When we were saying goodbye, she pressed into me, and we hugged closely, as we hadn’t done for a while. I smelled her hair, the only part of a person we can treat the way a dog would. She was wearing two or three layers of cotton, a dress and a cardigan, an impalpable, fleshy bundle, damp from our walk. She pressed against my erection, not pretending she wasn’t. “Man, why are you married? You’re not supposed to be married.”

“You’re so great. I’m not married.”

“But you are extremely taken.”

“True enough.”

We said good night and parted ways, now hugging warmly, like old friends.

I arrived at the pensione, where I met the old proprietor. He was from Piedmont, an old guy with shining white hair and only one hand, who gave me my keys and reminded me to settle what I owed, including for that night. I found his sullenness disturbing and reassuring at the same time. The building was very well air-conditioned, and the rooms were small, half of them without windows: this evening, he gave me one without, because he assumed that I wouldn’t be sleeping there, though he obviously didn’t say this, I mused, as I stepped inside and set my backpack on the chair.

I turned on the TV, ordered food off an app, went into the bathroom to check the corona of bruises that had formed under my beard.

I ate my delivery sashimi; they’d dropped it off at the reception desk, and the innkeeper brought it to me himself. I drank the lukewarm sake, pouring the little bottle into a glass. The room had one small table, almost entirely taken up by the television set, which I turned off while I ate.

Behind me, the bedside lamp emitted the only light in this cramped room with its walled-up window: the overhead light was too harsh, and I never turned on the bathroom light, either—I preferred leaving the bathroom door open and showering and using the toilet to the light of the TV.

While I ate, I thought about the designer’s apartment in relation to this room. I’d never gone from one to the other, from that big mattress on a wood floor to the single bed in this small, sterile space. When I slept here, I tried to arrive drunk, to just crash and sleep: in Rome, I often worked at night, but that was hard to do in Milan, in this depressing room. Now, I felt I’d fallen from grace: I’d never return to the designer’s apartment. Congratulations on your career, I told myself, and took one last sip of sake to wash down the sliver of raw fish.