Lying on that couch, Barbara became an insomniac and an avid reader. As soon as she could, she worked in coffee bars and during the last years of high school, began traveling with her girlfriends. She started having boyfriends as a teenager, never staying with any of them more than three years. For college, she moved to Rome and joined in with some feminist-art circles, where A Room of One’s Own became her religion, well beyond the subject of the female novel: you needed five hundred symbolic silver pounds a year and a room of your own, as Woolf said, to be able to do anything. Barbara never lived with a man—well, she tried once, but it lasted less than a month. She could only live with women, women who were “politically aware” and not inclined to invade her space. She’d go to the man’s place, countering the old-fashioned belief that women should stick close to the nest. Barbara visited men in their neighborhoods like she was on a trip, so afterward, she could return to her room.

I’d led her to believe, though, that this time, she could open her home to a man and not lose her freedom.

She’d never let men into her personal realm, not even with long-term relationships, preferring to betray—and to be betrayed—to the intimacy of living as a couple, which would suffocate her, take away her room of her own. In private, Barbara was more closed off than she was in public or with her friends: in private, she wasn’t good at asking, at getting what she wanted. She considered herself to be someone who existed more in public than in private, and working in the theater, she could enjoy spending every night of her life far from home (right from the start, I’d ask to stay at her place and would eat dinner there by myself).

The evening after I returned from Milan with a corona of bruises under my beard—that bite—I didn’t see Barbara at home; I saw her in a crowded bookstore.