So I set off for Rome, and everything would have gone perfectly if my father, quite unexpectedly forgoing his own pride, hadn’t decided to go with me to the station and stand waiting on the platform until the train left. The wait was long and unbearable. His big face was red from the effort of holding back the tears. We looked at each other in silence, as usual, but I realized that we were saying good-bye, and all I could do was pray for the train to leave and put an end to that heartrending look I’d never seen in his eyes before. There he stood on the platform, lower than me for the first time ever, so low that I could see how sparse his hair had become as he constantly turned his head to glance at the signal light at the end of the track. His big body was motionless, and he stood with his legs wide apart as if preparing to receive a blow, his hands like weights in the pockets of his overcoat, his eyes moist and his face red. And just as I was at last realizing that it meant something to be the only son, just as I was about to open my mouth and yell to him that I was getting off the train and that we would find a way to work things out without destroying our lives, the train gave a little lurch and began moving. And so, once again in silence, I was wrenched from him. I saw his big body give a start when the train moved. Then I saw him grow smaller the farther away I got. He didn’t move, didn’t make a gesture. Then he vanished from sight completely.

My period of respectability didn’t last long. I was dismissed after a year, although, to be honest, it could have happened even earlier. The small Roman office was the last asset to be liquidated before the magazine closed down, along with the boom that had given birth to it. The place where I worked, drumming up a little advertising for the magazine and occasionally writing a few articles to indulge the medical profession’s unfathomable fondness for literature, was a room filled with furniture upholstered in red damask in a neo-Renaissance villa just beyond the wall along the Tiber.