I reflected on this many years later, when examining my great difficulty in accepting help. Being able to get by on your own is good. Thinking you always must get by on your own, without ever asking for help, is a weakness disguised as a strength. If you don’t know how to ask for help, it generally means you don’t know what to do when it’s offered to you willingly and when it would be moral to accept it (and immoral to refuse it).

“A few months before she died, when she was still lucid,” Enrico went on, “Mamma said something that shocked me.”

“Do you feel like telling me?”

“Yes. She said it was hard for her to imagine the world without her. ‘When you’re young and you think of a world and a time when you didn’t exist, it doesn’t bother you, because history seems to have an implicit direction of travel that leads inevitably to the moment when you burst on the scene. The world without us before we’re here is a long period of preparation. The world without us after we’ve gone, on the other hand, is simply the world without us. As long as it seems a distant thing, we manage to alleviate the dread of that thought. But I know that in a few weeks, a few months at most, I won’t be here any more and the world will still go on, without even a ripple. Without even a tremor. You’ll mourn me, then you’ll have to deal with practical matters and you’ll stop mourning. And anyway you’ll be relieved that all the pain is over. You’ll be able to look away and get on with living. Which is only right. And that’ll be the end of it.’”

I took a deep breath and let the air out. “What was your mother’s name?”

“Agnese. For forty-two years she taught Italian and Latin. Her students loved her. Even now I meet people who 12remember her and say that the reason they’ve learned to love books and reading and so many other things is because of her.”

We stayed in that cafe a while longer. By the time we left, his eyes were no longer red from weeping.

I somehow managed to prepare for the next day’s cases and get through my other afternoon chores.

At exactly seven, I heard the doorbell in the distance – my office is the furthest one from the main door – and half a minute later Pasquale popped his head in, asked if he could show in Signora Delle Foglie, I said yes, and he opened the door wide and admitted a woman.

She was tall and quite slim, with short grey hair, and was wearing a leather jacket that was a little big and shapeless on her.