Certain clever gynaecologists, I no longer remember whether American or Swedish, would even like to name the maternity ward of their clinic after Ogino and Knaus, to indicate how many new births owe their good fortune (?) to those famous scientists. My son Augusto, born in 1948, is of that batch. We married young, Viola and I, and at the time knew very little about such things.

The chemical method seems to be more secure: as everyone knows, sperm prosper in an alkaline habitat and, on the contrary, react negatively when they find themselves in the presence of acids. So one has only to create an acidic internal environment (through special foam-generating suppositories) to kill or at least neutralize the sperm. The inconveniences are obvious: you feel the acidity, and not pleasantly, on the mucosa of the glans and especially in the balanopreputial sulcus.

Finally, there is the mechanical method: placing a pure and simple barrier between the sperm and the fertilizable egg. The barrier can be positioned either directly at the opening of the urethra (that is, using the common rubber condom) or in front of the cervix, using the diaphragm: it’s a disc, also made of rubber, with a diameter of eight centimetres and a reinforced edge, which, with an adroit manoeuvre, is suspended between the pelvic bone and the muscles of the anal sphincter, in such a way as to entirely block the mouth of the uterus. Best to dampen the diaphragm with a spermicidal substance when it’s inserted, as a guarantee against the possible porousness of the rubber. At first, to position it, the woman will likely resort to a special little plastic rod, jointed and serrated; then she’ll be able to do it using just her fingers.

In everyone’s opinion, the diaphragm (hardly noticeable after a short period of adjustment) is by far preferable to the condom, which is annoying and, let’s face it, humiliating. But a doctor has to measure the position and angle of the woman’s cervix, the contractibility of the striated muscles, the relative angle of the vaginal duct. Otherwise the diaphragm may not form a perfect seal, as, for example, in the case of my second-born, Cesare. My son was born in 1950, and my wife, Viola, accepted the new pregnancy with the tacit submissiveness that is her most admirable gift.

Her eyes turn soft and moist, her body is fuller, her skin clear: I have to say that she becomes beautiful. The trouble begins later, around the seventh month, when she loses her shape, along with her serenity: she’s no longer a woman but an animal, a plant that Mother Nature destined for procreation, and then she stays in bed, with the meek, vacant gaze of a sheep, and waits, waits to expel the infant, nurse it, clean it, cradle it in her arms.

Tiberius, the third-born, came into the world by mistake. It was in 1954, a Saturday evening when Cesare and Augusto were spending the night at their grandparents’, and we decided, on the spur of the moment, to spend the weekend out of town, stopping in the first motel we found on the road to the lakes. Viola had left her faithful diaphragm in the medicine chest, but the evening was beautiful, the wine light, pale and sparkling, and I didn’t manage to pull out. The pregnancy was smooth, as always: in the seventh month Viola fell into lethargy – lethargy, so to speak, of course: she ate, slept, took walks – and sent me to sleep in the guest room, so she wouldn’t bother me in the night, she said. Indeed, when she’s expecting a child, she’s always hot at night and wants the window open and scarcely a blanket on the bed.