“I think I’ll go home,” I said.

“You just try,” she said, and so we went to Eva’s place.

It was very similar to the Diaconos’, a white apartment building, but the garden was larger, and behind a few hedges an empty swimming pool for the residents lay wide open, waiting for summer. In the living room, there was the usual profusion of armchairs, and a few paintings, including a probably genuine de Chirico and a probably fake Morandi. In the armchairs, the usual people: a serene fifty-year-old whom everyone called by a very long name that was nothing like the very short one by which he was well known as a humorist; a young, left-wing journalist named Paolo, who, it was said, had a secret way with women; and a novelist with a white mustache and a Venetian-style villa in Friuli. Also part of the group were the estranged wife of a TV presenter, who was obliged to attempt suicide every time she wanted to collect alimony; a bearded and spoiled poet, who was heavily involved with the Communist Party; a pleasant foreign correspondent, who’d had a heart attack in Latin America; and an actress, who talked endlessly about Ivy Compton-Burnett. Finally, sitting together on the same couch that evening were a Russian-looking young man with a guitar, a haute couture model in love with a homosexual photographer, and an impoverished noblewoman in love with an Alitalia pilot nobody had ever seen. This was the central nucleus, joined for periods of greater or lesser length by other people who were seized on by the group and then expelled in a kind of natural regeneration that guaranteed its continuity. This sort of thing happened mostly in the winter because in the summer everyone went off in different directions. Seaside romances, travel, adventures—any opportunity was good enough for people to go off and do their own thing. But as soon as the sky turned less metallic and hard, as soon as the trees started to sway in a wind that brought clouds, as soon as the days began their headlong rush to the deep purple sunsets of October, the telephones started ringing again across the city, and these people once more sought out one another, exhausted but talkative.