“When your dream is to write and you manage to find a publisher, a real publisher, not those vanity ones, for your first novel, you have the impression you’ve arrived, that from then on everything will be plain sailing. In fact, the hardest part has only just begun. Do you know the shelf life of a novel in bookshops if it isn’t an immediate bestseller? Thirty, forty days. Then the booksellers remove it to make room for other new releases.”

“How do you mean, remove it?”

“It’s no longer displayed in a visible way. Nobody sees it and nobody buys it, unless you’ve gone into the shop specially. And after a few months the booksellers return the unsold copies to the publisher, who after a few more months sends everything to be pulped.”

What felt wrong in this conversation? Basically, it was an interesting subject, it was about books, which are my great passion. And yet there was a discordant note in Lorenza’s words, as if she were reciting a script she had repeated too many times. It was an artificial speech, devoid of truth, even if the events she was telling me about had really happened, more or less. She was acting, and it didn’t matter that I was the one who was listening. I was an audience like any other for a threadbare, mediocre repeat performance. Then I realized something else, something I had never thought about and that appeared to me all at once, as clear as a revelation. When after a long time you meet again a person you shared 136part of your life with, a person you actually thought you were in love with, it’s inevitable they should seem different. They’ve changed, as we all change, and this strikes you as normal. Then, sometimes, if you look carefully, if you don’t look away, you realize to your dismay that the person isn’t different.

They’re the same, at least in their basic characteristics. It was in the past, when you met, that they seemed different. You projected your desires, aspirations and needs onto them. In a way, you invented them, you created them, you told yourself a complex, cogent lie that’s difficult, very difficult to untangle.

Lorenza hadn’t changed, except physically. She had aged, but she hadn’t changed. She had the same attitude as when I had known her and spent time with her: a lack of interest in other people, a total focus on herself, a sense of resentment towards a world unable to recognize talent – hers, obviously.

Another characteristic that didn’t seem to have changed was her tendency to express extreme, clear-cut opinions about everything. Definitive, trenchant judgements on any and every political, philosophical or literary subject. Even on personal matters, matters of the heart. Other people’s opinions only mattered to the extent that they matched hers.