The following Tuesday, after breakfast, that sunny din still came through the embrasures; but the sky was no longer as clear. The wind had picked up and clouds approached from the sea. The daughter went down to play at the gate-keeper’s. And while the woman settled down to read in the only armchair, by the only window adorned with lush reddish ivy, he called her into a room, an old chicken coop, where he’d set up a small desk. I’ve consulted the I Ching, he said. He’d looked up the word ‘wife’ and what came up was ‘damage and devastation’. Then the woman, reacting to his ambiguous smile, remembered how he’d interpreted her nocturnal act of lying down beside him a few nights ago, reading it as nothing other than the behaviour of a woman who wants to sidle up to a man. Of course this hadn’t been the truth, nor could it ever be again. She turned sullen at their lack of understanding of each other. But she didn’t want to stoop to petty explanations. She left without a word.

And she observed this silence, not as if it were a pact, or an order, but instinctively.

Four more days went by. The air had turned chilly, and there were storms at night. In the morning, the sun-lit din no longer arrived through the embrasures: the sky was gloomy, the piazza deserted. The woman sat next to the window wrapped in blankets and shawls; the rain streamed down the wall of the house across the street; or it let up, and the drops glistened on the pigeons. The daughter kept playing her exciting games: up and down the tower stairs, with the cat; in the piazza, with the other children; she spent the evenings in front of the gate-keeper’s television. At times the father indulged her in her games – it was only with children that he resembled his former self. More frequently he sat at his desk in the chicken coop among crates of books, clothes and records he hadn’t bothered to open, though he’d been living there for several months.

The woman read. Or, inevitably, she remembered. She abstained from alcohol; she drank the cold water of recollection.

The tumult of the years spent in Milan, their cheerful ex-pat brigade: from one little job to another, one furnished room to the next, bar-hopping in the evenings. They’d left behind Posillipo, their neighbourhood in Naples. Ahead of them lay a future rich with promise. No one wanted to make money. Then those years ended for everyone. But he was still ensnared in his youth.

Now and then, lifting her eyes from the book, she observed the little room where she was holed up for those days; it felt like a bow window, or a boudoir.

Everything looked as if it had been salvaged from a shipwreck: the revolving bookcase saved from the ruin of his family, the mirror saved from the failure of their living together; the photograph of the young man she’d once loved; the photo of the daughter, about whom he’d once said: ‘It’s such a drag to raise a kid’; paintings by an old friend from their Brera days. But all this wreckage had been reorganized by a common aura she struggled to define: faded fabrics laid over the armchairs and beds; subdued light; rounded angles and nooks; a suffused pastel shade. A baroque disorder that evoked rosy children among the bushes; white skirts with thin sky-blue stripes that got snagged on the grass; playful, rotund priests; English profiteers and southern Italian viveurs; last rites, solemn and grotesque, because the dying had lived too long. Hence indefinably similar to his mother’s rooms, she around whom every place became an alcove or a boudoir, where every colour muted into a pastel hue, every sound sank into the carpets, every misfortune settled into good manners, every belief faded into a tolerance that seemed fatuous, but was actually insidious, lethal.