Books & Rough Business

VI

27 Tullio Pironti VI More formal schooling began for me in a square palazzo from the Fascist building boom, a place only ten or a dozen years old, but close by a far more weathered and disturbing edifice. The area was known as The Way to Purgatory, a name derived from its central church, which once had a reputation as a good place to pray for souls struggling up the purgatorial mountain.The sanctuary itself had a slang name too, roughly, “death-head hangout.” For along the gate before the entrance, at chest level, the church designers had posted four bronze skulls. A bit smaller than soccer balls, and with the lower curve of each sphere cut off by protruding bronze teeth, these had turned the same crud-black as the stone steps and iron gate. At some point during the bombing, the church had fallen into disuse. In the years since, the space has been deconsecrated .The skulls, according to the most persistent rumor, were cast from the actual remains of four church founders. But perhaps they were supposed to represent the four Gospels, instead, or perhaps they had some obscure connection to Purgatory. Whatever their story, the skulls sit there still, staring out towards Via Tribunali along the front of an abandoned church. The only difference is, one has been stolen—another mystery. Really, what could be the reason for taking an acetylene torch and, in the dead of night, cutting one of those things from its gatepost? What could you get for it? Myself, as I headed into school close by these memento mori, I looked a good deal livelier but not much cleaner. I was proving more of a roughneck than my brothers, after all; before school, I usually took part in a guainella, a street-fight with rivals from the next block. These battles had plenty of ammunition, the loose rock left behind by the bombing. Most mornings, 28 Books and Rough Business by the time I could ignore the schoolmaster’s calls no longer, I’d be sweaty, mud-smeared, even bleeding. The only lower-school teacher I remember with real clarity was De Renzi. Not that he looked particularly impressive, though he was as old and rangy as my father’s fencing partner. De Renzi’s hair was a mousy white tangle, and he had a comic walk, his feet splayed like a duck’s. Yet despite this, indeed despite a mild aspect generally, this teacher turned out to be terribly severe. Alongside his desk, he’d created a space we called “the torture corner.” There he’d laid down a carpet of chickpeas, on which he’d order us to kneel. And don’t forget my “rompers;” in 1944 and ’45 a boy rarely wore long pants. We would squirm on De Renzi’s hard-shell rug until he was satisfied we’d expiated our crime—only he knew how long that might take—and when that didn’t seem like punishment enough, he’d reached for his whip. This was an aluminum rod, lightweight but sturdy, and a stinging weapon when he slapped it down on a malefactor’s upraised palms. The usual punishment was ten burning lashes with the rod, but De Renzi would give you two for one if you tried to jerk your hands out from under his attack. It made no difference to him if the gesture was only an instinct, self-preservation. And soon enough I got it worse. This was one of those days, I see now. All of us in that room had run out of patience. Still, by then I’d become a ringleader, the worst of the troublemakers. After hours of uproar, our maestro raised a fresh threat: “Silence! Silence, or it’s fifty lashes!” Yet this only set me off worse, exploding in the kind of talk we hard cases used while flinging rocks at each other—a bit of Neapolitan, in fact, about his head being full of rocks. What did I expect? At once he growled, “Pironti! Vieni qui!” I came out from behind my desk assuring myself, or trying to, that he couldn’t be serious. I’d already suffered ten, I knew what that felt like, and no way he could give anyone fifty . . . But when, with palms upraised and eyes closed, I began to count the blows, it soon became clear that De Renzi was going well beyond his usual. The system we all knew was...