“In that case,” I told him, “you can watch the kids, and Daniela can become the next Ferrante of Agro Pontino and write a big fat novel set in Latina.”

Luca turned to her.

Daniela looked down at her plate.

“You want to write a novel? Knock yourself out.”

I took Barbara’s hand under the table.

After a slice of cheesecake, I felt better; I drank five glasses of water.

Then Daniela said to me: “So, you think Leone’s going to be as big as Camilleri?”

Barbara and Luca burst out laughing, and so did I.

“Let’s change the subject,” Barbara said, twisting around to give Daniela a look. (A few weeks back, my wife had learned on Facebook that Leone’s new agent, a woman from Milan—the best agent under forty—was working with a freelance press office, also in Milan; they were doing a full-on launch for Leone’s new novel, a very different book from what he’d done previously: a family saga involving a murder, a bit more accessible without compromising his literary reputation; Barbara had thought long and hard about how to tell me, while I, unfortunately, had already heard the news from Francesco: he’d been fighting with Giò and after she went to bed, he kept texting me as he lay on his living room floor: “What a goddamned phony”; “No—now we’re finally getting to see the real him.”

“Did you hear about Leone?” I asked Barbara. She sat up in bed, slid over, onto my lap, on top of the quilt, and she raised her pajamas, showing me her beautiful, small breasts, swollen because she was ovulating. I’d laughed and said: “Okay, fine, I’ll never be pissed at you over him again.”

“Thank you.” She lowered her top and leaned in to give me a long kiss, then rolled to her side, turned off the lamp, and was soon asleep. But I had to get up for my medicine, twenty drops, then I went and sat in the armchair in the dining room, waiting for it to kick in.)

“Oh, sorry,” my sister-in-law was saying at the end of our awful dinner, with her jobless husband and her brother-in-law who maybe for once could stop hurting her: “What, are you jealous? You discovered him, no?” The “n” was faint, the sound of Latina dialect, “him-no?” “So when he wins, you win. Besides, you wanted out of that world, right, you didn’t like it, and if you did, you’d be up there with all of them, right in the thick of it. You left, so what do you care? You’re a poet, not a novelist—what’s it to you?”

I puffed up my cheeks, and breathed out, my lips flapping in a pff pff pff, while I looked at Barbara.