He examined his shame. He poked at it. He experimented with ways of making it flare up or cool down. Where did it come from? It came from someplace in the constellation of My Father Is Dead but I Am Still Alive.
16
He wanted something to happen. He read more. It did not seem quite right to him that he should lose himself in reading, but he had nowhere else in the short term to go. It gave him no pleasure, but he didn’t want to be pleased. He wanted to be displeased, to feel the displeasure of his circumstances, because it did not seem right to him, no, it did not seem right at all, that his grief had all burned off before it could produce any effect. His grandmother had made loud, pulsing screams in her bedroom, a sound from the Dark Ages, while Ciccio kneaded the dough for their bread.
The Jesuits and his lay teachers forced him to read more, and he obeyed, stupid as a mill horse, hoping that if he got lost far enough then something would happen. He didn’t even care to be the agent of this thing. It was an accident that he found himself casting around in philosophy and religion for the thing that would happen. Those were the oats they were feeding him. If he had gotten into the union a few years ago, as planned, he would have lost himself in a hod or a wheelbarrow instead of in Thomas Aquinas.
During his winter oral exam that February, Father Manfred asked him, “If I told you I was both free and unfree at the same time, what would my rationale be?”
Well, said young Mazzone, we were made in God’s image, and you could make the case that God was for the most part free but not entirely so, since the list of things he couldn’t do was long. He could not come into being or pass out of being. He could not not be good. God was both free and unfree; we were made in God’s image; et cetera. How about that?
But, no, Father Manfred said, God could be and not be at once if he wanted. God didn’t mind contradicting himself. Try again.
All he could think of was to say: God is great. God is a mystery. God is like us and not like us.
“Yes, good, more,” the priest said.
“And if you’re a slave in your head? I mean, obviously you’re not free to fly to Mars on your own wings. It’s easy to say how you’re unfree outside your head. But what if you were unfree inside your head?”
“That’s it, play with that.”
“If you’re not free in your head—”
“Hit that. Slam away at it.”
“I am working a little harder, Father, because I am afraid.”
“Boom boom.”
“—then you never see how little sense it makes.”
“Nice. Go. Yes. Hit him. A left and a right.”
“Because it’s impossible that God exists, but he does. And unless you’re free in your head, you can’t see why it’s impossible.”
“And therefore look how much greater is God that he smashes even reason underfoot.”
Which, okay — there was the absurdly luminous shadow of paradox, believing because it was nonsense to believe. He knew they liked that sort of thing. So did he, to be honest. It made sense to him, ha ha.
He was at an impressionable junction and knew it. Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas were beyond the edge of his understanding. Much of his thinking these days was only ingesting what the priests said and then vomiting it back up on his shirt and looking at the vomit and saying, Gee, look what I made.
His father had always told him to disregard every third word the Jesuits said. They were famous for twisting people’s heads. They made vice look like virtue. They had, as an order, been kicked out of the Church for a few decades a couple hundred years ago. And yet his father’s position was ambiguous, had been ambiguous. After all, he’d paid a lot of dough to send Ciccio to the school.
There was civics and there was trig, okay. You were discouraged from getting too excited about them, probably because they were relevant to the twentieth century. There was Latin, of course. There was Latin, Latin everywhere, from incunabulum to extremis. And this year there was Greek, too. They had Ciccio trudgingly translating Aristotle in one class; reading him at length in English in another; and reading Aquinas, talking about him, in another. It was the junior-year Aristo-blitzkrieg. His defenses were weakening, but defenses against what?
“Don’t let them turn you into something you’re not.” That was his homespun father again. Ciccio would have been far more comfortable with himself if they had just made him keep memorizing tidbits from the Baltimore Catechism — that was the method of the nuns in junior high, and he had remained mostly immune. (He had not been turned into a papist knucklehead, like so many Irish and Poles. He had maintained the cynicism of his people respecting the double-dealings of the Church.) Instead, in the high school, the priests were on a crusade to grind him into the earth with work.
It must be understood that he was a boy on a trapdoor, and the latch of the trap had been pulled, and he had fallen, and he had somehow landed in a place where old European gentlemen were razing him in order to rebuild to their specs.
The catechism was, implicitly, out. Understanding, feeling competent to discuss the assignment, were out. Clarity was out. Usefulness was out, but that was old news. Declaratives were out. Interrogatives were in. Confusion and fear. The subjunctive and the conditional were certainly in. They were the beating heart of in.
He was made to memorize what Aristotle had said about something, and then what Saint Paul had said about it, and then what Thomas Aquinas had to say by way of fitting them together. But on the exam he had to disagree with Aquinas and make a point-by-point case for the disagreement. It was another one of their dissembling SJ tricks. They knew that as a teenager he was engineered to disagree, so they commanded him to disagree, for which he had to resent them, he wanted to resist them; and where was the most obvious outlet for his resistance? Why, agreement, of course, with Aquinas. In this way they were making a Thomist out of him despite himself. Or some of them were; the others, the paradox crowd, were trying to turn him into a Lutheran, maybe.
Not that he had the first idea of what that would mean, to be a Thomist, what credo he would be following.
Is it clear why he was looking for a credo to follow? Could you maybe cut him a break for taking it all so seriously?
An untranslated eighteenth-century copy of the Summa Theolgiae, all dolled up in still-green lambskin, occupied seven feet of shelf space over the chalkboard behind Father Manfred’s lectern. Now, there was no question of reading, much less of getting, this seven-foot-long idea, but there was the promise in it of a universe to get lost in. Short of joining the monastery, he was not going to read even 10 percent of Aquinas. But he’d read enough to have gotten lost in the thicket; he could say he’d read enough to have forgotten what was supposed to be the inspiring genius of the man’s thought, and to be lost made him afraid, which felt righter than nothing did.
He read in the afternoons, on the hallway floor between Mrs. Marini’s spare bedrooms upstairs, lying on a bath towel. It was the only place in the house free of the distraction of sunlight. Once, having fallen asleep, he woke up to her softly jabbing his ear with the toe of her shoe. The pages of his Selected Aquinas were folded irregularly under his head.
“This is not Ciccio who reads, this is Ciccio who lays about,” she said. She pointed an accusing finger, not at him, but at the book. She said, “It escapes you whole hog, I bet.”