As for me, it was a month I hated. With my friends gone and the trattorias closed, a person could die of starvation, with nobody to borrow money from to see him through until September. That year I had a job and the empty city shouldn’t have scared me. But I was alone. I hadn’t heard anything more from Arianna, Graziano must have left on his cruise, and the Diaconos had moved to their house by the sea. Sometimes I dialed their numbers anyway, just to imagine the phones ringing in their empty apartments. Apart from that, I slept until noon and then went to the pool, where I’d lie alongside it reading. There were two regulars who played chess and sometimes I challenged the winner, but the games weren’t interesting. Around four, I’d go back home to rest and eat a little fruit while waiting to go to the newspaper. A couple of times I’d heard the phone ringing as I came up the stairs, but I’d never gotten to it in time. Then one afternoon it rang as I was opening the door. I lifted the receiver. It was a voice I didn’t know telling me that Graziano was dead.

The police officer on duty at the hospital got to his feet when I arrived and sat down again only once I’d also sat down. He was very kind. He spoke in the appropriate tone. He told me Graziano had died that morning after two days in a coma. They’d been looking for me ever since he’d been taken to the hospital because they’d found a note on him in which he’d written that whatever happened to him, they had to phone me. They’d tried several times and in the end had come to the conclusion that I was out of town. The call I’d answered was a personal attempt on the officer’s part because he’d felt bad that someone could die alone like a dog. I thanked him. He said there was no need. I asked how it had happened and he said Graziano had been found by the doorman on Monday afternoon in the corner of the courtyard below his living room window. It was purely by chance, because that day the building was practically uninhabited and the doorman had gone there only to water a vacationing family’s plants. The accident had happened on Sunday evening, a few hours after Graziano’s wife and two daughters had left. The doorman had heard the thud but unfortunately hadn’t thought anything of it because it seemed to come from another building.

So Graziano had lain there, still alive, for a night and a day on the cobblestones of the courtyard. I remembered those cobblestones, they were small and oval and grass grew in the gaps between them.