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My perspective, like anybody’s, is not neutral. In my view he was an austere man, generous with his own family and others, even though many would think the opposite. “For some people I am a good guy,” he said, “and for others I am surely a wretch. You can't be okay with both God and the devil.” It was not difficult to find faults in him, not because he emphasized this in some particular human way but because it is never difficult to find faults in others. If they say there was once a perfect guy, who went around preaching democratic love even for his enemies and they crucified him anyway, what do you expect?

This was even more evident in the world of ideological passions. We always argued about politics. He always clung to his conservative principles and I always insisted on a rebuttal. Our arguments were intense but we always resolved them in a simple way: “Well, I can see now that we are not going to reach an agreement,” he said, “let’s go have some wine then.”

Of course, someone might say that tolerance is not the wine but the opium of the people. It is no less true that its absence is the death of nations and, even worse, the frustration of each one of the concrete lives that make up that mythological abstraction.