He looked at her. “I always do it myself,” he said.

He kissed her hand, then Eva’s, then the model’s. All very proper, truth be told, but by now too late to save face. All we could do now was get the hell out of there, as quickly as possible.

Arianna walked us to the door. “How are you?” she said to me in a sweet tone.

“How do you want me to be?” I said. “I’m fine.”

She stood there watching us as we walked down the stairs, which didn’t make things easier because Graziano kept turning his head to look at her. Outside, things went better. The evening wind revived him. “Whose is she?” he said again.

“Nobody’s.”

“That’s impossible. Isn’t she your girl?”

“No.”

“Amazing,” he said. “Right now, I’m going to go home, take a shower, and come back for her.” Instead, we went to a trattoria on Via del Babuino and he walked in and asked in a loud voice for the best leftovers in the house. Then he plunged headfirst into a huge plate of macaroni in cream sauce. He ate quickly, in silence, as if giving himself a transfusion. “Don’t expect me to buy that,” he said all at once, raising his head from the plate. “She’s your girl.”

At midnight we ended up in a disco, a dark, noisy place like all places of that kind, full of ghosts. We’d chosen a table a long way from the speakers, but it wasn’t any use and we had to scream in each other’s ears to make ourselves heard. I’d have liked to leave, but Graziano had his eye on a big, phosphorescent cube in the middle of the room where some long-legged girls were dancing. There was one of them he particularly liked. All at once, he threw himself into the mix, insisting that I follow him. For a while the three of us danced, but the girl didn’t seem to mind. Actually, all the people there were doing their own thing, as if they were in a skating rink. All at once, another girl materialized from the darkness, having been wandering through the room on her own, and now there were four of us.

We managed to keep them with us even when the music granted us a break and we walked back to the table, and Graziano ordered a bottle of champagne, which the girls started drinking as if it were orange juice. They weren’t bad. Very sure of themselves, truth be told.

“Allow us to introduce ourselves,” Graziano said. “Gazzara and Castelvecchio. The last of the Mohicans.” One of the girls asked if that was a band. “Oh yes,” Graziano said. “We’re banned everywhere. More champagne?”