She was scared, she hated any kind of change, and we’d had such a great May. I was struck by the sudden hope that at last everything would go right, that tonight would finally be different. But it didn’t work out that way. Once again, we found ourselves in my bed, wearing ourselves out with caresses, listening to each other’s bodies, begging each other, looking for the word that was never uttered—Don’t go thinking I love you—until dawn found us clinging to each other, as inert as a couple of lobsters.

“Wow, look at that suit!” Renzo said, getting out of his Mercedes in front of the TV center.

As an opener, it couldn’t have been more unfortunate. In the morning sun my suit was reflected in the glass of the building as if it might shatter it, while all around us was a whole crowd of executives in blue jackets with pipes in their mouths. Christ, I stuck out like a sore thumb.

Inside, things went a little better because in the artificial lighting my suit didn’t stand out quite so much. To make up for this, it was almost cold and the nervous sweat the suit had made me break out in chilled my back as I followed Renzo along a corridor lined with doors. We stopped at one marked Personnel Office and went in without knocking.

“Hello, Signor Diacono,” a female employee said, coming up to us. “Hello, Signor Gazzara.” Clearly, they were expecting me. The employee was an efficient young woman who as soon as we came in had slipped an index card into her typewriter. “Surname?” she said, even though she’d just used it. “First name?” She went on to ask my father’s name, and I thought about him, and my mother’s, and I thought about her. Then she asked where I was born and I thought about my gloomy city, then the date of the happy event and I thought about my birthday three months earlier drinking hot caffè lattes in a bus terminus at dawn. “That’s all,” the young woman said with a smile that brooked no reply. It was humiliating to be classified.

Renzo slapped me on the back. “Let’s go to your office,” he said, going ahead of me into an elevator that would take us to the room where within a month I would be earning a figure I’d never seen, at least not all at once, in my life.