The Church II (Mario)

Before I had reached my first pivoting point I had never felt sorry for myself, in fact the first time I did I should have been old enough as not to be able to feel sorry for myself anymore, it was just a way to feel things that had been already forsaken, it wasn't for the sake of rememberance, but more for the sake of time. On my way to the pivoting point I came back to the church, in a place so entirely different than my own; there I couldn't experience much of a religious feeling, not the hypocrisy or the common misery of all, the songs were a little empty and even the choir director resembled more a summer camp swimming instructor than an actual choir director. As you entered the church you immediately felt betrayed, the squared building (which looked more like a government building) had several tiny classrooms in the ground floor and a chapel upstairs adorned in a very Protestant style, wearing no other jewelry than a large wooden cross and refusing to host in any mysteries.

Right outside the church there was a large fence and a small concrete yard used often to play basketball, in short there was nothing there that could inspire one to think about anything other than submission and punishment, not even salvation would occur to you in a sudden sinking bliss. Yet at the social time this church did mean a significant social improvement and sooner than I had expected worldlessness and hypocrisy returned as though they had been disguised into something else just not to spare me the surprise to find them anew. The community had rather puritan leanings and it befit me just so well right in a period in which I had left all my puritan longings behind, so in order to confirm myself as a Catholic properly I used to escape the services to hide in the toilet and smoke and self-please myself soon thereafter returning immaculate to the service, almost proud of my mortal sins. Because of my boredom at school and time wasted in libraries reading serious books I enjoyed the church also because of Sunday School for Youth Ministry; there we had first Mr. Lunnen, one of the many American diplomats that would be part of our church and a rather wealthy man, very well built but already in his fourties. The class wasn't very interesting and there was but little one could learn, time in which I might say I could have missed the brothers at the French School but such a thought didn't occur to me at the time.

The Lunnens invited me over very often and I ate the most delicious food I can remember from the whole of my childhood, with the only exception of my aunt's mother-in-law's Christmas cooking. I enjoyed their company very much because it felt a little homely and not exceedingly artificial like when I sat with my father to watch TV, they weren't the most intelligent people but at least I could practice my English and well somehow play the pariah again, with all my "respectable" acquaintances. Their sons stroke me as rather stupid and tasteless except the middle one but I can't remember his name, I think he was the closest to a friend I had from the Lunnen's yet I put up with my act so that I could visit often enough without raising suspicions of being almost homeless in the spiritual and familiar sense. That as long as they didn't watch movies, then I had to run away and spend some time at the park or watching young people passing by and imagining someone would come to talk to me and "enact" a thoroughly revolutionary friendship or I could as well find my way down the hill to the German Institute and watch a movie or spend sometime in the library; there were two people I have some memories of: Sabine Ringler was first the secretary at Goethe's and then became an official at the Swiss Embassy where one of my first and most loyal penpals worked, Frau Christine Fischer, the cultural attache; of course she wouldn't be as helpful and patient as Herr Oliver Urban, who had the same position at the German Embassy.

The other person was Maik Mueller, who happened to be a friend of Till from Germany and someone I actually happened to admire at the time. This turns a little comic because years later my friend Daniel had an internship for his law studies in Haifa and he happened to be a friend of this Maik who comes from a god-forsaken place called Rostock in the East of Germany. Had I met this Maik only a couple of years later I could have said he belonged to one of those categories of people I would even refuse the privilege of sociability; it shows how funny young people can be sometimes. Not only this Maik became an outspoken faggot but quite a simple and pointless character, one of those that are often deleted from plays in later editions of the original script. But then again I might have got this wrong too because it seems to me I was acquainted with him while I was still at St. John's and way before my second partnership with Rome, nonetheless these details fit in perfectly in speaking about Lunnen. His wife was a pretty neurotic character and tireless chatterbox, possibly never becoming intimate with anybody and rather a saver of the humanrace herself, certainly not in the fashion field I can attest. I think their home was one of my first attempts at renewing my vows with the consumption of pork which I had broken since severing ties with my father, it wasn't long lived though.

Robert Lunnen was the first person I spoke to about my sexual orientation but of course, like most young people do, I did it using this "a friend of mine asked me that...." which might have been revealing of everything at the time, but I couldn't know this too well. This was also the time when I became knowingly aware of my Jewishness but that's a story I still can't write because there're many details missing and I shall speak to my parents before I can reconstruct this story and in any case, I didn't think there was any connection between one's religion and aggresive church attendance, because the church after all was about sociability and not about religion. It was about double morality, not about vocations. Yet at this point it becomes important only in order to show that contingency and the unpredictability of one's telos can down upon you very early in life.

At the church I met Mario (not my good friend of later years, that was when I entered the International School) and I can't exactly remember how; he was presumably a very snobbish kid and perhaps a year younger than me, a Mexican too. I believe we became acquainted at some youth group and the first memory I have from spending time together was a certain day climbing up the walls of a church to go and smoke pot right after Sunday school, a third guy might have been there with us but I can't remember that too well. I don't recall many details from those days but I know they were terribly intense and confusing, perhaps I was in fact in love but I don't know. He used to be a rather wild character and not very good at school but very popular everywhere and one of those kernels of sophistication I would form in my mind for long years. He used to have a girlfriend but I can't remember her name at all, and I do remember well his apartment in downtown and his parents; it was a very small apartment and his room was very warm and typical of a guy his age, so totally unlike mine, so large and cold and bookish yet totally lacking personality and overlooking nothing more than a very old grocery store and a very pauper street.

He had two friends who became my friends too, two sisters from another city and one of them extremely beautiful and not very devoted or intelligent. Mario and me had the most spectacular conversations you can think of, perhaps it wasn't like my days with Till but there was something really whimsical about it other than him being an extremely beautiful man. Only two scenes remain that can't be washed by the weight of the years of adulthood; once we had been late at night in the house of the two girls playing games and throwing pillows at one another, for some reason (perhaps part of a game) they closed themselves in the room and both of us stayed outside in the dark. I can't recall anything about the conversation but it might have been something rather embarrassing and at least for me frightening but I do remember myself standing up in the dark and having a long kiss with him even though I was self-assured about him having a girlfriend and not sure at all about myself; that was my first French kiss. I had been very hopeful there would be a continuation but soon thereafter I think his mother called and we ought to return to his flat and there I slept but nothing happened other than a very bitter conversation which slept away in disappointment.

From that point on I think I saw him more often than I would have expected but less than I wished, and even one day I simply went away with him and his family to their countryhouse and had one of the happiest times in several years (we didn't go for holidays too often and when at all, it was rather lame and pained), I remember his mother wasn't around at the time and only his father looked after us, which was like having a statue look after us. We didn't go to the city I believe but we ate together everyday and even play in the pool until very late at night. One day (which is the source of my second story) his father thought it would be really nice to take a mud bath; he was an homeopatic pharmacist and a rather exquisite and large person, in the social meaning of the word. That day we slept in a different wing of the house and I remember coming downstairs to shower and wash off the mud; perhaps I had a terrible argument with Mario and as I walked into the shower he did as well and tried to calm me down and kiss me again; not sure what came out of it but that's all I can remember. That night we listened to music until very late (I still have some favourite songs from him) and fell asleep, can't recall if perhaps I shed some tears that night, it's very possible. Nor I remember the letters that I wrote him or he to me, but I knew there are more than a few; I had always been a prolific writer, and he had also presented me with a copy of Shakespeare's "Midsummer's Night Dream", but this also might be false, perhaps it was another play. The day after the mud episode we returned back to the city.

I think it should have been fun with him in the city too but don't have memories of what we did that day, perhaps sooner or later I found myself in his home giving him another present, maybe a bottle of maple syrup I got from Canada and then I had this delicious meal which reminded me of the Lunnen's but in a totally different context because at the time I think I was definitely in love with Mario, and he was to blame. Next I betrayed my household and escaped back to his countryhouse expecting to spend both Christmas and Silvester with him but he treated me quite badly at the time and I felt obligued to return only two days later with his brother, I remember not liking him too much but he had been very generous in inviting me to share some pot. Before the trip back we also had pizza together, the three of us in some large restaurant in the town and I can very well remember having said something about the way Germans eat their pizza, perhaps something I learnt from Till or I just had invented it. I might have seen Mario perhaps very scarcely after that and one day he just disappeared; I went to this home and rang the bell many many times, but I never received an answer. One day I met his father (I might have taken a ride in his car, he really liked me, this old man) and he told me he had returned to Mexico with his mother. I wasn't heart broken though, and for some time we emailed; I remember well this e-mail about the movies he had seen which had been exactly my same favourite movies of the time, "La Vie Revee des Angels", a Spanish movie about a love story between Spain, Finland and Germany in a town called "Rovaniemi", whereby the Polar Arctic Circle starts, and also "Magnolia", whose music I listen listen to today.

One day I received a phone call from his friend, that beautiful girl, telling me that he was in town and had wanted to see me very much but he never contacted me. A couple of years later when I was already through my pivoting point and on my way to Israel I happened to meet a certain guy from the church who was perhaps who introduced us formally in the beginning; he told me at the time he heard Mario had "become" Jewish in Mexico. This wasn't a very weightful thing to hear at the time but now in retrospective it holds all possible meaning in the world, because contingency in human beings keen to make their own life choices, can be something so daunting that it might be perhaps shared from far away in the distance by friends and loves of younger years.

Sometime before or after (it might be years even) I went out to rollerskate with the Lunnens and found myself resting in front of the synagogue; I couldn't bother to look into very much but it had some power to attract me with the madness of drunkenning tiles. I had seen a boy standing there with a skullcap that very much reminded me of Mario, but it wasn't him. Digging into my memories I remember him showing me a framed picture of his father's grandfather who had been an immigrant from England - a very rare thing at the time; I also remember his curls, his eyes and some kind of dark irresponsible sensuality about him all. This is not precisely what I've found in myself but I look into him now by remembering my friends of later years and it no longer strikes me with oddity him being a Jew, like me. As I said, contigency can be sometimes so burdensome that it can be even shared by friends; the most powerful memory I have of him isn't the stories I just accounted for, but his smell... which years later I found in F., and then in Ofer and lastly on myself, as though it had been accursed on me by our common telos. I can only help myself by remembering all this precisely when the chips are down and we're summoned for judgement, for the care of the world, for responsibility, for accountability even. While I was in yeshiva in Jerusalem I might have prayed a certain night while he uttered the same prayers somewhere else, the idea that such could be possible, saved me from endlessness and recklessness and unknowingly sealed my pivoting point once again.