I passed my hand over my face, against the growth of beard. One of the gestures I make when I’m at a loss what to say. The 165idea of Annapaola testifying in court as to the substance of the witness’s statements – in case the latter didn’t say what we expected – was very risky. The kind of request that makes judges angry.

All right, I concluded, we’d think about that if the problem arose.

166

Lorenza

In my memories of those months there are sudden flashes, patches of light where everything is visible, everything is solid and real. And there are long interludes that I can barely make out, as if they’re something vaguely dreamed about or seen through a pane of frosted glass.

There’s no chronological order, no true connective tissue, in these memories.

I know only a few things.

I know that I always carried coins and tokens with me; that I kept only a small amount of paper money in my pocket, held together with a large paper clip; that I had a cigarette case I’d been given by a girlfriend, and a Walkman; that I used a scent called Drakkar; that I had quite long hair.

I saw Lorenza again a few days later. She came again to pick me up outside my office, without warning of course. From that point on, our relationship took on a rhythm of its own, neurotic but somehow regular. She didn’t have a telephone and would decide when to meet at the last minute. As to her movements, her work at school, what she did on the evenings when we weren’t together, they were shrouded in mystery.

Every now and again she’d call me at home, more often at the office. She’d ask for Avvocato Guerrieri, which annoyed me (she knew perfectly well I wasn’t a qualified lawyer yet, just a mere trainee prosecutor, and the practice’s secretary 167knew it too – whenever she put the call through to me, she couldn’t conceal the irony in her tone) and flattered me, as you might flatter a little boy who’s playing at being an adult.

Sometimes I thought of asking for her to be told that the avvocato was out of the office, just like that, to establish the principle that it couldn’t always be her who decided the when, the where and the how. I never did it.

She always found a way to provoke me about something. I would try to respond by reasoning and she would retort, for example, that my excess of rationality was a clear symptom of a lack of conviction, or of insufficient mastery of the various subjects. She had a formidable ability to manipulate any discussion, to avoid the obligation to answer argument with argument. A natural talent for fallacies. She liked it when I became rattled, got angry, possibly lost control. Immediately afterwards we would make love.