And that’s my career. One day I didn’t know where to go—six months after undergrad, I still hadn’t enrolled in a master’s program and my father hadn’t spoken to me in two—and suddenly I was dining with writers found in the culture section. I’d always been afraid of ending up a bum, since I’d never been able to imagine my future. “A bum”?—like that would ever happen. Luca, my brother, got along nicely in the center-left world, well-suited to that combination of optimistic Catholicism and hints of communism; my sister had chosen the strange, parallel world of fashion; while I was too much of a snob to do much of anything, and so in the end, I found the perfect job for a snob: I was a poet—a published poet—who corrected writers’ books.

I moved to Milan for three years, then they let me return to Rome and work with Roman writers, because I didn’t want to stay in Milan and someone was needed in Rome. I was good with literary authors, but I was always searching for other ways to make myself useful, as though I had to justify my position. I felt privileged they’d allowed me to stay in Rome. A few years ago, erotic women’s literature became popular and I got an idea for an Italian trilogy of erotic novels. I found a female author willing to write it, helped her develop the three story lines, it was a success, and her debut made this writer a millionaire. From then on, I found myself working on commercial books just as frequently as literary books.

It was around this time that Eleonora received her new book assignments and I began to think she might be sleeping with our editor in chief. The more I grew, the more she eclipsed me in the narrow field of “literary” authors: those writers who didn’t sell well, but garnered prestige in the publishing world. Then again, Eleonora’s dream was to make books that eventually appeared in textbooks. My dream had been to express myself, to live as an artist, and with my four poetry collections, I’d more than expressed myself, but as an editor, I’d mainly tried to survive.

And just like that, I’d worked nonstop for fifteen years. And what happened to the wholesome snobbery that brought me to Zeichen, to Ontani’s studio, on that perfect afternoon at the beginning of my adult life?

In our time, capital, they say, has been sucked up by a very select few. So today, the capital investment of the single individual—and let’s still say he’s middle-class—has a subtler quality: what he invests now is his own time, his own labor, his own ambition. And all he can do is ask himself if others are fulfilled. While I grew up with the crazy fear I might “end up under a bridge” (an insult to anyone actually at risk of this), I’ve always insisted—contradicting myself—that being fulfilled really only means you have an answer to the question: “So what do you do?”