I decided to make a serious attempt to stop drinking. I would sit out on the balcony in the sun, reading, and keep away from bars and the people who frequented them. The heat made the mixture of sweet wine and cold water I was using to wean myself off alcohol a little less disgusting, and gradually I even started to put on weight. The hardest part was the evenings, when I’d leave the copy department of the Corriere dello Sport and have to face those dead hours that stretch from ten o’clock to one in the morning. Girls were a great help to me. I’d always been lucky with girls, and in those months my battle with alcohol aroused their maternal instincts, so it often happened that I would wake up in strange beds, alone, since the girls I went out with were mostly teachers or salesclerks, which meant they had to keep regular hours. And it was great to wake up like that, truth be told. I’d get up, wander around the apartment, switch on the record player, check to see if coffee had been made and find it almost always had been, so that all I had to do was reheat it. Then I’d walk into clean bathrooms strewn with towels, brushes, hairpins, and mysterious jars of pale-colored creams. I’d look for an actual bathtub, almost always find it, and spend a long time soaking in it. Finally I would dry myself, get dressed, and leave, closing the door behind me and hearing the sound echo in the empty apartment.

Out on the street, I would buy a newspaper, glance at the secondhand books in the stalls, stock up on provisions, and go back home, trying to decide whether to spend the afternoon reading, at the movies, or at the newspaper office. It was on one of these mornings that I realized I didn’t have any money in my pockets. It wasn’t an unusual situation at all, but in this case it was complicated by a whole series of other misfortunes: the door I had irrevocably closed behind me, the car I had left the previous evening in a remote part of the city, the nagging feeling I’d forgotten something, something I couldn’t remember however hard I tried. It looked like it was going to be one of those days when our shirt buttons come off in our hands, we lose our address book, we miss our appointments, and every door turns into a trap for our fingers. One of those days when the only thing to do is shut ourselves in and wait for it to pass. But I couldn’t do that, so I set off on foot, in the rain.