My high school’s gym was the one modern addition to the school’s early-1800s building, half a block from the Sforza fortress. The gym was bare-bones, and it was awful. Playing volleyball was particularly hard, because the ceiling was too low and balls would bounce off it more often than not. Its one redeeming quality was that it also had access to the courtyard, which was equipped to accommodate a volleyball net and made it easier when the weather was warmer. Except that the courtyard had probably been a parking lot at some point, and nobody really wanted to risk a close encounter with its asphalt pavement.
The changing rooms, on the courtyard side of the ground-floor hallway leading to the gym, were pretty grim, but they had vaulted, frescoed ceilings. The building had been restored in the 1970s, and the frescoes in some classrooms and the aula magna had been given shockingly garish colors—you couldn’t look at certain electric blues without giggling, even after years. But the ones in the changing rooms had largely been left alone, perhaps because they were only fragments and didn’t deserve the right to punch you in the retina.
Of all the rooms in the school, someone decided that the guys’ changing room would host the oral part of my year’s esame di maturità. Maybe they picked it because it had its own en suite, which made it somewhat dank—usually an undesirable quality, but in that case it was part of what allowed it to be last room in the school to be engulfed in the summer heat. The written tests, a week or so earlier, had taken place in the first-floor hallway, and I want to remember the experience being just slightly too warm to be comfortable.
For posterity, let’s take a look at the esame di maturità
That’s still what it was called back then. It was part of the experimental model of 1969, which was supposed to last only a couple of years, yet there we were, twenty-five years later, still not reformed. Which was for the best, in retrospect.
The model was: two written tests, one oral discussion on two subjects. The written tests were: an eight-hour Italian essay, and another subject that would vary by year. Since in the standard programs of the liceo classico only Italian, Latin and Greek were considered written subjects, with everything else being oral-only, it was always a fifty-fifty. What we knew was that we’d have six hours to translate a complex excerpt from a dead language.
For the oral test, we could choose one out of four subjects decided by the ministry. Italian was always the first, immutable option. The other three slots, particularly for us who had a small pool of subjects to begin with, were fairly predictable based on previous years’ selections. The second slot would be Latin or Greek (whichever wasn’t picked for the written test), the third either history or philosophy, the fourth math or physics—rarely anything else, because obviously we classics nerds wouldn’t have the brain capacity. Each student would pick their first choice, and the committee would pick the second, which would be announced ahead of the colloquio. The customary thing was that everyone would pick their second-best subject as their first choice, and the committee would be trusted to pick their best as the second, so effectively students had some form of control over the entire experience.
But that was also what gave people nightmares: since everyone would basically stop studying anything but their chosen subjects after they were announced in April, “what if they change my second subject?” was the question that everyone was trying very hard not to ask. Because the answer would be: you’re fucked. If someone decided at the last moment to plop Italian on your lap (which also included Dante’s Paradiso, which is not a walk in the park), you would be done. And by you I mean me, specifically. But that almost never happened. If it did, it was usually when someone had been such an insufferable dick for five (or more) years that the internal committee member made sure they got punished. It didn’t happen in my class, and some people found other ways to punish themselves.
Let’s go back to the main topic, if there is one
The choices for our year were written Latin, and oral Greek, history, and math. And because I was already a weirdo and my best subject was math, I picked Greek, and they gave me math.
Greek and math had huge advantages over everything else: one teacher was lazy, and one was incompetent, and probably also lazy. A lazy Greek teacher meant that we couldn’t possibly go through everything we should go through in our last year, so she pretended we’d already done a chunk of it the year before. As much as I love the language, there are canyons in my knowledge of its literature. It also meant that we would get to do the least amount of work for the highest reward. Ultimately, all we really needed to know was a very short speech by Lysias (I guess his argument against the corn dealers was bulletproof) and four hundred lines of Antigone. Four hundred lines of iambic trimeters are truly not a lot of literature.
Having an incompetent math teacher was never great (I should know, since I had three of those in five years). The math programs of the liceo classico were stuck at a time when ministers decided that humanists shouldn’t try to break their brains with science stuff. Nobody ever expected us to know or understand anything, so the program was very small: officially, we’d get to study all the way to trigonometry, and calculus was the limit we barely got to graze. The chances of anyone asking anything other than to explain a trigonometric function was pretty much zero. But I don’t want to go off on a tangent.
The obstacle was the Latin and Greek committee member—a nerdy recent college graduate who, we heard, was very picky about details and seemed to want to show how much he knew just as much as he wanted to find out how much we didn’t. And our punishment for having a lazy teacher was for him to poke holes in our knowledge of grammar.
I was scheduled to appear on the fourth day or so, July 1, a Saturday, beyond the limit of when any student would tolerate to be asked about corn dealers. I’d been hanging out there the previous days to get a sense of how things were going. Despite the exams being public, almost everyone before me had refused to let anyone in. That was a mistake, in my opinion: are you really so afraid of not knowing stuff that you don’t want a supportive audience in there with you? Or are you really that much of an asshole that you don’t want others that will come after you to get a better sense of the committee? Both?
I don’t remember how I spent the day before. By that point I think I could have recited Lysias and Sophocles by heart (oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy), and trigonometry is a fairly circumscribed topic, so I doubt I obsessed too much over anything. I assume I probably got ice cream at some point, and maybe went for a swim. That sounds like me.
It’s hard to fall asleep the night before the exam, but rather than reciting π I went for Greek verbs instead.
αἱρέω, αἱρήσω, εἷλον, ᾕρηκα, ᾑρέθην, αἱρεθήσομαι
δίδωμι, δώσω, ἔδωκα, δέδωκα, ἐδόθην, δοθήσομαι
ὁράω, ὄψομαι, εἶδον, ὄπωπα, ὤφθην, ὀφθήσομαι
φέρω, οἴσω, ἤνεγκον, ἐνήνοχα, ἠνέχθην, ἐνεχθήσομαι
But wait: ἤνεγκον. I knew that was a weird one. Not only did it have a different theme from the present tense, but there was something else. That reduplication wasn’t just any other reduplication. Was it Attic reduplication, perhaps? I hadn’t thought of that in probably three years, and all of a sudden it decided to plant itself in my brain. I got up and looked at the grammar book. Yup, that’s what it was.
The next day there was a crowd. With only thirty-three people, our graduating class was so small that we had to share the exam committee with kids from a school in Bologna, who’d have to wait until mid-July to go through all of this. A number of students deigned to take the probably unpleasant train and scope out the situation. Except, of course, the first two or three people before me didn’t want an audience. The door was open, but every one of them threatened us not to dare eavesdrop. (I had some charming classmates.)
The Bologna people were happy to know I was going to let people in, and when I finally entered the room I had maybe fifteen people in tow, and I think the committee got scared for a moment. I probably was very polite with all the committee members, the internal member (my Italian and Latin teacher) may have said a couple of impartial words about me (not that they didn’t already know exactly who we all were, or how we’d done on the written part), then I sat in front of the scary nerd, who asked me to read and translate from Lysias.
And there I went: “ἀλλὰ γάρ, ὦ ἄνδρες δικασταί…” and so on. It’s been thirty years, so I remember exactly zero about that speech, but that day I had it down to a science. I translated, then he asked me the customary grammar question. He spotted a consecutive clause, so he asked me about it, and also asked me how else I could build one. I answered, he was happy. I don’t remember having to read from Sophocles, which I was probably okay with. As I was getting up to move my chair to talk to the math committee member, he had just one more thing to ask.
“That ἐληλύθασιν there, what is it?”
“It’s the perfect tense of ἔρχομαι, third-person plural: they have gone.”
“Yes, and what kind of reduplication does it have?”
The air could not have been stiller and the room quieter all of a sudden. I pondered how big my smile should be, and how smug. I decided to pause for a second, but not too long—I wanted him to know I knew what he was trying to do, but not to think I had to search my memory for the answer, which was there, ready to go.
“It’s an Attic reduplication.”
He had no more questions.