Then she asks him to drive her to the Capitol. “‘I’d like to see the city from the terraces of the Capitoline Hill.’ We got there in five minutes and went and leaned on the parapet just above the Forum. Beneath us, the squares were deserted, and the basilicas, frozen in marble, were dreaming of the day they would thaw.” At which point she utters something that underwrites the source of Leo’s—and one is tempted to assume Calligarich’s own—malaise. “‘Feeling nostalgic for something we never had.’”

Leo and Arianna feel like throwbacks from an almost remembered era that may never have been but that beckons to a better life that is indeed their rightful life, not the one they’re given in this makeshift town called Rome. His reply to her sudden exclamation will come a few pages later when they end up having brioches at dawn, and he remembers it’s his birthday. He is thirty years old, and, raising his boiling cup of caffellatte as though it were a champagne glass, he toasts, “‘To all the things we haven’t done, the things we should have done, and the things we won’t do.’”

Neither belongs either here or elsewhere, either in this calendar year or any other year.

No two stranded souls could have been better paired—which is why they are terminally destructive.

We may, barring another name for it, call this love.

It springs on them at the bus station, among the rising “good smell of coffee, that good smell cafés have early in the morning.”

But they won’t speak a word of love. Instead, she asks him to drive her to the sea. They’ll walk on the shore, close to the waves, feel the weather turn chilly, he’ll hold her, she’ll hold him, and Arianna will keep testing him throughout the night. But no sex, she warns. She will eventually fall in love with him, but in the past tense, “‘God, how I loved you … How I loved you,’” she’ll confide one day, and he too will say much the same, “‘I think I’m in love with you,’” to which she will snap back, “‘Never say that again.’” Then they start kissing, and when he asks her to come home with him she says, “Are you crazy?… I don’t feel like making love, haven’t you got that yet?” and he narrates, “She gave me a last, light kiss on the lips.”