“There’s one I remember. It was while I was sick.”

“What happened to you?”

“I caught something in Florence. I was in bed five or six days.”

“What was your dream?”

“I am in an Italian classroom. We are all teen-age students, but I am the only foreign one. There is a woman teacher who makes a big thing out of roll call, establishing our identities with a fussy precision and then assigning us permanently to our places. There will be no moving around to empty seats, she says, she’ll abolish the leftover places. Then she asks us to call out suggestions for a theme we are to write. We try to impress her and call out words like Love, Justice, Faith, Art, Family, Freedom, and so on, and she writes all these words—they’re bright and flickering with psychedelic colors—on the blackboard. Then, one by one, following our discussions she erases them until only one word remains . . . it seems to be ‘Grossness.’ I’m not quite sure—it seems to be that: something low, animal, shameful, not nice. Anyway, this turns out to be the subject for our composition. The teacher says to one of the girl students, ‘If you do as well as usual, you won’t have to come to class regularly, just check in every so often.’ I put on big black glasses like yours and start writing. But I have this anxiety. We are at old-fashioned desks, the kind with inkwells in them, and I notice that ink is being passed out among us without any regard to fairness—some get more, some less. I have definitely less and this makes me terribly anxious: Will I run out before I finish the assignment? I keep thinking: But I am a foreigner, I already have a disadvantage, so shouldn’t she at least give me more ink or some special consideration? I raise my hand to ask her, but she ignores me. It’s getting late. I start writing even though I have this feeling of unfairness.”

Marguerite took a cigarette from her bag and Dr. Verdile leaned over to light it for her. She looked at him quietly, waiting for him to take his pipe from his mouth and talk. She thought of the conditions she had set for an acceptable shrink once she had decided on analysis.

“But the face doesn’t matter,” Alberto had told her impatiently. “What’s important is that he knows his profession. If he’s good you won’t even notice him as a person.” How wrong Alberto was about her, as usual. How quick to make everything about her fit only his own necessities so as not to have to waste his time. They never thought in the same way. Where she envisioned a concrete situation and wanted a setting of terms, Alberto saw an idea. He saw analysis as an extension of his Catholicism: a magnetic force into which one released one’s soul, hopefully trusting in the roots of one’s past and the revelations of the doctor, with firm faith in the future.