ABSTRACT
I realized Grandpa would never approve of my male lovers. As long as I was enthralled with the guy, Dario hated his guts. His hostility often helped to bring my relationships to an end, after which he started to have some respect for the unlucky fellow. “I don’t know what she finds in him,” he confessed to Katia one day. When I met your father Giulio your grandfather Dario didn’t even seem to notice what an improvement he was. He wanted jurisdiction over my choices as if he was going to bed the fellow himself. Was he afraid that some day I would discover men weren’t necessary? I thought he’d approve of a lover who was my peer, both culturally and intellectually. But that scared the shit out of me. “Why?” Grandpa must have thought, “Hasn’t her mother been happy?” But as a child, I had seen what my father missed. Your grandmother Delia did not live on to enjoy the concordance she and Dario had. As soon as they had children, her career became secondary; her desires were crushed and he absorbed her intellectual energy. When he left school for politics, she supported him, but when her opportunity came to get into educational TV, it did not occur to him that it would have been as important for him to support her. Finally, when it came to purchasing a family home, he encouraged her to accept her father’s offer. My grandfather too wanted his daughter near him, and Delia found herself stuck between two men. The patriarchal order surrounded her-the cancer she got was a natural way to smother a flame that had been asphyxiated already. A lover my father would approve of would be one with the potential to behave like him, and I felt this would be a deadly trap for me. If I found him, how would I stave off the pressure to make him the center of my life? And if I allowed that to happen, how would I ever find a center of my own?
