Sometimes we’d go back together to Eva’s store, which meant having to spend the evening with all the others. It didn’t happen often because by now it was obvious that my relations with Eva were as cold as could be. The time I’d gone there with Graziano had seen to that because if there was one thing Eva couldn’t stand it was drunks and, to top it all off, she’d found out that I too had once exercised the same vocation. Whenever we were all together, I’d avoid speaking to her and would spend my time chatting with the Diaconos, or the writer with the white mustache, or sometimes even the fashion model, but only to see Arianna squirm until I stopped. After that, she wouldn’t talk to me for an hour.

Most times, though, we managed to be alone and we’d have dinner in some open-air trattoria or other and then wander through the city, which was cool and animated, teeming with adventures and rendezvous outside the bars and around the fountains. Usually, we’d roam in search of baroque churches, because Arianna was thinking about a doctoral thesis demonstrating how superior Borromini was to Bernini, and one way or another we always ended up outside the Oratory of San Filippo, pallid under the streetlights, as bloodless yet elegant as a lady who consumes nothing but tea. Although I didn’t understand what the baroque had to do with the hydraulic problems of saving Venice, I would follow her in these wanderings of hers, kissing her in the cavelike entrances of churches, her lips as cool as her breasts, then ending up at my apartment, where we slept together until dawn, when she would leave so that she could be found in her own bed when Eva woke up and get ready for that day’s excursion to the sea. Until, one morning, we found as many as four villas occupied by their rightful owners and we realized that that was the end of that.