“Me too. Home isn’t far, but in general I go everywhere on foot or by bicycle.”

For a moment neither of us spoke. It might have been my old fear of silence, my always feeling uneasy and slightly responsible for other people, worried about what they were thinking, that made me say something I didn’t really want to.

“Would you like a drink, maybe a bite to eat?”131

As with the coffee, I thought she would say no, thank you, I’m going home to sleep. Instead of which, she replied completely naturally:

“Okay, but you choose where to go, I don’t go out much in the evening. To be honest, I almost never go out, and I’m not very familiar with restaurants.”

I took her to a trattoria near the university, a place I rarely went. It seemed only natural to choose a place where I thought – I hoped – I wouldn’t bump into anybody I knew. I realized I was embarrassed to be seen with her, and I also realized that the embarrassment was to do with vanity. And that made me feel ashamed.

As we sat at the table and she studied the menu, I kept thinking. I’d always had vague visions – rather than genuine memories – of the brief period when our paths had crossed. Visions marked by a deep sense of unreality, as if certain events hadn’t really happened, as if we’d never really met. At least not the way I thought I remembered it.

We ordered starters, salted sea bass and a bottle of white wine. She ate methodically and took large, regular gulps of the wine, as if complying with a prescription. By halfway through dinner the bottle was finished, and I ordered another without her raising any objection.

“Twenty-seven years,” she said suddenly after finishing her fish. “What month did we meet?”

She’d caught me unawares. “It’s almost twenty-seven years.”

“Almost? So you really do remember what month we met?”

“March. The end of March 1987. But I don’t know the exact date.”

So we started talking about what had happened in our respective lives in those almost twenty-seven years. I didn’t have any great desire to talk and I muddled through by 132mentioning just a few things that were more or less general and more or less true. She, on the other hand, after a slight hesitation, a slight holding back maybe, relaxed and gave me a thorough and, I think, quite honest summary of what had happened to her.

She had lived in Bologna and for shorter periods in other cities. Then she had returned to Bari and now lived in the apartment she had inherited from her parents.

“You remember how I used to say I wanted to write?”