I was at the end of my tether, as far as energy went, but I still wanted to know what she had in mind, so I headed in the direction of the infamous Via dei Glicini. It was a neighborhood I couldn’t stand, a district of ramshackle streets crisscrossed by the most fucked-up streetcars I’d ever seen. The jerry-built houses were falling to pieces, and the sidewalks were lined with disgusting restaurants alternating with electrical appliance stores and auto body shops. Gangs of boys astride lethal motorbikes gunned their engines, making an infernal noise. A stench of disinfectant that knocked you back spewed out onto the sidewalks from the movie theaters, and in all of it there wasn’t a single garden, a single tree, a single flowerbed to protect the inhabitants from the incessant summer sun, so that in the end the names of flowers on the street-corner signs made you feel as if you were in a madman’s dream. What was someone like her doing in a place like this? Without saying another word, I plunged into the long, straight streets of the neighborhood, with their dim fluorescent lights. Huge human hives rose in the night on either side, like towering cemeteries. Arianna looked at them in silence, with those eyes of hers that were too big.

Once we’d passed a run-down amusement park and the perimeter wall of a vocational school, the car began to be reflected in the windows of the electrical goods stores. We wandered in the livid air until I found Via dei Glicini. It was a tunnel through lines of washing—at least that was one objective we’d reached in the game. Apart from that, it was just decay and squalor. “What are we doing here?” she said. “You got it all wrong, this isn’t my Via dei Glicini.”

“There aren’t any others.”

“Of course there are,” she said. Then she grabbed the bottle of perfume and dabbed her wrists and temples. The smell of lilacs that pervaded the car did actually make the view of the street more bearable. A night watchman, dressed in black, was coming toward us, pushing his bicycle.

“Let’s get out of here, please, I beg you!” she said with a moan. “Night watchmen give me the creeps.”