The men listened seriously, attentively: maybe because he was expressing himself in a foreign language and they didn’t want to miss a word. It was as if they were listening to a lecture. Then they rebutted, debated, contradicted, cited facts, conditions, that should have changed Captain Smith’s opinion. Lello, who had seen what had happened in the north, spoke of houses gutted by bombs, families that went from one village to the next with mattresses on their backs, seeking shelter, innocent Jews deported and stuck into ovens, alive, partisans hung from trees along the avenues and left there, dangling, their tongues black between their teeth, their mothers not allowed to cut them down from the branches and carry them away. I stared at him, hoping he would meet my gaze and realize that he should stop talking. We shouldn’t speak about all that. About us, our wounds, I was gripped by a steely restraint, feminine, jealous. I couldn’t allow them to be discussed like that, between one course and the other. And above all I sensed that the foreign officer wouldn’t have understood the motives that had driven us to do certain things, or not to do them, that he wouldn’t have been able to appreciate our efforts, our suffering. What did he know about all this? He had set his cigarettes and lighter on the tablecloth, very fine cigarettes that were sold around here on the black market, on street corners, by people risking prison every day. Ours were the events and the miseries of a poor people, of illiterate peasants that eat bread and onions, of a bitter earth that only yields fruit, flowers and children. All of this, when you read about it in books, is very picturesque. But it dug an unbridgeable divide between us and him. My brother-in-law continued to speak and I appealed to him with my eyes. I begged him: Be quiet, Lello, be quiet. How could our guest understand all this? Captain Smith had been educated at the best boarding school in the world, and he travelled across continents with nonchalance, in shorts, as if he were in a colony wherever he went. On the tablecloth I could see his arm, naked to the elbow and densely covered with red hairs. I asked myself why he had come dressed like this, while my husband would never dare, even in August, to sit down at the table with me without a jacket. And I was irritated with myself at the fact that he could take such a liberty in my home.