If not for this apartment and the agreement Eleonora had with her fiancé—that she could stay here during the week—she would have wound up feeling stuck and breaking up with him for sure, and we would have wound up sleeping together so often that I couldn’t possibly have stayed with Barbara. God knows what that young accountant thought of her. Why would anyone agree to such an arrangement? Barbara and I both honored our unwritten pact. Ideologically, we both hated the notion of family and couples, but we couldn’t help ourselves: we didn’t know how to live alone and preferred staying together to starting with someone new and winding up two or three years down the same road. But those two, what reason could they have? Maybe it was better not to wonder. I had an excuse for not sleeping with my girlfriend: I lived over five hundred kilometers from Milan. But how did Eleonora manage to convince her fiancé, whom she lived with in a rented apartment next door to his parents’ house along a state road that headed straight into the fog, like something that was more terrible and psychic than a mere road? It was absurd. It was absurd that our generation believed in “the couple” and that to keep clinging to our belief, we chose not to see all the absurdities needed to preserve this illusion.