Booze is an option, and Leo is prey to alcohol and will stop drinking only after being stricken with the DTs. Friendship is another option, as are women; then there are books, the sea, and finally, of course, as ever again, beloved Rome, home to the abyss. Rome cradles all forms of dejection, nourishes them, and then, when you least suspect it, turns out to have been starving you all along. Calligarich’s characters, and Leo in particular, are unwilling or unable to connect with others, to consummate whatever life tosses their way. While they may be dissolute, ultimately they are numb to experience itself. This is neo-Sartre and post-Camus. As his friend Graziano will tell Leo, “You can’t just go on like this.”

But, yes, he can. And his curse is that he knows he can.

What gives him the greatest pleasure is not so much sleeping with a woman but waking up in her bed after she has gone to work and smelling the coffee, ready to be reheated, or, better yet, getting up, roaming around the empty apartment, switching on music, reheating the coffee, then finally lounging in a bathtub filled with hot water. After which he’ll dry himself with clean towels, dress, and shut the door behind him, never to return. Women, as he himself says, come easily to him.

Then one evening Leo meets the beautiful Arianna. They’re at a stylish cocktail party in a large apartment owned by a friend who is a successful television producer who will eventually offer Leo a job, though within a few hours of being hired Leo will walk out. With hardly a penny to his name, and soaked from a rainstorm, Leo arrives at the party, where people are very consciously bedecked in fashionable rainy-day clothes. A rolling cart containing various alcoholic beverages makes the rounds. And a bowl full of peanuts materializes. Totally famished, Leo tackles the peanuts. When the hostess, his friend, asks him to fetch some ice from the kitchen—it’s their butler’s evening off—Leo opens the refrigerator and gorges himself on all manner of cheeses. On his way to and from the kitchen he runs into Arianna, who is curled up on the floor, on the phone. They talk for a moment, then reconnect later, and eventually, by three in the morning, leave together. They casually talk books; she loves Proust. She asks him when he would have liked to be born. His answer: “In Vienna before the end of the empire.” Perhaps his is an unconscious wish to walk back his family tree to a time preceding his grandfather’s flight from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when everything was as it should be, or so it seems in retrospect. As for Arianna, her answer to the same question couldn’t be simpler: “Combray,” she says.