27	STATE OF GRACE

When I went into a store with him, it was as if they had opened a skylight.

His name was Julio, and he was a Peruvian dancer. Utterly beautiful, gentle, sharp, and sweet. And very sensual. It was he who taught me that in bed you can, you must, be completely free. It was with him that I experienced passion, love for another person that is also the maximum of desire. It was his smile that first of all and more than anything moved me. When the first thing I do is look someone in the eyes, that’s the sign that I am in love.

Today when I say in love, I am saying that I desire beauty, of course, but above all your presence, having you in the house, going to the cinema together, almost more being able to go on a trip together than make love, although lovemaking certainly wouldn’t be bad either.

I’ve always had a hard time making love and sex coincide. For many years, like the Catholics, like Saint Paul, I regarded sex as a pressing need, to be met as quickly as possible. It was my background, I suppose, but also the historical epoch in which I lived. I don’t believe I have had a happy sexual life.

I saw Julio for the first time in the house of some acquaintances.

I froze. Thunderstruck. Dazed. Madly in love.

When you’re in that state, you don’t think about anything else. I had to find him again, but how? Days spent searching for him, tracking him, with little to go on. A dancer. Arrived in London with a Peruvian dance troupe and then bolted to Turin on his own. A dancer. For the first time I said to a few people, my best and oldest friends, Melita and Piero, “I’m in love, I’m in love.” “With whom?” “With a Peruvian ballerino.” “Oh, that’s great.” Didn’t bat an eyelid. A dancer. The theater. They helped me find him. We thought of the university theater center.

He was there.

It was a month . . . you know the kind of thing you feel? When you feel yourself welcome in the eyes of God and man. With Julio it was like that. I felt myself in a state of grace. I kept repeating, incredulous, “I’m in love, I’m in love.” I was still living with my mother. Melita and Piero loaned us their place.

Everyone fell at his feet. All around him. Shopgirls, clerks, mothers, grandmothers, aunts and uncles.

He illuminated the world. He was benediction, he was like Jesus.

I had just had an operation for my ulcer and was ashamed of my body. He told me I shouldn’t be ashamed of the body, of sex. He really educated me, taught me a new rapport with sex, meaning with myself.

One day we ran into Pareyson in Piazza Castello. Julio had a salmon-pink jacket I had given him the day before. I introduced him to my master with some embarrassment, but not that much.

It only lasted a month and a half. But we always remained friends and kept in touch. I remember when he came to visit me in New York in 1973, and I was living in a house full of cockroaches. We slept in the same bed and waged war on them with boric acid for ammunition.

He suddenly decided to go to Rome, get married, have a daughter. In a small way, I still take care of her.

Abandoned, I thought I would die.