“No,” she said, with a smile, “you’re nice. Where are you from? Everyone in Rome is from somewhere else, have you noticed that?” Her change in mood was startling. She was almost expansive now. “What a horrible city!” she said when I mentioned Milan, then, fearing she’d upset me, said the streetcars there were great, and every time she visited she always took a ride on one.

She was from Venice, as I knew, from San Rocco to be precise, which made me think of Tintoretto’s Crucifixion, and the struggle a painter with that diminutive name must have had to produce such a big picture. I asked her why she’d left.

“Why? Don’t you read the papers?”

“You mean they mentioned your leaving?” I said.

She laughed. “Oh, only the local ones! They even brought out a memorial edition! No, I meant because of the sea. It’s terrible, knowing you’re sinking into the sea.” I looked at her. I liked looking at her. Her eyes were too big and her mouth too determined, but all things considered it was they, her eyes and her mouth, that declared courage to still be the ultimate human resource.

“Look, it’s yellow!” she said loudly, seeing a car pass. She knew a game, a kind of solitaire without cards, that could begin only when you saw a yellow car in motion. When it passed, you needed to make a wish and keep your fist clenched until you saw washing hung out to dry, a young man with a beard, a dog with a short tail, and an old man with a stick. It sounded like something that would never end.

“Listen,” I said, “that sounds like it’d never end. Wouldn’t it be better to stop for a drink and then go home?”

“I get it,” she said. “You’re just like all the others. Oh God! Why do people always live as if life can be repeated?”

At this point all I could do was keep quiet if I didn’t want to come across like some office clerk, so I kept quiet as we drove into a service station on Via Flaminia. A few slow, powerful trucks passed us, creating an earthquake, before vanishing northward into the dark. Arianna pressed her clenched fist on the horn. After a few minutes, a guy dressed in yellow came out of the booth and walked over to us, rubbing his face with his hand. “Were you asleep?” she said, with mock innocence.

“No,” he said, “I was fishing.”

But Arianna wouldn’t be put off and gave him one of her radiant smiles, as if she were ecstatic that he was the one who would be serving her. The guy was so invigorated by this, he even cleaned the windows without being asked.

“All right,” she said, setting off again. “But first I want to eat. What would you say to a warm brioche?”