Antonio Monda
L'indegno

"Before deciding to become a priest, I had only made one other decision with equal conviction: to kill myself”

The priest is an extreme man. He always is, even when he has abandoned his ideals and dreams. His reaching into mystery places him, despite himself, above mediocrity, and even when he would otherwise be a coward and mediocre, like Don Abbondio, his priestly character makes him an extreme mediocre, a champion of mediocrity, so to speak.

For this reason, it is very difficult to talk about him: one risks using only the strong colors of the palette, like in an expressionist painting, so that after a few pages the character no longer seems credible, suspended between hagiography and caricature. But for this very reason, the priest is always a fascinating character, a receptacle of contradictions, a paradox unto himself, suspended between the Grace that has grasped him and the abyss he is called to redeem, between the poverty of his life and the enormity of his vocation: to conform his life to the mystery he celebrates, as stated in the formula of the promise made on the day of ordination, in two words, to be Jesus, a challenge no one can accept serenely.

Naturally, the history of literature is full of priests, precisely because of this intrinsic charm they carry within, and many of them are, obviously, unworthy priests, like Abram Singer, the protagonist of this beautiful novel by Antonio Monda. I think of Bernanos and Graham Greene, but I also think of cinema, particularly of a forgotten masterpiece like “lo spretato” by Leo Joannon. Unfortunately, it is rare to find credible priests in both literature and cinema, and when it comes to unworthy priests, it is extremely rare for them to rise above the depth of the page on which the story is written, so that there are far more caricatures than true characters.

Well, this is not the case here: Abram Singer is a very vivid character, so alive that I could swear I have known him. I, a believer, can identify with him, and reading his reflections (the novel is entirely written in the first person, subjective, like a long meditation of the protagonist), I can easily recognize perhaps not myself, but a version of myself that I have been, or could easily have been if the unpredictability of life at certain turns hadn't entirely played in my favor.

Abram Singer is not afraid of his contradictions; he undertakes a titanic struggle every day not to concede any discount to either the God who besieges him or the flesh that tyrannizes him, and the price to pay for trying to reconcile the opposites within himself is to live with an immense wound carved in his chest, which never heals and often expels pus and blood in continuous suppuration: “Our Father, if I did not love you I would hate you deeply, and maybe sometimes I do, because you know that I am loving you even in that moment. Father who sacrificed your son, father who became flesh and felt all that flesh desires and demands. Father of sinners and murderers. Father of the failed and the betrayers. Father of my father, who saw my mother love and conceive this unworthy body. Have mercy on my fury of the fallen angel”. In fact, even his sin proclaims the magnificence of God and expresses a revolt against the primary sin, the greatest indignity, which is that of mediocrity “my sin was a rebellion against the mediocrity of existence that condemned me not to see its intimate poignant wonder”.

The tension between the chosen and desired abasement and the cynical and amoral lowness, between a continuously desired glory and the divine humility that alone can express it, is the most constant feature of the protagonist's soul. In this, I dare say, Abram Singer is unmistakably American and New Yorker; for the little I know of American society and the Church living in the USA, I find the same contradiction. The United States lacks a Charles de Foucauld, a Saint Francis, or even just a Chesterton, capable of shouting the beauty of all that is small in the city where everything is immensely large, and through this smallness grasping the magnificence of life.

Due to this lack, the protagonist's aspiration to greatness cannot resolve itself into true humility; it does not find its expression in the celebration of the everyday, the mundane. It may seem paradoxical, but if the priest in this novel is an extreme sinner, it is because he would like to be an extreme saint and lacks the tools for it. It's no coincidence that Monda places at the end of the novel the axiom dear to the desert fathers: “Both God and the evil one want you to become a saint. Only the devil wants you to become one immediately”.

Certainly, this novel could only be set in New York, the New York of the late '70s, when punk was beginning, and the Californian utopianism was turning into a sordid sea of cynicism and violence. It is the New York of Lou Reed more than Patti Smith, of “Taxi Driver” more than “Manhattan,” seen more in its desperation than its intellectual cynicism, which, in fact, it is the inability to be fully cynical that characterizes the protagonist. I retain only literary hints of that city; I do not have the privilege of living there like Monda, so I do not want to exaggerate in emphasizing what is otherwise obvious, but if the novel is part of a grand fresco intending to recount the twentieth century of the City, the fact remains, not at all taken for granted, that its protagonist is a priest.

From this perspective, then, the novel is surely also a reflection on the American Catholic Church as a whole, and through Singer, one can perhaps see both the anxiety to imprint the Gospel in society and the inability to accept the irrelevance to which it seems to have been reduced. “Those who see us from the outside have no idea of our tastes, our pleasures, the moments when we live in the world (…) the world can never love us for who we are and what we represent (…) What the world does not understand and cannot accept is that we are happy: that is the scandal, and it is yet another reason to be hated. Our happiness is an object of derision, of disdain, and at best, we are seen as deluded, to be pitied”.

The irrelevance of the spiritual, which was felt even more strongly in the '70s, led in Europe to the overvaluation of the social, which in many priests ended up replacing the spiritual, while in the USA it led to a kind of exacerbation of sex (as seen in Woody Allen's films, for example, where sex assumes almost a religious dimension). It's no coincidence that today in the American Church, the theme has exploded in many positive and negative aspects, ranging from a great impetus given to the so-called “theology of the body” to the manifestation, in not-so-small fringes, of genuine sexophobia and puritanical moralism. Not to mention, of course, the scandals now under everyone's eyes.

But Monda is too sharp and profound to be trapped in stereotypes, and the protagonist remains a truly genuine character in his inner conflicts that also speak to the contemporary man. “It's hard to be a saint in the city,” sang “the boss” just a few years before the period in which the story is set, and ultimately, the entire novel could be read in this way, as a terrible and unsettling question: is it possible to be a saint in New York? Is it possible to be a saint in today's world, in the city we have built? Just see that every time Monda presents models of positive, accomplished priests, he places them elsewhere, in a mythological mission, far from the city, as if fleeing from contemporaneity.

It is also too easy, then, to read the love story with Lisa as an attempt at secular redemption, sex as a revolt against the death that seems to pervade everywhere in the novel. “When I love Lisa, I don't feel dead, not at all dead”. We like to imagine that this is, after all, the question that unsettles every Catholic priest, in the Big Apple as elsewhere: is it right, is it honest toward oneself and life to aspire to a higher redemption, or is all that we can aspire to just the celebration of life, which finds its highest point in the explosion of the flesh?

Emily Dickinson's verses, quoted at one of the points of greatest narrative tension, express this paradox very well: “Because love is life/ and life is immortal/ if you doubt that/ I have nothing else to show you/ love/ but Calvary”. This explains the protagonist's obsessive anxieties, his inability to accept either the stereotype his role wants to force him into or his condition as a conscious outsider, a paradoxical seeker of love.

This very exacerbated desire for holiness is, eventually, the spring that locks Abram into the funnel of his sin. He is a sinner because he wanted to be a saint through his own strength, instead of receiving holiness as a gift. “my greatest sin was not putting myself in a position to be helped”. He did not understand one of the first truths of Christianity: no one is holy alone. He tried to elevate himself on an impossible pinnacle and thus fell ruinously, and because he wants to save himself, he cannot even accept forgiveness. “There is an important question I must ask you - the bishop asks him in that interview which is yet another opportunity for redemption offered by Grace - are you ready to ask for forgiveness?” But Singer remains silent; his self-disgust is so strong that it prevents him from throwing himself into the Father's outstretched arms, and for the umpteenth time, he remains closed in on himself, aborting once again the chance for an Encounter. For this reason, he is a man ultimately incapable of true interior life. Even his meditations, profound as they may be, remain on a fundamentally aesthetic level and do not have the power to truly move life. “I am afraid of quiet, of silence, of peace. Of contemplation, of meditation (…) I am afraid of life itself when it stops to be loved, enjoyed, known”.

Perhaps it is for this reason that Singer's thoughts obsessively circle. Like a horse that refuses the obstacle, he continues to repeat the path and continues to stop without making the leap that might set him free. This results in the dark character of the entire narrative: there is no happy end, no final smile of Grace peeking from the sky, which alone could bring light to a dark panorama; instead, the novel closes in the desperate attempt to reach sleep in the city that never sleeps, as if oblivion, self-forgetfulness, were the only salvation and the only forgiveness.

Faith is born from encounter, and for this reason, Abram Singer does not have faith, because he remains incapable of a true encounter. Like a bird trapped in a dome, we observe him struggling, attempting all apparent exits without result. Not even the encounter with Lisa is a real encounter: at the center of his attention is not her, but his own passion. Certainly, Lisa loves him, and yet he still questions himself, rightly so, whether his love for her is genuine. There is no redemptive eros; he never really exits himself, and this is the reason for his solitude and ultimately his damnation.

“New York is a city of lonely people,” he says at one point, yet his damnation perhaps lies precisely in this: he does not accept his solitude, he is unable to make it a positive energy. Perhaps the novel's key lies in the dramatic and epic account of the clash between Ali and Foreman, where the one who suffers the most wins. How much is Singer willing to suffer? What price is he willing to pay to get out of himself and open up to love? At the beginning of the novel, Father John, perhaps the one who best knows the protagonist's soul, warns him about solitude: “Transform it into strength and always look inward, without fear”, but he confesses his impotence: “I have tried, Father John, and I still believe, but I can't. And each time, I see the abyss”.

Singer has the desire for faith, yes, but this desire never reaches the intensity needed to escape the gravitational pull of selfishness and truly launch into the space of love. There is not a single gesture he makes that is truly disinterested, and for this reason, in his desire for God, he misses the mark and continually falls back on himself. Yet he evokes compassion in his continuous struggle. He is a loser, but a loser you cannot help but love, and though he despises himself, not for a second is the reader led to judge him. Too extremely human to come across as unpleasant, too “one of us” to condemn him.

It remains to report on a nervous, fractured narrative, divided into a thousand small scenes that struggle to follow a coherent thread in the continuous flashbacks and forwards of the protagonist's reminiscences. It almost seems like a concept album, like those popular in the '70s, a record made up of songs held together by a rather thin narrative thread but which have their own autonomous dignity. The chosen language, that of introspection, is a challenge for the reader: it works if a mechanism of identification with the protagonist clicks, but otherwise, it can be heavy and push one to desire a bit more action, after all, the plot could be described in three lines! But if one manages to put themselves in Abram Singer's shoes, then the novel is inescapable: it is as gripping as a thriller, and until the end, you are there wondering who will win in the titanic duel for the possession of this restless soul.

Yet, one must not give in to the haste of reading, and even a voracious reader like me must force themselves to proceed slowly. This is a book to drink in small sips, not like a good whiskey, but like a cheap bourbon, the kind sold in the bars dear to Tom Waits, which burn your throat and guts if you gulp them down in one go. It is a book to sip slowly because its gems are hidden, and rushing over it might cause you to miss them; it is a book to sip slowly because it is hard and dark, because it doesn't offer answers and demands that the reader provides their own, without avoiding confrontation.

In the end, what Monda asks the reader is to do what his protagonist is incapable of: “Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi” (do not go outside, return into yourself), which is why his book is uncomfortable and disturbing.

For this reason, it is precious.