A little girl, her hand held by her father’s, kept turning sideways to watch the pigeons and the sea, but her father supposed that it was the dead man who attracted her, hence his well-meaning yanking of her wrist; while the whining boy was sure that she kept looking at him in fascinated contempt; and it was this memory above all, whose basis you have just seen to be false, which hurt him most in later life — but did any of this justify his actions?
So the naughty boy grew up with his ever-merciful mother whom he hated, teased, tormented and drained. Those two were of so little interest to anyone else that they lived on the eighth floor of a seven-storey façade (chiseled dirty stone, which might have been pink or tan beneath its greyness). It could have been worse; they could have lived on the ninth floor, among the old widows who have gone to heaven; although it could have been better, in which case they might have been privileged to exist on the seventh floor, among the old widows who no longer watch but listen through the dark shades of their narrowly vertical windowpanes. Those years half throttled him with the stickiness of clothes at knees, elbows, shoulders, chest and back. He kept running to see where life was. Whenever life got away from him, he grew enraged and smeared his excrement on monuments. He was a disgusting boy, to be sure, and always had been. When he was small he used to fly from banister to shoulder or armchair to neck like a vampire bat, sinking his sharp little teeth into the flesh of anyone he chose. When people prayed he would roll his eyes and utter rude whistlings. Those behaviors grew more discreet upon the death of his father. Anyhow, what was he to do? Everything was grey with white glare behind it, like the noon sky in Trieste late in a summer which will not die. So he remained miserably exempt from the fear that so many feel in the face of death, from the vain desire to keep death from achieving total victory by commissioning monuments to ourselves. But finally his testicles descended, and at once autumn began, with a wind which whirled away the potato chips from their glass dishes on the tables of the outdoor cafés. The shadows were more distinct and we could all see farther. What we spied between the slats of our shutters used to be undifferentiated whiteness; but now it organized itself into distinctions of white light and blue light.
His mother bought him a little briefcase. He began to be excited by the dull sheen of brass plaques.
I cannot tell you whether he wanted to be good or merely to be approved of. He was a boy who told lies. Once his mother told him to eat a certain apple before it got overripe, and he said that he had done it but she found it in the dustbin. These careless lies of his became more extravagant, hence almost endearingly unearthly. A beggar came to the door. His mother was upstairs scrubbing the floor. She heard the beggar arguing with her son; she was just about to rise up off her aching knees and go to the young man’s aid when the door slammed behind the beggar; then her son came rushing upstairs with his face alight with virtue; he announced that he had given the beggar five hundred lire of his own money. What could the mother say? Perhaps he had at least felt a momentary charitable inclination, which should not be discouraged. Smiling pityingly, she patted his elbow and went on scrubbing the floor.
When he threw the brick at the Madonna’s white, white forehead, at first he disbelieved the result. Then, determined not to change his life, he approached the divine image in a scientific spirit, seeking to see some reservoir of rusty water beneath the paint. But no; she was bleeding. And she gazed at Nino, lovingly smiling — the smile of a lover, or a mother, or simply of a woman who loved — so giving, that smile, and so fearless, but not like the smile of the woman he would someday marry, who sometimes, at least at first, expressed such happiness that he seemed to smell the fragrance of oranges and lemons; and not like the heavy-lidded smiles of the prostitutes with whom he would in time lie on July afternoons, with the window open in hopes of a harbor breeze; no, she gazed at him with sad awareness — after all, not like his mother, who narrowed her awareness in order to avoid loving him less on account of his sins. Sad smile, brown eyes (one of them larger than the other), bleeding forehead — what did all this mean?
The boy knew well the tri-tiered stands of gum, candies and cough drops in little boxes, and then around the corner he knew a specific double-shelved pastry case, with cookies like full moons eclipsed at the center by smaller planets of jam. These cookies did not seem stealable, so he bought one with his mother’s money, then ran off with it to lurk amidst the sunken weedgrown columns of the Teatro Romano, seeking to deny what he had seen.
The psychotherapist Wilhelm Stekel asserts that our fundamental emotion is hatred. Hence we may conceive of the masochism merely as a painting over the sadistic portrait beneath. Such an assertion would be monstrous, could it not be proved. Are we created in Mary’s image — or, if you like, is she one of us? If so, what sadism does her portrait conceal? If not, is she inhuman? Or is Stekel incorrect? 7