Like I already mentioned, ten years before all this happened I took a shot at getting married, but she left me the week before the wedding. When my brother came by with the news that the wedding had been “postponed,” my father couldn’t talk to me. My mother, too, was very sad; she drifted around me like she was in mourning. Those were rough months because my fiancée couldn’t make up her mind, but she also didn’t want to break off our engagement, in spite of the scandal. I left for Turin—I was working freelance then for the publishing house but didn’t want to move to Milan, where I’d feel obligated to live at my sister’s—and there in Turin I just tried to keep busy. I wrote a book of poems: The Merry Widower. After two months, my father came to see me in Turin, to start talking again; he came with my mother and a couple of their friends. We had lunch together in the Langhe wine region, and then dinner in the city. “He looks good,” my father told my mother: “Doesn’t he?” he said, pointing to my cheeks. In private he told me: “You have my full support. Don’t see her again. There’s a wound here that can’t be healed. Don’t talk yourself into getting back together—it would just be the same thing all over.”

He asked me if I felt like “playing a little joke” on my ex. He’d taken it upon himself to pay for the reception instead of the parents of the bride, as tradition dictated, and he’d never told me what it cost. After this ugly event, he learned from his lawyer that there were rulings in favor of reimbursement for someone left “at the altar,” specifically, after the banns were published, without probable cause. My father had put together a list of expenses for the reception, my wedding suit, and some furniture in the apartment where she continued to live. I just wanted to leave her everything, because I loved her and because, after the shock, I realized, with my sense of liberation, that our marriage was stillborn after years and years of being a couple. Even if the appeal that inspired my father’s actions required a “justified reason for not fulfilling the promise of marriage”—something she couldn’t offer—I knew a reason did exist. The lawyer managed to get this money back for my father, who once again kept the amount from me. With a mixture of kindness and sadism, he negotiated a monthly rate of one hundred euros, interest-free, with the would-be bride, a debt which, at the time of this story, I’m guessing probably hadn’t been paid off yet. Naturally, after this joke, I had no chance of ever talking with her again; and my father never mentioned her.

I needed to spend a few pages on him because his style and success start to matter now in my story.