The owner was Count Giovanni Rubino di Sant’Elia, a distinguished man in his fifties with a nonchalant and somewhat affected manner. Distant at first, almost as if he came into my office only to open the French windows that looked out on the garden and allow me to breathe in the scent of his lilacs, he ended up spending more and more time in the armchair in front of my desk and engaging me in conversations that became more familiar in tone as his true financial situation was revealed. When he told me he was completely ruined, we decided we could be on a first-name basis.

He lived with his wife, a plump blonde, disorientated by her husband’s straitened circumstances, in the back part of the house, opening the door only to the baker’s boy, and ever since she’d opened up one day only to be confronted with some fellow who had then confiscated the magnificent gilded table in the drawing room, I’d been obliged to play the part of their somewhat bumbling secretary. But I was glad to do it. Especially for him. I liked seeing him come into my office, smooth the gray hairs at his temples with his hands, and jerk his elbows so that the cuffs of his spotless shirt shot out from the sleeves of his jacket. “So what are we doing, working?” he would say. Then I would put the cover on the typewriter and take out a bottle. He never talked, as a Milanese would have, about his financial problems, only about pleasant things—aristocrats and celebrities and, above all, women and horses—and sometimes telling quite risqué jokes with a gleam in his eye.

When summer arrived, we got in the habit of moving into the drawing room, and there, when the sun retreated from that part of the house, the two of us surrounded by walls that bore lighter patches where the furniture had been removed, the count would play his Steinway grand and I would sprawl on the last remaining couch and listen to him. And every afternoon, as soon as I heard those first notes, I would telephone a nearby bar, order some cold beer, and join him. There he would be, wearing an old silk dressing gown, hopelessly carried away. He would dredge up his repertoire, old songs I’d heard from my mother, tunes by Gershwin and Cole Porter, but, above all, an old American song called “Roberta.” Sometimes, we would sing together.