“If you feel up to it,” he said. I thanked him and headed for the door. As I opened it, he spoke again. “Gazzara,” he said. I turned because his voice sounded different, kindlier. “It’ll be hard,” he said when I looked at him.

“I know,” I said. “I tried once before.” Suddenly, I felt like crying.

“Come back if you need help,” he said.

I closed the door and headed along the corridor. A nurse was pushing a cart loaded with red syringes. It clinked like a cart full of bottles. I stopped her and asked her if I could have my clothes. I went back to the big ward and sat down on my bed and waited. When the nurse came in with my clothes, I asked her what day it was. It was ten days to Christmas.

Whenever you quit drinking, you get the impression the world is taking the opportunity to attack you from all sides, but, in my case, it wasn’t only an impression. The next day, at home, I was awakened by a kind of muffled, monotonous throbbing I’d never heard before. I went to the window and saw that the valley was done for. In the cold December sun, a digger was uprooting the trees, leaving a dark trail across the meadow like a wound. They were constructing something and as usual they were starting by destroying everything. It went on like this for days and days, and every now and again the throbbing of the digger was joined by the crack of a tree being felled, but from this point on the only time I was home was to sleep.

I could barely keep on my feet. The alcohol had gone from my veins, leaving a void I didn’t know how to fill. I forced myself to eat a lot of meat and fresh vegetables, one of the recommendations on the sheet of paper I’d been given on leaving the hospital, along with some blue compresses, but all I could manage to drink, and then only with difficulty, was a little tea and some orange juice.

One day, thinking it might be easier to eat with company, I phoned the Diaconos. Viola answered, but hearing behind her voice other voices I knew I made an appointment for the following evening.

When I arrived, I walked in and there in the living room, behind the white velvet couch, was a Christmas tree not much smaller than the one in the Rinascente department store. “The city’s gone crazy,” Viola said. “Have you been downtown lately?”