Read Online The Woman I Wanted to Be by Diane von Furstenberg - Free Book Online

was very cold and humid and every hour he would put a sixpence coin into the heater to keep it going. His bed was cozy and so was he. We kissed a lot. I was a virgin and was still wearing little girl cotton underwear, which I felt embarrassed about. I wanted to pretend I was older and sophisticated but I did not really want to have sex. We broke up for a while and then started seeing each other again. By then I had bought silk underwear. I was sixteen. He became my first lover, kind and attentive. He mademe happy. Many, many years later I found out that I, too, was his first lover. He was twenty-one.
    The following summer, I was on holiday in Riccione, Italy, with my father and brother. Sohrab and Shidan drove from England to see me on their way to Iran, where they were going to sell the little turquoise Volkswagen for a profit before going back to Oxford. They did not stay long, barely an afternoon. To this day, my brother, who was still a child, remembers and doesn’t understand what happened next. One day I was clearly in love with Sohrab, keeping his framed photo by my bed in my hotel room. The next day, I met Lucio on the beach. He became my next boyfriend.
    Lucio was a very handsome twenty-two-year-old who looked like the Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni. We fell in love. He was passionate and experienced. He would hold my arm firmly and take me into the pine forest behind the beach. He would make love to me endlessly, making me feel like a real woman. During the day I was a normal seventeen-year-old girl having a nice holiday with her father and brother, but at night I had a secret life, a grown-up woman having a very sexy love affair. Lucio was very much in love and so was I.
    We kept up a passionate correspondence for a long time and every now and then would manage to meet. Once, in Milan, where I had accompanied my father on a business trip, we locked ourselves in a hotel room near the railroad station for the entire day. Another time I went to Crevalcore near Bologna where he lived. Taking advantage of the fact that my mother was on a trip with Hans, I left boarding school early and took a detour to Italy on the way home to Geneva. I met his family, who had a small handbag factory. They organized a dinner for me in a local restaurant and I slept in a tiny hotel near his home. Later on he came twice to visit me while I was studying in Spain. Our passionate encounters remain a wild memory.
    Two years ago I received a sad letter from Lucio’s wife. He had died and she had found letters from me and some photographs. Would I like to have them? “Of course,” I said, and to my delight I received a huge box with hundreds of love letters I had sent him as well as photos, menus, and train tickets. He had kept them all.
    In England after the holiday I became infatuated with a French girl at my school. Her name was Deanna. She was very shy and masculine and she intrigued me. We became very close. We went on together to the University of Madrid where there were so many anti-Franco riots and so many strikes that we hardly ever went to class as the university was almost always closed. We shared a grim little room in a pensione for girls on the Calle de la Libertad in the center of Madrid. To get into our pensione at night, we had to clap and the Serrano, who held the keys for the block, would open our building’s door and let us in. We made friends at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras where we took Estudios Hispánicos classes. We watched flamencos at night and went to bullfights on Sundays. Madrid was a repressed city at the time, still wounded from the civil war. The mood was dark and I was bored.
    My life took a different turn during the Christmas holiday that year. My mother, Hans, his son Martin, my brother, and I went to celebrate the holidays in Gstaad in the Swiss Alps. We were staying at the Hôtel du Parc having a dull time when suddenly, one afternoon in the village, I bumped into my best friend from