Then a man approaches forty, and another axis is added on, one of duration, of accumulation: Have I done enough? To provide convincing answers for strangers, I (the snob) worked hard. Faced with the problem of social identity, the same man can seem cynical, then noble, then fragile and lost.

One day shortly before Christmas break, I was promoted to director of Varia. This didn’t happen in front of Eleonora, though I had seen her in the office that day, after a long spell of not seeing her at all. We barely spoke. It happened one afternoon, when I left the building with the editor in chief, who was giving me a lift to the station on his way to the historic center.

I’ve thought about that moment so often it’s no longer a living thing, just the silhouette of a story, wordless. A man in crisis, a poet, about to turn forty, sitting in the passenger seat of the director’s roadster, hearing that he’s been promoted. The boss—the writer-manager—talks and his hands leave the wheel as he emphasizes what he’s saying. The poet’s only reaction: to roll down his window and stick his elbow out and raise his fingers to his neck.

This news comes as they’re leaving the enormous parking lot of the publishing group; the employee turns, and through the rear window, stares at the enormous glass block rising up out of the wet greenery. The sky looks yellow, seems lit with three suns. The car, a responsive cube, turns and enters the street.

I could run Varia commuting from Rome, because the politicians were in Rome, and many of the talk show hosts. Maybe the pattern of going up to Milan would be more unpredictable, more hectic, but the raise was eight hundred euro a month. I carried this secret with me onto the train, where the air was dry and the seats didn’t recline and a stranger’s feet blocked my way. I took an anxiolytic, but the bright light and my high blood pressure kept it from helping much. My head throbbed.

The first person I told was my father, while I was getting off the train. After three air-conditioned hours, I thought the heat I felt rising from the underside of the train was the natural heat of summer: it dispersed at once, devoured in the cool.

“Dad, I have good news. I got a promotion.”

“Tell me the exact words.”

“My boss said, ‘You’re great. You want to be the director of Varia?’”

Lines like “you’re great” I’ll quote exactly. My father is fascinated by the allure of my job: his son, the poet, who can handle the most intricate power relations just like he does the challenges of Italian and who goes to dinner with newspaper editors and publishers.

I filled him in on the details while walking along a side street leading from Termini Station’s east exit. Homeless men with ruined shoes were watching me. A mean-looking woman asked me for money; I shifted my phone from one hand to the other so I could use my right to touch my wallet in my pocket.