THE JESUIT
then, we were not friends any longer, and
if
I saw him from time to
time, it was mainly to test some newly discovered idea or argument
against his skillful adherence to tradition. Sometimes, he would sud–
denly interrupt the argument and, looking me straight in the eye,
announce that he was praying for me. To which, what could I
answer except "Thank you"? Then, at seventeen, Martelli told me
that he was going to become a Jesuit. A year later, he entered the
Novitiate.
I did not see him for three years, and when he emerged from
his seclusion, he had undergone a weird mutation. There was simply
nothing spontaneous about him any more; behind every one of his
acts and gestures there was premeditation.
It
was as if his innermost
being had been submitted to an uncannily thorough process of plastic
surgery. "Like a dead body, like a cane in the hand of a blind man" :
the
aim
starkly set by Ignatius in the chapter
aDe Oboedientia"
had
been attained in him, too. The adolescent, the young man, the defec–
tive human being, had been corrected, straightened, stamped into a
fixed shape, made into a dependable spiritual tool. Of Martelli as
I had known him, only the outer shell was left, and not even that,
since his countenance and gestures had also changed. No other organ–
ization, I thought, could get that much from a man, simply because
no other organization would care to work on an individual so ex–
haustively. Certainly not a political party, and certainly not the state
either, however totalitarian. The conditioning of youth by the Fascist
regime looked silly indeed, when compared to this sort of achievement.
I found myself without any means of communicating with my
old playmate, and I was able to talk to him only in distant and vague
terms, or else by treating him as the emissary of an evil. power, the
Church, and getting angry. The rare times we saw each other, I did
not know what to do except to be polemical on the subject of the
Church prostituting herself to Fascism. He answered that it was a
mistake to judge the Church on such trivial grounds, and that, any–
way, if he was sorry for some of the things I said, he couldn't help
feeling glad that I could get so passionate about Church policies :
that was not a sign of indifference, was it?
As
for Fascism, he didn't
like it either, but if the Church could advance her aims a bit because
of Mussolini's megalomania, that co_nsoled him for many a sad aspect
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