates this book. Sometimes, it feels as if the text is already written on the page and I only remove the white stripes that cover the words. I just erase them and let the text appear. (interview)

We can endure any truth, however destructive, provided it replaces everything, provided it affords as much vitality as the hope for which it substitutes. (The Trouble with Being Born)

The other, not the self, should be the center of whatever “communication” might mean. An episode from the life of William James captures the problem well. He had been given charge of a turtle’s heart for a popular lecture on physiology by one of his Harvard Medical School professors. The lecturer was demonstrating that the heart would pulsate when certain of its nerves were stimulated, and the pulsations were projected onto a screen in the front of Sanders Theatre. Halfway through the lecture, James realized the heart was not responding, so he took it upon himself, in a sudden and almost automatic response to the emergency, to make the proper motions on the screen by manipulating his forefinger such that the audience would not fail to gain a true understanding of the heart’s physiology. Writing many years later—in a final essay on psychical research that was centrally about the balance of fraud and faith in what we can know—James admits that such simulation could be disdained as shameless cheating.2 Had he acted otherwise, however, the audience would have been cheated of an understanding of physiology. His forefinger had performed humbug in the service of understanding. Confessing his prestidigitation or the demise of the heart would have offered only a secondary truth: the flaws of the apparatus rather than its capacity to project truth. All our knowledge, he suggests, may rest on strategically concealed frauds—or rather, what would be considered frauds by those who still hold to a copy theory of knowledge. The criterion for knowing should not be accurate duplication of the world, but the ability to make our way through with the best aids we can get. (Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication)

and then he looks down at the floor in that way he has and when Åsleik looks down in that way it’s like he isn’t looking down, it’s like he’s looking up, like he’s looking at everything all together, like he’s seeing a big context without being clear about it and then something comes over his face, yes, it’s like he is suddenly falling out of this evil world and into a still and peaceful clearing or clarity, an area of stillness, of light, yes, of shining darkness, because it’s like he’s fallen out of himself, out of where he usually is, like he no longer knows himself, like he’s gone, away from himself, as he stands there looking down with a light that’s like what the sky can give off, together with the clouds, when that’s what the light wants to do, yes, a light like that comes from him, the kind of light that can come from a dog too, from a dog’s eyes, yes, that happens a lot, when I think about it I’ve often seen that strange light coming from a dog’s eyes (The Other Name)

I hurried to the spinet desk, I put the dippen in the violet ink, I praised the Lord almost, though my Lord you must understand I see as a kind of doglike man with a sad face Who watches the gate here, He never says anything to me, He knows my suffering, and He knows that my buddies are not as dead as I, and He knows I must walk upon the earth for a spell before going down into the total mulberry night. (In a Shallow Grave)

Symbols apart, his political views were of an extraordinary solidity and had that freedom of great character such as is made possible only by a total absence of doubts. As the heir to a feudal estate he was a member of the Upper House, but he was not politically active, nor did he hold a post at Court or in the government. He was “nothing but a patriot.” But precisely because of this, and because of his independent wealth, he had become the focus for all other patriots who followed with concern the development of the Empire and of mankind. The ethical obligation not to remain a passive onlooker but to “offer a helping hand from above” permeated his life. He was convinced that “the people” were “good.” Since not only his many officials, employees, and servants but countless others depended on him for their economic security, he had never known “the people” in any other respect, except on Sundays and holidays, when they poured out from behind the scenery as a cheerful, colorful throng, like an opera chorus. Anything that did not fit in with this image he attributed to “subversive elements,” the work of irresponsible, callow, sensation-seeking individuals. Brought up in a religious and feudal spirit, never exposed to contradiction through having to deal with middle-class people, not unread, but as an aftereffect of the clerical instruction of his sheltered youth prevented for the rest of his life from recognizing in a book anything other than agreement with or mistaken divergence from his own principles, he knew the outlook of more up-to-date people only from the controversies in Parliament or in the newspapers. And since he knew enough to recognize the many superficialities there, he was daily confirmed in his prejudice that the true bourgeois world, more deeply understood, was basically nothing other than what he himself conceived it to be. In general, “the true” prefixed to political convictions was one of his aids for finding his way in a world that although created by God too often denied Him. He was firmly convinced that even true socialism fitted in with his view of things. He had had from the beginning, in fact, a deeply personal notion, which he had never fully acknowledged even to himself, to build a bridge across which the socialists were to come marching into his own camp. It is obvious that helping the poor is a proper chivalric task, and that for the true high nobility there was really no very great difference between a middle-class factory owner and his workers. “We’re all socialists at heart” was one of his pet sayings, meaning no more and no less than that there were no social distinctions in the hereafter. In this world, however, he considered them necessary facts of life, and expected the working class, after due attention to its material welfare, to resist the unreasonable slogans imported by foreign agitators and to accept the natural order of things in a world where everyone finds duty and prosperity in his allotted place. The true aristocrat accordingly seemed as important to him as the true artisan, and the solution of political and economic questions was subsumed for him in a harmonious vision he called “Fatherland.” (The Man Wihout Qualities)

In those years, the intoxication of defending tradition to the furthest extreme and the opposite thrill of shaking off tradition were mixed: generally we think of only the latter approach as somehow exalting, capable of generating euphoria, an unstoppable wave that rises higher and higher, until it sweeps away the old state of things. But truth be told, reactionaries and religious bigots were starting a riot all their own, a visceral response, a savage sentiment that came from the gut … that fed on desire much more than it was fueled by reality. In fact, nobody gave a damn about reality. It wasn’t a situation with (demented) idealists on one side and (prudent) realists on the other: everyone was equally deranged. And in the demonstrations that filled the streets, where one might expect the community spirit, the collective soul, to prevail, in reality everyone was fighting for themselves alone, shouting and marching for themselves, seized by the thrill of liberty, a delirious fever of the ego that lusted for its independence, its own enjoyment. Even those seized by a nostalgia for order and authority were shaken by the violent fever of individual initiative, the determination to triumph whatever the cost—be it one’s own life, or someone else’s. Everyone could afford the luxury of desires, but these individual desires were further fueled by shared actions. One mistreated oneself and others with the same indifference. Everyone was alone, facing off with the dizzying risk of “living life.”

Alone, and yet together with many others, lifted high on a collective wave. (The Catholics School)

But to come back to the elections: that was supposed to be the year of the Communists. The Communist Party was by far the leading party in Turin, Naples, Venice, in Emilia and in Tuscany. In certain cities, two thirds of the population voted Communist. The Communists even picked up votes in the ranks of the classes that communism had historically declared its determination to abolish, and perhaps those classes voted that way out of a subconscious desire to contribute to their own destruction and finally eliminate the mark of distinction that in other historic phases they had striven ruthlessly to attain. There was a bourgeoisie that defended tooth and nail the prerogatives acquired and a bourgeoisie that fought, at least to hear them tell it, against the regime that had hitherto always protected, coddled, spoiled, and cherished them. These two souls of the bourgeoisie, mirror images of each other, would soon come to a final reckoning. And that final reckoning was expected to come with these elections. When I talked, socialized, argued, made friends, made love, or went to the movies it was almost exclusively with Communists. Of various varieties and degrees, some of them authentic Communists, some less so, and a few who were unquestionable fakes, but all of them red, members of the PCI, the FGCI, Lotta Continua, Manifesto, PSIUP, Marxist-Leninists, anarcho-Communists (as we members of Collective M proclaimed ourselves), renegades of the extraparliamentary world, Trotskyites, adherents to the First, the Second, the Third, and the Fourth International, Socialists even farther to the left than the Communists themselves, and a vast number of so-called gruppettari, members of grouplets whose political militancy made explicit reference to movements that there is not enough space here to mention, so frequent were their schisms and reconciliations and breakaways and fragmentations, by the end of which there were increasingly extremist and sectarian formations. The only one that I’ll cite, if only for its exemplary name, and because the older sister of my first girlfriend was a militant in its ranks, was Serve the People. I, too, was a Communist to all intents and purposes, I was one even if maybe I wasn’t one, I hadn’t been before and I wouldn’t be afterward, I was one even though the ideas of communism failed to persuade me back then any more than they do now, that is to say, almost not at all, and their practical applications actually disgusted me, to the point that I could much more readily say that I’m an anti-Communist than a Communist. So how can an anti-Communist proclaim himself to be a Communist, and act and vote and even wade into brawls, feeling himself wholly to be one, and I mean sincerely, with full conviction—so I ask myself, how can that be? My sole anchor of salvation and my one way of scuttling out from the dilemma of that contradiction was, in any case, to proclaim that I was opposed to Stalin—whom I considered a criminal even then and have ever since, and one of the worst criminals ever to have existed on the face of the earth—and against the Stalinists, and in that way I managed to carve out a virtuous little niche for myself in that ocean of bloodthirsty events and behaviors. All the same, I already know that, no matter how hard I try, no matter how I explain it away, I’ll never be able to understand and justify the contradiction that deep down still drives me, even now that I’ve stopped rooting for one side, now that I’ve even given up voting, the contradiction that still sometimes drives me to take the positions of a free-market gentleman, and on other occasions unleashes within me the delight of being implacably, coldly Marxist. A disenchanted bard of the status quo ready to turn into an equally disenchanted analyst of man’s exploitation of his fellow man. How can that be? And yet it most assuredly is. For that matter, I exist, there’s no doubt about it. And I sway, back and forth. I hardly think I’m alone in this.

Perhaps the fact that I sway can be attributed to the profession of writing, which tends to make me adopt different positions from case to case, different ways of looking at things. It’s a collateral effect of this calling. Or else, perhaps, I chose this line of work precisely in order to afford myself the luxury of swaying, in order to encourage it, so that I could impersonate first this person, then that one, that idea …

Savor pineapple

And dine on pheasant

No future for you, bourgeois,

So hold on to the present! (The Catholic School)

Now, if I write about fascism for the next few pages, it’s because several of the protagonists of this book were Fascists, just as the entire quarter was basically Fascist in those years, and also because the Fascists were, in their way—though in the minority, and with highly contradictory attitudes—exemplary specimens of the period I’m writing about, as were for that matter their left-wing adversaries. Actually, though, it is true of the Fascists in an even more distinctive and interesting way, inasmuch as they were deeply anachronistic. That same feverish reaction to the new era that was being ushered in all over the world by left-wing movements became typical of those same years, and in its determination to oppose the advent of the left, practically a constant attribute of the period. By opposing the left, fascism often and eagerly took on its very semblance, though reversing it, distorting it, and deforming it so that it became even more radical than the left at its most radical. This is due to the intrinsically twofold nature of fascism, present from the start: fascism contains within it both repressive institution and impatient uprising, law and transgression, instinct for preservation and childish delight in dilapidating, dispersing, and wrecking the very sandcastles it so lately built … the cult of order united with the apex of anarchy. As pure aspiration, fascism is the virtual locus of unlimited enjoyment, absolute, perverse, and therefore impossible, hence maddening, a source of despair, and logically leading to the most rigid repression of that very same enjoyment. Its secret ideal would be the wildest and most uncontrolled promiscuity, whereas its concrete practice took the form of a coercive control over all and any deviancy. Like an image that is distorted in its reflection, thus unexpectedly bringing out its hidden features, invisible to the ordinary line of sight, it is precisely in fascism—obstinate, residual, but constantly seeking rebirth, tirelessly renewed—that we can best perceive the contradictory character of the era in which this story unfolds.

The main problem with fascism is that you can never be Fascist enough. You could always be more of a Fascist, you could even be more of a Fascist than Mussolini, more of a Nazi than Hitler. There’s a sort of frenzy that can never be satisfied, a boundary that is always being pushed forward. Like all mystiques, the Fascist mystique is bottomless. There is always someone who can criticize you for being lukewarm, totalitarian but not wholeheartedly totalitarian, loyal and trusting but not blindly so, fervent and daring but only by half, and if that someone is lacking, then the inner Fascist that can be found in every Fascist will interrogate himself.

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On soil always ready to produce the bitter fruit of derision, fascism did nothing but sharpen the sense of vanity, the sheer vanity of any individual in the face of the potential stature of the hero, and cultivate a contemptuous attitude toward those who did not take part in this faith, those who failed to believe in it or even understand it. Therefore, the die-hard loyalists felt they were condemned from the very outset to a sterile martyrdom, which in the aftermath was bound to go unacknowledged, and in any case, a thousand times degraded with respect to the figures taken as paragons and venerated—ancient Romans, medieval knights, Vikings, patriots … while the unfaithful, the infidels, would always be the target of their scorn, because they had been incapable of grasping the depth, the boundless profundity of the Fascist faith, a blind faith, a faith precisely because it was blind, blind inasmuch as it was faith, deep and dark like a bottomless well, into which they let themselves fall, fall, fall.

The constituent unhappiness of fascism, its spleen, its deep-seated bitterness and negritude, all originate in and derive from this long-standing inadequacy in the face of the models, of the hyperbolic watchwords: and who will ever be so evil? so daring? so brainless? so passionate? so ruthless? Who will ever succeed in being sufficiently Nazi, if you stop to consider that the Nazi himself outstrips all conceivable monstrosity? There is no act sufficiently misguided, rash, cruel, obscene, megalomaniacal, arbitrary, or chivalrous to meet that requirement, to fully answer the call. They are all too petty, and they all burn out almost instantly in their accompanying meanness. They become wretched at having failed to achieve wretchedness on a grandiose scale. The only haven for this unfulfilled tension is madness. Planting bombs, crashing fatally on a motorcycle, liquidating yourself with heroin, murdering, devastating, shooting yourself in the head. They set out to become knights like Percival, and in short order they became common criminals, and for that matter, grimy two-bit criminals. The stature of the hero remains a mirage, a colossal shadow, not even coming close to heroism, and in the meantime taking on, to a caricatural degree, all the vices, the excesses, the brashness, the nefarious deeds. Like fleas on a dead horse.

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The gratifying cult of annihilation: life gleams at its greatest splendor at the instant in which you suppress another’s existence, or when you accept without trembling the suppression of your own. Dying in order to become eternal in the cult of the dead: that is the horizon, the pure Fascist mystique, corroborated by countless historical and literary examples. The sacrifice must be witnessed, illustrated, celebrated with commemorations, to make sure it remains exemplary. In the collective Fascist imagination, the dead heroes are still present, more present than the living. To understand that fact, you need only take a stroll through the QT, still today, and read the graffiti on the walls, read the posters …

Legionaries, labarums, anthems, recitations: the QT is a notepad of fallen soldiers.

In those posters, the talk is of wolves and slaves, cowards and loyalty, death and noble blood: the language of ancient Nordic poems is borrowed, from Beowulf to the Eddas and the Nibelungenlied.

What can we acknowledge as an achievement of that culture? A certain graphic style, its extreme stylization, occasionally the ability to choose striking slogans or titles (like the title of the infamous French magazine Je suis partout, “I Am Everywhere,” which is certainly on a level with the finest avant-garde art of the twentieth century).

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Their credo could be summarized in a single brief phrase: “Viva la morte!” Long live death! ¡Viva la muerte! For them, killing at random, a hail of killing, killing for none but the most futile of reasons, with no particular criterion but in an unquestionable fashion, was even more inebriating than to strike well-chosen targets with a specific political objective. Indeed, the political objective was, in fact, to have no objective, always to veer toward the gratuitous, because it is in gratuitous sacrifice (whether meted out or suffered, each amounting to practically the same thing) that fascism expressed its energy: the absence of any need to answer for its deeds, sovereign acts, which were in fact not open to discussion, redeemed from and uncontaminated by the leprosy of reason. Their most typical motive, the vendetta, almost never struck those directly responsible for the misdeeds they meant to retaliate against. Every action, every deed was justified by the mere fact of having been committed, and any action performed was in any case preferable to inaction. To succeed or to fail were seen as equivalent. WHAT PURPOSE DOES A SWORD SERVE IF IT REMAINS IN ITS SHEATH? WHAT USE IS IT UNLESS IT IS STAINED WITH BLOOD? If violence and death exist (and there is no doubt that they do), then why not exercise a preliminary right to inflict them, even if that exposes you to the risk of suffering them?

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The specificity of fascism is that it is, as we say of certain diseases, aspecific, which means that it does not consist of the content of its ideology, but rather in the way it constructs around that ideology an action and an identity. It is not what you believe in that matters, but the fact itself that you believe it, the absolute conviction, not of something in particular, but of the very fact that you’re convinced of it. One is convinced of one’s own conviction, one has faith in one’s faith. The credo of the Fascist is not a doctrine or a specific political program, because a program is for tomorrow while the struggle is for today. You can therefore behave and think or speak like a Fascist without really being one. Exactly because that credo is a forma mentis, a way of thinking devoid of any specific content, or full of any given content in glaring contradiction with all others, it is therefore exceedingly difficult to refute and to abjure. One can, perhaps, abjure a faith per se, but not because its content has been shown to be false, since there never was any content in the first place, or if there was, it was interchangeable, revolution for reaction, defense of the bourgeoisie for overthrow of the bourgeoisie, cult of the past for impetus into the future, and so on (a fundamental difference between communism—which has a doctrine, and a substantial one, however gross and ham-handed and false one may judge it to be—and fascism).

The fact that fascism stubbornly defies definition can be sensed even in the difficulty any writer encounters in formulating statements about it that are anything other than slogans of exaltation, on the one hand, or insults and vitriol, on the other.

Fascism in fact constitutes the dilemma of unrepresentability: and perhaps for that very reason, incessantly, it loved to depict itself in whole, healthy forms …

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Also interesting is the impudence, the extraordinary insolence that the Fascists show in proclaiming that they act in the name of injustice. It is by no means true that all political regimes claim to act justly, that they strive to reform society in order to obtain better conditions for those who live under them: in any case, here, to the contrary, they are openly fighting to establish a more unjust society, as unjust as is humanly possible, and they take this struggle as a point of honor.

The kinds of things Fascists used and did in those years:

They had a passion for snakes: they’d keep a python, or else a caiman, in the bathtub

Sharp-toed boots

Thor’s hammer

Rugby, Tolkien (before they made the movies), the Holy Grail (before The Da Vinci Code).

(There was a famous incident in which one of them—while the police were arresting him and beating him soundly, so soundly that he died of it—invoked the god Odin.)

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The right and the left aren't symmetrical. In a society like Italy, in spite of appearances, they were almost always in the minority. It was their spectacular presence in the world of youth culture that made them seem stronger, which in politics, only rarely or only for brief intervals, is the same as actually being strong.

The political formula of the extreme right in the seventies: the left (that is, political aggression, revolutionary drive) minus humanism equals pure subversion.

No, there is no symmetry. The extreme right always felt it was superior to the traditional division between right and left (the so-called third position: NEITHER USA NOR USSR was the recurring graffiti on the walls of the QT). Neither right nor left, or else right and left together, as in the very definition of national socialism.

What drove them? Camaraderie, hatred for democracy, the myth of individual courage, scorn for the enemy, the cult of violence and death, pride and despair at being in the minority.

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It is difficult to keep from considering the enemy to be a criminal. Reptiles, rats, cockroaches, the demented and the possessed, demons, wild animals, chimps: these are the figures that are often mentioned in the same breath as the enemy. “Fascists are not human. A snake is more human,” the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez rapturously declared, receiving vast approval.

If what reined in the radical thrust of historical fascism was the need for a compromise with the monarchy and the Church in order to govern, neofascism had none of those restraints, allowing its militants to cultivate a purely subversive dream, wild and free. But once again historical reality made sure there was a price to pay. The most extremist political action turned into its exact opposite, in the end. The militants murdered people, convinced that they were medieval knights, whereas at best they were serving as guardians of the established order. A fine paradox!

Terrorists on the left and terrorists on the right. The former were vying for the dictatorship of the proletariat, and they did everything they could think of to make sure the nightmare became reality. They failed in that effort, okay, but what about the latter, the right-wing terrorists? What was it they wanted? It’s not clear what project or utopia the terrorists on the right had in mind, if they had anything at all—and I’m limiting myself to the ones who weren’t being manipulated like puppets on strings by the intelligence services. Steeped in the myth of the hero, they killed or got themselves killed or wound up serving life sentences without parole in order to defend the future rights of matrons in the exclusive neighborhood of Collina Fleming to double park. They planted bombs in piazzas in order to make sure those bleached blondes could go to water aerobics classes. They spilled their blood to defend the status quo. The Parioli tennis club and the Maurizio Costanzo Show, a popular talk show. To make sure the Communists never got their claws on those precious legacies. They blew up trains and banks—for that.

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Hence the rhetoric of “one day you’ll thank us.” We did time behind bars to save you from the Reds. More than the democratic state (which we hated), we defended the state of things.

Aside from their own legacy, there’s a great deal of the anarchist school (and further back, Christian rigorism) in the scorn for danger and death flaunted by the neo-Fascists. Their typically funereal tone derived from the very nature of their ideology, but to an even greater extent from their awareness of defeat, which therefore demands a sacrifice, unlike Christian ideology, devoid of hope, an end to itself, sterile.

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A few days ago, I saw one of these killers on television, for the first time after thirty or so years behind bars. In the interview, concerning his past offenses, he spoke of heroism and the quest for a beautiful death. I have no reason to doubt he meant what he said, that is, that he was genuinely convinced of the things he claimed. The whole truth, though, is that the murders committed by those political groups were ambushes, laid for helpless or unprepared people, who were shot in the face and, even before they could understand by who and why, were dead. They called them by name to make them turn around, thus making certain they were shooting the right person. When you shoot someone in the face, you’re killing them, but more important, you’re deleting them. If an encounter with another person consists of the perception of their face, in the reciprocal acknowledgment of a certain humanity, then to devastate their features with a metal-coated projectile while their eyes meet yours deletes in an instant that option. At first, in front of you, you have an anonymous silhouette, and after you’ve pulled the trigger, there is no one: their face, their life has already been sucked into the void, and you can walk away.

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Their objective was to turn peacetime into a disagreeable misunderstanding, a meaningless intermission. A lukewarm bath in which the hero only grows soft. Against this languid and pacific image—the struggle, the challenge, a stiffening defiance, a venturing beyond, a provocation … There are enemies in every camp and they must be flushed out: in politics, liberalism (even the Communists are more worthy of respect, almost admirable, because they, too, battle against the liberal), laxity in the field of education, Petrarchism in literature, faggotry in terms of customs and lifestyle—these are the enemies. It is necessary to bring war, and its mythical protagonist, the warrior, in peacetime. One must violate peace, useful only to merchants and shopkeepers, fertilize it. Protract a condition of war ad infinitum.

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They fanatically supported any act capable of shattering the individual. They believed that by breaking a person, something new and superior would emerge, something authentic, savage, and pure. It was an idea naïve in its premise, crude in its implementation, nefarious in its consequences. Anything, anything at all, as long as it could be used to crack the shell of normality, conventional identity, in short, the habits that flatten man and render him stupid, when instead he should be reawakened, whatever it takes: you could do it with boxing, drugs, beatings, prayer, gunshots, workouts in the gym, choral singing, hiking, summer camps, anything. But then this same fragmented individual sooner or later would have to be reassembled, strengthened, given discipline: after mystically losing himself in the nothingness, he had to rediscover himself. “For nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.”

The ideal moment to complete this sort of recruitment-training-indoctrination was between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. I mean, back in those days: nowadays that age would be too late, or maybe the effort would be wholly pointless: adolescents have countless distractions and it’s harder to focus their energies, I mean to say, to focus their energies in a single fanatical direction. The blindness of an adolescent of today may be very profound indeed, but it’s almost never total: that young person can be seduced and deceived, no doubt about it, but by many things at once, very rarely by just one. In the darkness of their cavern, many flames flicker and gutter, many illusory will-o’-the-wisps may dance, but it is unlikely that all at once the powerful floodlight of a supposed truth will switch on. So much the better, I believe. And here I’m talking once again about the males, that’s right, the males, the poor miserable males, miserable about the simple fact that they’re male and therefore foolishly proud and fond of their misery. The female readers of this book will, I hope, forgive me for the monotony if at least they’re able to recognize in the characters populating these pages some distant reflection of their fathers, brothers, male friends, sons, and those men they may have chanced to fall in love with and who seeded their lives with insecurity. A woman thinks that she’s found a bulwark, but instead it was a cabin with walls as thin as rice paper, or perhaps it was a castle, yes, but an illusion of a castle, a trick castle whose walls, as soon you turn your back, vanish in the blink of an eye.

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While I took part in the political meetings on Via Spontini, with a couple of comrades outside on the lookout against possible Fascist incursions, I noticed how every twist of the discussion corresponded to a step in their radicalization. The line of reasoning would snap and then be resumed from a subsequent point that matched a higher level of virulence, exactly like a round of hands in poker, with each player seeing and raising the previous bets, so that with each hand the pot necessarily grows, and grows, the ante continuously piling up, richer and richer. A verbal risk is almost never associated with the actual risk, and that is how certain players tilt into bankruptcy without noticing. Betting a higher sum when you’re in the throes of vertigo, in the trance of total detachment from reality. More, more and more and more. Just for the giddy inebriation of that endless tailspin. The thread might have snapped at the sound of a mocking phrase, torn by an insult or a curse, or else by a paradox, which almost inevitably gets the better of all the arguments brought to bear. How so? By its sheer incongruity, which caught your interlocutor off guard, leaving him defenseless, at least temporarily, pawing helplessly at the air. By leaping from one verbal plane to another, you create a void into which your interlocutor—who was following you closely, marking you man-to-man, eager not to let you outdistance him—helplessly tumbles. It’s the best way to silence your adversary: leap from one topic to another, attack him on a level or a subject that has nothing to do with the matter at hand, passing from the rational plane to the emotional or the physical, both impossible to refute. Logic crumbles if contaminated by hatred or passion or ridicule, all that remains of its various delicate passages is a grid of threads burned to cinders, like Loki’s net. In a dispute, one theory can be opposed by another, one mental broadside can be met with a proportionate response, until someone throws the mechanism out of whack, tosses all the cards into the air. Until someone pulls out a whiff of folly, a handgun, a succession of absurd questions, low blows, flashes of genius, a beating, something unspeakable.

Superior to the philosopher who reasons (Hamlet) is the philosopher who does not reason (Nijinsky). (The Catholic School)

A further surreal effect burst loose yesterday evening on Via Benaco, as I was walking along, hands clasped behind my back, pondering who I ought to put in the next scene and how to give that person shape, and as I thought, I slowly entered the gallery of greenery, whereupon, raising my eyes, I realized that I had stepped into that famous painting by Magritte: under the vault of foliage it was already dark night, the bright yellow streetlamps casting shadows, a gloomy silence like some provincial city—while overhead, above the branches, you could still glimpse clear and luminous the sky of Rome, crisscrossed by darting swallows.

High above, there was still daylight.

On the ground, darkest night.

Sort of like in this story. Divided by a line where opposites meet, even though the canvas is the same, and so is the instant. Even the protagonists are the same, whether they act in the darkness or in the light of day. There, it is as if the light itself produces the darkness, as if its splendor engenders the darkness, and I’m certain that this contradiction in terms has some meaning of its own, that’s right, that it is prosperity itself that engenders malaise. I can’t find this meaning, I can’t find it on my own, I have to reach out to my memory and my imagination for help. You might say to me, what help are you looking for, whose help are you asking for, in that case? Whose help, if you are still the one, who remembers and invents. But the memory and the imagination aren’t mine, I’m not really me, the forces that come to my aid as often as not also abandon me. If they really were mine, they’d do as I say, wouldn’t they? Like a hand that reaches out to grasp a glass. Hand, grab that glass, and my hand grabs it. Lift it to my mouth. Tip it …

A thirst-slaking gulp of water.

I have no choice, though, but to hope that memory and imagination come to visit me, and I cannot expect anything certain, maneuverable, from them. I have begun to suspect that these are not two separate, distinct forces, recollection and fantasy, but rather a single force, and that the words come from the same spring, they are neither true nor are they false, neither authentic nor invented, there is just one voice that recounts and reasons, and I have no option but to listen to it. Trustingly. (The Catholic School)

Self-restraint, in fact, consists of the ability to resist, to master, to tame, to keep from giving in to vulgar or dangerous inclinations. Which can mean that once the levee breaks, there is no bottom, there are no more limits to the actions that take joy in the savage delight of being liberated … and by the sheer force of inertia continue their course without hindrance. Into the void. From rigid conformity to outright perversion, the distance is not only short, it can be a single step. You should further consider that pitiless and bullying acts, while they may sorely restrict the freedom of those upon whom they are inflicted, unleash the freedom of the person inflicting them. And they therefore constitute at the same time the maximum level of oppression and the maximum level of liberty, both coercion and unbridled freedom. There is no point in trying to resist the argument: rape and murder are liberatory, if viewed with the eyes of those who commit them. Perfect circularity between these two extremes is attained when those who have been oppressed by violence utilize it in their turn to achieve liberation: the joy of those who suddenly stop obeying, submitting, restraining themselves, being patient—and simply explode. Suffice it to think of the celebration of this turnaround that can be seen in countless revenge films, of which the founding father remains Straw Dogs, where the professor, the civilized man who has been the victim of mistreatment, suddenly reverses the situation by making use of the same violence that was used against him, but amplified tenfold by his frustration and brilliant mind. Malevolent energy concealed behind the screen of good manners. (The Catholic School)

The next day it would be my turn to say confession. I saw it as a sort of test I would have to take, and I wondered if I would be fully prepared for it. As long as it was a matter of repeating lessons you’d heard in class or things you’d read in a book … but the things you’re supposed to confess aren’t written down anywhere. They were going to have to come out of me, out of my soul, and what’s more, they were bad things, nasty and filthy, my sins.

Whichever way it goes, you come out looking pretty bad. If you were to confess little or nothing, it might seem you were trying to conceal your wicked deeds (which in fact amounts to one more wicked deed), or else it must mean that you are such a good person—but I mean so full of sweetness and light—that you had nothing to tell the father confessor, in other words, a disgusting little angel.

To me, the intimacy required to tell someone else the harm I had done was inaccessible. You can conceal it, the harm, you can invent it, exaggerate it, or attenuate it … but you can never say it.

[...] 

As long as I went to confession and said confession, it remained a genuine torture for me. I was sincere but, at the same time, I lied, and though I was sure I’d told the truth, at the end of confession, it seemed to me that I hadn’t told the truth at all, both because the sins confessed weren’t true, and because I had kept the real ones carefully hidden. I thought that I’d forgotten to mention important things, wrongs I’d committed that were far more serious than those I’d confessed, even though when I stopped to think about it, none actually came to mind. Or else I have the even more sinister sensation that I had soft-pedaled my sins, telling them in such a way that I came out looking good, so that when all was said and done I got away scot-free, I practically deserved to be congratulated, if not for having committed them, at least for having recounted them so very nicely. Too nicely, in other words, like Rousseau and his Confessions, which of course I hadn’t read at that age but in which I’d later recognize a reflection of myself, make no mistake, not for the spiritual greatness and breadth of thought, unequaled and unattainable, but rather for the pervasive hypocrisy, about which there could be no doubt. But my greatest remorse came from the awareness that I had by no means actually repented, that is, that the repentance declared at the end of confession was in no way genuine. A convention to be respected, a formula to be recited. I only had one real regret—that I felt nothing. Nothing at all. No authentic repentance nor any impulse to make a new resolution or deep emotion or a vow to give something up. I wasn’t ashamed, exactly, but neither was I proud of the wrong I had done, the way one may feel when one is truly wicked.

I felt insincere, whatever I might say or refrain from saying. My remorse was never authentic or spontaneous, my contrition was always contrived, copied from some other model, from something I’d read or heard or seen, just like so many other behaviors in my life, truth be told, that I adopted simply out of imitation, like a talented calligrapher, without ever feeling them wholeheartedly as my own for even a fleeting instant, without believing in them or, rather, believing that it was best, all things considered, to act that way, because that’s just the way people act, because it’s required of you, because that’s what others do, because everyone else expected it of me. This is a more than adequate reason to go along: the problem is that slight feeling of being out of phase, that instant of detachment. My confession was like a song being lip-synched, with the background music playing and the lips moving as you pretend to sing, but all it takes is the slightest hitch in the timing and the fakery is revealed on the singer’s face. Confession was, for me, the utmost moment of artificiality, that is, of distance not between what I was saying and what I was thinking, but rather between what I was saying and what I was feeling. And that, I am sorry to say, was nothing at all.

And then there was that morbid certainty of having forgotten perhaps the only real sin that was worth bothering to confess and expiate. Sincerity, courage, memory: zero. Exactly what this great buried sin might be never came to mind, no matter how hard I tried. It was there, of that I felt certain, but it remained out of my reach. (The Catholic School)

As little children and then as boys and young men, we were full of doubts of a legalistic nature. Do we or don’t we? Are we allowed to? And under what conditions? What were the terms established, the oaths sworn? Isn’t this a bizarre miracle—that something prohibited should suddenly become licit? Why? Isn’t it perhaps unjust that that which is unjust should suddenly become just? Schedules, quantities, measurements, very precise calculations, boundaries not to be transgressed. As far as the gate, only up to the sign that says DANGER, no later than eight o’clock, not before meals, be back in an hour. Even games are made up of prohibitions. The observance of every commandment ends up giving more importance to the rules as such, than to the reasons those rules were established. The prohibition against going swimming after a meal is an obvious and generic precaution, but if you give it an exact duration (when I was a kid, no less than three hours! You couldn’t go swimming for three hours after eating, which in our imagination meant that if you dove into the water two hours and fifty-nine minutes after polishing off a panino, you’d die the minute you hit the water…), when you draw an exact line, then all the forces are marshaled on one side and the other, like two armies lined up in battle, the forces of good and evil. Children are the most inflexible custodians of the given promise, of the geometry of prohibitions, and when they break their word or a prohibition, it’s out of either extreme courage or desperation, never out of solid good sense, they never think, “Oh, come on, how much will it really matter…” the way adults do. There’s no adjustment possible in the mind of a child. Home before dark, is that clear? All right, Mamma, but dark, exactly … when does dark begin?

With holy mass, the same thing happened. I had more scruples than an elderly Pharisee, and if I had been born an Orthodox Jew or a fundamentalist Muslim or any other of those many faiths brimming over with rules and prescriptions telling you that you must take care how you walk, when you breathe, what you drink, watch, and eat, which hand you use and which hat you wear and how many times you wash, painstakingly attentive to the smallest actions that are all regulated from the very outset, I think I would have been perfectly at my ease, ahhh, life would have been prescribed and guided minute by minute according to the observance of the laws, like a ticking clock, calmly, ineluctably, and once you’ve respected those rules you’re all good, no one can say a thing to you. You’re safe. You’ve paid in advance. The sternest law works this way, so that the very fact that you’ve observed it constitutes punishment enough. You punish yourself by obeying it.

The problem, though, is that little by little the moral core of the law begins to escape you, and you limit yourself to doing the basic minimum necessary to respect it, not a gram, not a lira, not a second, not a genuflection more than is strictly required. The rule is reduced to bone, worn shiny from being gnawed. Done! you can say to yourself once you’ve observed the precept. Done with that, now, too!

When I found out that a mass was valid once you reached the Our Father, then there was no way I was going to attend the whole service. Never. I split the second to make sure I got there just in time for the eucharistic liturgy after I discovered that that was all it took. (The Catholic School)

 Confession is a sacrament that may be even harder to understand than the eucharist—when you’re ten years old. He would ask me what sins I’d committed and I didn’t know what to answer. I would have been glad to accuse myself, in utter seriousness, of something very bad, but I searched and searched, almost desperately rummaged and struggled to feel a powerful sentiment of remorse, and nothing came to mind except for trifles and the desire to be done with it: I was, as so often happens to me, deeply moved and at the same time bored and impatient, and so I replied to Father Saturnino that I’d told lies … and then, that I’d disobeyed … disobeyed Mamma: but even that was half a lie, since I was an obedient child. Still, I was ashamed to have so little to confess and, therefore, little of which to repent; I really was embarrassed, not of my sins, but rather of their paltry number and negligible nature, and as a result I wished I could invent a few more, to make a more interesting sinner of myself, one more deserving of forgiveness, a prodigal son. I had understood that the more you sin, the greater the joy your repentance will cause. Indeed, to use the language of the religious, the greater the jubilation.

This blessed rule stupefied me then as it does now and should be classed among the things whose spiritual grandeur I am able to intuit, but it is in fact that very grandeur that upsets and irritates me, undermining my very sense of justice. This would happen to me many times in the years that followed, when I saw men of the cloth so impassioned in their devotion to sinners that they made them their pets, almost their fair-haired boys: repentant terrorists, bank robbers who have turned to painting Madonnas, murderers who, in the end, seem almost to be better people than their innocent victims, seeing that, by choosing goodness after committing so much evil, they’ve helped to shift the scales in which the world’s good and evil are weighed, because if they stop their killing, then the dish of the scale that holds evil will in fact become that much lighter. I once thought of a way to win the Nobel Peace Prize: one sure method would be to become a terrorist, plant bombs and blow up airplanes, etc., and then at a certain point, decide to give up my wicked ways and lay down my arms and, in this exact manner, become to all intents and purposes a peacemaker, a man of peace.

Victims don’t stir the same passions as a rogue redeemed, that much is obvious.

I sincerely wanted to attain redemption but I didn’t know what from, so Father Saturnino came to my aid, convinced that I was ashamed to confess my sins, while I was actually struggling with a shame of the exact opposite hue; and just as good-hearted teachers do during an oral exam, when they see that a student is having difficulty, it was he who suggested to me a few of the sins I might have committed: and even if it wasn’t true or I didn’t begin to understand what the specific sin might be, I hurried to answer yes, yes, to each of his questions, yes, I did that, as if I thought that in order to obtain that blessed pardon I needed to reach a certain quota, a predetermined scorecard of evil, so that I could reset that number to zero and start over, as in the card game of sette e mezzo or blackjack, or a loyalty program at a gas station.

And I remember very clearly just what the last sin was that Father Saturnino suggested I go and rummage around in my memory for, just in case I might have committed that one, too.

“Have you ever watched dirty movies?”

“What?”

“Dirty movies.”

This time I hesitated to answer yes, because I really didn’t know what the brother was talking about. Dirty movies? Was he possibly talking about … pornographic films? That couldn’t be. I was ten years old. It wasn’t like now, when a kid can go on the Internet and watch people having sex, or threesomes, or group sex, rapes, and orgies. Again this time, when the wise brother saw me hesitate, he decided to help me out.

“You know what I mean, don’t you? Movies with undressed women.”

Just the mere word “undressed” made me blush violently. I’d never seen undressed women, in the movies much less in real life, if you leave aside a certain episode from my childhood that I may perhaps tell you about later on. And so, deciding that enough was enough, that I’d confessed to enough sins to give an image of myself as a sufficiently wicked Candlewick, I was about to say no, when the father confessor specified: “Like, Double O Seven movies.”

Secret agent 007. Bond. James Bond. And I had seen at least a couple of those movies, back then, Goldfinger for sure, and maybe Thunderball, but the women were never actually nude, when they took off their bras or when 007 unhooked them, they always had their backs to the camera, and even when they let their robes fall to the ground, the only thing you saw was their shoulders. Yes, in effect, I found those movies very unsettling, the brother had hit a bull’s-eye. And in Goldfinger I remember that there was a girl completely naked, dead on a bed and covered from head to foot in gold, painted gold … (The Catholic School)

We were all eager to spend time together but at the same time we were terrified at the idea of opening up, revealing the truth about ourselves. Pranks and crude jokes were the best way we had to conceal our inner life, drowning it in a vulgar laugh that was always slightly awkward and embarrassed and defensive. It was in fact much simpler to show off your penis in the locker room after gym class by swinging it like a lasso than to display any other undefended part of your personality. The crudeness cauterized wounds or prevented them from being inflicted. Sports were the ideal activity for this purpose, they allowed us to spend time together without obliging anyone to open up in any real way. In fact, by playing sports with our classmates and pals, we developed a supermuscle of control. In order to protect ourselves from the risk of potential confessions (the kind of stuff you’d expect from young ladies), we preferred to do things instead of talking about them, and in sports there’s next to no chitchat at all, a game is the kind of thing that after an hour and a half or two hours of insane intensity, thank heavens, comes to an end, so that you’ve given your all without actually giving anything specific or useful, the most burning commitment over the shortest period of time—and in fact it has many things in common with sex. That is, it allows you to emerge still virgin and uncontaminated. Risking your physical safety in sports ensures that you preserve your psychological safety. Male locker-room camaraderie, in other words, has very little in common with intimacy; instead it’s something midway between vaudeville, with its rat-a-tat volley of gags and bullshit, a lineup of suspects, and a conference table surrounded by generals with maps and charts before or after a battle. The things that are said there have the muscular character of an exhibition, and the rhythm of a variety show.

Unfortunately, true intimacy doesn’t exist in a partial or moderate form: it’s always, by its very definition, excessive. Made up of vertical lunges. Contaminating, like saliva in French kisses. That’s why we feared it, because we dimly sensed that you can never quite recover from contact with it, you can no longer veil what has once been unveiled.

Rather than opening up to your pals, then, it was necessary to conquer them, or, at least, stand up to them. Hold your own in public in such a way as to avoid being riddled with indiscreet questions. What it required were such gifts as a powerful or strident voice, the capacity to tell jokes and anecdotes (a good memory was fundamental if you wanted to keep stock of your repertory), quick repartee so that you could offer a clever or filthy riposte to any mockery, the ability to lay your audience low in helpless laughter or else make them shut their mouths with a sharp glare. What’s more, sports, as practiced intensively at SLM, were a reasonably effective bulwark against the threat of girls, or at least the thought of them, seeing that there weren’t any in the surrounding area. The only individual of the female gender in the entire school, as I’ve previously mentioned, was a woman who sold pizza at recess. Still, even a vague thought can be every bit as unsettling as a physical presence and, in some cases, even more intrusive. I, for one, can say that I’ve never felt females to be so incredibly close to me as the times that all I saw on all sides were other males: in my years at SLM, during my mandatory stint in the army, and in prison, I could easily swear that they were physically present, that’s just how close I felt them, intensely close, upon me, inside me. It’s like the old joke about the guy who goes to the doctor, claiming that he’s a hermaphrodite; “What are you saying, are you sure of this?” the doctor replies. “Let me take a look…” Then, after an examination, the doctor reassures him: “Trust me, you’re fully male, perfectly normal…” “No, doctor, the thing is,” the guy insists, in desperation, “I have a pussy, more than one in fact, right here!”—and he slaps his hand against his forehead.

Nothing remained to us, in other words, but mental projections that we’d try to exorcise with chaotic basketball games, hikes, push-ups on wooden handles, kicking balls back and forth on dusty red fields, raising long trailing clouds behind us with every galloping charge, like in the cartoons with the racing ostrich. Some went so far as to try heading a seven-pound medicine ball. With actual flesh-and-blood girls, in any case, we wouldn’t have begun to know what to do, what to say, it was an unknown ritual, one that most of us would learn, if anything, by testing out and rehearsing an array of phrases and acts borrowed from our older brothers like good suits, but only after we’d graduated. Once we were expelled into the real world. Only a mechanically applied ceremonial protocol would allow us to get over the shyness we’d accumulated over years of dress rehearsals.

People can’t begin to imagine what a fragile fabric male shyness is, they never seem to make the effort, except perhaps to make fun of it. And they never consider, even more than the stumbling block of shyness itself, just how mortifying it is to have to make recourse to various stratagems to find one’s way out of it: in pathetic little vignettes, the movies and TV have retailed the tryouts, a boy in front of a mirror rehearsing his lines, as he plans to invite a girl to dance, the declarations of love uttered to one’s own image in the mirror by gawky guys who then shut their eyes and wrap their arms around their own shoulders and kiss themselves, but all this is strictly to get a laugh out of the audience, while male shyness really does have a dark, morbid side, demented and mad, which can lead variously to murder and suicide, forget about sophomoric comedies with Jack Lemmon or Adam Sandler! When you feel as if you’re being strangled … that the air won’t reach your lungs … and a devastating wave of desire rises to the verge of an anxiety attack, and yet it still can’t breach the levee and transform itself into action. You don’t lift a finger. Your voice dies in your throat. And she impatiently turns away, walks across the room, starts talking to other boys …

Even idiotic pranks like taking a classmate’s underwear, left in the locker room during swim lessons, and drenching them thoroughly (this was a trick played frequently on Arbus, and I confess that a couple of times I myself was a member of the gang of pranksters), played a role in this process of negotiation. These were moves on the chessboard of our identities, constantly under construction. In this way, we negotiated the fear of being taken for faggots. We negotiated the desire, however small or large that desire might be, to be faggots without letting it be seen. We negotiated the rank that we were to be given in the hierarchy, where the classmate forced to wring out his sopping underwear was dropped a level or two, and if subjected sufficiently to cruel leg-pulling and ass-kicking, might sink to the very bottom of the barrel, and even remain there, a permanent pariah. To become the target of ridicule, in fact, constituted our greatest fear, a fear that we negotiated with ourselves, each of us splitting into a dual personality, at once victim and agent of the same persecution, to see which of the two personalities would be the first to collapse, the faggot within me or the real man? The serial killer or the naked girl in the shower? When you’re an adolescent, it’s impossible not to be both things at once. We negotiated our way through that rising tide of pointless, vulgar words and a barricade of rude and repetitive gestures pushed well beyond the bounds of the absurd (pinches, knuckle-grinders, nape-smacks, accompanied by shrill whistles and neighing, goat-nips and donkey-chomps, soldier-slaps, unannounced smacks to the testicles), struggling the whole time with our aggressivity. Put like that, I wouldn’t be able to say whether we tamed those aggressive impulses or became enslaved to them like so many robots.

Since all of us were equally revolted by the thought of playing the part of the victim, we had to study, like so many would-be professional executioners, how to lop off a head, hurrying feverishly lest our own head be lopped off first. Honestly, I never really believed in even a tenth of the jerky wisecracks or extravagant boasting I spouted back then, in retaliation to those spouted by my pals and classmates, and I’m not saying that I realize that only now: I already knew it at the time. And yet, like so many others, aspiring as I did to be like everybody else and, when it came right down to it, succeeding—I said those things. I spouted them. Well, what’s so bad about that? You were in trouble if you missed a chance to make a rhyme with words ending in “-ock” or “-ucker” or “-ussy” or “-unt.” They just made your mouth itch at the chance. We also negotiated these succulent opportunities to show off our poetic or creative sides. To show some wit—wit, which delights in whistling through obscenities. Though none of us were born to the working classes, the low humor of our filthy nursery rhymes challenged the finest creations of an age-old tradition, in general, and Roman tradition, in particular, based on long, filthy lists and a ruthless vision of life, a cavalcade of cynicism and ass-fucking.

But foul language made us feel like good kids. Why not, a genuine community of good kids. It’s often said of people with dubious reputations, even of criminals, that deep down they’re good kids. If you scratch the surface, deep down you’ll find a good kid. What is it exactly that makes a young man a “good kid”? What are we talking about? About someone who’s always loyal to his buddies and ready to do what they’re willing to do without hesitation, to follow them anywhere, even when we’re talking about deplorable deeds, because if he tried to pull out at the last minute, then what kind of a buddy would he be, what would be so good, after all, about this good kid? A man is judged by the things he does, not by the things he says, so if someone doesn’t happen to get the chance to show what he’s capable of, he runs the risk of remaining a child, in the sedentary society we live in, stingy as it is with special moments. That’s why sports were invented, that is, a rapid succession of acid tests that can be administered two or three times a week, even at school, without having to wait for a war to break out or an apartment building to catch on fire in order to test those who are involved, to test their courage, their emotional control, and their willingness to endure pain. With the fairly pedestrian excuse of physical exercise, improving their posture, etc.: and at SLM they’d understood all this perfectly, to the point that they outfitted the school with a very modern gymnasium, and a pool where half of the Quartiere Trieste now splashes and swims (we’ll talk about that later on), as well as a sports center with basketball courts and soccer fields on Via Nomentana, where every afternoon buses full of shouting kids would pull up, and then leave several hours later full of the same kids, but now exhausted. We’d return from that sports center so sweaty and weary that often, in the winter, when night fell early and Via Nomentana was jammed with traffic, we’d fall asleep, dusty heads leaning together. Maybe males can establish relationships only in the midst of raging battle, so they re-create that condition on the playing fields. (The Catholic School)

Anyone who as a boy belongs to the middle class doesn’t even notice the fact, in part because the privileges he enjoys or the privations he suffers aren’t really all that spectacular, in the final analysis; he hardly even imagines that he can qualify as a “bourgeois young man”: when he looks in the mirror he sees a young man, not a “bourgeois young man,” even though that’s exactly what he is and how he actually appears, even when he’s in his underwear he’s a bourgeois young man in his underwear, lifting weights to develop his arm muscles, in front of the mirror in the bathroom of a bourgeois home, etc. But he doesn’t perceive himself that way, at age fifteen or sixteen he hardly thinks that belonging to a class is significant, and most of all he really doesn’t think of himself as belonging to a social class, if anything he might consider the soccer team he roots for, the music that he likes or detests, the way he dresses, or his political beliefs, which, in the case of a middle-class young man, could vary from the extreme right wing to the extreme left without either option seeming odd.

A borgataro from the poorer outskirts of town or an heir to a fortune or the scion of an aristocratic family almost immediately realize who they are and where they come from and where they’re heading or risk heading: the markers along the highways of their lives.

The young bourgeois man, on the other hand, will all at once perceive, on a given day that is as likely to come at age eighteen as at age thirty or forty, the class he belongs to, and in a flash it will become just as evident to his eyes that his clothing, his home, his motorcycle or his car, his very thoughts and desires and the way he has of relishing life or suffering, and even the sweetheart he has chosen or who has chosen him and who might well now be his wife, and have been for some time—all these things are the way they are precisely because he is bourgeois.

From that moment on, no matter what he might be doing, even organizing a picnic or signing an insurance policy or kissing a woman who might or might not be his wife, he’ll be possessed by that awareness. (The Catholic School)

We had a destructive and self-destructive attitude. Self-destruction was the science we knew best, the discipline that we practiced most assiduously. Even those who studied seriously or attended a gym on a regular basis, and thus seemed to be interested in strengthening their mind or their body, would end up distorting them both, generating maniacal thoughts or bowing themselves down under a heavy blanket of muscles. There seemed to be only two paths: either reject all exercise, or else take it to a fanatical extreme. Whichever path you took, the result was unharmonious.

We were out to conquer the world, or actually, the universe, but before doing that, we had to beat the closest adversary, even if it was just at a game of cards: there, your deskmate, that’s who you had to defeat, destroy him—but at the same time, help him. That’s what they taught us at SLM. The weakest must be defeated and, at the same time, helped.

It’s the same contradiction we encounter so frequently these days in politicians’ speeches, when in the same breath they claim to be fighting “for a meritocracy,” but also to ensure that “no citizen is left behind,” when it’s plain as day that the first thing excludes the second. (The Catholic School)

As little children and then as boys and young men, we were full of doubts of a legalistic nature. Do we or don’t we? Are we allowed to? And under what conditions? What were the terms established, the oaths sworn? Isn’t this a bizarre miracle—that something prohibited should suddenly become licit? Why? Isn’t it perhaps unjust that that which is unjust should suddenly become just? Schedules, quantities, measurements, very precise calculations, boundaries not to be transgressed. As far as the gate, only up to the sign that says DANGER, no later than eight o’clock, not before meals, be back in an hour. Even games are made up of prohibitions. The observance of every commandment ends up giving more importance to the rules as such, than to the reasons those rules were established. The prohibition against going swimming after a meal is an obvious and generic precaution, but if you give it an exact duration (when I was a kid, no less than three hours! You couldn’t go swimming for three hours after eating, which in our imagination meant that if you dove into the water two hours and fifty-nine minutes after polishing off a panino, you’d die the minute you hit the water…), when you draw an exact line, then all the forces are marshaled on one side and the other, like two armies lined up in battle, the forces of good and evil. Children are the most inflexible custodians of the given promise, of the geometry of prohibitions, and when they break their word or a prohibition, it’s out of either extreme courage or desperation, never out of solid good sense, they never think, “Oh, come on, how much will it really matter…” the way adults do. There’s no adjustment possible in the mind of a child. Home before dark, is that clear? All right, Mamma, but dark, exactly … when does dark begin?

With holy mass, the same thing happened. I had more scruples than an elderly Pharisee, and if I had been born an Orthodox Jew or a fundamentalist Muslim or any other of those many faiths brimming over with rules and prescriptions telling you that you must take care how you walk, when you breathe, what you drink, watch, and eat, which hand you use and which hat you wear and how many times you wash, painstakingly attentive to the smallest actions that are all regulated from the very outset, I think I would have been perfectly at my ease, ahhh, life would have been prescribed and guided minute by minute according to the observance of the laws, like a ticking clock, calmly, ineluctably, and once you’ve respected those rules you’re all good, no one can say a thing to you. You’re safe. You’ve paid in advance. The sternest law works this way, so that the very fact that you’ve observed it constitutes punishment enough. You punish yourself by obeying it.

The problem, though, is that little by little the moral core of the law begins to escape you, and you limit yourself to doing the basic minimum necessary to respect it, not a gram, not a lira, not a second, not a genuflection more than is strictly required. The rule is reduced to bone, worn shiny from being gnawed. Done! you can say to yourself once you’ve observed the precept. Done with that, now, too!

When I found out that a mass was valid once you reached the Our Father, then there was no way I was going to attend the whole service. Never. I split the second to make sure I got there just in time for the eucharistic liturgy after I discovered that that was all it took. (The Catholic School)

The “I” in narrative is no longer the singular subject of the biography, but rather the occasional experimenter. The first person can be generated by the third person, etc. Writing produces a series of transformations and disintegrations, whether it is the “I” who stages the story, or the material or experiences that are integrated into its workings. (The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: The Happy Years)

I think differently, in a different way. I say different things to myself. I have different pictures. ("Lectures on Religious Belief" in Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religion)

The work of a young writer—Werther is the classic example— is sometimes a therapeutic act. He finds himself obsessed by certain ways of feeling and thinking of which his instinct tells him he must be rid before he can discover his authentic interests and sympathies, and the only way by which he can be rid of them forever is by surrendering to them. Once he has done this, he has developed the necessary antibodies which will make him immune for the rest of his life. As a rule, the disease is some spiritual malaise of his generation. If so, he may, as Goethe did, find himself in an embarrassing situation. What he wrote in order to exorcise certain feelings is enthusiastically welcomed by his contemporaries because it expresses just what they feel but, unlike him, they are perfecdy happy to feel in this way; for the moment they regard him as their spokesman. Time passes. Having gotten the poison out of his system, the writer turns to his true interests which are not, and never were, those of his early admirers, who now pursue him with cries of “Traitor!” ("Writing" in The Dyer's Hand)

And yet, when he got home full of impressions and plans, ripe and new as perhaps never before, a demoralizing change took place in him. Merely putting a canvas on the easel or a sheet of paper on the table was the sign of a terrible flight from his heart. His head remained clear, and the plan inside it hovered as if in a very transparent and distinct atmosphere; indeed, the plan split and became two or more plans, all ready to compete for supremacy—but the connection between his head and the first movements needed to carry it out seemed severed. Walter could not even make up his mind to lift a finger. He simply did not get up from where he happened to be sitting, and his thoughts slid away from the task he had set himself like snow evaporating as it falls. He didn’t know where the time went, but all of a sudden it was evening, and since after several such experiences he had learned to start dreading them on his way home, whole series of weeks began to slip, and passed away like a troubled half-sleep. Slowed down by a sense of hopelessness in all his decisions and movements, he suffered from bitter sadness, and his incapacity solidified into a pain that often sat like a nosebleed behind his forehead the moment he tried to make up his mind to do something. Walter was fearful, and the symptoms he recognized in himself not only hampered him in his work but also filled him with anxiety, for they were apparently so far beyond his control that they often gave him the impression of an incipient mental breakdown.

But as his condition had grown steadily worse in the course of the last year, he found a miraculous refuge in a thought he had never valued enough before. The idea was none other than that the Europe in which he was forced to live was hopelessly decadent. During ages in which things seem to be going well outwardly, while inwardly they undergo the kind of regression that may be the fate of all things, including cultural development—unless special efforts are made to keep them supplied with new ideas—the obvious question was, presumably, what one could do about it. But the tangle of clever, stupid, vulgar, and beautiful is at such times so particularly dense and intricate that many people obviously find it easier to believe that there is something occult at the root of things, and proclaim the fated fall of one thing or another that eludes precise definition and is portentously vague. It hardly matters whether the doomed thing is the human race, vegetarianism, or the soul; all that a healthy pessimism needs is merely something inescapable to hold on to. Even Walter, who in better days used to be able to laugh at such doctrines, soon discovered their advantages once he began to try them out. Instead of his feeling bad and unable to work, it was now the times that were sick, while he was fine. His life, which had come to nothing, was now, all at once, tremendously accounted for, justified on a world-historical scale that was worthy of him, so that picking up a pen or pencil and laying it down again virtually took on the aura of a great sacrifice. (The Man Without Qualities)

All the Offenbach neophytes were buried in the city cemetery, though some years later this cemetery began to interfere with plans to expand the town, and it was ultimately liquidated in 1866. The bones of those buried there were carefully collected and respectfully reburied elsewhere. Jacob Frank’s skull was removed from his grave, and, thoughtfully recorded as “a skull belonging to a Jewish patriarch,” it passed into the hands of the historian of the city of Offenbach. Many years later, under unknown circumstances, it made its way to Berlin, where it underwent detailed measurement and research and was labeled a prime example of Jewish racial inferiority. After the Second World War, it vanished without a trace—either it was destroyed in the turmoil and chaos of war, crumbling to dust, or else it is still lying around somewhere in the underground storage facility of some museum. (The Books of Jacob)

Once swallowed, the piece of paper lodges in her esophagus, near her heart. Saliva-soaked. The specially prepared black ink dissolves slowly now, the letters losing their shapes. Within the human body, the word splits in two: substance and essence. When the former goes, the latter, formlessly abiding, may be absorbed into the body’s tissues, since essences always seek carriers in matter—even if this is to be the cause of many misfortunes.

Yente wakes up. But she was just almost dead! She feels this distinctly now, like a pain, like the river’s current—a tremor, a clamor, a rush.

With a delicate vibration, her heart resumes its weak but regular beating, capable. Warmth is restored to her bony, withered chest. Yente blinks and just barely lifts her eyelids again. She sees the agonized face of Elisha Shorr, who leans in over her. She tries to smile, but that much power over her face she can’t quite summon. Elisha Shorr’s brow is furrowed, his gaze brimming with resentment. His lips move, but no sound reaches Yente. Old Shorr’s big hands appear from somewhere, reaching for her neck, then move beneath her threadbare blanket. Clumsily he rolls her body onto the side, so he can check the bedding. Yente can’t feel his exertions, no—she senses only warmth, and the presence of a sweaty, bearded man.

Then suddenly, as though from some unexpected impact, Yente sees everything from above: herself, the balding top of Old Shorr’s head—in his struggle with her body, he has lost his cap.

And this is how it is now, how it will be: Yente sees all. (The Books of Jacob)

The demand for simple things is the demand for definiteness of sense.

We tend to take the speech of a Chinese for inarticulate gurgling. Someone who understands Chinese will recognize language in what he hears. Similarly I often cannot discern the humanity in a man.

It’s so easy to wander about amongst great objects in distant regions, so hard to grasp the solitary thing that’s right in front of you…

On the terrible days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, kneytlakh legn takes place—the measuring of graves. The women measure out the cemeteries with a string, then wind the string back up around a bobbin, for later use as candlewicks; some of the women will also use it to tell fortunes. Each of them murmurs a prayer under her breath, and they look like witches in their wide, ruffled skirts, which catch on blackberry thorns and rustle among the dry yellow leaves.

Once, Yente herself measured the graves, believing it to be the duty of every woman to measure how much room was left for the dead, or whether there was any room at all, before any new living people were born. It is a kind of bookkeeping that women take care of—women are always better, in any case, at keeping the accounts.

But what reason do they have for measuring the graves and cemeteries? After all, the dead are not contained in their graves—Yente has learned this only now, however, after plunging thousands of wicks into wax. Graves are in fact altogether pointless, since the dead ignore them and roam—the dead are everywhere. Yente sees them all the time, as if through glass, for however much she might like to join their ranks, she can’t. Where is this? It’s hard to say. They behold the world as if from behind a windowpane, inspecting it and always coveting something inside it. Yente tries to figure out what the faces they make mean, likewise their gestures, and in the end, she gets it: The dead would like to be talked about; they are hungry, and that is their food. What they want from us is our attention.

And Yente notices something else—that that attention is inequitably distributed. Some people are spoken about a great deal, with myriad words pronounced about them. Of others, people utter not a single word, nary a syllable, ever. Those dead will flicker out after a while, moving away from the glass, disappearing somewhere into the back. There are a great many of that latter group, millions of them, completely forgotten. No one even knows they lived on earth. There is no trace of them, which is why they are freed faster, and depart. And maybe that’s a good thing. Yente would depart, as well, if only she could. If only she weren’t still bound by that powerful word she swallowed. The little piece of paper is gone, and there’s no trace left of the string. It’s all dissolved, and the tiniest particles of light have been absorbed into matter. All that remains is the word like a rock that reckless Elisha Shorr employed to tether Yente. (The Books of Jacob)

During that year, for “security” reasons, as they say, I recorded almost nothing of my political evolution, as we might call it; I had moved on from the tenuous anarchism of my youth to Marxism, aided by my studies in history and particularly by a modern-history course that I had taken with Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, a Spaniard closely affiliated with the Communist Party who had escaped from a Francoist prison along with other activists, among them a woman, Barbara Johnson, an American who had allowed herself to be arrested in order to organize the escape from inside the prison. And Sánchez-Albornoz had ended up in Buenos Aires, where his father, the prominent Hispanicist Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz was, if I am not mistaken, the president or prime minister or chancellor of the Spanish Republican government-in-exile, an imaginary position given that Franco’s power was well established and he ruled the country with an iron fist, aided by the Americans. And so, Don Claudio did nothing but get together with the melancholy exiled Spaniards in the bars on Avenida de Mayo, in Buenos Aires, while his son traveled to La Plata every week to teach us modern history in the College of Humanities. He would arrive on Tuesday mornings, give his class in the history department for three or four students, myself among them, and then return to the capital by train in the afternoon. His classes left a permanent mark on me because he decided, in 1962, to concentrate his course on the passage—or the transition—from feudalism to capitalism and made us read, along with the rest of the syllabus, the extraordinary chapter in Marx’s Capital on primitive stockpiling, that is to say, on the origins of capitalism. A history of epic, legendary proportions, because the peasants and their feudal counterparts in the countryside began to be leveled by commercial capital, that is to say, by money, which was eliminating the power of the rural nobility and causing an ever-growing mass of the peasant population to lose everything and have nothing to sell other than their labor. Foucault, Emilio said, Michel Foucault has said that historians are led unavoidably to utilize the Marxist categories in their analysis. “To say ‘Marxist historian,’” said Foucault, “is a pleonasm, like saying ‘American cinema.’” And so, in that course, while taking notes frantically and reading Marx and the great English Marxist historians until late at night, I was forgetting my father’s Peronism and the vague family anarchism of my girlfriend Elena (without an H). University politics also influenced my decision, and my friendship with Luis Alonso, a provincial who had come to the University being—or claiming to be—a revolutionary, was another influence, just as I, like all of my contemporaries, was influenced by the Cuban Revolution and the figure of Che Guevara, who had given a stunning performance to the OAS, near us, at the meeting at Punta del Este, dressed in his olive-green suit, with his thin beard and the five-pointed star on his beret, which looked like a third eye on his face, so Argentine. But, as has been the case throughout my life, books were what really convinced me. One time, not long ago, some friends invited me to go fishing at El Tigre, and so, to prepare for the occasion, I, who had never fished or been interested in that private activity of standing still and silent and waiting, rod in hand, for a fish to bite, I bought myself a couple of fishing guides (How to Fish for River Fish was one), and the next day, on the island El Tigre, I caught more fish than any of my friends, who had all practiced the art of fishing since childhood. I was the absolute champion in that friendly fishing tournament in the Paraná River. In this same way, I became a Marxist: because of reading some books in Sánchez-Albornoz’s course on the origins of capitalism in England.

We took a break for coffee in the study’s kitchen and then returned to the worktable, and Renzi went on recounting the adventures of his second year as a student in the city of La Plata.

He was active in the student union, and his perception of politics soon made him decide, as a Marxist, to oppose the Argentine Communist Party’s positions in particular and the politics of the USSR in general. In this way he was naturally getting closer, along with his friend Luis Alonso, to the positions, we might say, of Trotskyism. First, because the Trotskyists categorically opposed the Communist Party, and second because they are very theoretical, ultra-intellectual, and not very practical. So they suited me perfectly, as someone who above all was, and continues to be, an abstract intellectual. The funniest thing is that I came closer to Silvio Frondizi’s group, a small Trotskyist sect, very Anti-Peronist and not very practical. For example, the person who “enrolled” me in the movement of the revolutionary left, Praxis, which was the name of the small circle of militants, was Tito Guerra, a perpetual student, very entertaining, who convinced me to join that clandestine and minuscule organization. I can remember our final conversation in the woods at La Plata, in front of the lake, and there, one autumn afternoon, I decided to commit myself to politics and become part of the group. The funny thing was that the day after he convinced me, Tito Guerra renounced his position in the organization and abandoned politics.

Thus began my political experience, organically; my life didn’t change too much, I went to some meetings, stayed active in the College, was a candidate for president of the center but, luckily for me, I lost the election by three votes (it would have been by two, if I had voted for myself, something I did not do, of course). Meanwhile, I had started writing the stories for La invasión, and with one of the first, “Mi amigo,” which was actually the second I had ever written, I won a short-story competition organized by a magazine that carried a fair amount of weight among young writers in those days. The funniest thing is that I discovered I was the winner during a lecture one afternoon by the writer Beatriz Guido, who had come to La Plata to give a talk on Salinger at the College; in the middle of the lecture, she said she had just read a very good story because she a was a judge in the magazine’s short-story competition, and she started to talk about a literary epiphany and named me, as I sat in the audience that afternoon in the Great Hall, and praised my story “Mi amigo,” and I realized, surprised, that she meant me and felt a contradictory emotion, which has always accompanied me through good and bad: it was not I, sitting there among my companions, who had written that story, it was someone else, different from me, more introverted and more valiant, whereas I was fairly lost in those days, emotionally distanced from everything. I could not bring myself to talk to her; it seemed impossible to me to stand up and tell her, “I am the young writer of that story.” A true horror, too real. Literature is much more mysterious and strange than the simple physical presence of the so-called author, and so I stayed in my seat, in the tenth row, I think, which is to say that I was close enough for her to see me but she did not know me, and I preferred to remain sitting, anonymous, though I would later become friends with Beatriz Guido and she was always generous, enthusiastic about me and whatever I was writing. I kept still, and she went on talking, and the people who knew me must have thought that I was not there or else did not realize she was talking about me. The fact is that, with such an acclaimed writer naming me as one of the most serious and promising of young Argentine writers, my stock had quickly risen to a new level. The girls immediately started becoming interested in me—me, who tried to stand at the peak of my brief and stunning fame.

Perhaps as a result, the directors of the Trotskyist group proposed that I act as the editorial secretary for the magazine they were planning to publish. And so, for a couple of years, I was in charge of the magazine Liberación, a legal publication, at least on the surface, as they would say in the conspiratorial jargon of the time. The director was a Trotskyist laborer, José Speroni, a union leader of great import who belonged to the revolutionary militant group that had followed the instruction of Nahuel Moreno, who, in secret, while a member of the Fourth International, had defined the tactics of “enterism,” meaning a militant Trotskyist infiltration of Peronism, undercover agents of the worldwide revolution working inside the unions but never revealing their true political position. The tactic was so effective that ten years later, when he was still close to returning to power, General Perón condemned and denounced the Trotskyists in the Fourth International, those he labeled responsible for controlling the left wing of the Justicialist movement, as Perón called his political force. Speroni had been a “mole” in the Peronist union movement and had reached the level of secretary-general in the textile guild. But he was discovered to be an undercover agent and had to resign from his position and act openly as a militant Trotskyist. He was very intelligent. Very bright, had a great deal of experience, and was a figurehead as director of the magazine. The other editorial member was the great philosopher Carlos Astrada, who had studied with Heidegger in Germany and was one of the favorite disciples of the author of Being and Time, but who, being more or less close spiritually, as we might say, to Peronism in his interpretation of the national identity’s phenomenological essence, had veered toward Marxism. He wrote a memorable article during that time, explaining how Lukács’s book History and Class Consciousness, and in particular his chapter on the fetishism of commodities, had a direct influence on the delicate Black Forest philosopher. The magazine was designed by Eduardo Rotllie, a sculptural artist from La Plata who was very interested in the Russian avant-garde of the twenties. In this way, the magazine where I published articles, interviews, and notes really was a school for me and an unforgettable experience. My political activity during those years was limited to the magazine meetings. Meanwhile, the group’s activists would go through the working neighborhoods of Berisso and Ensenada, bringing Trotsky’s words from house to house, using a system they learned from Evangelist pastors: they rang the bells or knocked on doors (if there was no doorbell) and handed to the surprised refrigeration workers or their wives or their children copies of the group’s newspaper, which was called, believe it or not, The Militant. The neighborhood people thought it was an army publication because, of course, they confused the word “militant,” which they did not know, with “military.” They thought “militant” was just another way of saying “military.” All except for the Peronist sympathizers, who understood immediately that it signified a Trotskyist daily. In response, following Perón’s directive, they insulted them and called them nasty epithets while slamming the door in their faces. I never participated in any evangelical work, and that seemed to create a certain hostile climate toward me in the organization. In fact, one afternoon, during a meeting of “the cell,” as they called it, in which my friend Luis Alonso participated, along with his girlfriend Margarita and a Peruvian student who slept in my room at the boardinghouse during the discussions, I remember as if it were today, my friend and comrade Luis Alonso asked to speak and, as though History were speaking through his mouth, contended that the organization should sanction me and sever me from my responsibilities as the magazine’s editorial secretary because I did not demonstrate the “mettle” (that was the word he used) of a revolutionary. In short, he wanted to occupy my position at the magazine himself, but he would not say it in that way; rather, he set to describing the differences between a revolutionary intellectual (for example, him) and a petit-bourgeois intellectual (for example, me, who, to my perfect horror, he called “pequebú”), so that I saw myself transformed into a sort of animal species, the pequebús, as it were a peccary. Then I asked for it to be put to a vote: Luis and his girlfriend voted against me, the Peruvian either abstained or voted against, and I don’t remember if I voted in my favor or abstained. He brought the decision from the tribunal—that’s to say, from the cell—to the higher proceedings of the organization, as he called them. They didn’t pay him the slightest attention and I stayed in charge of the magazine, but, from that moment onward, I never spoke to him again, treating him as though he were invisible. The case is a minor one, but I realized then that if my comrade Luis had held the power he would have condemned me to the gulag in the name of the interests of the global proletariat. He spoke and was convinced he spoke in the name of truth, the truth of History and socialism as well. That ridiculous situation seemed to me an experience that was replicated elsewhere in the revolutionary groups and in socialist states: someone is accused of failing to obey the laws of History and is condemned to exile or to prison. It was a revealing experience for me and also a way to perceive the stores of depth and anger hiding inside our so-called “Argentine friendships.” (The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years)