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)