Of all the hotels I’d lived in, the one behind Campo de’ Fiori was my favorite. I liked going back there in the evening, walking through the side streets and across the empty, silent squares. It was the old stone heart of the city that visionary architects had built five centuries earlier on the orders of stern pontiffs, where a disproportionate number of churches, hemmed in by houses, lifted their travertine summits to indicate the possible cruelty of heaven. By day, the area was an ants’ nest, but toward evening you became aware that you were below the level of the river and on the walls of the houses stone plaques with dates on them bore witness to the levels reached by long-ago floods. Sheltered by higher embankments, the area had dried out, as it were. Large cracks furrowed the walls of the palaces, the plaster was coming away, and when you walked the streets and peered in through the windows you could see the decorated ceilings falling to pieces. The artisans in their workshops always looked as if they were repairing something.

I was seeing a lot of a girl named Sandra. She was twenty-two, and we’d meet on Piazza Navona, have dinner, and catch a movie. She loved the art houses, but they were always showing movies I’d already seen and when eventually I told her to choose between me and the art houses she chose the art houses. Apart from that, I went to the newspaper office every day, though I wasn’t working with Rosario anymore. An article I’d written, substituting for a sick journalist, had opened the doors of the newsroom to me. I couldn’t think of any reason not to accept, but Rosario took it badly because I was doing what he’d always dreamed of doing and earning more than him. I was sad that he’d grown cold toward me because he’d helped me a lot in the hard times, and I tried to go see him as often as possible in the copy department but that just irritated him even more and in the end I stopped bothering.

In the spring, our tennis writer published an interview with Livio Stresa. He was playing tournaments again and the journalist wondered if at the age of forty and after such a long period of inactivity he was still capable of good things. The tournament was being held in Rome and I followed it in the articles we published. To everyone’s surprise, Stresa played some great matches and was lucky enough to get to the finals, where he’d be playing against a twenty-year-old Pole who’d just defeated the top seed. I thought about it for a while, then decided to go see the match.