“How unlucky I am,” she said. “I always make the wrong choices. I’m going home now, and I’ll throw all these packages in his face.”

“No,” I said again.

“Why not?” she said, her voice starting to quiver.

“We can’t afford it,” I said. I felt she was mine. I had never before felt that so much as I did now, when she was someone else’s. What lousy luck. I knew what it meant, that she could only belong to me when she was someone else’s. When she too was a leftover. She started crying, silently. “Don’t cry,” I said.

“At least you let me cry,” she said angrily. I went to her and sat down on the bed. “I’m ashamed,” she said. “I’m so ashamed. I make love like a hooker.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“No, I mean it. He taught me how, he’s always going to hookers.”

I didn’t say anything. We were so old, it was so late, everything had gone so badly.

“Graziano’s dead,” I said abruptly. “Did you know?”

From the darkness came a moan and her voice broke into desperate weeping. I knew immediately that it would never again be as it had been before. It was the only thing I thought, that I had broken her voice for good.

She wept for a long time, clutching my hand, while I thought about her now dead voice. Then gradually she calmed down. “I want to go home,” she said.

On the street, the rain poured down with a noise like something that had suddenly fallen. We dressed in silence, while the record continued with the old songs from the previous year. When we went down into the lobby, the doorman didn’t look up from his Corriere dello Sport, but Arianna’s face hardened all the same.

By this time, the street was already dry and we walked in silence as far as a taxi stand. When we got in the cab I realized I couldn’t leave her like that. I wanted to explain, to tell her something, but even when we were in the cab, surrounded by traffic, and I’d put an arm around her shoulders, I couldn’t think of anything to say. Then she let herself go and laid her head back on the seat, terribly tired. “All in one year,” she said. “It’s such a short time, one year.” She closed her eyes. “Sometimes,” she said, “I wish I could go back to the clinic, but this time I wouldn’t want anybody to come and get me.”

“I would.”