My back against the cool granite floor, I was waving my arms around while I spoke, lying beside the glass and plate with the remaining caciotta and bits of flatbread. “My grandma was studying political science, but as soon as they got engaged, my grandfather decided she had to change her major to literature, which was more suitable for raising refined children … My grandma waited until she was eighty-eight to mention the poet again—whatever the real story. A half century in the blink of an eye. To be born, to die.”

“Mother of god,” Francesco said, “such tenderness.”

“Yes. Such tenderness.”

Then one of us, checking the clock, said: “Let’s go hit on some girls at Hop’s.”

“Yeah, let’s.”

“If that salesgirl’s there, let’s make sure to talk with her.”

We got up, stiffly, and each of us had our turn in the bathroom.

We took the stairs, because I didn’t want to be shut up in the elevator for eight floors. But as soon as we were outside, Francesco said he needed more time in the bathroom. “You go on ahead.”

I thought maybe he wanted to call some woman. “Be there by midnight, though.”

Walking to the bar, I started laughing, thinking that in less than an hour, I’d be “someone headed into his fifties,” while right now I was “someone headed into his forties”: the power of words, figures of speech. A decade in an hour, like something for sale at 99.99 euros.

I’d put my headphones on and was listening to a song, rich with distorted, compressed guitars, recorded in the nineties, when that music meant everything to me, and now it was pounding in my older ears, my fragile eardrums, through a pair of noise-canceling headphones that cut me off from the consular road I walked along, chuckling, pensive, out of breath.

Under the cloudy orange sky, interrupted by a row of buildings, I stepped into the intersection by the grocery store, walking against the light: first the lane of cars moving toward me, leaving the city; then the two sets of tram tracks, going their opposite ways; then the lane to downtown. I kept an eye on the approaching cars, headlights shining, and was almost to the other side when I said something out loud, and I felt like I’d spoken to my mother—it gave me the shivers. I know the exact words, because when I was back on the sidewalk, I stopped and wrote them down on my phone, convinced I’d never said anything more true: this is who I am, someone crossing the street, listening to music, headed to the bar.

Acknowledgments

Draft by draft, this book was born thanks to the critiques of Edoardo Albinati, Mattia Carratello, Massimiliano Catoni, Arianna Curci, Gabriele Di Fronzo, Natalia La Terza, Francesca Mancini, Lorenzo Moretto, Alessandro Piperno, Nicolò Porcelluzzi, Rebecca Servadio, Fabio Severo, and Laura Spini.