I didn’t know who Airota the father was, but certainly my classmates became respectful again: I was invited to parties or dinner. At a certain point I even had the suspicion that they talked to me because I brought Pietro out with me, since he generally kept to himself, absorbed in his work. I began to ask questions, all directed toward finding out what the merits of my new friend’s father were. I discovered that he taught Greek literature at the university in Genoa but was also a prominent figure in the socialist party. This information constrained me, I was afraid of saying or having said in Pietro’s presence things that were naïve or wrong. While he went on talking to me about his thesis-book, I, fearful of saying something stupid, talked less about mine.
One Sunday he arrived at the college out of breath, he wanted me to have lunch with his family, father, mother, and sister, who had come to see him. I was immediately apprehensive, I dressed up as well as I could. I thought: I’ll make a mistake with subjunctives, they’ll find me clumsy, they’re grand people, they’ll have a big car and a driver, what will I say, I’ll look like an idiot. But as soon as I saw them I relaxed. Professor Airota was a man of medium height in a rather rumpled gray suit, he had a broad face that showed signs of weariness, large eyeglasses: when he took off his hat I saw that he was completely bald. Adele, his wife, was a thin woman, not pretty but refined, elegant without pretension. The car was like the Solaras’ Fiat 1100, before they bought the Giulietta, and, I discovered, it was not a chauffeur who drove it from Genoa to Pisa but Mariarosa, Pietro’s sister, who was attractive, with intelligent eyes, and who immediately hugged and kissed me as if we had been friends for a long time.
“Do you always drive here from Genoa?” I asked.
“Yes, I like driving.”
“Was it hard to get a license?”
“Not at all.”
She was twenty-four and was working for a professor in the art-history department at the University of Milan, she was studying Piero della Francesca. She knew everything about me, that is, everything her brother knew, my scholarly interests and that was all. Professor Airota and his wife knew the same things.
I spent a wonderful morning with them; they put me at my ease. Unlike Pietro, his father, mother, and sister conversed on a wide variety of subjects. At lunch, in the restaurant of the hotel where they were staying, Professor Airota and his daughter had, for example, affectionate skirmishes on political subjects that I had heard about from Pasquale, from Nino, and from Franco but of whose substance I knew almost nothing. Arguments like: you’ve been trapped by inter-class collaboration; you call it a trap, I call it mediation; mediation in which the Christian Democrats always and only win; the politics of the center left is difficult; if it’s difficult, go back to being socialists; you’re not reforming a thing; in our place what would you do; revolution, revolution, and revolution; revolution is taking Italy out of the Middle Ages, without us socialists in the government, the students who talk about sex in school would be in jail and so would those who distribute pacifist leaflets; I want to see how you’d manage with the Atlantic Pact; we were always against the war and against all imperialism; you govern with the Christian Democrats, but will you stay anti-American?
Like that, a swift back and forth: a polemical exercise that they both obviously enjoyed, maybe a friendly habit of long standing. I recognized in them, father and daughter, what I had never had and, I now knew, would always lack. What was it? I wasn’t able to say precisely: the training, perhaps, to feel that the questions of the world were deeply connected to me; the capacity to feel them as crucial and not purely as information to display at an exam, in view of a good grade; a mental conformation that didn’t reduce everything to my own individual battle, to the effort to be successful. Mariarosa was kind, and so was her father; their tones were controlled, without a trace of the verbal excesses of Armando, Professor Galiani’s son, or of Nino; and yet they injected warmth into political formulas that on other occasions had seemed to me cold, remote, to be used only in an attempt not to make a bad impression. Following each other in rapid succession, they moved on, without interruption, to the bombing of North Vietnam, to the student revolts on various campuses, to the many breeding grounds of anti-imperialist struggle in Latin America and Africa. And the daughter now seemed to be more up to date than the father. How many things Mariarosa knew, she talked as if she had first-hand information, so that Airota at a certain point looked at his wife ironically, and Adele said to her, “You’re the only one who hasn’t chosen a dessert yet.”
“I’ll have chocolate cake,” she said, breaking off with a graceful frown.
