In the afternoon she went down to the piazza to buy food; people stared at the ‘foreigner’. Who knows what they take me for, she said to herself. Maybe they think I’m the wife of a new office worker, or a whore.

She thought of him in the town, more of a foreigner than an office worker. Sheltered in that dilapidated abandoned tower none of his relatives would claim. Limited to spending time with only a few people: the gate-keeper – a woman who’d known him since he was little, when his parents had money, who now, seeing him poor, treated him with a calculated informality – and a boyhood friend, a decent man, a shopkeeper entirely devoted to work and family. She imagined him living for weeks on rice, olive oil from Puglia, and packs of Nazionali, as if he were in solitary confinement, in voluntary exile, after the suicide (or accidental death) of a friend.

He spoke to the daughter, at length, about the mouse who lived in his drawer, his faithful companion fattened up on cheese rinds; the unusual light at certain hours or on certain days that unveiled or lit up the islands; old stories about the tower: traps, assassins, labyrinths. He spoke of a happy, hard-working future, when, who knew, he might plant basil, tomatoes, aubergines and lettuces in the tower’s dried-up moat – maybe even roses and geraniums.

The daughter, one day, had asked her: ‘Why doesn’t he live with us?’ And she, lying, had replied: because he wants to be like a bird, free. Instead he seemed to her, in that tower, an ensnared bird who had lost its bearings and could no longer get out.

It was late to shop for food. The market was empty. She found a little shop and chose something from the leftover fruits and vegetables. They threw in some wilting basil, bereft of its proud scent. She bought bread and cheese. Everything was complicated in that mistrustful town, where no one seemed to know anything, not even where the little shop was. Where eyes stared at her, half closed or still, like thick wax seals.

She had to make dinner, set the table. The family triangle, there at the table. She was overtaken by frenzy. She had a wicked impulse. There was no one watching her. She undid the triangle: she stacked the three plates in the middle and put the silverware on top, next to the glasses, one inside the other. A kind of buffet. Father and daughter paid it no heed, they didn’t even notice. He merely recreated the triangle. And since the child didn’t like certain foods, he started to amuse her, to instruct her, to convince her that she had to try every new thing out of curiosity, not obligation.

After dinner everyone was sleepy, for different reasons: the little girl because it had been an active day at the beach; the woman because she was hungover from the day before, and because of her period; as for him, who knew – in those days he fell asleep easily, maybe to thin his delirium down to a fog.