The gentleman stood up and, rather than head for the door as he usually did, turned towards the lady and, without saying a word, offered her a cigarette. The lady was both delighted and disturbed, as if she were a shy teenager, and the way the gentleman brought the lit match up to her cigarette felt like a small gesture of intimacy.

It wasn’t a real conversation; just a few words about the hotel, the location. Mulling over it later, the lady noted that a cue hadn’t been lacking, in fact, the gentleman had provided one, and she regretted not having picked up on it. That evening in bed, for the twentieth time, the lady repeated the morning’s exchange, and with no trouble at all, she found infinite ways of starting up an interesting conversation. The gentleman had mentioned that the hotel manager had got married that very year, but it was only because his mother had died and he needed a woman in the hotel; otherwise he would have remained a bachelor, because he and the gentleman had similar thoughts about marriage. She could have asked him to elaborate on this topic, thus getting to know what he thought about women.

On the other hand, the lady knew that it wasn’t just the brevity of the gentleman’s conversation that had disappointed her. She knew he had a lovely voice, but that his pronunciation was marred, betraying the fact that he spoke dialect. Above all, she knew it was too late. The moment of realizing that she’d been deceived, a moment she’d been through on other occasions – during which she’d always made a quick decision – was somehow already behind her, without ever having been reached.

The lady began envisioning favourable scenarios, ranging from the adventurous to the catastrophic. For example, a fire at night in the little hotel: mayhem, people scrambling to escape. She remembered that similar fantasies had consoled her in childhood, when she wanted to be noticed by an older classmate who paid her no attention. Back then those imaginary disasters served as pretexts for rescues, heroic actions, feats of self-sacrifice. Whereas now they served as occasions for escaping in one’s pyjamas, or wearing even less. The lady ended up falling asleep to these fantasies, and her dreams almost always picked up the cue, granting it unexpected developments.

On her solitary walks – she avoided going to see Nicola Rossi, who was still stuck in his hotel with stomach troubles – the lady reflected at length on the fragmented escapades of her dreams. The dreams ended up creating some sort of complicity between herself and the gentleman. But they only managed to intrigue her further, without ever instilling confidence in her, not only because she was aware of their one-sided nature, but because they weren’t enough to convince her, even in an illusory way, of a change in the gentleman’s attitude, since he’d always behaved, even in her dreams, implacably like himself.

These dreams weren’t lacking a more playful side – though what it meant escaped the lady – that may have represented a sort of unconscious revenge.