“I imagine you must have a beautiful bathroom here,” I said, remembering the lovely old apartment on Campo de’ Fiori, where they’d lived before.

“Oh, it’s palatial! You absolutely must see it!” For a moment, I thought she was going to take me by the hand and drag me there whether I liked it or not. “And what about you, are you still in that little hotel downtown?” But there was no need to answer, because just then a voice rose up from the armchairs, begging to begin a parlor game, and she had to leave me. Alone now, I started making an inventory of the people around me. For them, the rain was just a pretext to get dressed up in the right way—that much was clear from the start. With their velvet trousers, woolen shirts, and heavy shoes, they made it clear that, yes, of course they knew perfectly well how things were outside, in that world full of rain and sordidness, but they also knew that a glass of Chivas Regal and a pleasant chat with friends would allow them to ignore the multitudes pressing against the walls.

Some of us are besieged, others do the besieging, I was thinking by the time I was on my second drink, and those doing the besieging are weary with hunger and homesickness. That’s what I was thinking, as my eyes kept wandering toward the huge white velvet couch on which a man and a girl sat with the absent demeanor of two birds at rest. The man, perched on the arm of the couch in a tangle that suggested he was uncommonly tall and from which his hands stuck out like two short, useless wings, made you think of a bird that, evolving over time, had somehow lost touch with the sky. As for the girl, she was very beautiful. On that couch, she indeed looked like a migratory bird that had found a boat in which to rest while waiting for a storm to pass. Absent, alien, vaguely nervous.

I’d only just managed to get the bowl of peanuts back into my possession when Renzo took me by the arm and forced me to let go of it and follow him between the armchairs. “What are they promising you now?” he said, referring to the left-wing newspapers for which he’d worked before getting into TV.

“I don’t know, I don’t know anything about promises,” I said pointedly, but he was too caught up in what he was saying to grasp that I was alluding to his having forgotten his invitation to me.