Leo will struggle not to speak his love, and almost drives himself into believing he feels no love for her, while she has been running hot and cold with him, until, maybe all too suddenly, in bed together, he realizes he is unable to feel aroused and longs for the warmth that would have stirred him: “I was frozen and unhappy and there was nothing in me, not even a little of that warmth I would have liked more than anything else in my life, that all-consuming warmth that would have spread from my belly through my body so that in the end I’d be able to reach her.” Much later in the novel, when she is emotionally available to him, he longs not for that tepore (warmth) in his belly but for exactly the opposite, torpore (numbness): “… the languor I had so long looked for with her.” The paradox couldn’t be crueler. And yet, as unsettling as this paradox can be, it is compounded by another paradox far more bitter and harder to swallow when Leo realizes that Arianna is now living with another man: “I felt she was mine,” Leo thinks, four pages before the end of the novel. “I had never before felt that so much as I did now, when she was someone else’s. What lousy luck. I knew what it meant, that she could only belong to me when she was someone else’s.”

Avanzo in Italian means a leftover, a remnant, the unwanted, discarded remains of someone else’s life or property. In many ways, that one word also sums up the essence of Leo’s life. From a cheap hotel near Campo de’ Fiori, he moves into his married friends’ apartment when they invite him to house-sit during their two-year absence in Mexico. Their marriage is on the rocks, and they welcome the change of scenery; Leo makes a pass at the wife, when the husband is not in the room, but things don’t go any further. Since the couple can’t take their old Alfa Romeo abroad with them, they sell it to him for a pittance. The car, the apartment on Monte Mario, down to the bowl of peanuts at the party, even the attempted pass at the wife—all these details, as Leo will grow increasingly aware, are leftovers from other people’s lives.

Similarly, though married to an American millionairess, the perpetually drunken Graziano Castelvecchio loves to dine on avanzi in restaurants. Some restaurants, he claims, have the best avanzi.