28	THE BICYCLE LEFT BEHIND

Hegel used to say: decide to get married first, then look for a wife. That’s how it was with Gianpiero. A choice. Just as my sister’s marriage was a rational choice, following an unhappy grand passion.

If you marry for passion, it ends badly.

Before him, apart from Julio, I had had “friends.” But they were those terrifying things I did at night. In hiding. Even from myself.

My heart was in pieces when Julio left.

A friend introduced me to Gianpiero. From then on, until his death, for twenty-four years, we were always together.

He wasn’t even twenty, thirteen years younger than me. He came from the sit-in at the Massimo D’Azeglio high school and enrolled in the university.

We were really fond of each other. He was simpatico, intelligent. Utterly sweet. And me with all my doubts, with the fear, or rather the certainty, that I wasn’t his type, that I didn’t please him enough physically, that I wasn’t exactly like the men he desired.

Neither of us ever dreamed for a moment that the other would be “faithful” to him. We even went to saunas together, and inside it was every man for himself, obviously. All the same there were outbursts of jealousy, on his part and mine. Even though he had many more encounters than me. That was always my problem with my friends who were younger than I was: they had many more encounters than I did, and I always felt a bit embarrassed. It isn’t that I didn’t want to “betray” them. I was that I couldn’t.

But we got on so well together. And I still have letters from him in which he writes, “Do whatever you want, the important thing is that our feelings remain.” Because he did what he wanted, and then, as now—accepting suffering and contradictions—that seemed to me absolutely just.

But being together was calming for both of us. We had had, like the majority of homosexuals, especially then, difficult lives. His parents found out from his diary that he had had an affair with a friar who was his teacher of religion.

Even in sex we were very reserved, restrained. We were almost like a Christian married couple: “I don’t do it for pleasure, only to make children for God.” In our case children were out of the question, but you get the idea. I exaggerate a little, but not much.

One of the first memories I have with Gianpiero is that we went to a crummy little movie house to see Pasolini’s Teorema, which had caused a scandal when it was presented at the Venice Biennale in 1968.

In the early years I still lived with my mother, and when I did leave home, it was to live with Gianpiero. My mother and I had changed apartments twice more, first we were in Via Vassalli Eandi, then in Corso Francia, near Rivoli, a beautiful spot in front of a villa that is still in use as a municipal garden, called Villa Tesoreria.

Gianpiero and I saw each other every day. Often he ate at my house, and then we went out to the cinema. Or else we stayed home with my friends Piero and Melita in Piazza Vittorio.

The first years were really happy. He taught me so much, and freed me from so much. He convinced me to wear a duffel coat of the sort that all the left-wing students then wore, a coat purchased at the Standa department store for ten thousand lire that made me euphoric. It represented the crucial change of my life. The watershed between before and after. I remember that black duffel coat that I wore all winter and made me feel free in the wildest way.

It went on like that until autumn 1972, when I was invited for the first time to teach in the United States. In September I left for New York, and Gianpiero came with me. He stayed for a month and then returned; he had a job as a teacher in an evening school. I got back in the middle of winter, after four months.

And at this point, in the spring of 1973, we decided to move in together. Up on the hill, as we say in Turin, at Valsalice. We found an apartment in a rustic building and fixed it up ourselves, together. It was the start of the happiest period of my life.

We drove down every morning in the Diane and went to the university.

You’re too young, Stefano, you wouldn’t remember. But there was the oil crisis, the famous pedestrian Sundays. We used to walk down from the hill on foot too, happy as cats.

Cats were something we had plenty of.

A stream ran under the house, I got rheumatism for life, yet it was lovely. There was so much humidity I never heard the newspapers rustle.

And I remember 1974, when a fiercely contested referendum made divorce legal in Italy. We drove into town with the top down and went to celebrate in Via Roma amid a huge crowd, an epic affair, like when Italy won the World Cup.

One day Ezio Mauro, then a young reporter with the Gazzetta del Popolo, came round. We talked in the garden and then an article came out with a terrible photo of me, but in Panorama, because he also wrote for the weekly.

We always had beautiful vacations, first in Yugoslavia and then in Greece, at Thassos, Ithaca, Santorini.

War and Peace I read only at the start of the 1980s, at Santorini, and it was such a beautiful experience that I was glad I hadn’t read it earlier.

At Ithaca, on the other hand, we lodged with a lady we called Nonna Papera (Granny Duck). In the middle of the country, with no electric light, but near an irresistible little beach. Nonna Papera’s husband—don’t ask me why—lived in a hut in a tree. He stayed there all day and all night.

We went on vacation with Mario and my great friend Angela, a psychoanalyst. That’s one of the reasons I still have close ties to Mario, since he has been a widower. They always left two or three days ahead of me because I unfailingly had some job to finish.

I hadn’t publicly professed my homosexuality, it wasn’t inscribed anywhere officially, but everyone knew I was living with my friend and that gave me a great measure of peace.

Once I got back from a trip abroad and found a racing bicycle left behind in our garage. It wasn’t hard to imagine how Gianpiero had entertained himself and passed the time while I was away.