He was silent for a moment, then started lighting a cigar. It took him a while, and when he was done he gave me a dazzling smile. “Good for him,” he said. “He knows a thing or two.” And he once again stretched his legs on the armchair, which was turned toward the sun. But from behind his dark glasses he was studying two young men at the table opposite. They had well-combed long hair, sandals, belts, and Indian shirts, and were trying to play the flute. All at once, Graziano blew cigar smoke in their direction. “Pennywhistle rebels,” he said.

The two young men stopped playing and looked at each other. Then the sturdier of the two held up his flute and said politely, “Want it up your ass?”

Graziano smiled behind his glasses. “Wouldn’t make much difference to the sound,” he said.

I stood up and put money on the table. I knew what he was like when he got that way, he never knew when to stop. “Can you believe those guys?” he said as we moved away under the covered walk. “But I put them in their place, didn’t I?”

“Of course,” I said. “You showed them.”

“Sure, I showed them, I can’t stand these pennywhistle rebels. Did you see how good-looking they are? I bet their teeth would break iron like it was nougat.”

His own teeth were small and decalcified. That’s what made him look like a poor man still, in spite of his two-hundred-thousand-lire clothes. It’s always the teeth that betray that a person was born poor, the teeth and the eyes, and Graziano had known a lot of hunger during the war. They’d had to operate on him twice before they’d discovered that what gave him those pains in his stomach was simply the memory of the hunger he’d experienced as a child.

We’d taken off our jackets and were walking in the sun. “So,” I said, “nothing but stones on Crete?”

“And not even a slingshot.”

“Big stones?” I said, grasping the fact that once again things hadn’t gone well for him.

“Big stones, little stones, stones of all sizes. Fucking boring!” he said as we entered Campo de’ Fiori.

We started strolling amid the market stalls. The market was bright and alive with cries—only the statue of Giordano Bruno was grim and silent, but he had his reasons. When we got to Ponte Sisto, Graziano didn’t want to cross the river because it would take him closer to his wife, who like all American women in search of local color was in Trastevere.