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)