But afterwards, of course, there was a certain emptiness which after a while made me turn spiteful. It seemed like the most sublime kind of castration, the way she made me so acutely aware of how abstract the role of us men is in a process that, presumably, constitutes the only, or at least the quintessential, meaning and purpose of our existence: the preservation of life by means of the preservation of the species. In zoology, of course, this is known as mating—what mockery! It is actually the separation of Homo sapiens into two utterly different species. The fruit that our first parents picked in the Garden of Eden gave them the knowledge of their separation into two total strangers. In the moment of utmost bliss, Christa was as remote from me as Saturn. She let me know what tremendous spaces I was trying to bridge with my ridiculous striving for spiritual union.

Very well: I learned my lesson. Soon—we hadn’t been married for a year—I scarcely dared approach her, lest I alarm her with my warmth, annoy her with my tenderness, my need for some token of her affection, understanding, indulgence, some small gesture that would let me feel that I was more to her than merely the man whose task it was to ensure her physical well-being, to which end after all it was not entirely insignificant that I had something dangling between my legs that relieved the occasional itch between hers more effectively than her own middle finger or the candles of her teenage years.

It could hardly be denied that, as a provider, I was a nothing. As for my ability to ensure the rest of her well-being, I soon no longer even dared wonder about it. One way or another: I was put in my place. My ego shrank to the measure of what I was biologically: a seed carrier, a drone, nothing more. It struck me as presumptuous on my part to have any other claims and to seek any but a purely physical union with a daughter of the Great Mother, a world-bearer, able to resurrect mankind from within her body—to reduce, inside her belly, millions of years of protozoan-to-primate development to three-quarters of a solar revolution, to mold a human being perfect in all faculties of body, mind, and soul, and to release him into life, letting him become Messalina or Saint Cecilia or Adolf Hitler or Jesus Christ or anything in between.

My goodness, what a difference in realities! How unreal, in contrast, was our male contribution to this extension and continuation of the world, of life! . . . How meager, what a wretched crumb from the table: a few angry minutes of dark sweet pleasure, a few moments of effacement, of cramped discharge, while, in several ejaculatory thrusts, that wonderful, for us ever-incomprehensible, ever-mysterious, essential, actual something took place—beyond our awareness, snuffed out in a few instants of blissful near-death, in the dazzling of utterly sweetened pain . . . and then basta, finito, done! Well, that was that again, thanks a lot, don’t worry about the rest, ci penso io, dottò . . .