After a discreet plunge in the water Luca settled on a plastic deckchair, then realized she had left the book she brought for vacation reading up in the room. It was called Betty and the Aliens, a bestseller she’d bought at a newsstand even though she was already reading a different book; the book was a success, the kind of book you read on vacation, because a vacation represents success. She had left the other book at home. It was sad, disturbing, not the kind of thing you read on vacation; now it was lying face down like a dead soldier on the nightstand in her bedroom.

A woman sat down on the next deckchair, but Luca didn’t look at her, following the etiquette which dictates that common places are meant to be used commonly but not together, as if Luca were in one room and the woman in another, except that the two rooms happened to share the same space somehow. The woman was wearing a bathrobe. She smelled of chlorine.

‘Hi!’ she said, thereby inviting Luca into her own room. Luca smiled back and said hi as well. Now they were in the same room. The woman placed her fluffy towel behind her head and opened up a book. ‘The Knowledge of Places’, read the title, and Luca burst out laughing.

The woman looked at her.

‘Sorry,’ Luca tried to explain herself, ‘it’s only that I’m reading the same book.’

The woman broke into a faint smile.

‘I mean, not here, but at home,’ Luca continued, although she thought she was imposing now. ‘Here I’m reading Betty and the Aliens.’

The woman closed her book.

‘They were actually written by the same author,’ she said, extending her hand. Her name was Alexandra.

After the swim Luca and Robi returned to their room to take a shower and get changed for dinner. Luca hung her bikini out to dry, already disgusted at the thought of having to put the chlorine-soaked garment back on again.

They closed the door behind them carefully and turned to head for the restaurant. They stopped dead in their tracks. A fox was watching them from the end of the corridor, its large ears pointed towards the ceiling. Robi backed away slowly, but Luca didn’t move; Robi whispered a swear word, but Luca remained silent, as if the fox had hypnotized her and the animal’s muteness had become her own.

The fox must have heard some distant noise, for it turned its head towards one of the windows and ran down the fire escape.

After this they went to have dinner.

‘It must have had rabies,’ Robi mused at the table. ‘Foxes with rabies are friendly,’ he added.