Emma has written me another long email. She says that the organizational team has already defined a great number of details, and that they’ll see to my every wish. Then she proceeds in stops and starts, with studied remarks. The father’s delighted that I’ve accepted, he’s spoken to her at length about what a wonderful student I was. Whereas he said nothing about the fact that we were involved. It was her mother who told her that, just yesterday, which she transcribes for me, making light of it. Nadia told her: yes, she wasn’t just his best pupil, but something more. School wasn’t the only thing she was good at, apparently. At this point she launches into a detailed story about her troubled relationships with men. The aim is to link her unhappy affairs to mine with her father. I wasn’t lucky, she says, neither my husband nor my lovers ever turned into friends, the rancor prevailed. She hopes, instead, that I remember Pietro with fondness, and then she goes on to praise him for another twenty lines, as a teacher, as an intellectual, as a man—she practically wants to craft the speech that I’ll be giving. She signs off reassuring me that she can’t wait to meet me.
This email got on my nerves. At first it occurred to me that both the father’s pulp novel and the daughter’s invitation might be part of the same strategy, orchestrated by Pietro himself, to end our affair with a big splash. But now I realize that it was Emma who put this whole contraption in place, without consulting her parents beforehand. All you need to do is read between the lines to realize that Nadia isn’t happy about digging me up again, and that Pietro, as usual, is worried about how I’ll behave. So then why on earth am I going to Rome?
I went out for a walk to calm down, even though this month of May is antagonistic toward the elderly: one day it’s warm, the next day it’s freezing. Tonight it’s tepid. It’s still light out, but the lampposts are blazing. I stopped to chat with the drug dealers that hang out by the chess tables. I walked along the avenues, breathing in the aroma of flowers and hashish. I reached the fountain that shoots out high white streams, where the kids love getting wet, where young girls pose seductively in the spray while a band plays music. I went to see the black man who eats, drinks, and makes paintings in the style of Pollock, and sleeps on a hot slab of metal next to one of the university entrances. But I didn’t feel better.
Fifty years have gone by, and I’m preparing to go to Rome to meet Pietro the way I did when, after I graduated from high school, I went to wait for him at the school with the intention of telling him verbatim: I loved you for three years and now I want to be loved back. That’s just how I said it, using the friendly “tu” even though we’d addressed each other with the formal “lei” up until then. There’s more: I kissed him on the lips. It was an instant, it was like a blow, and he raised his left hand, as if to protect himself.
We were in a café steps from the school, we’d ordered something, I forget, and we’d talked about my plans for future study. Pietro paid, we headed for the exit, I uttered those words to him, and I gave him that kiss. Who knows what I was expecting, over fifty years ago. Everything he did and said was an excessive promise. But the young man who seduced us all with the many things that he knew, with the emphasis he put into each word, placed, between us and him, a polite distance we could never overcome, but that each of us would have wanted to overcome. Now I’d overcome that distance, and I demanded that he give not what he’d already given me in the classroom, but what no one other than me, in that moment, might receive. Perhaps he realized it just before I declared my love for him, just before I kissed him. I wanted more, more, not sex but the hyperuranian ideal to which, I believe, he must have attributed the person who showed up each day in the classroom. Except that either that ideal didn’t exist, or he hid it from me from the very start, and went on to dazzle other young girls, as if I weren’t enough for him.
I’ve never met a man in my life who was so submissively available to feminine yearning. Those were times when proclaiming, to the world, that you were really free overlapped with open sexual availability. He cheated on me, and I cheated on him more than he did, in plain sight. We humiliated each other and extolled each other, reciprocally. But in the three years that we were together, the many joys were always less joyous than I expected, and the many sorrows were ignored or quickly chalked up to the catalogue of paltry grievances of the petty bourgeoisie. I don’t know how many times we broke up with loathing, and then seized each other again, with ferocious zeal. Until I proposed that experiment: let’s reveal the worst of ourselves to one another, far, far worse than what we’ve already revealed. Naturally, when I made that proposal, I already knew I’d leave him, I couldn’t take it anymore. We do so many stupid things when we’re young. No trace should remain of youth, not even a memory. Pietro, on the other hand, wanted to leave traces, given all that he wrote. In that so-called novel of his, he tends to hide the fact that, from a certain point forward, and especially with the advent of email, he started to treat writing like a strait-jacket. I’ve never met a man so full of life, and more afraid of his own bewitching fullness. He exaggerated, he overflowed, and he used me to hold himself back. He acted as if he were sure that the two of us, together but apart, could keep each other in check. But it wasn’t a solid conviction, he’s never had any conviction that was solid. One time, talking about his job, he wrote to me, desolate: no matter how much you study, how many titles you earn, it’s easy to be Hyde, harder to become Jekyll.