They were happy years … carefree: the hardships of university were behind me, military service filed away with good memories, the apprenticeship of the first jobs done and now, just over 30, I had reached those life “milestones” that let you start enjoying it to the full.
In fact I finally had a good job, interesting, with excellent career prospects and paid much better than many friends, I had a wonderful girl I loved and with whom we were getting ready to start a family, I was happy and everything was fine....or at least so I thought.
But that day something strange happened, apparently insignificant, in some ways incomprehensible and even comic in itself (in fact it made the cheerful group, made mostly of couples, that my future wife and I met from time to time, burst out laughing), which to me (and only to me) sounded like a kind of dark and unsettling omen of something dreadful awaiting me in the future, so amid the laughter that that incident had triggered on a carefree Saturday afternoon, I felt my mood veer abruptly out of the “comfort zone”, without really managing to understand why.....and stay there.
We were all hosted at the home of the couple who had organized the get-together in a very “old english” way: tea and biscuits, all together, in their new house.
The fact was simply this: the new hostess, while serving the tea, spilled a bit on one of the guests, a boy, a man...a “male”, and, after letting out a sorry and embarrassed little moan, she turned 180 degrees, spotted the “male’s” partner who at that moment was chatting with a friend, and apologized....TO HER....not to HIM!
Obviously the whole group burst out laughing....and I too had initially laughed at first, at least until I realized that the “male” would receive no apology, of any kind, it ended there...PERIOD, and that, all in all, there was nothing particularly strange: the curtain had simply been lifted for a moment on something that everyone (except me) knew; it was as if the bathroom door flew open while someone is taking a shower and their private parts were displayed....funny...but no big deal.
Only many years later, when I had already seen my marriage to the wonderful girl collapse miserably, did I grasp the deep implications of what that gesture meant; only then did I understand my sudden change of mood that Saturday afternoon.
In that group of young, modern, western, well-off people with a high level of education, as the 3rd millennium approached, there prevailed, creeping but steady, an archaic and chauvinistic setting of male-female relations.
The two halves of the sky were seen as inexorably separate and unable to communicate, two alien entities, forced to cooperate for biological-economic reasons, that was all, romantic love was not even contemplated except as a screen, a useful alibi to hide the real “framework”, the “business as usual”.....the “normality”.
