I stopped in astonishment. I had the impression I hadn’t said exactly what I was thinking. Was that really how I was? No, of course not. I reflected: how to recover my fondness for all living creatures, of which Giovanni was surely one? I immediately gave him a smile, making a huge effort to mend my ways and to excuse him and love him. But he kept me from doing so, as he paid my benevolent smile no heed whatsoever and, as if resigning himself to the observation of a monstrosity, said:

‘Well, in practice, all Socialists end up resorting to the hangman.’

He had defeated me, but I hated him. He perverted my entire life, even the part of it preceding the doctor’s intervention, a part I looked back on as highly luminous. He had defeated me because he had revealed the very doubt that had assailed me terribly even before his words.

Another punishment awaited me immediately thereafter.

‘He looks well,’ my sister had said, looking at me with satisfaction, and it was an infelicitous phrase, because my wife, as soon as she heard it, foresaw the possibility that the excessive wellbeing that was colouring my face would degenerate into a proportionally great illness. She was as frightened as if she had been warned of imminent danger just then and turned fiercely on me:

‘Enough, enough!’ she shouted. ‘Put that glass away.’

She appealed for help from the man next to me, one Alberi, who, slender, dry and healthy but, like Giovanni, bespectacled, was one of the tallest men in the city.

‘Be so kind as to take that glass from his hand.’

And since Alberi hesitated, she got emotional, agitated:

‘Signor Alberi, please. Take that glass from him.’

I wanted to laugh; that is, I sensed that a well-mannered person would do well to laugh then, but it was impossible for me. I had readied my rebellion for the next day and it wasn’t my fault if it broke out right away. Those public rebukes were really insulting. Alberi, who didn’t give a fig for me, my wife and all those people who were giving him food and drink, aggravated my situation, making it ridiculous. He looked over his glasses at the glass I had in my grip, moved his hands over as if he were going to take it from me, and ended up pulling them back with a quick jerk, as if he were afraid of me for looking at him. Everybody was laughing at me behind my back, Giovanni with a shouted laugh of his that caused him to get out of breath.

My daughter Emma thought her mother needed her help. With a tone that struck me as excessively imploring, she said:

‘Papà, stop drinking.’

And it was on that innocent creature that I poured my wrath. I said to her a harsh and threatening word dictated by an old man’s and a father’s resentment. Her eyes immediately filled with tears, and her mother stopped concerning herself with me to concentrate entirely on comforting her.