How could I not get angry? I had been forced to endure a wretched period of life. Frightened and impoverished, I had let any generous instinct of mine die out to make room for pills, drops and powders. No more Socialism. What could it matter to me if the world, contrary to all of the most scientific conclusions, remained under private ownership? If many people, for that reason, were not allowed their daily bread or the portion of freedom that should adorn man’s every day? Did I perhaps have either?

I tried to become my essential self that blessed evening. When, in his stentorian voice, my nephew Giovanni, a gigantic man who weighs more than two hundred pounds, started telling a few stories about his own cunning and other people’s credulity in business, I found the old altruism in my heart again.

‘What will you do,’ I shouted at him, ‘when the struggle is no longer a struggle over money?’

For a second, Giovanni was stunned by my dense phrase, which happened to shake his world. He stared at me with his eyes made bigger by his glasses. He was examining my face for explanations by which to get oriented. Then, while everybody was looking at him, hoping to be able to laugh at one of the retorts of that ignorant and intelligent oaf, at his ingenuous and malicious wit, which is always surprising despite having been used even before Sancho Panza, he stalled for time by saying that for everyone else wine altered the view of the present, whereas for me it muddled the future. That wasn’t bad, but then he thought he had come up with something better and shouted:

‘When no one fights over money any more, I’ll have it all to myself, without a fight, all of it, all of it.’

He laughed a lot, in particular at a repeated movement of his big arms, which at first he held out all the way and then drew towards him with his fists closed to suggest that he had grabbed the money that was supposed to flow towards him from all sides.

The discussion went on, and no one noticed that when I wasn’t talking I was drinking. And I drank a lot and said little, intent as I was on studying my core, to see if it was finally going to fill with benevolence and altruism. That core was burning slightly. But it was a burning that would later turn into a pleasant, diffuse warmth, into the feeling of youthfulness provided – but briefly, alas – by wine.

And, expecting this, I shouted at Giovanni:

‘If you take the money others refuse, they’ll throw you in the clink.’

But Giovanni quickly shouted:

‘And I will bribe the jailers and have those who don’t have the money to bribe them locked up.’

‘But money will no longer corrupt anyone.’

‘Then why not let me keep it?’

I got immoderately angry:

‘We’ll hang you,’ I yelled. ‘It’s what you deserve. A noose around your neck and weights on your legs.’