They wouldn’t be seeing each other this way, recalling, over a bottle of grappa, a world they’d shared, had it not been for the daughter. But this conviction – the woman thought – was also a salvation. She objected to the evasions of the past; deep down, in fact, she was severe. But how it weighed on her! He would have wanted her to be unhappy, in fact, like some men want their mothers to be. Mater Dolorosa. No, not her.

At the start of their scheduled encounters she had always ended up drunk, because the effort of deciphering the enigma still flummoxed her: there it was in front of her, unfathomable, some meaning looming, dreadful, neither able nor willing to reveal itself. On either side a Yes and a No, leaning in, at loggerheads, among the falsely obliging fumes of alcohol; and this eventually left them exhausted, muddled by an ambiguous complicity.

But now, for quite some time, everything had changed. On either side of the table there was only the obligation of staying together for the sake of their daughter; but at times the age-old habit of seeking an impossible, mutual understanding took hold of them, like a bad habit. Then they were bogged down in a perilous swamp of memories.

Like all people who are profoundly alone, the woman was naive and violent. They hadn’t spoken to each other in a long time. So she fell back, again, into the bad habit of complicity, mistaking it for sharing. Their conversations seemed like ancient sophisms, harmful to the world and to themselves. Paltry ruins of ancient wisdom. She surrendered to the alcohol until she threw up, liberated. An acute discomfort followed.

When the ritual had been carried out, she went to bed, next to her daughter. But the discomfort intensified. Waves rose up as if from a swamp, not from memory but from nothing; deep waves, and rapid fog. She wanted someone beside her to quell them, to shoo them away; the way her mother did.

She got up, went to his bed, and hugged him tight, but kept to the edge of the mattress so she wouldn’t bother him, so she wouldn’t be pushed away; just like she would with her mother who, when she didn’t push her away, would indulgently call her ‘my little ivy-leaf’. That was how tightly she’d squeeze into her mother in bed.

He tried to chase her away, he’d misunderstood. But she insisted, deaf, until the discomfort gave way to sleep.

In the morning, father and daughter decided to go to back to the sea. The woman had a massive headache, as well as the morbid heat of her period, so she stayed in bed. But after a while she felt the urgent need to escape the distressing odour of her blood. She got up; the sun was coming in again through the embrasures, along with the din of the piazza. She read all day. She finished The Confessions of Zeno. She started One Hundred Years of Solitude.