56	AT A CERTAIN HOUR

Now I’ve gone back to being a libero, or “sweeper” in soccer parlance: in the newspapers, in Italy, around the world. Back to thinking, elaborating, writing. Being a university professor. I wouldn’t want that to be forgotten, because it’s not something residual to me. It’s my job, my primary commitment.

Indeed, I’d like to be remembered as a professor who was generous and accessible, the way Pareyson was with me. I try. I strive to be accessible and welcoming. But I don’t believe I’ll ever succeed in supervising anyone the way Pareyson supervised me.

When he died, fifteen years ago now, in 1991, and my career as a fifty-five-year-old professor had long been running on its own steam, I missed him profoundly.

He really treated me as the apple of his eye.

In the years right after I graduated, while I was working on my first book on Heidegger, if we weren’t together at the institute he would telephone me in the afternoon. If I was supposed to phone him, there would be a mix-up, because he would say, “Call me at a certain hour.” A certain hour when? Then I learned that “a certain hour” for him was a precise timeframe, between 4:00 PM and 5:00 PM. He would get me to tell him how my work was going.

Some onlookers were probably saying that our relationship was baronial, with him as the baron and me as the dogsbody. When he left for Rome to sit on an academic promotion committee or something, it’s true that I used to drive him to the airport on Sunday morning in my car, things like that. But the security and the protection he gave me were worth a thousand times more than those little duties.

We spent countless days together. He took me along with him for years, to conferences, to meetings, even when I said things that embarrassed him in front of other important Italian philosophers. He got me a professorial chair twice. He didn’t object to my profession of Maoism, he didn’t bat an eyelid at my homosexuality, he, a Catholic to the marrow, ultramoderate, with that devastating sense of sin of his. Imagine, one day—before he knew about me—we were talking about Pasolini, and finally he said to me, “Yes, but still . . . somebody who’s publicly homosexual.” It would never have remotely occurred to him that before long his own disciple would be “somebody publicly homosexual.”

He never reproached me for a single thing, even when I might have been straining the alliances that he, like everyone else in the university system, needed. He always accepted philosophical confrontation with me on equal terms. We wrote essays together, and worked together a lot, and for a long time, on the Rivista di estetica.

He knew Julio, Gianpiero, and Sergio and respected them profoundly.

I regret to have to say that he was someone who died of sorrow. His daughter Emanuela, who was highly gifted, died of cancer, and he began to get cirrhosis. But he didn’t drink. It was the unhappiness.

His wife Rosetta still practices as a psychoanalyst in Milan. She has always been very affectionate and friendly with me.