Then I drank little and only if people were looking at me, and not a word more did I say. All around me was cheerful shouting, and it bothered me. I wasn’t listening, but it was hard not to hear. An argument between Alberi and Giovanni had broken out, and everybody was having fun watching the fat man contend with the thin man. What the argument was about I don’t know, but I heard fairly aggressive words coming from both of them. I saw Alberi, who, standing up, stretched out toward Giovanni, was putting his glasses almost in the middle of the table, very near his adversary, who had comfortably laid his 260 pounds in a deckchair offered him as a joke at the end of the dinner, and was studying him intently, like the good fencer he was, as if he were weighing where to aim his own thrust. But Alberi was fine too, so very lean, though still healthy, mobile and serene.

And I remember, too, the good wishes and the endless farewells as we took leave of each other. The bride gave me a kiss with a smile that seemed maternal to me again. I took that kiss absent-mindedly. I was thinking about when I would be given leave to explain to her a thing or two about this life.

Just then a name was mentioned by someone, that of a friend of my wife and old friend of mine: Anna. By whom or for what reason I don’t know, but it was the last name I heard before being left in peace by the dinner guests. For years I had been seeing her with my wife and greeting her with the friendliness and indifference of people who have no reason to complain about having been born in the same city and at the same time. But now I was remembering that, years earlier, she had been my sole offence. I had wooed her almost up to the moment I had married my wife. But no one had ever spoken of my act of betrayal, which had been so sudden I hadn’t even tried to cushion it with a single word, because shortly thereafter she, too, had gotten married and been very happy. She hadn’t taken part in our dinner because she was in bed with a light bout of the flu. Nothing serious. What was odd and serious was that I should remember my offence, which came now to weigh on my already troubled conscience. I had the feeling I was being punished for my old offence just then. From her bed, in which she was probably convalescing, I could hear my victim protest: ‘It wouldn’t be fair if you were to be happy.’ I went off to my bedroom in very low spirits. I was a bit confused, because the fact is it didn’t seem right to me that my wife should have been entrusted with avenging the person whose place she herself had taken.