The man woke up, pulled out the guide from his carry-on and looked for his hotel. What he found was reassurring: two restaurants, a pool, room service, the hotel had closed for the winter and had only reopened in mid-April, and this meant very few tourists would be there, the usual clients, the northern Europeans thirsty for sunlight, as the guide described them, were still in their little boreal houses. The pleasant voice from the loudspeaker asked everyone to buckle their seat-belts, they’d begun the descent to Athens and would land in about twenty minutes. The man closed the folding tray table and put his seat upright, replaced the guide in his carry-on and from the pocket of the seat in front of him pulled out the newspaper that the flight attendant had distributed, to which he’d paid no attention. It was a newspaper with many full-colour supplements, the usual weekend ones, the economics-financial supplement, the sports supplement, the interior-design supplement and the weekend magazine. He skipped all the supplements and opened the magazine. On the cover, in black and white, was the picture of the atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud, with the title: THE GREAT IMAGES OF OUR TIME. He began leafing through, somewhat reluctantly. First came an ad by two fashion designers showing a young man naked to the waist, which at first he thought was a great image of our time, but then there was the first true image of our time: the stone facade of a house in Hiroshima where the heat from the atomic bomb had liquefied a man, leaving only the imprint of his shadow. He’d never seen this image and was astonished by it, feeling a kind of remorse: that thing had happened more than sixty years before, how was it possible he’d never seen it? The shadow on the stone was a silhouette, and in this profile he thought he could see his friend Ferruccio, who for no apparent reason, on New Year’s Eve of 1999, shortly before midnight, had thrown himself from the tenth floor of a building on to Via Cavour. Was it possible that the profile of Ferruccio, squashed into the soil on the thirty-first of December in 1999, looked like the profile absorbed by stone in a Japanese city in 1945? The idea was absurd, yet that’s what passed through his mind in all its absurdity. He kept riffling the magazine, and meanwhile his heart began beating erratically, one-two-pause, three-one-pause, two-three-one, pause-pause-two-three, the so-called extrasystole, nothing pathological, the cardiologist had reassured him after an entire day of testing, only a matter of anxiety. But why now? It couldn’t be those images provoking his emotions, they were faraway things. That naked girl, arms raised, who was running towards the camera in an apocalyptic landscape: he’d seen this image more than once and it hadn’t made such a violent impression, and yet now it produced in him an intense turmoil. He turned the page. There was a man on his knees, palms together, at the edge of a pit, a kid sadistically pointing a gun at his temple.