If the illuminated part of me preserves the facts I’ve presented in the preceding chapter, the person I was that afternoon, that Marcello, enveloped in the white light of the vending machines glowing behind me, in the saturated air of that open-plan interior, with a piece of sponge cake in one hand, looking out the window at the rainy sky, the puddles in the empty garden, the sun turning the rain golden, I, that Marcello, felt myself reduced to a new low: I thought Eleonora had tossed me aside for her career. After her writer boyfriend, there was me, the editor-poet lover, and after me came the editor in chief. I attributed her career advancement to a strategy that was cynical, cruel. I was desperate because I sensed I was losing her, this fantastic, introspective woman. She didn’t have the subtle fear of most women, who, when they possess a man’s body, almost imperceptibly squeeze our hips with their legs, withdrawing from us when they are physically closest to us. Eleonora’s legs, in contrast, spread open like a yawn, and then closed. I would never feel her thighs around my hips again, and I wondered if I could keep working in that remote, paradoxical place of glass and darkness, that sprawling suburban building, so far from downtown Milan, if I could keep taking the high-speed train every week, the train, too, wrapped in glass but so stark, so bright inside that when I returned to Rome at night, I’d sometimes break into a cold sweat looking at that screen by the ceiling that listed our speed at three hundred kilometers an hour, while looking out the windows I barely saw anything at all, and that big, lit-up, plastic and alloy canister, filled with men and women and phones, gathering speed, all of us exposed, all of central Italy watching. The soulless absurdity of that commute. And I’d spend a few nights in a hotel in Milan, garishly lit … Could I go back just to living with my real girlfriend in Rome, who didn’t travel for work and who’d told me she couldn’t take that sort of life with me anymore?

Standing there by the windows in the lobby area, swallowing my cake, I caught Eleonora’s scent among the office smells of cardboard and steel, and I felt like I’d been jettisoned into space.