I thought she was the one. Instead, no, it wasn’t her problem. It was his. And she knew it or, at least, if she didn’t actually have the certainty, she must have entertained the suspicion. That’s why she laughed She laughed at me because I admired her for that presumed incapacity of hers. She laughed silently in her evil heart and waited. Until one evening …

It happened here, in this room.

I was here in the dark. You know that I like to go to the window and watch the day die and let myself be taken and wrapped gradually by the darkness, and to think, ‘I’m no longer here!’ To think, ‘If there were someone in this room, he would get up and light a lamp. I won’t light the lamp because I’m no longer here. I’m like the chairs in this room, like the little table, the drapes, the wardrobe, the couch, that don’t need light and don’t know and don’t see that I’m here. I want to be like them and not see myself and forget I’m here.’

Now then, I was here in the dark. She came tiptoeing in from my father’s room, where she had left a small night-lamp lit whose glimmer came through the small opening in the door and faintly spread through the darkness, almost without diminishing it.

I didn’t see her. I didn’t see that she was about to bump into me. Perhaps she didn’t see me either. When we collided, she let out a cry and pretended to faint in my arms, on my chest. I lowered my head. My cheek brushed up against hers. I felt the ardour of her eager mouth, and …

After a while, her laugh roused me. A diabolical laugh. I can still hear it! She laughed and laughed as she ran off, that wicked woman! She laughed because she had set a trap for me with her modesty. She laughed because my ferocity was vanquished. And she laughed because of something else that I learned about later.

She went away three months ago with her husband, who was assigned to the position of high-school teacher in Sardinia.

Certain assignments come in the nick of time.

I will never see my remorse. I will not see it. But at certain moments I am tempted to run off and find that wicked woman and choke her before she puts into the trap that unfortunate whom she wrested from me with such treachery.

My friend, I’m happy I never knew my mother. Perhaps if I had known her, this ferocious thought would not have arisen in me. But since it has, I’m happy I never knew my mother.

Come, come, come here with me into this other room. Look! This is my father.

For seven years he has been here. He’s nothing any more. Two eyes that cry, a mouth that eats. He can’t speak, can’t hear and can’t move any more. He eats and cries. He is spoonfed. He cries in private without reason or, perhaps, because there’s still something in him, a vestige of something that, though it began to die seventy-six years ago, doesn’t want to end yet.