This was the chit-chat; and the woman was gripped by an aristocratic yearning to be sitting in a café in Istanbul or Vienna, where nobody knew her, where no one would say a word to her or divert her from her state of weary concentration.

Then a huge racket arose, from the clearing between the pier and the sea: children, not joyful but petulant, asking for gelato, a cookie, gum, and: ‘When, when can we watch TV?’

After that there was the trip back in the car; the daughter, still full of energy, who wanted to go down to the gate-keeper’s house and watch TV, who wanted gelato, a cookie, gum. Dinner at home because, as everyone knew, kids had to eat. But there wasn’t much in the kitchen. The father went out to buy some milk and a fancy tin of cookies – also a bottle of grappa for the two of them. The girl had dinner, she frolicked a bit on the tower steps and with the cat; she fell asleep, exhausted, reading the same comic books she’d been reading all week.

The father and mother were also tired, but not from air, motion, sea and sun; they were tired of themselves, and they were even more tired of being together again, because of the daughter.

Grappa had always kept them company in those final years: at first for the difficulty of being together, then for the boredom of being together again. Grappa when they had money, otherwise wine. And that night they still had some money.

He’d taught her how to drink grappa and wine, and inebriation. He taught all this as if it were a form of bliss, as if it were a pledge. He’d accompany the initiation with a smile, now gentle and radiant, now winking with intelligence, now muffled with secret suffering, now airy and engrossing, now sorrowful, as if offended by the hardships of the world; it was the smile of perennial adolescence, though sometimes it turned mean, belonging to someone who couldn’t bear the weight of being unmasked. Then, more and more with the passing of years, the smile was darkened by the offences of misunderstanding and those, yet more serious, of understanding. A smile that had seduced her in the beginning because she’d warped it, that is to say, made it out to be more than it was, the way children do when they see beauty in ordinary faces, or enormity in the village piazza, or think that animals can talk. Or maybe it really had been beautiful back then, and life was what had distorted it.

Now, occasionally, the smile seemed petty or afraid: not gentle but pusillanimous, not radiant but kitschy; the winking intelligence was still there, but it was ensnared by petty daily grievances – and if it rose to a higher plane, it seemed like a delirium or a trap set for others who were more naive; the sorrowful irony had become a tic, a sign of offences suffered and dealt. Then, more recently, nothing moderately appealing about that smile remained; instead it seemed to turn people away; and often it turned into a grimace, like someone who puts his hands over his ears because of a screeching sound, or covers his eyes from a blinding light. Tolerance had turned to cynicism, compassion to self-pity and acrimony.