51	THE RICH FIANCÉE

As you well know, I’ve always desired a family. Always.

Right after the Heidelberg years I courted, and spent a lot of time with, a girl, a student of mine, whom I still see and who never married. She’s a psychoanalyst.

She was pretty, but above all rich. That she was rich was important for me. My thinking was: only petit-bourgeois people have a myth of “authenticity,” because they can only afford one house. Rich people can take broader views. I thought that a haute-bourgeoise girl wouldn’t be so set on the notion that you had to be with her and her alone, and wouldn’t regard good dining room furniture as the highest aspiration of marriage.

It’s not that I wasn’t fully aware of my homosexuality, on the contrary. I thought, and still think, that the problem of gayness is essentially a socioeconomic problem.

I ardently wanted to have a normal family. And I miss not having had one, not having one even now. I would be happier today if I had one. I wanted a wife, children, a mother-in-law. And with any luck a house in Morocco where I could have boys. I have rich friends—whose names you would know if I mentioned them, but a few don’t hide it so it wouldn’t even be a scoop—who live in exactly that way and have done so all their lives.

I take the view that sexual specialization is impoverishing.

I would have liked to organize a serious bisexual life.

At Turin, my “homosexual frequentations” were known. I didn’t walk around wearing a sign, but I didn’t hide them either. My fiancée knew too, but she pretended not to, or she thought who knows what. And I said to myself: if I betray you with the girl next door you’ve got a reason for resentment, but if I go with a boy, what’s that to you?

The fact remains that we were seriously engaged.

The fact remains that her father didn’t exactly see it that way.

He had us followed. For a long time. He went in person to see the questore, the head of the police in Turin. Being rich, he could do that. The questore confirmed the “rumors” to him, and the handful of episodes in which I had been spotted and identified.

I went to have a man-to-man talk with her father. He said he was sorry, but his mind was made up. He gave a little speech along the lines of: “You know, I can’t accept, I am unable. . . .” He didn’t discuss the possible unhappiness of his daughter. His fear was that he would have gay grandchildren. He was convinced that homosexuality is transmitted from father to son.

He sent his daughter to London to keep her away from me. I went to visit her with no precautions, leaving normal and visible traces everywhere that I could easily have concealed. When he called Alitalia they confirmed that I had taken a flight to the British capital.

When she got back her father staged a scene, and between him and me she chose—him. And dumped me.

It was December 1967.

Complicated, having a heterosexual family and being homosexual. Yes. Sure. Expensive, above all.

But Aristotle did it.

But that was a different world, you’ll say.

Exactly. A different world is possible.