Advice for Italian Boys (9 page)

Something is called for, it seems. Anything.

“My grandmother always says ‘
Chi nasce tondo non può morir quadrato,
’” Nicolo told him. “It’s a saying, from the south of Italy where my family comes from. What it means is that something that is born a circle can’t die a square.”

Patrick gazed up at Nicolo damply. It appeared something more was expected. Nicolo took a breath and thought hard.

“I think what it’s saying is that we all have our own natures,” he said. “And I think it is trying to tell us that it is important to accept what we are, instead of trying to be someone different. When we are teenagers, we like to be with people like ourselves. But, when we are older, we learn to understand and even start to like the fact that we are all different. A circle stops looking for other circles. It might find a square more interesting. Even if that doesn’t happen, the circle can’t try to become a square. It isn’t in its nature.”

Patrick shook his head slowly. “What’s that again? Ki nashay tondo non…?”

“
Chi nasce tondo non può morir quadrato.
”

Patrick nodded slowly. “Yes, you might have something there. I’ll have to think about it.”

“Let’s go and do some stretching,” Nicolo suggested.

Patrick disentangled himself from the bicycle and, his long arms hanging freely from his shoulders, followed Nicolo meekly through the crowded gym to the mats.

N
icolo arrived ten minutes early for his first psychology class. The availability of university courses in the distant northern suburb where Nicolo’s family lived was a phenomenon of recent years. Over the past decade, in a bid for new sources of revenue, although not without misgivings, the city universities had begun to cast off some of their former aura of exclusivity and to engage in experiments at delivering “modules” of learning, like educational spores, beyond the borders of their historic campuses, first in carefully selected downtown locations, and then, confronted with growing competition from community colleges and institutions, many of which were offering all kinds of alternatives to students—courses by correspondence, classes on
the Internet, movable classrooms in portable trailers—in parts of the city that some of the university faculty had never visited, except, perhaps, when they drove along one of the highways on their way to their northern cottages. Nicolo walked over from his parents’ house, allowing himself extra time in case he was waylaid by a neighbour and also in order to see whether the pleasure of walking to school was recoverable after a gap of several years—it was, but with some self-consciousness. He felt overgrown and not entirely sure of himself, returning as an adult to a formal classroom with its neat rows of desks. He was carrying his textbook and a new silver-grey laptop, which was thinner and lighter than the textbook, in a sports bag slung over his shoulder.

“Make your notes directly onto your laptop,” Enzo had advised him. “Highlight the key concepts as you go. You can sort and search through them more easily when you’re getting ready for the exam. And scout out the kind of person you might want to have in your study group. The good ones get taken early. A good study group is practically guaranteed to add four or five percentages to your final mark.”

Nicolo was the second student to arrive. Already in the room was a young woman with a broad back and solid arms and a thicket of short bristly hair cut into a geometric wedge above her neck. She had selected one of the tables at the front of the room and was busy arranging in front of her a stack of new notebooks, a plaid-printed plastic pencil case with a zipper, her textbook, a one-litre bottle of water, a metal box of geometry instruments and a small clear-plastic package of tissues. Nicolo chose a desk at the back of the room.

Over the next ten minutes, a dozen other students arrived, most of them younger than Nicolo. Only one or two were clearly older, including a man who looked as if he might be retired—he wore tan-coloured slacks, a loosely buttoned red cardigan, and a beneficent expression that he bestowed on everyone as he entered. He was the only other student who had come equipped with a laptop, a matte black rectangle that he held in his outstretched hands with obvious pride. At the last minute, a woman of approximately Nicolo’s own age, with long flat brown hair, darting eyes and slightly shaking hands, slid into the chair next to him. She was emptyhanded. She leaned toward him.

“Do you have any paper I can borrow?” she asked.

Her voice was low and grainy and pleasing; it reminded Nicolo of a toy instrument from his kindergarten class, two ridged sticks that were played by being dragged rhythmically against each other. Nicolo tore a few sheets from the pad he had brought with him and slid them over to her.

“Thanks,” she said. “Carla.”

“Nicolo.”

“Got a spare pen?”

Nicolo took one of his extras from his jacket pocket and handed it to her.

At exactly seven-thirty, a thin man dressed in professorial clothes—khaki trousers, beige shirt, tweedy jacket, unpolished loafers—strode through the door and up to the front of the class. He kneaded his hands together and cracked his knuckles, then ran his fingers through the strands of ginger hair on his brow, lifting them a centimetre above the top of his head and then patting them back into place.

“Welcome,” he exhaled. Then, more strongly, “Welcome, all of you, to an adventure in higher learning.”

Nicolo glanced sideways at Carla. She met his gaze and shrugged.

“O-kaaay,” she said from the side of her mouth, her voice sandpapery. “Because we live out here, he thinks we’re a bunch of dummies.”

The thin man turned and began to write with a marker on the whiteboard that was fastened to the front wall. He spoke slowly, sounding out the syllables as he wrote.

“I am Pro…fess…or…Wern…er. Pronounced
Vvverner,
not
Wwwerner
. Professor Werner.” He turned back and looked somewhat challengingly at the class.

“Any questions? Good. Let’s get started then. You will need to read chapter one of our textbook,
Introduction to Psychology: Voyages in Understanding,
before our next class in one week’s time. What we’ll be doing today is laying the groundwork for some of the ideas and lessons in that chapter.”

Professor Werner turned and wrote
CH
1
FOR NEXT WEEK
and
GROUNDWORK
on the whiteboard. He underlined each word twice.

“Any questions? Good.”

“There’s a textbook?” Carla whispered.

“Yes.” Nicolo raised his book and tilted it to show her the front cover. “You can get it at the university bookstore.”

“Can I see it for a minute?”

Nicolo passed the book over to Carla and then trained his attention on Professor Werner.

“Wouldn’t you know it?” Carla muttered after another moment. She held up the book, and inclined her chin toward
the front cover. “‘Chapell, Strang and
Werner,
eds.’ And you paid a hundred and ten dollars for it? Some kind of a racket they got going, eh?”

Nicolo lifted his shoulders and let them fall, recognizing the gesture as one that his father made frequently around the house, signalling a kind of resigned acceptance of the generally wicked and inexplicable ways of the world.
Eh bene.
Oh well. What can you do?

Professor Werner erased the words on the whiteboard and drew in their place a pyramid shape, which he then divided with lines into horizontal slices. He wrote underneath it:
MAZLOW’S HIERARCHY OF NEEDS.

“What is our most basic need?” he asked.

No one in the class spoke.

“What could we absolutely not do without?” Professor Werner prompted.

“He thinks we’re a load of idiots,” Carla whispered. She put up her hand.

“Food and water,” she said.

“Very good,” said Professor Werner.

“Food and water. Unless you have both of these, you won’t last longer than a few days.” He wrote the words
FOOD AND WATER
in the lowest level of the pyramid, and then drew a circle around them.

“This is existence at its most basic. With food and water alone, you might be able to attain the barest minimum level of subsistence. You exist but you are not exactly living. What do you think comes next?” He rapped with his marker one level up on the pyramid.

“A place to live,” the woman in the front row suggested.

“Excellent.” Professor Werner wrote
SHELTER
and then drew a circle around the word.

“Shelter. Safety. Warmth. Protection from the elements and from animals. A cave or hut or tent or longhouse or igloo or hut. Add a safe place to store, preserve and prepare food and water and you are getting a bit more out of life. You have sustenance and you have security. Nothing to sneeze at, but still pretty minimal. Once these needs are met, what do we need next?”

“Family?” came a suggestion.

“Good,” Professor Werner encouraged. He wrote
BELONGING
on the pyramid, one step up. “A family or tribe or gang that accepts you or at least tolerates you. Some group to be a member of. Then what?” Four rungs remained blank above those that had now been labelled.

“Television.”

“Education.”

“Transportation?”

“Sex.”

“Beer.”

“Who said education?” Professor Werner held up a hand, palm forward, to stem the cascade of suggestions. “Education may be closest to what I am looking for in the next two categories. We all have a fundamental need to achieve—for self-esteem, to have a sense of self worth and to acquire and hone our skills and understanding.”

He wrote
ESTEEM
in the next slice of his pyramid, and
KNOWLEDGE
in the one above that.

“What about beauty?” he prompted. The class remained silent.

“What about art?” Professor Werner’s hand hovered in the upper third of the triangle.

“Art?” a woman repeated, turning the word into a suggestion.

“Yes, yes.” Professor Werner’s voice took on a cast of impatience. “Our need for art, for symmetry, for order.”

“Aesthetic,” Nicolo said quietly. Then more loudly. “Aesthetic needs.”

The truth is that he had seen the word when he was reviewing his textbook and had asked Enzo what it meant, and had paid attention to how Enzo pronounced it, and so he felt that the professor’s glance toward him, in which he could read a subtle but plainly recognizable upward reappraisal, was dubiously earned. Professor Werner wrote
AESTHETIC NEEDS
in the next level of the pyramid.

“And at the top?” Professor Werner asked. “What is it that we strive for, and yet so seldom achieve?”

His face took on an ambiguous expression, one in which Nicolo thought it might be possible to discern that even Professor Werner, with his textbook, his precisely calibrated clothes, his vaguely and possibly faux East Coast accent, his degrees and honours and classes and students, even Professor Werner may have yet to attain all that he longed for.

No one spoke and Professor Werner didn’t prompt them. Instead, after a long minute, he emitted a long slow breath and then reached forward and wrote in looping letters, a change from the block capitals he had used below this, in the peak of his triangle, the word
Self-actualization.

“The need to be fulfilled,” he said. He spoke quietly, as if he were speaking to no one in particular. “The need to
be integrated, to fully realize our inherent human potential. That is what makes it all worthwhile, this gathering of food, hunting and storing up of provisions, building or buying a house, raising a family, getting educated, making or hanging art on the wall. This is the goal. Self-actualization. Achieving the goal of becoming the fullest possible person we can be.” Most of the students nodded and bent to write
Self-actualization
in their notebooks or on their laptops.

At the end of the class, Nicolo packed his computer and book into his bag and nodded to Carla, whose untidy notes, he saw, filled less than a quarter of a page. Her handwriting varied in size, starting small and growing larger, and it sloped down the page. She nodded back and jammed the pages containing her notes into the pocket of her navy-blue peacoat.

“Thanks for the paper,” she said, and then twisted her mouth in a manner that suggested a wry self-awareness. “See you next week, I guess,” she added, and she reached and touched Nicolo’s jacket just above his wrist once, lightly. She was close enough for Nicolo to smell her scent—like bread and flowers. There was something in the set of her head and shoulders that made her seem brave.

Nicolo walked the six blocks back to his parents’ house, taking long strides through the thin, cold air of the dark January night, his computer bag bumping like an awkward companion against his side. He could smell a mass of snow in the northeast, yellow-toothed, unwashed and unruly, and he could hear the coming force of the storm worrying already like an advance scout through the skeletal branches of the trees that bordered the street—maple, oak, ash, poplar, beech. The heavy branches of the trees swayed in the
swelling wind and the few dry leaves and seed pods that remained from the fall were stirred and tossed together, whispering and rattling, the percussion section of a reedy orchestra warming up. Dried stalks of last summer’s grasses rustled and sighed near Nicolo’s striding feet. Beside the walkway, massed banks of shrubs huddled like dark sheep butting heads against the forward eddies of the wind. Every forty or fifty feet, a cement path led away from the sidewalk straight up past banked snow to a modest front door with a half-pie window inset at eye level. Some houses still had their Christmas lights up and lighted—white, red, green, one house done up in startling pink.

Nicolo swung his arms and as he lengthened his stride had a sudden sense of how free he was, compared to the fixed immobility of the rooted plants and paths and houses and even compared to the frost-encased cars—domestic, worthy, faithful—parked along the quiet curb. He walked down the avenues, and brittle ice and rime cracked underfoot, smashed by the tread of his boots into islands and continents that would reform and refreeze all through the long hours of the night. He could feel his warm blood coursing in his swinging arms and hands, and his heart stir—every physical part of him weighted, tested, dependable—against the gravity and chill of the late, late evening. He heard and felt his own pulse throbbing to the steady metronome of his heart. He felt a sense of joy, of membership in, even a feeling of ownership over this still, northern slice of the city, these streets settled by people who had come from a sunny, dry, hot place, a new geography turned by their naive and faithful labours into something useful and enduring. He passed a small row
of stores, paused, turned his head and blinked. The sign for Catanzaro Grocery was no longer lit. It had been turned upside-down in its frame, signalling the failure of the business, an unexpected reminder of the fragility of all human endeavours.

When he reached the corner of Ross Avenue and Emerald Crescent, Nicolo stopped again. He could see his house toward the far end of the block. The hour was late. His parents had gone to bed. Their bedroom window was dark, the lights out, their curtains drawn. Enzo’s car was missing from the driveway; he would have come home from school, eaten dinner, got in a few hours of sleep or study, and then left for the factory where he worked three nights a week from eight in the evening until three in the morning. Nicolo let himself into the silent house, put his bag and keys on the desk in his bedroom, and went into the kitchen with his psych textbook under his arm, drawn by the dim glow of the yellow light that could just be seen through the small, fogged, heatetched glass window in the oven door. On the centre rack of the barely warm oven was a dinner plate covered with a damp linen towel, and under the towel was a plate of pasta with garlic and bread crumbs cooked in olive oil, fava beans and braised fennel. He turned off the oven and set the plate in the centre of a placemat that had been left out for him, with fork and knife, on the kitchen table. He sprinkled the pasta with several spoonfuls of grated cheese from a metal container in the fridge, and he read ahead into the next chapter while he ate his dinner, chewing slowly. Suddenly too tired even to let the water run cold, he filled a glass and drank and then he placed his dishes in the sink and went down the hall to clean
his teeth. The furnace rumbled companion ably and warmed air rose silently from floor grates toward the ceiling. Food. Water. Shelter. A sense of belonging. What else would a person need to be able to climb from these up the steep slope to the apex of Professor Werner’s triangle?