Nicola Chiaramonte
THE JESUIT
We had been at school together, at the Collegio Massimo,
the time-honored Jesuit college where the sons of the Roman middle
class sit in the same classroom, but do not mingle, with the scions of
the "black" aristocracy. We had been together responsible for a
collective act which consisted in greeting the teacher of French with
the word "Scythian" whispered by thirty mouths, and, also, for the
editing of a mimeographed school magazine, an initiative which was
strictly forbidden by the Fathers. We had played soccer and ex–
ploded homemade land-mines in the same vacant lot. We had both
been in love with Pearl White, and done many irregular and dishonest
things for her sake, like selling textbooks and stealing from our
fathers' wallets in order not to miss the next episode of
The Mysteries
of New York.
But when we were fifteen our roads began to part:
Martelli went into the Catholic Youth and embraced the ideology of
the Partito Popolare (the pre-Fascist version of the Christian Demo–
crats) , while I was for D'Annunzio and (because of D'Annunzio)
also for Mussolini. In the meantime, I had also begun to disbelieve
in God, and more specially in the necessity of submitting to the torture
of weekly confession, while Martelli remained a devout boy and went
into retreat every year, to perform Saint Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises
under the direction of a very old Father, famous all over Catholic
Rome as an outstanding specialist in that kind of devotion.
As
a con–
sequence, Martelli and I could not be intimate any longer, and in
fact we started having different friends. But our ideological quarrels
remained
a
strong bond between us, especially since from politics we
had both rushed into theology. It was St. Thomas against Nietzsche
(or rather: Zarathustra ) , and Nietzsche suffered many logical de–
feats; at the same time Martelli consistently beat me at chess. By
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