48	UNDER A BAD SIGN

They say there comes a critical age for everyone. For some it’s their thirties, others their forties or their fifties. Not for me. To me that hasn’t happened. For me it’s been more like the seasons changing, from summer to winter, not an illumination but a darkening of the sky, an onset of overcast weather.

After the idyllic years, our family life began to grow unhappy. The rivalry between Gianpiero and Sergio increased; it was as if they were older and younger brothers. Sergio sulked a lot. Gianpiero got angry. Only on vacation all together were we still happy, like before, we three and Angela and Mario.

We changed apartments again. My friend Franco Debenedetti lived on the tenth and eleventh floors of the Torre Littoria, and he told me there was an apartment free. We celebrated the New Year there in 1983. And we lived in that apartment for five years, give or take.

There was a lot of competition to get into that building, but I succeeded. The reward was Sergio and Gianpiero squabbling over the furniture (I was paying for Sergio’s analysis at that time) and remorseful self-torment for me. I had the impression of having become too rich, of no longer being what I once was. Via Mazzini was beautiful, but it was an attic, and now we were living in a real, luxurious apartment.

But things had been going that way for a while. In 1978 Gianpiero’s father died at age sixty-three, and that was sad and difficult.

Then, to top things off, Gianpiero got AIDS. I think it was in a sauna at Nice in the autumn of 1985 while I was teaching in the United States for my usual semester.

Back in Turin in January 1986, and just turned fifty, I was recording a series of television programs for La Clessidra to be broadcast in the spring, a project they had asked me for and that I had written. It consisted of discussions between me and other philosophers, and it was the high point of my public success in Italy. And in due course they were broadcast; the first went out on April 19 at 7:30 on Raitre. I published all of them in the book Filosofia al presente (Philosophy at Present). The other philosophers were Francesco Barone, Remo Bodei, Italo Mancini, Vittorio Mathieu, Mario Perniola, Pier Aldo Rovatti, Emanuele Severino, and Carlo Sini.

Gianpiero had something wrong with his eye; he was always touching his glands. All three of us got tested in February, and his was positive.

Tragedy, fear. This was the first wave of AIDS in Italy. We knew little or nothing about it and protected ourselves even less. In those years people thought, “It can’t possibly happen to me” (I wonder if those years are really over; it doesn’t seem like it). Above all, those were the years when the “gay plague” was generating terror and marginalization and self-marginalization, and in any case people were dying, it was no joke. Research was just starting. Today’s pharmaceutical cocktails that allow so many people to live for decades were a long way off.

We didn’t tell anyone for years.

And the first thing we did was to buy a VCR. Instinctively. Make our nest at home. Wait for the end. What else was there to do at that point?

In 1989 the symptoms became worrying. I’ve suppressed almost all memory of the long intermediate phase of the disease. And yet I continued to teach and travel. It’s actually hard for me to believe that my book La società trasparente came out in 1989, and two more in 1990, Etica dell’interpretazione (Ethics of interpretation) and Filosofia al presente. I know I took leave from the university more than once, but I don’t remember how often and for how long. In 1990 I might even have been on leave for the whole year, but I’m not sure.

But I can connect the First Gulf War, the bombing during the night of January 17, 1990, with our decision to go to the Riviera for a month.

I rented a house at Beaulieu-sur-mer from a Turinese countess, and we left, Gianpiero, Sergio, and I. I remember the long walks we took every day along the beach.

By this time we had told our closest friends. And they came to visit: Franco Debenedetti, his wife Barbara, Mario and Angela as always.

In summer 1991 we went to the mountains, at Davos in Switzerland, to the famous sanatorium from The Magic Mountain, which is now a luxury hotel. But Gianpiero was really ill. The medicines were giving him a tough time.

It’s hard to hold things together in my mind. Realities near in time, but as if belonging to different lives.

On September 9, Pareyson died.

But as Eliot has it, “April is the cruelest month.”

In 1992, Easter fell on April 19. In April, Gianpiero had his first attacks of epilepsy. In April his mother died. On Easter Monday, Gianpiero attempted suicide. I came in and found him in a garbage bag he had wrapped himself in so as not to make a mess. He left a note too, but Sergio found it before I did and kept it from me for a long time, to protect me a bit from the pain. In late spring we went to a house on the hill that our friend Carlo Montanella lent us. I took constant care of him, always ready with needle in hand.

Yet there were still lighter moments, somehow, that relieved the burden of living that life for a few minutes. Every evening, before going to sleep, we sang popular songs in bed, rhymes in Piedmontese dialect.

Did I hope? What was there to hope for? I hoped for nothing, they had made it perfectly clear to me that there was nothing more to do. But I hoped it would last a little longer. That’s what I always used to tell Gianpiero: “Every new day is a day gained, gained for life, for the hope that they’ll find new pharmaceuticals, new cures.”

In summer we decided to go to the mountains again, but this time to Zermatt, to see the Matterhorn from the other side. A telling incident occurred right away. To get there, we had to park the car at a certain point and take the local train. I had to go and take care of something or other, and I told Gianpiero to wait for me there. When I returned he was gone. We didn’t have cell phones then. I was terribly worried. I searched for him for a long time; he had wandered off without realizing it. Fear turned to anger, and we quarreled because of the tension. He didn’t drive anymore and wasn’t perfectly lucid. Horrible days.

About the autumn, I remember that we watched cartoons on television together. There’s a tune I can’t listen to any more because I get emotional, “Cielito lindo,” about the three caballeros.

I was always asking him: “Aren’t you happy to be still here, at home?” And he would say yes. That consoled me for having prevented his suicide, because a doctor friend of ours had told me that it would have been better for him if I had given him another dose of Gardenal and helped him to get it over with.

On November 24, he was admitted once again to the Amedeo di Savoia Hospital. That is one date I can’t forget. That day Gianpiero had written “A” in his calendar. There was a concert by Amália Rodrigues he wanted to go to. Instead, he went into the hospital.

I made friends with a nurse, very simpatica, Valeria Grano, who looked after him in the clinic at night, and sometimes at home as well.

It’s really sad to think how one gets used to anything. You don’t know if there’s a limit, or where it is. The limit between what’s humanly bearable and what’s not.

I recall writing articles for La Stampa in the hospital and phoning them in.

I feel a sense of estrangement rereading those pieces today, written while I was by Gianpiero’s bedside without knowing that the end for him, and an epoch in my life, was near. He was practically in his agony, and on December 14, on the front page of La Stampa, I was commenting on “the wave of violence (racist, xenophobic, tribal, or ‘simply’ hooligan) spilling over the world from East to West” and fearing “the risk of an Islamic holy war that seems ever ready to explode.” On December 20, with the Tangentopoli scandal in full swing (Mario Chiesa had been arrested the previous February) I commented on Craxi’s prosecutorial notification. In Tuttolibri for December 27 I wrote about the new catechism the Catholic Church had given birth to after six years of work; in La Stampa for the same date, one of the endless cases of Palestinians expelled from Israel and refused entry by Lebanon; and on December 29 (it makes me shiver) a short piece on Umberto Bossi. December 29, the day before. I didn’t know it was going to be the day before forever.

As long as Gianpiero could still walk, we used to take a stroll in the courtyard of the hospital around noon. There were a lot of cats there too, a colony of hospital cats that we used to feed.

When Gianpiero could only get around in a wheelchair, I would push it, in the garden.

Sergio was around. But he had his job as a teacher too.

The period between Christmas and New Year was the final plunge. Gianpiero went into a coma. He died on December 30. At just forty-three years of age. I’m glad that I helped Valeria, the nurse, prop Gianpiero up in bed and change his diaper just half an hour before he died.

Sergio and I were looking at a newspaper, the travel section. Gianpiero’s breathing was raspy. At a certain point we didn’t hear him any more. Imagine if he had died while I was taking a quick nap at home. It would have been devastating. But no, luckily I was there. I was there, close to him.

On the hospital file they wrote “exitus.” Really: “exitus.” Mamma mia.

For the funeral I managed to get the church of San Lorenzo, which wasn’t easy because they generally use it for weddings. But in the end I got it. We were in the middle of the holidays, so it was a few days before the funeral could be held. We held it on January 4, the day of my fifty-seventh birthday.

I remember there was a huge turnout. There was no guarantee there would be, far from it. But he had a lot of friends, and so did I obviously. Julio came from Rome too, already wearing a cap to hide his hair loss. He had AIDS as well.

There were friends, colleagues, students.

At those moments it’s as if you’re in preanesthesia, distraught and only half-aware, it’s as if everything is wrapped in a sort of protective fog. Out of that fog I saw a few faces looming here and there, “important” friends whom I’ll always remember for turning up: Livio Garzanti, Cesare Annibaldi, Ezio Mauro, Paolo Mieli.