By the time I’d finished, Arianna had withdrawn even more into the darkness of the doorway. So I turned my back on her, and we stayed like that for a long time, Arianna in the shadows, me sniffing my fingertips, which still smelled of oranges, watching the stream of people, a stream to whose banks we clung.

“Never say that again,” she said in a muffled voice. “Promise?”

“All right,” I said.

“Good,” she said, and her voice emerged from the shadows like a brief guitar solo emerging from a band, cautious at first, then increasingly bright, note to note. “Where are you taking me to eat?”

“Charlie’s?” I said. It was the trendiest restaurant in town.

“You’re crazy,” she said, laughing. Then she picked up an orange that had been left on the sidewalk and started peeling it. “Let’s go somewhere ordinary and just be close, that’ll be enough.”

“It won’t be enough at all,” I said.

I had my rent money in my pocket, and what I wanted to do was spend it all. Which I almost did in a restaurant not far from there. Elegant and expensive, with waiters in dickies, looking stiff. We ordered hearts of palm, pepper steak, and Burgundy.

“It’s wonderful to be rich!” she said. “It gives you such a sense of security. In Venice, I didn’t think about it, I didn’t realize until I came to Rome. But in Venice I had Eva, whereas here I don’t have her anymore.” Because, obviously, I didn’t know how Eva used to be! These days, she’d become a hysterical snob, but Arianna couldn’t forget how she’d been when she was younger. God, what a horrible thing it is to get old! She didn’t want to get old, she didn’t want to. It was different for us men, the older we got, the more fascinating we became. I was too young for her tastes, did I know that? But women! What a horrible thing it was for women to get old! And yet if it hadn’t been for Eva, she’d have died, or gone completely crazy, did I know that? But how could she forgive her for ruining Livio in that way? She’d forced him, with all that flirting of hers, all that obsessive night-crawling of hers, to stay up until four in the morning even when he was in training, until eventually he stopped playing, and when he stopped she divorced him. Because Livio Stresa had been married to Eva, did I know that?