But Graziano was lost in thought again and said nothing. We walked on as far as Piazza del Popolo. There, in every bar, we found a message from his wife, which Graziano ignored, securing the complicity of every bartender with an astronomical tip. Whenever he did so, he’d take a mouthwatering wad of money from his jacket pocket.

“The novel is dead,” he said suddenly on our way out of one of the bars.

“They all say that.”

“I mean mine,” he said. I was sorry to hear that—it had been the one thing keeping him going. “Too difficult, too pointless. We have to start doing something substantial, otherwise what’ll we tell the angel?” He raised that thin finger of his. “You should know by now how things really are. Do you want it to be your best friend who tells you how things really are?”

“As long as he’s gentle.”

“I’ve developed a theory. They’re great inventions, theories, much better than practice. Look around you,” he said as we walked down Via del Corso, surrounded by people coming out of office buildings. “Is there anything you feel part of? No, there isn’t. And you know why there isn’t? Because we belong to an extinct species. We happen to still be alive, that’s all,” he said, stopping to light a cigar. Because, if I didn’t know, we were born just when beautiful old Europe was fine-tuning its most lucid, thorough, and definitive suicide attempt. Who were our parents? People who slaughtered one another on the battlefields of countries that no longer existed, that’s who they were. We were born between one furlough and the next, and the hands that had stroked our mothers’ loins were dripping with blood—not bad, as images go—or else we were the children of the old, the sick, the senile. The wrecked or the wreckers. We had the most fucked-up parents in history.

“Speak for yourself,” I said, but then I recalled my father’s silence, as he repaired the chair in the kitchen on the very day he returned home from the war, and I fell silent.

You just had to look around, Graziano went on. Having returned home, our heroic progenitors threw the most opulent, festive, vulgar funeral banquet in the history of mankind. They made more children, those same pennywhistle rebels who were now replacing us. And what about us? We were an ugly memory, survivors of the slaughter, and we just had to be content with the leftovers.

“When we like them,” I said, thinking of the bowl of peanuts at the Diaconos’ apartment. Then I thought of my old Alfa Romeo and the apartment overlooking the valley. It was true, everything I possessed was someone else’s leftovers. Except for Arianna, and I didn’t possess her. “All right,” I said, “couldn’t we survivors put these leftovers together into a juicy hamburger? I’m hungry.”