And just fifteen days ago, further south, beyond the lagoon lakes, she’d carved out the time for a youthful weekend getaway. She’d left without her daughter, going with three friends who fished underwater, they, too, without girlfriends or wives. They’d tooled around in a small car through camping grounds, bays, Saracen towers, fields of prickly pear, white towns, abandoned plains; sun gave way to stormy weather, wind and sea took turns riling one another up, discouraging her companions from fishing, either by skin diving or scuba diving. And so in the end, in addition to being on their own, they were also rudderless. In the deserted camping ground, two of the friends had engaged for hours in a fight, like warriors in the Iliad, making shields out of the plastic lids of garbage cans, jousting with leafy torn-off branches, or even iron bars pried off the roof of the diving shop, among battle cries confused by the wind. At night, inside her small tent, she’d heard one of the men complaining; he wanted a woman. And he only calmed down on the third day, as they rode back, when each of them was immersed in thoughts of everyday hassles, and the loved ones they’d left behind.

The woman thought back to those two adolescent moments – each so far apart in years, both so turbulent and raw. She thought back to that friendly camaraderie with men – at first it had drawn out a spell of eternal, unscathed expectation, but then it had led to disenchantment.

Sun, sea, wind and the daughter’s frenzied playing, which the father continued to indulge, were poorly suited that day – she saw this more and more clearly – to that sense of mild levitation and illness. So she got dressed and headed over to the small establishment managed by the person who had once administered the assets since squandered by her ex-boyfriend’s parents.

She had to chat with the wife, a thin blonde woman, mother of two children: chat about the car, her husband, the new stove she wanted, having seen it in the pages of Grazia, and about hairdressers, holidays, the dishwasher, her kids’ school, Emmanuelle,⁴ the pill, her family. She also exchanged a word or two with the woman’s mother-in-law, an elderly peasant nostalgic for conversations that would take place on the little street she’d long since left behind, who showed her bobbin lace, pulling them out from a box, lace destined for the countless children and grandchildren who got rich in the north during the boom; lace that was previously scorned but, now that the family had grown sophisticated, was highly coveted. Just like the oils and preserves that the other old women who still lived in the village sent to their children and grandchildren, factory workers in Milan who, back in ’55, used to be ravenous for them. But then, in later years – years, precisely, of economic growth – hand-made goods would only be barely tolerated, out of sentimentality – Sasso oil was better, it didn’t ruin your liver, so were jellies from Massalombarda, and Pavesini biscuits, and zampone wrapped in aluminum foil and hermetically sealed – only to be fancied again, when it became fashionable, in motels along the highways, to have fake rustic genuine preserves, sealed in old glass jars, with hand-written labels glued to them.