Years later I came across the perfect expression – coined by David Foster Wallace – to describe this attitude, this difficulty in recognizing a space for other people’s interpretations and positions: ambiguphobia. Lorenza was a perfect specimen of an ambiguphobic person.

When you think about it, changes only happen when you really interact with another person. They may just be fleeting moments but they have a crucial importance in our autobiographies. We’re almost never aware of them. Even if we remember these moments for their perfection, we don’t understand how vital they are to the changes in us. 137We think it is time, slowly and persistently, that changes us. But time in itself doesn’t change anything – at most it ages us. People incapable of really interacting with other people, like Lorenza, don’t change.

I wondered how much this might also apply to me. What am I now that I already was back then? Not a single cell in my body existed then; no cell from then exists now. But what about my identity? Was it the same or had it changed?

While I was thinking this, she was talking and drinking.

“I make my living from substitute teaching, I’m the classic temp teacher because I never wanted to take the exam. I thought teaching would be a temporary job, that it wasn’t worth it. But now, it’d be convenient to be a permanent member of staff. In any case, I have to make ends meet, and the salary’s not enough, especially now with Iacopo’s trial and all the costs. So I give private lessons, and sometimes, when I can, I provide assistance to elderly people. Only if they’re self-sufficient, though. But you already know this, it’s in the file.”

When I had known her, it struck me now, she was twenty-nine and had already been doing substitute teaching for a while, had already been an independent, adult working woman for a while. That was what had fascinated me about her back then in 1987, when for a short time, depending on her whims, she had let me into her life.

Now she was pushing sixty and was still a substitute teacher. It made me sad.

“What about Iacopo’s father?”

“We lived together with the child for a year, or just over. In Bologna, in an old building with other people. Then he left.”

He’d left from one day to the next, without giving any explanations, unconcerned about the insignificant detail that he had a son.138