We went back to the neighbourhood of Bianca di Savoia so that she could try it on. It was very entertaining: I began listening to Rachmaninov in the other room, while Linda changed, and suddenly she appeared before me in bathing suit and sandals, hips swaying; she took off Rachmaninov, put on a cha-cha she liked, and started dancing, just as she was. Then she had a drink, got excited, and I had the sensation that this time she had a real orgasm. I told a friend, but he’s a sceptical type, and he responded that maybe the wetness I’d felt was only the acid-foam-producing suppository, inserted for contraceptive purposes before the sex act. Actually I had an inflammation in the glans afterward, which would confirm my friend’s hypothesis, but it was still a satisfying experience.

We decided to go away for a weekend together, as I’d once done with my wife, Viola, and we spent Saturday night in the same motel on the road to the lakes. Thus I was able to talk to Linda and get to know her a little better. She wasn’t happy with her job at Stipel, she said, especially because of a female supervisor who was old and sour, who made fun of her, blamed her for the delays in service and the malfunctions and the customers’ complaints. But, she added, now she was becoming friendly with a big shot there at Stipel, a certain Manera, fifty and married, and thanks to him she would find a way of getting even with that nasty old maid.

She had talked to me about Manera at other times, partly admiring, partly mocking. Because he had strange tastes: for example, he would invite two girls to his house, besides Linda, have them strip and line up, crouching, under the window, between the wall and the curtain, so that only their rear ends were visible, sticking out. Then he’d enter, in tailcoat and striped trousers, a bowler on his head, parade past the bottoms with short steps, and, taking off his hat, say: ‘Hello, little asses!’

Apart from that he was a gentleman, polite and lavish in his spending. He had even taken her with him to Campione, where they gambled until three in the morning. ‘Why don’t we go, too?’ Linda asked me one night. ‘Why don’t we spend a westend in Campione?’ I didn’t even correct her, and after that I stopped calling her, because I am certainly not the type to throw money away on the green baize, which seems to me in fact shameful and stupid.

Because he isn’t wrong, that friend of mine, when he says that I’m still basically a man from Pontremoli, that I haven’t forgotten how my grandfather and my father built up this little fortune, book by book, lira by lira, living on chick-pea pancakes and water from the fountain. In fact, every so often I get in the car and make the trip: it’s a lovely drive, below Monte Cisa and through the narrow valley, up to the old houses of Pontremoli, along the river. Above all, there’s always a chance you might find something, rummaging through the shops of the secondhand-book sellers. Or when they give the prize, and then publishers, writers and cultural figures come to Pontremoli, most of them from Milan. I spent a couple of holidays right nearby, at the quiet little beach of Bocca di Magra, which Elio Vittorini and the critic Giansiro Ferrata¹ discovered after the other war.