As Eleonora approached her goal of editing actual books, she added up how much time had passed: it was six or seven years since that writer in his fishing jacket had come to her school. For the first time, she felt like an adult—she’d never wanted anything for so long. In college, she found her high school teacher on Facebook, wrote to her, and learned that the teacher and the famous writer had only worked together on two novels, then lost touch, and that she no longer had any connection to the literary scene in Milan. From the teacher’s nostalgic tone, Eleonora gathered that the two of them had been involved, and this explained, more than anything else, their collaboration. Eleonora hadn’t been raised a feminist and didn’t run in feminist circles, but she read this exchange with her teacher as a warning: she had to be careful about relying too heavily on sexual or romantic relationships to get ahead, because these relationships wouldn’t last, and would only serve to trick her into believing she was making progress in the literary world, given that male intellectuals—including her own boyfriend—tended to imagine they had intellectual chemistry with the women they desired.

Eleonora couldn’t help sparking men’s imaginations—because of her looks, yes, and also because she knew how to talk to them. One Saturday, she went to her boyfriend’s writing workshop and, after silently observing and listening for six hours (including at the lunch break at the small tables outside a bar in the historic center), when five o’clock rolled around, she approached the two teachers, both men and both published authors, and asked to be their assistant: “I promise I’ll stay in a corner and be quiet the whole time,” she said in a strawberry voice. “I’ll keep all the student manuscripts and stories in order, I’ll do your emailing, anything you want.” And those two male teachers, both of them around forty, immediately said yes before they even consulted the school’s director.