Poor Gino, sighed Alda, his heart will be broken! At the workshop, everyone knew that Gino Battagliola, the owner of the neighbourhood’s hair salon, was mad about Giulia. He had been courting her for years. He came each week to sell his cut hair. Sometimes, he would come for no reason at all, just to say hello. All the women laughed about it. They laughed at the presents he brought her, to no avail. Giulia was unmoved, but Gino lived in hope, and came back time and again, tirelessly, bearing fig buccellatini, which the women all devoured.

In the evening, after the workshop had closed, Giulia would go to her father’s bedside and read to him. At times, she felt guilty to be so alive in the midst of this tragedy. Her body was filled with joy, shimmering with pleasure such as she had never felt before, while her father was fighting for his life. And yet Giulia clung to her joy as a vital need; it was her way of telling herself that she would carry on, that she would not give in to pain and exhaustion. Kamal’s skin was a balm, a salve, a remedy for the sorrows of this world. She wanted to be just that, a body abandoned to pleasure, the pleasure was what kept her on her feet, kept her alive. She felt torn between extremes, both defeated and exalted; like an acrobat on the high wire, she swayed with the wind. This is how it is, she told herself, our darkest and brightest moments come all at once. Life gives, and it takes away, all at the same time.

Today, Mamma had entrusted her with a mission – to go and fetch a paper from her father’s desk at the workshop. The hospital was asking for some document, but her mother couldn’t find it. Dio mio, everything is so complicated, she moaned. Giulia hadn’t the heart to refuse. But she didn’t want to go into Papà’s office. She hadn’t set foot there since the accident; she didn’t want to touch her father’s things. She wanted him to find the place just as he had left it, when he emerged from the coma. That way he would know that they had all been waiting for him.

She pushed the door of the old projection room, which her father had made his office. Slowly, she stepped inside. There was a framed photograph of Pietro on the wall, beside the pictures of her father and grandfather, three generations of Lanfredi, each one succeeding the other at the helm of the workshop. Further along, other pictures were pinned up: Francesca as a baby, Giulia on the Vespa, Adela at her first communion, Mamma in her wedding dress, with her fixed smile. The Pope, too, not Francis but John Paul II, whom everyone admired the most.