Somebody once wrote that we should be capable of dying young. Not in the sense of really dying, but in the sense of stopping what we’re doing when we realize we’ve exhausted our desire to do it, or our strength, or when we realize we’ve reached the limit of our talent, if we have any. Everything that comes after that limit is repetition. We should be capable of dying young in order to stay alive, but that almost never happens. I’d often thought that thanks to what I’d earned in my 7profession, of which I’d only spent a small part, I could quit, sell the practice and devote myself to something else. Travel, studying, reading. Maybe trying to write. Anything just to escape the grip of time. Time that kept passing, never changing. Nearly motionless in its daily repetition, yet fading fast.

Time accelerates with age, they say. The thought wasn’t a new one, but that day it had been bouncing around unpleasantly in my head.

At the appeal court that morning, I’d run into a colleague of mine, almost a friend. A civil lawyer named Enrico Garibaldi – “No relation to the general,” he would say like a child whenever he was introduced to someone.

A pleasant guy – you could have a good laugh with him. A really nice person and a good professional too. We’d occasionally hung out together.

“Everything all right, Enrico?” I’d asked him with a smile as I shook his hand. It wasn’t a real question, just something you say. Everything all right? Yes, everything’s fine, and you? Everything’s fine, we really should get together one of these evenings, bye, see you soon.

“Not too good, to be honest,” he replied. And after a brief pause, but before I could ask him anything or even just prepare myself (face, tone of voice, all the essentials), he continued: “My mother died two days ago.”

The air went out of me for a moment, as if I’d been punched in the stomach.

“Oh God, I’m sorry, Enrico, I didn’t know. I’m so sorry, forgive me…”

“Don’t worry, Guido. Obviously you weren’t to know. And anyway, I’m ashamed to say this, but it was a liberation. A year of illness had taken away all her dignity. Not just hers, poor thing. Ours, too.”8

He paused. His eyes became watery. I remained silent, basically because I didn’t know what to say. He hesitated, then decided he needed to talk. Maybe he’d been waiting to meet me – well, not specifically me, he’d been waiting to meet somebody and I’d happened to show up – to get things off his chest, at least a little.