In fact, rather than the old streetwalker, who still costs five hundred lire, the seminal evacuator might even prefer the rapid contact with the pederast, who is willing to pay him. Not much, because the pederast is usually a crafty, cheap man, but he does pay.

Second: the decline of the profession. We’ve seen how fleeting and precarious the human relation between client and call girl is. The girl has neither the time, nor the way, nor the will to refine the quality of her performances. As for high-class prostitutes, their main goal is to establish as good a price as possible: the man who is unprepared, or even just a little shy, will feel that he can’t refuse five thousand lire. The woman will then equivocate about the price of the room. Once the act is over and he’s gone down with the girl to the front desk, the client, who had understood that everything, room and service, was included, all together, in the five thousand lire, will hear her innocently ask him to pay for the room. He doesn’t have the courage to argue in front of the desk clerk, who is looking at him with a single sarcastic eye. So he pays.

The act itself, which was supposed to be intercourse – and for this the client has agreed on a price – becomes an operation of emptying the epididymis as rapidly as possible. Sometimes it makes you think that if the prostitutes knew by what means the torturers of the SS extracted seminal liquid from the testicles of their victims, exhausted by malnutrition and ill-treatment, to be used for who knows what laboratory experiments – if prostitutes, I repeat, knew that, they wouldn’t hesitate to do likewise.

Even the ones who are reputedly more skilled, and during the hurried act fake excitement and orgasm, and moan, and mumble, will open their mouth – note – only to demand and stimulate a rapid ejaculation. Thus young clients don’t learn properly; in their turn they have neither the will nor the imagination necessary to ask for a larger and more complete sexual service, and the vicious circle drags on, who knows since when and who knows until when.

There is a remedy: not, certainly, a return to the old brothels, which I continue to disapprove of and condemn, but, instead, an effort to spread a healthier sexual morality in Italy. To preach clearer and more open relations between man and woman, from puberty, liberalize the mentality of both young men and young women, teach them that a sexual relationship is a mutual joy and that as such it should be practised and granted freely. All I ask is not to have to pay that ten thousand lire every time.

But these are debates, the goal is quite far off, and, given the way the wind blows, the worst is to be expected. I’ve tried to do what I could, in the current conditions and with current means. For example, establish a steady relation with a young call girl, setting a fixed price in advance, cultivating her, so to speak, getting her to understand my demands (which are, more or less, the demands of an average Italian client), educating her, in other words, in her trade. A vile trade, someone will say. But come on, read what Croce writes about it! The concept of a trade entails the beginning of an economy, and so is, in its sphere, a value. It produces a value, as a trade, and so, in the economic sphere, it’s neither reputable nor disreputable, neither reprehensible nor commendable.