“Yes, you would,” she said. When the taxi, having managed to extricate itself from the traffic, stopped outside Sant’Elia’s villa, she wouldn’t kiss me. She got out in a hurry, in that conceited way of hers. She opened the gate and I saw her run up the steps, press the bell, and stand waiting, surrounded by the scent of lilacs. She never turned around. Then she went in.

I looked at the taxi driver, who was asking me where we should go. I wasn’t far from the hotel and felt like walking, so I paid him and set off on foot. A few drops were falling again and the city smelled of dust.

The next morning I went out, intending to go to the newspaper office. During the night it had rained again and the air was clear and fresh. When I found myself stuck in the traffic along the riverbank, surrounded by the clamor of car horns, I looked over at the trees. Their leaves were coming back. Soon, I thought, it would be summer and then fall and then winter and then again spring, and so on forever, or for a time so stupidly long as to seem like forever. What was I going to do? I suddenly knew that the time had come to get the hell out of there. They all got the hell out, sooner or later. The first rule was to not be an exception to the rule. I turned onto the first clear street and drove back to the hotel.

It didn’t take me more than an hour to pack my bags. I used three suitcases, one for my clothes and two for my books, the ones I never left behind, the ones I always took with me when I went from one hotel to another, from one place to some other place. There was the old Medusa edition of Ulysses, Pavese’s translation of Moby-Dick, Conrad, and the cheap edition of Gatsby, yellowed but still intact. I also took Martin Eden, Nabokov, old Hem, the poetry of Eliot and Thomas, Madame Bovary, The World of Yesterday, Chandler, Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Shakespeare, Chekhov. All in two suitcases.