‘What about you?’ he says, immediately aggressive.

‘Yes,’ I let out.

‘Hmm,’ he says, mouth closed; he presses the button, the lift starts and he stands facing the door, leaving me behind.

‘You haven’t answered,’ I mutter. ‘You haven’t answered,’ I repeat.

We’ve reached the ground floor. The old lift squeals and shakes. I take advantage of the din: ‘So why do you always ask me?’ I say resentfully.

We walk out of the lift.

‘Because I need to hear you repeat it,’ and with a jerk he closes the doors and slams the little iron gate behind him.

We pass the caretaker one after the other, as stiff as two German soldiers, and wave to her with the deference of the distracted. She follows us out of the corner of her eye. Under the arch of the main entrance, his impatient voice articulates sonorously, ‘You should know it by now.’

Then (but the caretaker can no longer hear him): ‘You don’t know,’ he says to himself, ‘it’s a dream.’

What time is it now? This interdependence isn’t right. I’d have done better to read, to do something useful, instead of being here in the warmth, idle, in this total lethargy, in the dark.

He doesn’t understand that it’s much healthier to go to bed early and work at dawn. The lucidity you feel in the evening, when your body is worn out, isn’t the same at all, it’s a tense, abstract, disembodied intellectual clarity, not the fine, full calm of the mind getting down to work in the morning, with the body relaxed, restored, responsive; there’s more space. Instead of which, he does everything on the edge, he has to tire himself out, that’s his temperament, feeling hassled.

He phones me from the office, someone or other has done something or other to him and he takes it out on me. Oh, yes? I think, now I’ll show him, and as I answer him curtly, a warmth spreads through me, and maybe he senses it, because his voice grows softer and he can’t remember what it was he wanted to tell me, he’ll call me again later.

Like when he comes home. He sits down at the table, casts a hypercritical circular glance at the dishes, unfolds his napkin, and mutters, examining the spaghetti, ‘Any news?’ and I tell him the events of the morning, ‘Today Class 3C … That colleague you know … I didn’t tell you, the father of …’ I get excited and laugh ever more loudly.

‘It’s impossible to understand you when you laugh and speak at the same time,’ he says, chewing with diligent haste.

He cuts the red meat, stabs his fork into the side dish of light green curly salad, pours himself a drink and breaks the bread with calculated gestures, every now and again shooting me a glance that sizes me up and stabs me like a mouthful of food and then looking down again. I feel like one of those odalisques who are there to enliven the pasha’s meal as he bends over his food and peers every now and again to see if the little finger of that dancer arching her back in the third row is gracefully crooked.