A shudder travels through the audience and spreads to the pews and the vaults, seeming almost to make the candle flame flicker. The director exhorts us to go to bed, but no one moves. A long line forms in front of the confessional, everyone intent on giving in to sleep only after the merest hint of sin has been confessed.
In the menacing comfort of dark naves, fleeing the evils of the century, I spend my days in icy ardors, in which even Christmas carols, and what had been the comforting crèche of my childhood, become the birth of the Child into the horrors of the world:
Sleep, do not cry, oh my sweet Jesus, sleep, do not cry, my beloved Redeemer… Oh beautiful child, hasten to shut your sweet-natured eyes in horror extreme.
That’s why they sting, the straw and the hay, Because your bright eyes are shimmering still. Hasten to close them, so sleep at least may offer its remedy for every ill. Sleep, do not cry, oh my sweet Jesus, sleep, do not cry, my beloved Redeemer…
One Sunday, Papà, a soccer fan and a bit disappointed in that son of his who spends his days ruining his eyes over books, takes me to a match. It is a minor contest, the stands are nearly empty, speckled with the colors of the few onlookers, blotches on white bleachers that are scorching hot in the sun. The game is stopped by a referee’s whistle, one captain protests the call, the other players move around the field aimlessly. Two colors of jerseys in disarray, bored athletes milling about a green field, a scattered mess. Everything stalls. What happens unreels now in slow motion, as in a parochial movie theater when the sound suddenly cuts off with a meow, movements become more careful, then jerk frame by frame to a stop on a single image, which dissolves on the screen like melting wax.
And in that moment I experience a revelation.
I realize now that it was a painful sense that the world is purposeless, the lazy fruit of a misunderstanding, but in that moment I was able to translate what I felt only as: «God does not exist.»
I leave the match in the grip of lacerating regrets and run straight to confession. The fiery confessor from my previous visit now smiles, indulgent and benevolent, asks me how I got such a silly notion in my head, mentions the beauty of nature, which points to a creative and ordering will, then talks at length about the consensus gentium: «My child, the greatest writers, Dante, Manzoni, Salvaneschi, have believed in God, and great mathematicians like Fantappie, and you want to be lesser?» The consensus of people, for the moment, calms me. It must have been the match’s fault. Paola told me I never went to soccer matches, at most I would watch the finals of the World Cup on television. I must have had it in my head, from that day on, that going to a match meant losing my soul.
But there are other ways to lose it. My schoolmates begin telling stories in whispers and giggles. They drop hints, they share magazines and books stolen from home, they speak about the mysterious Casa Rossa, which we are not yet old enough to visit, they empty their wallets at the cinema on comedies featuring scantily clad
women. They show me a photo of Isa Barzizza in skimpy panties, on stage in a variety show. I cannot refuse to look without seeming like a pharisee, so I look, and as we know anything can be resisted except temptation. I enter the movie house furtively, early in the afternoon, hoping not to run into anyone who knows me: in The Two Orphans (with Totò and Carlo Campanini), Isa Barzizza and several other convent girls, in defiance of the mother superior’s orders, bathe naked.
The girls’ bodies cannot be seen, they are shadows behind the shower curtains. They throw themselves into their ablutions as if it were a dance. I should go to confession, but those transparencies remind me of a book I once clapped shut in Solara, fearful of what I was reading: Hugo’s The Laughing Man.
I do not have it in the city, but I am sure my grandfather has a copy in his shop. I find it, and while my grandfather converses with someone I curl up at the foot of the bookshelf and turn feverishly to the forbidden page. Gwynplaine, horribly mutilated by comprachicos who turned his face into a freak-show mask, cast off from society, finds himself suddenly recognized as Lord Clancharlie, heir to an immense fortune and a peerage.
Before he fully understands what is happening to him, he is taken, wearing the splendid garb of a gentleman, to an enchanted palace, and the series of marvels he discovers there (alone in that resplendent desert), the fugue of rooms and chambers, makes not only his head spin, but also the reader’s. He wanders from room to room until he comes to an alcove where he sees, upon a bed, near a tub of water ready for a virginal bath, a naked woman.
Not literally naked, notes Hugo slyly. She was dressed. But in a chemise so long and sheer as to make her appear merely wet. And here follow seven pages describing how a naked woman looks, and how she looks to the Laughing Man, who until then had loved, chastely, only a blind girl. The woman looks to him like a dozing Venus amid an immensity of sea foam, and as she sleeps her slow movements draw and erase enticing curves with the vague dynamics of water vapor forming clouds in the blue sky. Hugo remarks: «A woman naked is a woman armed.»
Suddenly the woman, Josiane, the queen’s sister, awakes, recognizes Gwynplaine, and makes a frenzied effort to seduce him, one the wretch is by this point unable to resist, except that she has brought him to the brink of desire without yet yielding herself. She launches into a series of fantasias more disconcerting than her nakedness, presenting herself as virgin and as prostitute, eager to enjoy not only the pleasures his deformity promises, but also the thrill of defying the world and the court, prospects which intoxicate her: Venus on the verge of a double orgasm, from both the private possession and the public exhibition of her Vulcan.
Gwynplaine is ready to yield, but a message arrives from the queen, who informs her sister that the Laughing Man has been recognized as the legitimate Lord Clancharlie and that she is to marry him. Josiane declares, «So be it,» rises, points to the door, and (shifting from the tu to the vous) tells the man with whom she had wanted to couple wildly: «Begone.» She explains: «Since you are my husband, begone… You have no right to be here. This is my lover’s place.»
Sublime corruption-not of Gwynplaine, of Yambo. Not only does Josiane offer me more than Isa Barzizza had promised from behind her curtain, but she wins me over with her shamelessness: «You are my husband, begone, this is my lover’s place.» Could sin possibly be so heroically overpowering?
Are there, in the world, women like Lady Josiane and Isa Barzizza? Will I ever meet them? Will I remain thunderstruck by them-sffft-just punishment for my fantasies?
There are, at least on the screen. On another afternoon, furtively, I went to see Blood and Sand. The adoration with which Tyrone Power presses his face into Rita Hayworth’s belly persuades me that some women are armed even when they are not naked. As long as they are brazen.
To be intensely educated about the horror of sin and then to be conquered by it. I tell myself that it must be prohibition that kindles fantasy. Thus I decide that, if I am to escape temptation, I must avoid the suggestions of an «education in purity»: both are the devil’s stratagems, and each sustains the other. This intuition, however heterodox, hits me like a whip.
I withdraw into a world all my own.
I cultivate music, always glued to the radio in the afternoon hours, or the early morning, and sometimes they play a symphony in the evening. My family would prefer to listen to other things. «Enough with these dirges,» complains Ada, impervious to the muses. One Sunday morning I encounter Uncle Gaetano, now an old man, on the street. He has lost even his gold tooth, or maybe he sold it during the war. He asks benevolently after my studies, and Papà has told him that these days I am obsessed with music. «Ah, music,» he says with delight, «how well I understand you, Yambo, I adore music. And all kinds, you know? Any sort, as long as it’s music.» He reflects for a moment, then adds: «As long as it’s not classical. Then I turn it off, of course.»
I am an exceptional creature exiled among philistines. I sequester myself ever more proudly in my solitude.
In my high school’s first-year reader, I stumble on the verses of several contemporary poets. I discover that one can be illumined by immensity, encounter the evil of living, be pierced by a ray of sunlight. I do not fully understand it, but I like the idea that this is
