50	THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL

Every time I go to Frankfurt my heart skips a beat. But then, it’s only been three years, or a bit more.

When Sergio found out he had a tumor six centimeters in diameter on his left lung, I was leaving to give yet another lecture in Spain. It was February 2003.

I said to him, “Calm down, we’ll see what can be done, it’s not over.” We began a round of visits to all the medical luminaries in Turin. And they all said, “It can’t be removed.” It was inoperable, so we had to try chemotherapy. But Sergio had seen his only sister die of breast cancer and he wouldn’t budge: surgery he would undergo, but not the dreadful horror of chemotherapy. Never. “I’d sooner die.”

Sergio was very strong inside. He taught me a lot about our rapport with illness. God almighty, he was admirable.

His mother has told me this story a thousand times. Sergio rang her and told her to come to Turin, where he told her, “I’ve had a happy life, filled with beautiful things, and now this has happened.” He was the one consoling her.

Still, he was a man of forty-seven who was facing death.

His sadness made him behave badly, even with me.

I wanted to be as close to him as possible, he wanted to be alone. Actually, he was afraid of starting to look like a skeleton, he who was so young-looking that he often had to show his identity card even when he was close to fifty. In his last photograph, in his coffin, he still looks young. I was the one who took it, because his mother asked me to.

He went to live in the apartment we had bought in Paris. I begged him: “Let me come visit.” Sergio: “If you come, I’m leaving.” In the end we met in Amsterdam, because once it was clear there was nothing to be done, he had decided to resort to euthanasia. So we stayed in a big hotel—when someone’s about to kick the bucket you treat yourself to the best hotels—and we became friends with an Italian doctor who worked in Amsterdam, Professor Giuseppe Giaccone. But even there, we often had spats.

Before Easter, Sergio grew more serene, and we decided to make a trip to the United States. He wanted to see at least two things he had never seen before: the new Asian Art Museum rebuilt by Gae Aulenti in San Francisco, and the house built over the waterfall by Frank Lloyd Wright in Pennsylvania.

We left for San Francisco on April 9. Upon arrival we rented a car. Sergio could hardly walk anymore. Then the insomnia began. The stabbing pain in his spine kept him from sleeping, he spent the nights in the hotel sitting astride the toilet. It was very hard to obtain painkillers because the Americans have this beastly fixation about drug use. Trips, phone calls, doctors. Once, while we were trying to alleviate his pain, a couple of maniacs arrived. Instead of giving him something for the pain, they tried to take him away on a stretcher. Sergio refused, and so did I.

Wednesday of Holy Week arrived, and we went to see the famous house over the waterfall. On the morning of Easter Saturday we were in New York. Sergio’s aunt had given him a hundred million lire to spend. Sergio bought two Carlo Scarpa vases for that amount from an antique dealer. They’re still sitting in a cupboard around here somewhere.

That evening we left for Amsterdam to get it over with once and for all. I knew that the oxygen would be a big problem. But they wouldn’t even hear of us bringing a canister on the jumbo jet; in fact, they got suspicious and threatened not to let us on board. Sergio pretended he was feeling better, and we got on a Lufthansa flight. They brought us supper: caviar and champagne, the condemned man’s last meal. Sergio could hardly even talk anymore.

Shortly after we ate, he got up and went to the washroom. But he didn’t come back. The minutes ticked away, and there was no sign of him. I became alarmed and went to look for him. I knocked and knocked but he didn’t answer. I called the steward. We opened the door, and Sergio was lying there on the floor. I tried mouth-to-mouth respiration; they called for a doctor who was on board. It was the night of April 19–20. Easter night. There was nothing more to do.

We were only a couple of hours out of New York, still flying over the American coast. The flight was seven hours long. I held Sergio’s hand for five hours on the seat beside me, feeling it gradually grow cold, freezing. At one point the steward handed me a note of condolence and consolation. I took care to put plenty of his favorite perfume on him; you never know. That vial you see in the bathroom is the same one I brought home from the airplane.

We disembarked at Frankfurt and the Pietät, the funeral service, arrived. I was joined by Peppino Iannantuono, a friend who had been my assistant in Brussels, and his wife Melita. We celebrated a mass. I had to leave him there and return to Italy. Then finally it was back to Frankfurt so the cremation could go ahead.

Sergio returned to Turin for the last time with me. In an urn.