My son Ottavio, thirteen years old then, came running to his mother just then. He hadn’t noticed anything, either his sister’s distress or the dispute that had caused it. He wanted permission to go to the movies the following evening with a few friends of his who had suggested it to him just then. But my wife, completely given over to her position as Emma’s consoler, wasn’t listening to him.

‘Yes,’ I shouted, trying to assert myself with an act of authority, ‘of course you can go to the movies.’

Ottavio, not hearing anything else, went back to his friends after having told me:

‘Thank you, Papà.’

A pity, that haste of his. If he had stayed with us, his happiness, the product of my act of authority, would have raised my spirits.

The good mood at the table was wrecked for a minute or two, and I sensed that I had wronged the bride, for whom that good mood was meant to be a good omen and a sign of things to come. And yet it was she alone, or so it seemed to me, who understood my distress. She was looking at me downright maternally, willing to excuse me and flatter me. That girl had always had that look of certainty in her judgements.

As when she was aspiring to a cloistered life, she thought now she was better than everyone else for having renounced it. Now she was prevailing upon me, upon my wife and upon my daughter. She felt sorry for us, and her lovely grey eyes fell on us, serenely, to look for the flaw that, in her view, had to be present wherever there was distress.

That heightened my resentment of my wife, whose behaviour was humiliating us. It made us inferior to everybody else at the table, even the most wretched figures. Down at the far end, even my sister-in-law’s children had stopped chatting and had brought their little heads together to talk about what had just happened. I clutched my glass, unsure whether to drain it or to hurl it at the wall or even at the facing windowpanes. I ended up draining it in one go. That, a declaration of independence, was my most energetic act: it seemed to me the best wine I had had that evening. I lengthened the act by pouring myself more wine, which I also sipped a bit of, into the glass. But joy wasn’t forthcoming, and all the overly intense energy that was enlivening my body was rancour. An odd idea came to me. Not everything was clarified by my rebellion. Could I not also ask the bride to rebel with me? Fortunately, she smiled gently just then at the trusting man by her side. And I thought: ‘She doesn’t know yet, and she is convinced she does.’

I remember, too, that Giovanni said:

‘But let him drink. Wine is old men’s milk.’

I gave him a look, wrinkling my face up to feign a smile, but I couldn’t find it in me to wish him well. I knew that he was concerned only about the good-mood atmosphere and that he wanted to content me, the way one does an excited child who is disturbing a gathering of adults.