Hi Project,
we met in person in 2012 and spent a day together. You may remember that in the morning we went to the Museum of Roman Antiquities and in the afternoon to Villa Borghese. You were exactly my father’s age and I’m writing to you for this very reason: my father is dead and I miss him, I miss him a lot. He also resembled you physically and you reasoned in very similar ways. When I was 20 I had the problem of whether or not to tell my parents that I was gay and for the first time I talked about it with you. On this point you were very careful. Three years later things in my life have changed radically, but since you don’t know the facts, it’s good that I tell you them in order. My father had been a widower for 5 years at the time, I had lost my mother at 15 and my father had not remarried and in practice from 15 on I grew up with my father. He was not very expansive, he used to speaking little, especially after my mother’s death, but was also very rational, especially when he had to think about me. He used to get up very early in the morning, made me breakfast and went to work, he left me a total freedom which I never took advantage of, he never acted in front of me like a man experienced in life affairs who had to teach me how to behave.
When I entered University, in a faculty to tell the truth not particularly easy, I found myself with a very assorted group of colleagues, from those obsessed with studying (very rare people) to those absolutely use to do absolutely nothing and convinced that they would graduate because they were “intelligent”. I did not feel particularly intelligent and initially I found myself in enormous difficulty, especially due to the total absence of scholastic preparation in Mathematics and Physics. I thought that if I had given up I wouldn’t have many other chances and I did my best to make up for my remote shortcomings. And here my father has been a great man. He didn’t understand anything about Mathematics and Physics, but he began to study with me and he did it with care and love. We used to study, then stop for a snack and then we restarted to study. In practice, I passed all the exams of the first year studying with my father who, I repeat, had started from scratch.
The second year I felt able to follow the lessons without help and I started to study with Peter, a colleague of mine who had to take my same exams. We studied together and my father used to bring us tea with biscuits in the afternoon, and to prepare lunch for us when I studied with Peter at my home, but he used also to prepare dinner for me, when I studied with Peter at his home and used to come back at dinner time. I liked Peter, at the time I only knew this: that he was a good guy and that I liked him and also that he wanted to study seriously.
The second year ended well, with Peter we studied hard, we wasted no time, studying was not an excuse to stay together, it was really the basic purpose of our common work, and we were good with each other. I didn’t have the courage to tell Peter that I had fallen in love with him. I don’t know what my father understood, but I noticed that at a certain point, when Peter was at home, my father would go out and return directly to dinner time. At the beginning I didn’t give weight to this “detail” but it was a form of respect. I used to talk a lot about me and Peter and I was very proud of what we were doing, my father approved, always in his very reserved way. We took the three-year degree and enrolled for the specialist degree.
At a certain point, without any formal admission neither on his part nor on mine, Peter and I began to understand that “maybe” we were both gay. One day a very handsome guy passed in front of us and Peter said: “What a handsome guy!” and I nodded yes and my eyes probably sparkled more than usual. He said looking straight into my eyes: “Then I guess I wasn’t wrong! I was afraid that my imagination had flown too high.” Then we stared into each other’s eyes for about ten seconds. There was no need to add more, we were now a couple. With Peter we understood each other immediately, the words were very few and in a sense, even if with very few words, we talked about everything with the utmost freedom. There was no space between us for psychological discussions of any kind, we had a study goal but that for us was already “our” goal, that is, our goal as a couple, we knew very well that after university we would still be together.
I told him I didn’t know what to do with my father, he replied that he thought it would happen without any particular problem. Peter, in these things, was much more skilled than me and was able to see much further than me. After those days our behavior became much more casual, even at home and in front of my father, and my father had the confirmation of how things really were between me and Peter, assuming he had not understood it before, But I think that very likely he had understood everything from the beginning. Obviously my father would never have talked to us about the fact that we were a couple, even though he had understood it perfectly well because he thought it would be inappropriate anyway.
One day Peter and I found ourselves talking with my father about the university and we began not only to boast of having done well but also to give opinions not so positive on some of our colleagues who had dropped out of school. My father at first listened and did not intervene. Note, Project, that Peter at that time called my father by name, without having any problems. Then, at the end of the evening, my father told us that he had to tell us something important. We thought he wanted to ask us about our relationship and we felt embarrassed but the speech was completely different from what we expected. My father intervened with his calm but also with his decision: “Guys, you have worked so hard and you have done important things but you must not judge the guys who have stopped on the road, never forget that you have also had many fortunes, above all the good fortune to meet and study together.”
Peter and I blushed, and Peter caught the ball and said to my father: “Albert, for a moment I thought you wanted to ask us about our relationship, I mean the one between me and Aldo …” My father just said: “No , I understood that you love each other and that’s a good thing, that’s is your freedom, and there is nothing more beautiful than loving each other. You are two good guys and I’m happy that you met and that you are fine together. Your happiness is my happiness! The problem is not this, that you, guys, love each other it’s fine but never judge your neighbor, because, before judging, the life of others should be known from within. Now I’m going to tell you something I only said to my wife, but I think it’s time to tell you too.
When I was a boy I went through very difficult times, you see me now, but I wasn’t always like this, when I was a boy they couldn’t handle me. I was very frustrated by the school that I could digest by no way and by the relationships with my parents, who sometimes I hated deeply because they humiliated me in public and, as my father told me, they wanted to straighten my back but by dint of slaps and blows . I don’t want to talk bad about my father, because he drank and didn’t control himself, he was violent, he beat my mother and me with the belt and he behaved like an animal. It happened that I ran away from school in middle school and he took me back to humiliate me and insult me in front of my classmates. He thought he was a strong man who was respected but they feared him because when he drank he was really out of his mind.
I was always around hanging out with some criminals of my age, who used to steal and did damage to the traders, trying to extort some money. As long as it was about being braggart with girls and acting like a bully, I liked doing it, but I felt it was wrong to go and break shop windows, but my friends told me I had to prove I was a man and show my courage. In practice, according to them, I had at least once to go and break the window of the delicatessen shop under my house, it was a small external window, and I broke it deliberately, I was about 15-16 years old, no more.
The owner was an old man who knew me, he had seen that it was me the one who had broken the window and he also knew where I lived, because sometimes had delivered the shopping to my house, and I was afraid he would report me to the police, but this seemed to me quite unlikely, I was much more afraid he would go and tell my father all the story because my father would have beaten me badly. Inside I was scared but with the guys of my gang I had to be a braggart. The old man did not come to my house and my father remained calm, I didn’t know what to think. The next day, before going to school, I passed the delicatessen and the old man kindly motioned me to come closer, I was afraid, but I saw him all in all calm and I didn’t know what to say. I made the scene of the one who didn’t know who had broken the window: “They broke your window … but do you know who did it?” And he told me. “Yes I know it was you … but are you going to school?” I said yes and he said to me, “Wait a minute!” He went into the shop and a minute later he came back with a wrapped bundle and said to me:” This is a loaf with pork roast, it’s good! But you has to start studying seriously. Don’t go around doing damage because you can find people who if you break their shop window can ruin you! Did you understand?” I nodded yes and added an awkward half smile, then waved a wave and walked away.
In short, after that morning I began go past the delicatessen every day before going to school and above all I started going to school again, and every day there was a different snack. This story went on until the year of the final exam. In January they closed the delicatessen for mourning, the old man was gone. Seeing that closed delicatessen caused me a violent reaction of tears, it was the first time that I had not cried out of hatred but because I had lost a person who had believed in me. I didn’t end up drifter or delinquent because I found the butcher, but if I hadn’t found him who knows where I would be now. Perhaps Aldo would not be there and you would never have met him. What you two are experiencing now you also owe it to the butcher, even if you have never heard of him before. Remember what you have had from life. You are a couple of guys, and that’s okay, but you have to be a couple of good guys not only with each other but with those who are worse off than you. I’m not homosexual and I’ve wondered many times why that old man prepared a loaf for me every day, I don’t know if he was married or had children, maybe he was gay too, I don’t know, and in any case, we’ll never know, but he changed my life!”
Peter loved my father, when my father was ill and was hospitalized we were always close to him “together” to the point that people thought we were brothers. My father never raised the issue of accepting a gay son, such an idea never crossed his mind. He said, “Whether and how accept a gay son? What a strange issue! … I had two gay sons, one better than the other!” He passed away at the end of 2019 and for us it was an excruciating loss. Peter, if he thinks about it, tears come to his eyes and for me it’s just the same, and when it happens we hug each other very tightly until we almost hurt ourselves.
Project, this story is above all a tribute to my father. He taught me many things I didn’t know and also that a pork roast loaf can give birth to happiness even 50 years later! It sounds unbelievable but things went exactly so.
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If you want, you can participate in the discussion on this post open on the Gay Project Forum: http://gayprojectforum.altervista.org/T-gay-couples-and-loaves-with-pork-roast
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