He taught me about Socrates and Giordano Bruno. And Bakunin, about whose work and life I had known very little. He told me about Campanella, Sarpi, and Galileo, who were all imprisoned or tortured by priests for trying to spread scientific principles, and about some who had cut their own throats, like Ardigò, because the bosses and the Vatican were keeping them down.
Since I had read the Hegel entry ("Emin. Ger. phil. of the pantheist school") in the Nuovissimo Melzi, I asked Gragnola about him. "Hegel wasn’t a pantheist, and your Melzi is an ignoramus. Giordano Bruno might have been a pantheist. A pantheist believes that God is everywhere, even in that speck of a fly you see there. You can imagine how satisfying that is, being everywhere is like being nowhere. Well, for Hegel it wasn’t God but the State that had to be everywhere, therefore he was a fascist."
"But didn’t he live more than a hundred years ago?"
"So? Joan of Arc, also a fascist of the highest order. Fascists have always existed. Since the age of… since the age of God. Take God-a fascist."
"But aren’t you one of those atheists who says God doesn’t exist?"
"Who said that-Don Cognasso, who can never grasp the most trifling thing? I believe that God does, unfortunately, exist. It’s just that he’s a fascist."
"But why is God a fascist?"
"Listen, you’re too young for me to give you a theology lecture. We’ll start with what you know. Recite the ten commandments for me, seeing as the Oratorio makes you memorize them."
I recited them. "Good," he said. "Now pay attention. Among those ten commandments are four, think about it, only four that promote good things-and even those, well, let’s review them. Don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t bear false witness, and don’t covet your neighbor’s wife. This last one is a commandment for men who know what honor is: on the one hand, don’t cuckold your friends, and on the other try to preserve your family, and I can live with that; anarchy wants to get rid of families too, but you can’t have everything all at once. As for the other three, I agree, but common sense should tell you that much at a bare minimum. And even then you have to weigh them, we all tell lies sometimes, perhaps even for good ends, whereas killing, no, you shouldn’t do that, ever."
"Not even if the king sends you off to war?"
"There’s the rub. Priests will tell you that if the king sends you off to war you can, indeed you should, kill. And that the responsibility lies with the king. That’s how they justify war, which is a nasty brute, especially if Fat Head is the one who sends you off. But notice that the commandments don’t say it’s okay to kill in war. They say don’t kill, period. And then…"
"Then?"
"Let’s look at the other commandments. I am the Lord thy God. That’s not a commandment, otherwise there would be eleven. It’s a prologue. But it’s a sham of a prologue. Try to picture it: some guy appears to Moses, or actually he doesn’t even really appear, a voice comes from who knows where, and then Moses goes and tells his people that they have to obey the commandments because they come from God. But who says they come from God? That voice: ‘I am the Lord thy God.’ And what if he wasn’t? Imagine if I stop you on the street and say I’m a plainclothes carabiniere and you have to pay me a ten-lira fine because no one’s allowed on that street. If you’re smart you’ll say back: and how can I be sure that you’re a carabiniere, maybe you’re someone who makes his living by screwing people over. Let me see your papers. And instead God persuades Moses that he’s God because he’s says so and that’s that. It all begins with false witness."
"You don’t believe it was God who gave the commandments to Moses?"
"No, actually I do believe it was God. I’m just saying he used a trick. He’s always done that: you have to believe in the Bible because it’s inspired by God, but who tells you the Bible’s inspired by God? The Bible. See the problem? But let’s move on. The first commandment says you shall have no other God before him. That’s how the Lord prevents you from thinking, for instance, about Allah, or Buddha, or maybe even Venus-and let’s be honest, it couldn’t have been bad to have a piece of tail like that as your goddess. But it also means you shouldn’t believe in philosophy, for instance, or in science, or get any ideas about man descending from apes. Just him, that’s it. Now pay attention, because the other commandments are all fascist, designed to force you to accept society as it is. Remember the one about keeping the Sabbath day holy… What do you think of it?"
"Well, basically it says to go to mass on Sunday-what’s wrong with that?"
"That’s what Don Cognasso tells you, and like all priests he doesn’t know the first thing about the Bible. Wake up! In a primitive tribe like the one Moses took out for a walk, this meant that you have to observe the rites, and the purpose of the rites-from human sacrifices on up to Fat Head’s rallies in Piazza Venezia-is to addle people’s brains! And then? Honor thy father and mother. Oh hush, don’t tell me it’s good for children to obey their parents, that’s fine for children, who need guidance. But honor thy father and mother means respect the ideas of your elders, don’t oppose tradition, don’t presume to change the tribe’s way of life. See? Don’t cut off the king’s head, though God knows if we have a head on our own shoulders we have to, especially with a king like that dwarf Savoy, who betrayed his army and sent his officers to their death. And now you can see that even Don’t steal isn’t quite as innocent a commandment as it seems, because it orders you not to touch private property, which belongs to the person who got rich by stealing from you. If only it ended there. There are three commandments left. What does Thou shalt not commit impure acts mean? The Don Cognassos of the world would have you believe its only purpose is to keep you from wagging that thing that hangs between your legs, and to drag in the stone tablets for the occasional wank seems a bit much. What’s a guy like me supposed to do, a failure? That beautiful woman my mother didn’t make me beautiful, and I’m a gimp to boot, and I’ve never touched a woman who’s a woman, and they want to deny me even that release?"
At that time I knew how babies were born, but my ideas about what led up to that were vague. I had heard my friends talking about wanks and other kinds of touching, but I never dared do further research. Still, I did not want to make a bad impression on Gragnola. I nodded silently, solemnly.
"God could have said, for instance, You can screw, but only to make babies, especially since at that time there weren’t enough people in the world. But the ten commandments don’t say that: on the one hand, you can’t covet your friend’s wife and on the other you can’t commit impure acts. So, then, when is screwing allowed? I mean really, you’re trying to make a law that works for the whole world- when the Romans, who weren’t God, made laws it was stuff that still makes sense today-and God tosses down a Decalogue that doesn’t tell you the most important things? You’ll probably say: Sure, but the prohibition against impure acts forbids screwing outside of marriage. Are you sure that was really the case? What were impure acts for the Hebrews? They had very strict rules, for example they couldn’t eat pork, nor cows that had been killed in certain ways, and from what I’m told not even whitebait. So the impure acts are all the things that the people in power have prohibited. Which are? All the things that the people in power have defined as impure acts. Just look around, Fat Head claimed it was impure to speak ill of Fascism, and he’d send you off to confinement if you did. It was impure to be a bachelor, so you paid the bachelor tax. It was impure to fly a red flag. And so on and so on and so on. And now we come to the last commandment: Don’t covet other people’s stuff. But have you ever asked yourself why this commandment exists, when you’ve already got Don’t steal? If you covet a bike like the one your friend has, is that a sin? No, not if you don’t steal it from him. Don Cognasso will tell you that this commandment prohibits envy, which is certainly an ugly thing. But there’s bad envy, which is when your friend has a bicycle and you don’t, and you hope he breaks his neck going down a hill, and there’s good envy, which is when you want a bike like his and work your butt off to be able to buy one, even a used one, and it’s good envy that makes the world go round. And then there’s another envy, which is justice envy, which is when you can’t see any reason why a few people have everything and others are dying of hunger. And if you feel this fine sort of envy, which is socialist envy, you get busy trying to make a world in which riches are better distributed. But that’s exactly what the commandment prohibits you from doing: Don’t covet more than you have, respect the rule of property. In this world there are those who own two fields of grain just because they inherited them, and there are those who toil in those fields for a crust of bread, and the ones toiling must not covet the owner’s fields, otherwise the state will be ruined and we’ll have a revolution. The tenth commandment prohibits revolution. Therefore, my dear boy, don’t kill and don’t steal from poor kids like yourself, but go ahead and covet what other people have taken from you. That’s the sun of the coming day, and that’s why our comrades are staying up there in the mountains, to get rid of Fat Head, who rose to power funded by agrarian landowners and by Hitler’s toadies, Hitler who wanted to conquer the world so that that guy Krupp who builds Berthas this long could sell more cannons. But you, how could you ever understand about these things, you who grew up memorizing oaths of obedience to Il Duce’s orders?"