The girls at the typewriters, with their headsets on, greeted me with little cries of surprise—this wasn’t the time I usually showed up—and when I asked for Rosario, they pointed me to a booth, from which my friend emerged at that very moment, browner in the face than the wax disc he was holding. “Well, look who’s here!” he said as he passed me. I didn’t lose heart. Even though it was obvious there was no work for me, I could still ask for a loan. He knew that too, so he withdrew into his own headset and immediately set to work playing back the disc and typing out its contents. I sat down and looked at him until he had to give in. “How much do you want?” he said, putting his hand in his pocket. He gave me exactly half of what I asked him for, and on top of that I had to listen to a lecture. How much longer did I think I could continue like this? Didn’t I know that the head of the department was tired of not being able to rely on me? The job was there, why didn’t I take it? He’d gotten me the job, which entitled him to speak. He was a good friend, a melancholy southerner with a discontented wife. He’d left his village, on a promontory overlooking the blue Ionian Sea, to come to Rome and work as a journalist, but all he’d ended up doing was recording other people’s articles onto wax discs, then transcribing them. The complete idiocy of the job was proving a discouraging end to the years of his youth, but he didn’t give up. He was small and dark, weary but indomitable.

I got the hell out of there. Outside, it was pouring. Torrents of water hammered down on the decapitated statues of the Forum, the collapsed columns, the palaces in the paved squares, the desolate afternoon arenas, the ornate churches, and, absurdly, the overflowing fountains. For a while I waited in a doorway, splashed by rain and cursed at by passersby—other castaways seeking salvation, like me, in the dark, cavelike entrance—then, taking advantage of a break in the weather, I ran, hugging the walls, until I reached a small movie theater nearby. They were showing something with my poor sweetheart, Marilyn Monroe—I refused to think of her as dead—and I watched it all the way through twice, eating salted seeds and listening to the thunder rolling over the roofs of the houses. By the time I came out, I was madly in love with her and very badly disposed toward the world, because a dead sweetheart is already sad enough in and of itself without there having to be rain too.