Only a few weeks had passed since that night in Cosenza. Thomas and I were on a train taking us to the place where we would celebrate New Year’s Eve on our own.

“Do you have any idea where we could go?” I had asked him.

“A quiet place,” he had answered, “far away from everyone.”

So we had rented a little house surrounded by trees, lost among the Umbrian hills. It was red as a cherry, small and red.

There, we said, our dreams would meet at night, regardless of where we ourselves might be.

“When we’re far away from each other, our dreams will be there, and they’ll meet—we’ll see them twining in the air and they’ll dance in a close embrace to a symphony that hasn’t yet been composed,” he had said.

Inside, the house had yellow walls and terra-cotta floors, and if we walked around barefoot we could feel a vague, faint warmth spreading around the whole of our bodies.

Once inside, it was almost impossible to leave. I think a thin, poisonous cloud hung in the air above the bed and kept us from getting up. Three days passed as though the hours, the minutes, the seconds, the day, and the night belonged to other galaxies, other worlds. In that suspended red world, above the great green breast of those hills, the only thing that quivered with life was love, a gigantic, lost, stunned love. I sipped slow and long, and I gulped it down, a love that allowed us to stroke each other and sometimes to kiss, but never to plunge into the deepest, blindest darkness of passion.

His body was soft and motherly; I stretched myself out on top of him and was no longer afraid.

“If we were ever to part,” I said, “who would I tell my funny stories to? When something funny happens I can’t wait to tell you about it.”

Who will I tell my funny stories to now? And do such funny things really happen?

I don’t know, I don’t really think so.

Perhaps what I flushed into the sewers wasn’t something human, but the fruit of an extreme feeling whose name I’ve forgotten.

TWENTY-EIGHT

At four o’clock this morning I was woken by a voice that led me to the study. It was the woman in brown with the slashed wrists.

I looked at her, frightened, and she grinned crookedly.

Often, during my nightmares, I have felt an oppressive weight that keeps me from screaming, from calling for help, from running. The same thing often occurs to me in reality as well, and it happens when I can’t keep track of myself and my ghosts.

“Pick it up,” she said to me, nodding to the pen on the desk.

I didn’t move.

“I said pick it up!” Her narrow lips didn’t move, but I understood.