22 | THE DREAM OF A THING |
Who can ever recount summer afternoons, the lassitude and the languor of certain summer Sundays? Nothing else is so close to the surface of the skin, alive and desperate at the same time.
There was a boy who was my colleague at the Casa di Carità, a swimming champion, beautiful as an angel, strong. I passed tormenting Sundays with him, reading him The Good Person of Sichuan.
One afternoon I said to him, “Let’s go rowing on the Po.” We got on a bus. There was just me, him, and a mother with a young daughter who looked a bit retarded, watching us with a dribble of spit coming out of her mouth . . . she was looking at us the way I was looking at my friend.
When I started to frequent cruising places . . . it was even worse. I remember terrifying afternoons, with springtime in the blood, the eyes, the nerves . . . restless as a cat . . . without finding anyone, in the end.
Or leaving the house on foot to go to the Valentino Park, then waiting for the last tram.
I don’t often feel self-pity, on the contrary. But sometimes I felt like a bit of a sorry figure then. And sorry about Don Pietro. Certain summer afternoons I would go to his place and find him with a few buttons of his black suit undone, and the air of someone who had undergone terrible carnal temptations, his features haggard, unshaven.
But there wasn’t only torment.
In mid-August there’s this sense of emptiness, it’s true, but also of great freedom, this sensation of living a moment out of the ordinary. A bit like during a general strike: every stranger you meet is a friend. And you converse, without effort, with tranquil complicity, with naturalness, with the awareness of sharing a completely extraordinary situation.
At Heidelberg, the first year, I worked extremely hard on my Heidegger book. It was a great intellectual adventure, but a physical one too, an exhausting labor. I remember the most beautiful summer back in Turin, a bit Pasolinian. I would work all day and then walk around at night, searching, but without that desperation. The feeling was more like a buzz, the reward you give yourself, the breath you draw till your lungs are full after a tiring day, but one well spent and full of satisfaction.