She grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard until we were out of the neighborhood. The fact was, not only did she not live on Via dei Glicini, she’d never even been there, she said. That morning she’d read an ad about two rooms for rent, and the fact that the streets had the names of flowers made her think it was a nice residential area. On a map of the city, she’d seen it was more of an outlying district, but how could she ever have imagined it was such a horrible place? How unlucky she was! I didn’t say a word. She must have been relying heavily on those flower names. What I really wondered was who she was running away from, because there was no doubt about it, she was trying to get the hell out, to escape. I wondered who from. Then I found out it was her sister. They’d quarreled that morning and Arianna had decided to leave home even though she was genuinely terrified of living alone. Had she really left with only the Proust book, a few matches, and a bottle of perfume? “And a deck of cards,” she said, in that conceited way of hers. “Why not?” She never went anywhere without a deck, but, as for anything else, in the heat of the quarrel she’d forgotten her keys and locked herself out. That was something I could relate to. I thought about my own dumb departure in the rain that morning and all of a sudden I remembered what it was I’d forgotten. That was it! I’d spent my whole birthday trying to remember that it was my birthday.

“What? You forgot?”

“Well,” I said, “birthdays aren’t what they used to be.” But I was thinking of all the things I’d intended to do, starting that day. Then I looked up at the sky, because apparently you always look up at the sky when you turn thirty.

“You must be crazy,” Arianna said. “How can anyone forget their own birthday? I start crossing off the days on the calendar a month before!” Faced with such an extraordinary phenomenon, she’d forgotten all about Via dei Glicini and the rest of it. “We have to celebrate anyway,” she said. “Let’s find somewhere we can get a drink.”