The next day I won’t see him until evening. The tape recorder will stay off. And I’ll spend most of my time rereading my notes or thinking, lying on the bed in my air-conditioned hotel room, while it’s 104 degrees outside, at the end of July with this tropical humidity.
I will go to pick him up at 8:30 in front of the entrance to his apartment building in Via Po, under the portico, a few steps from Piazza Castello.
The doorbell at street level reads “Vattimo-Mamino.” Up on the third floor, the nameplate reads “Vattimo-Cavaglià.” Sergio and Gianpiero, his two friends who, despite death, have never gone away; they have only gone out for a long walk.
I’ll buzz him and he’ll come down. Three floors on foot (but there is another entrance with an elevator), above him the administrative offices of the university, beneath him the embassy of Burkina Faso.
Khaki pants and a white shirt with light blue stripes.
I am not seeing him until evening because we’ve more or less finished. Then too, this will be one of those days. The Professor has a heap of things to do, the tiny huge nuisances of all mortals, paying bills, getting ready to leave for his little house at Nice, just over the Italian border. And there are the annoying dizzy spells to torment him, and a back pain that just won’t go away, perhaps because of this rotten weather. Above all, the funeral of Nicoletta, the wife of his friend Nicola Tranfaglia, is being held this morning. Nicola will then come to lunch. And as always there will be his old friend Mario, who has lunched at his place practically every day since his wife died and doesn’t need an invitation. And Stefano.
Starting in September, says the Professor, enough of all these people, it’ll be by invitation only. But he knows better than anyone that he won’t do it. He is totally incapable of not being generous almost to the point of heedlessness. Then too, he wants a family, and today this is his family: Mario, Stefano, Jasmine, the Filipino lay sister who looks after him and lives in the apartment next door to his. Jasmine will prepare spaghetti al pesto. The Professor likes spaghetti, but he doesn’t like anyone else to make them for him, even in a restaurant.
Then there’s an appointment with German radio, an hour-long interview about the book he wrote with Richard Rorty on the future of religion. Italian television also phoned, and there was a long, amusing, sarcastic exchange between the Professor and the person at the other end of the line, who gets raked over the coals and keeps on saying, “I’m not the one responsible.”
The journalist Paolo Flores D’Arcais phoned too, and the Professor tried to convince him to take a position against Israel. Naturally, he didn’t even say no to Paolo; he will write a piece for Micromega on the new center-left Democratic Party. It will be entitled “Comunque auguri” (Anyway, good luck) and will end—in caude venenum—this way: “It’s unlikely that those who go to the polls for the first and second round will ever vote for such a party, which is programmatically and realistically aimed solely at keeping things from getting immeasurably worse. Perhaps the Latin American left (comrade Berlinguer, Chile has things to teach us . . .) or some other horde of ‘barbarians’ will save us. Anyway, good luck.”
Finally, Santiago Zabala, his cleverest disciple, the one who will continue his philosophical thought, telephoned.
Another task was dropping by the university to confer with the two final students for this year, and once again he didn’t say no.
Although it is evening, the heat and humidity are still suffocating. We set out on foot. It’s not far. There is a restaurant he likes a lot, and a waiter who works there has caught his eye. It’s not the first time we’ve been there together. We turn left, toward the Gran Madre, toward the river, then immediately cross Via Po and enter Via Bogino. A car pulls over. A lady sticks her head out the window and asks directions to a hotel in tentative Italian. In perfect French, the Professor gives precise and apparently complicated, but actually simple, directions, as when he talks about philosophy. I say, “You really know your way around Turin.” He answers: “When I used to go out cruising at night, you have no idea how many boys I used to take home, in every part of the city. I could drive a taxi.” But he never says, “In the good old days, when I still. . . .” Maybe he is thinking it, feeling a bit sorry about the present, about old age, about the youths who are looking for younger men, but he never says, “In the good old days.” It is not an accident. And it is not insignificant.
We turn left at Via Principe Amedeo, and in no time we are in Piazza Carlo Emanuele II. “Here everyone calls it Piazza Carlina,” he explains to me, “and sometimes it’s even difficult to make yourself understood, give exact directions. Piazza Carlina alludes explicitly to the homosexuality of Carlo Emanuele.” A ghost of a smile. We sit down.
Seated at a table outdoors, we finally feel comfortable. Piazza Carlina resembles a city square in France a bit. I tell him that he reminds me of Ignazio Silone, “Christian without a church and communist without a party,” ferociously and infamously attacked in life and in death.
I try to pay for once, but I practically have to get down on my knees and beg. I insist. For once, just once, to celebrate, a toast to our shared labor. He always pays, with everyone, however many guests there are. And he could reel off an endless list of persons to whom he regularly gives a little money at the end of every month. Generosity. An atavistic sense of guilt for a financial comfort he could never have imagined, and which he takes so little for granted that he fears: “If I go on like this I’ll wind up on the sidewalk and then they’ll have to support me.” And that ironic knowing bittersweet smile of his flickers once again: he knows they wouldn’t. And he tells me the story of a friend of his, a former Russian princess fallen on hard times who lived by borrowing from her chambermaid.
Around 11:00 PM, we return. Fuddled by the humidity and the wine (actually just a glass or two, our toast) we weave back toward Via Po. We look like two overage—very overage—students, and it wouldn’t take much for us to start slapping each other on the back. Oh, right, his back. It’s really hurting him. Jasmine asked him to wake her up so she could give him a massage. Naturally he won’t. Invincible, atavistic generosity. He left a portable air conditioner on, but it won’t have got the best of this high temperature, this humidity.
He complains that tomorrow morning he would like to sleep in and spend a whole day for once without seeing or talking to anyone, but the telephone will start ringing before 8:00 AM, that damned telephone. “Unplug it for a couple of hours or something,” I tell him. Then we look one another in the eye and say in unison: “But what if it was about an interview?” We laugh uproariously, because a few days earlier he had told me a story, extremely funny and exquisitely malicious, whether true or not, about Norberto Bobbio. Old, tired, and ill, Bobbio complains that the telephone is disturbing him. He is told, “Unplug it, don’t answer.” Bobbio: “But what if it was about an interview?” Now this surrender to vanity, to the contradictions of success, not so much on Bobbio’s part as on that of the human species in general, makes us laugh like mad. Along with the heat. The tiredness. The wine.
He doesn’t like to sleep alone, in fact he hates it, but he has slept alone for many years now. He’ll go upstairs, go down the long, straight corridor that leads to the main area of the apartment, three large rooms full of books. Photographs of Sergio and Gianpiero in simple frames on the mantelpieces: Sergio with his baby face, dressed in pastel colors. A very young Gianpiero, Gianpiero as an adult, Gianpiero with the cat. He’ll watch television, recite compline, and go to sleep late. Like all those a bit lonely and unreconciled to their own solitude, but without drama. Without tragedy.
So I tell him that I had read in the paper that morning about some American research supposedly showing that sleeping beside a partner makes males wake up stupider the next day. He gazes at me, properly incredulous, and not in the least comforted.
At the last turn before the entrance to his building are two Moroccan boys. I’ve already seen them more than once. They are waiting for him. With a familiar and faintly derisive air: they know he’s such an easy mark that if it weren’t for the money, it wouldn’t be any fun hitting on him. “Professor Gianni, Professor Gianni . . .” They extend their hands. He parries them, trying to act stern: no, there’s nothing for you tonight, go away. It’s comical. As he insults them, using dreadful language, you can see how fond he is of them. One says, “Today is my birthday.” Yeah, sure. With Professor Gianni, birthdays happen 365 days a year. And “Professor Gianni” already has his wallet out: twenty euros for the “birthday boy” and ten for his friend, everybody gets the same treatment, except for the “birthday” prize. He has already given a lot of money to the accordion player who tried to disturb our supper, and he overtipped the waiter—who wasn’t even the “right” one, his favorite having disappeared.
The Gran Madre is fully illuminated now, down there by the bank of the Po, where the Valentino Park begins.
Good night, Professor Gianni. May sleep bring you sweet dreams; God knows you’ve earned them again today. Anyway, I know you’ll put up with your back pain for the sake of not waking Jasmine, that Stefano won’t even call you to say goodnight, that tomorrow you’ll answer the telephone early. And that in the afternoon you won’t go to the cinema alone, as you claimed you would, pretending to feel free and relieved. You’re one of those who hate going to the movies alone. You wouldn’t go into a cinema by yourself these days even if they paid you. You’ll prepare your notes and a bag of books. And off you’ll go to the seaside.