It seemed that the bride didn’t feel the need for a lot of good wishes. In fact, it seemed to me that her face was practically fossilized into an expression of trusting abandon. But it was the same expression she had worn when she was announcing her intention to withdraw into a cloister. This time, too, she was making a vow, a vow to be happy her entire life. Some people in this world are always making vows. Would she fulfil this vow any better than she had the earlier one?

Everyone else at that table was cheerful, with great naturalness, as spectators always are. I was missing naturalness altogether. It was a momentous evening for me, too. My wife had gotten permission from Dr Paoli for me to eat and drink like everybody else. The freedom was made more precious by the warning that it would be taken from me immediately afterward. And I acted exactly the way those young fellows who are given the keys to the house for the first time act. I ate and drank, not out of hunger or thirst but out of eagerness for freedom. Each bite, each sip, had to be a declaration of independence. I opened my mouth more than what was necessary for me to put the individual bites in it, and the wine went from the bottle to overflowing in my glass, and I left it there for but an instant. I felt an urge to move, and, riveted to that chair there, I somehow had the feeling I was running and jumping like a dog freed of its chain.

My wife made my state worse by telling a woman next to her about the diet I was usually on, while my daughter Emma, fifteen years old, was listening to her and giving herself airs by adding to her mother’s remarks. So they wanted to remind me of the chain even at that moment at which it had been lifted from me? And the entirety of my torture was described: how they weighed the little bit of meat I was allowed at midday, depriving it of all taste, and how there was nothing to weigh in the evening because dinner was a roll with a sliver of ham and a glass of warm milk without sugar, which nauseated me. And as they spoke, I offered up a critique of the doctor’s knowledge and their affection. If my body were really in such bad shape, after all, how was it possible that that evening – seeing as we had managed to get someone who wouldn’t have married had she been left to her own devices to get married – it could suddenly take so much indigestible and harmful food? And as I drank I readied myself for the rebellion of the next day. They were going to be in for a tough one.

The others were on the champagne, but after having had a glass or two of it in response to the several toasts, I’d gone back to the ordinary dinner wine, a dry and sincere Istrian wine a friend had sent for the occasion. I loved that wine the way one loves memories and wasn’t wary of it; nor was I surprised that, instead of procuring me joy and heedlessness, it was making me angrier.