I can tell he’s getting carried away now; his flow of words accelerates, he bangs the table with his index finger as he describes the rhythm of work, the unflagging tempo that devours the morning, devours the evening—That’s the hardest thing: no evenings off, you know what I mean? I haven’t had an evening off in four years!—leaving just a few meager hours in the afternoon, a dead time that you could do something good with, but alone, because at that time of day everyone else is working, so you go upstairs to take a nap and you come back down when it’s time to start work again, and on Sundays you sleep in, you stay in bed much too late, you just lie there, feeling groggy, because you’re way too exhausted to do anything much with your time, so you hardly even leave the neighborhood, and little by little the boundaries of your life shrink: the neighborhood, the passageway, La Belle Saison, the micro-kitchen where he keeps banging into things, until finally his entire life is reduced to the surface of that countertop. I saw again Mauro’s studio apartment above La Belle Saison, the low-ceilinged room where he’d thrown a large mattress on the floor, where his clothes piled up, where the computer sat on top of a stack of unopened boxes of books; I saw again the orange sodium light that filtered through the permanently drawn curtains. Mauro lived in his workplace—I realized this suddenly—and what had, to begin with, seemed so practical—this little apartment, a convenience that would spare him so much time wasted on transport, yeah, he was so lucky—this little room had ultimately deprived him of any way of decompressing, had robbed him of a buffer between his workplace and his home, had stolen from him those tiny cracks, those hazy intervals, that can open up cavities of daydreams in the hardened concrete time of each day.