Was it that year or the next that saw the appearance of Grand Hotel, the first comic book for adults? The first image of that first photo-romance led me toward temptation, but I fled.
That was tame compared to something I later came across in my grandfather’s shop: a French magazine that as soon as I opened it made me burn with shame. I filched it, slipping it in my shirt and leaving.
I am home, stretched out in my bed on my stomach, and as I flip through the pages I press my crotch into the mattress, just as they advise you not to do in the devotional handbooks. On one page: a photo, fairly small but immensely evident, of Josephine Baker, topless.
I stare at her shadowed eyes so as not to look at her breasts, then my gaze shifts, they are (I believe) the first breasts of my life-the ample, flaccid things on the à poil Kalmyk women were something else entirely.
A wave of honey surges through my veins, I feel an acrid aftertaste in the back of my throat, a pressure on my forehead, a swoon in my loins. I stand up frightened and moist, wondering what terrible disease I have contracted, delighted by that liquefaction into primordial soup.
I believe it was my first ejaculation: more forbidden, I think, than cutting a German’s throat. I have sinned again-that night in the Gorge was the mute witness to the mystery of death, and this moment is the interloper penetrating the forbidden mysteries of life.
I am in a confessional. A fiery Capuchin entertains me at length on the virtues of purity.
He tells me nothing I have not already read in those little handbooks at Solara, but perhaps his words were what sent me back to Don Bosco’s Provident Young Man:
Even at your tender age the devil is laying snares to rob you of your soul… It will aid greatly in preserving you from temptation should you remain far from opportunities, from scandalous conversations, from public spectacles, from which no good can come… Endeavor to keep busy at all times; when you do not know what to do, adorn altars, straighten images or small pictures… If afterward the temptation persists, make the sign of the Holy Cross, kiss some blessed object and say: Saintly Aloysius, let me not offend my God. I give you this saint’s name because the Church has declared him the special protector of youth…
Above all else, flee the company of persons of the opposite sex. Understand well: I mean to say that young men should not ever enter into any familiarity with girls… The eyes are windows through which sin makes its way into our hearts… thus you must never stop to gaze upon that which is contrary in the slightest to modesty. Saint Aloysius Gonzaga did not want even his feet to be seen as he put himself to bed or rose from it. He did not permit his own mother to look him in the eyes… He spent two years with the queen of Spain as a page and never once gazed upon her face.
Imitating Saint Aloysius is not easy, or rather the price of fleeing temptation seems rather exorbitant, given that the young fellow, having scourged himself bloody, would put pieces of wood beneath his sheets, to torture himself even in his sleep. He hid riding spurs beneath his clothes because he had no hair shirts; he sought his displeasure wherever he stood, or sat, or walked… But the exemplar of virtue my confessor proposes to me is Domenico Savio, whose trouser legs were misshapen from too much kneeling but whose penances were less bloody than Saint Aloysius’s, and he also exhorts me to contemplate, as an example of holy beauty, Mary’s exquisite face.
I try to become infatuated with a sublime and sublimated femininity. I sing in the boys’ choir, in the apse of the church or at other sanctuaries during Sunday field trips:
Thou risest at dawn full of beauty to gladden the earth with each ray. The sky puts its night stars away, for none is so lovely as Thee.
Lovely Thou art as the sun, white as the light of the moon, and the loveliest star is but a far candle to Thee. Thine eyes are more lovely than oceans,
the color of lilies Thy brow, Thy cheeks are two roses, kissed by the Son, and Thy lips are a flower.
Perhaps I am preparing myself, though I am not yet sure, for my encounter with Lila, who must be equally unreachable, equally splendid in her empyrean, her beauty gratia sui, free from the flesh, able to dwell in the mind without stirring the loins, with eyes that gaze elsewhere, above and beyond me, rather than fixing slyly on me like Josephine Baker’s.
It is my duty to pay, by means of meditation, prayer, and sacrifice, for my sins and the sins of those around me. To devote myself to the defense of faith, as the first magazines and the first wall posters begin telling me about the Red Menace, about Cossacks waiting to water their horses at the holywater fonts in Saint Peter’s. I wonder, confused, how in the world the Cossacks, who were Stalin’s enemies and had even fought alongside the Germans, have now become communism’s messengers of death, and whether they will also want to kill all the anarchists like Gragnola. These Cossacks look to me very like that evil Negro who was raping the Venus de Milo, and perhaps they were drawn by the same artist, reinventing himself for a new crusade.
Spiritual exercises, in a little monastery out in the countryside. A rancid smell from the refectory, strolls through the cloister with the librarian, who advises me to read Papini. After dinner we all go into the choir of the church, and illuminated by a single candle we recite the Exercise for a Good Death.
The spiritual director reads us the passages on death from The Provident Young Man: We do not know where death will surprise us- you do not know if it will take you in your beds, as you work, in the street or elsewhere; a burst vein, a catarrh, a rush of blood, a fever, a sore, an earthquake, a bolt of lightning-any could be enough to deprive you of your life, and it could happen a year from now, a month, a week, an hour, or perhaps just as you finish reading this passage. In that moment, we will feel our head darkened, our eyes aching, our tongue parched, our jaws closed, heavy our chest, our blood cold, our flesh worn, our heart broken. When we have breathed our last, our body, dressed in a few rags, will be thrown into a ditch, and there the mice and the worms will gnaw away all our flesh, and nothing of us will remain save a few bare bones and some fetid dust.
Then the prayer, a long invocation recounting each of the last throes of a dying man, the pangs in his every limb, the first tremors, the rising pallor leading to the facies hippocratica and the death rattle. Each description of the fourteen stages of our final passage (only five or six come clearly to mind) concludes, after defining the body’s attitude and the moment’s anguish, with merciful Jesus, have pity on me.
When my motionless feet shall warn me that my time on this earth is nearing its end, merciful Jesus, have pity on me.
When my numb, tremulous hands shall no longer be able to grasp you, my blessed Crucifix, and against my will shall let you fall onto the bed of my suffering, merciful Jesus, have pity on me.
When my eyes, darkened and stricken with horror by death’s imminence, shall fix their enfeebled and moribund glances on You, merciful Jesus, have pity on me.
When my pale, leaden cheeks shall inspire compassion and terror in onlookers, and my hair, damp with death’s sweat, shall stand erect, announcing the nearness of my end, merciful Jesus, have pity on me.
When my imagination, agitated by terrible, fearsome specters, shall be immersed in mortal sorrows, merciful Jesus, have pity on me.
When I shall have lost the use of all my senses, and the entire world shall have vanished from me, and I shall moan in death’s final, anguished throes, merciful Jesus, have pity on me.
Singing psalms in the dark thinking about my own death. It was just what I needed, to stop me thinking about other people’s. I relive that exercise not with terror, but with a serene consciousness of the fact that all men are mortal. That lesson in Being-toward-Death prepared me for my destiny, which is everyone’s destiny. In May, Gianni told me the joke about that doctor who advises a terminally ill patient to take sand baths. «Do they help, doctor?» «Not really, but you’ll get accustomed to being underground.»
I am getting accustomed.
One evening the spiritual director stood in front of the altar balustrade, illuminated-like all of us, like the entire chapel-by that single candle that haloed him in light, leaving his face in darkness. Before dismissing us, he told us a story. One night, in a convent school, a girl died, a young, pious, beautiful girl. The next morning, she was stretched out on a catafalque
