Serena was still in the bedroom, surrounded by open suitcases. She must have been afraid they would swallow her, because she was walking up and down, wringing her hands. “Where’s Glauco?” she said. I told her he’d be back soon, and she continued to move around the room with an air of tragedy. When she passed me for the third time, I finally put an arm around her shoulders, and she huddled against my chest and looked at me in confusion. But when I hugged her tighter, she stiffened, and I realized the answer was no, that she would have liked it to be yes, but some other time, right now it was no, it was too late. We talked about Mexico until Glauco came back.

“So,” he said, “shall we go?” I was surprised by the sadness in his voice. That final farewell must have been particularly hard. Standing in the middle of the room, with that muscular body of his, he had the cheated, immature look of a heavyweight who’s lost his title. For the first time, I felt a kind of fondness for him.

I went with them to the airport. We said good-bye, kissing one another’s cheeks, and then I went up to the observation platform to watch them leave. As they climbed the steps up to the plane, they looked around for me. We waved at one another until they got on board. The plane took a while to get going, but at last it moved toward the center of the runway, where it stopped, as if to catch its breath, taxied, then started gathering speed until it rose out of sheer force of habit and kept climbing, glittering in the sun, and at last disappeared. Only then did I leave the airport.

On my way back to the city, I thought about other farewells. I thought about when I’d said good-bye to my father and when I’d said good-bye to Sant’Elia, and I thought about how all these farewells had changed my life. But it’s always like that, we are what we are not because of the people we’ve met but because of those we’ve left. That’s what I was thinking, as I calmly drove the old Alfa Romeo. It was as slow and noisy as a whale, and the birds in the trees fell silent as the car passed, as if a dark cloud had crossed the sky. It had a list of owners as long as the phone book of some provincial town, but its aroma of ash and leather was almost intoxicating.