I didn’t start looking for work after I quit—I started after I told my father. After hearing, then forgetting his response: maybe one of those “Ah”s of his, looking down, shifting, turning away from me. The next day, I’m sure, I “put my mind to it”—something we say in our family and that means a lot for our pragmatic côté—and I decided that my first move would be meeting with the newspaper contacts I normally sent our books to. I’d always written for the rival Milan paper, but to start this new chapter in my life, I thought a Roman paper might be better, where I could just drop by for lunch or coffee.

My closest contact was a friend my age on the assignment desk, who after asking about all my latest professional news told me that due to budget constraints, for the last few months they’d mainly given editors the assignments, but he’d find me something when he could.

I was like a student again, directionless, wandering around Rome, or like a recent graduate, new on the literary scene, running from one bookstore event to the next, to hear writers and try to meet them. Since I was no longer the disproportionate competition for the smaller, “quality,” independent publishers, I noticed that those who’d shunned me for years now stopped to chat, curious about the decision I’d made, just when the rumors about the merger of the largest Italian publishing groups were proving true. And it was on one of those public relations mornings, among the Roman hills, an ordinary January day, with the first hints of spring and my coat unbuttoned after an hour’s walk, when, over coffee in the public park by the Colosseum, a publisher of a small press asked me to translate the unpublished diary of a great mid-twentieth-century American author.

I let my parents know what I’d be doing for work now. “Seeing how things are,” I explained to my mother at dinner, so my father would hear, “maybe it’s for the best. Everyone’s reacting really strongly to the merger, and in the end, if I really think about it, if I truly want to be a serious intellectual, it’s better just to step back now from that Varia business.”

My mother forgot this was more of a personal decision and started discussing some political aspects of the merger, something she tended to do when one of us discussed our job: she couldn’t stay focused on the personal. But at least my father knew my situation now, and in the weeks that followed, he started contributing again to the conversations concerning me, even if he wasn’t speaking to me yet.

One evening, as we crossed paths in the hallway, he reached out and stroked my cheek.