Then I got out of the car and crossed the courtyard, once again feeling, as I had in the corridor at the Diaconos’, her eyes on my back, like a weight. I stopped by the front door and listened to the car driving away. It disappeared, leaving an unbearable silence behind.

“Good morning, Signor Gazzara,” the doorman said.

I said something in reply and started climbing the stairs, my legs shaking. The steps seemed higher than usual and I stumbled a couple times. This reminded me of occasions when I’d climbed the narrow stairs of hotels where I’d been living, mornings when I’d been hungover and confused. Just like then, the first thing I did when I got inside was look for a little bit of warmth. I crossed the apartment, which smelled of cigarette smoke and mustiness, and, in the uncertain light filtering through the shutters, went to the kitchen and took out my wonderful Ballantine’s bottle, with its heraldic label, which I reserved for whenever I caught a chill. I filled it with boiling water, then took two aspirins and collapsed on the bed, clutching it to my stomach.

But the chill didn’t go away. And so I did a stupid thing. I started crying.

4

I got out of bed four days later and, sneezing fiercely, caught a bus and went and recovered my old Alfa Romeo, feeling as if it was part of me that had been blown off in an explosion. On the way back, I stopped to buy more aspirin and a few provisions, then shut myself in at home, determined not to go out until the world had apologized to me.

It did its best, truth be told. The days were warm and the sky a disarming blue, but in a way the very beauty of the weather merely increased my anguish. I roamed the apartment, gripped by an invincible sense of futility. Even when I went out on the balcony to read and have a smoke, I caught myself wondering why I was doing it. I would go downstairs just to pick up my mail without any idea of what awaited me apart from the usual advertising flyers—for detergents, mainly—which I stuck in the mailbox next to mine. One time, I received a postcard from Graziano Castelvecchio. He was on Crete, and wrote: There are stones here, don’t come. Another time, I found a letter from my family that I’d have preferred not to receive, all things considered, not so much because my mother was complaining that she hadn’t seen me for a year but because my father was sending me money for me to buy him a set of Vatican stamps, which meant getting up at dawn and standing in line outside His Holiness’s post office.