“What was it I told you once?” Alberto said affectionately to Massimo, catching him for a moment while he was being filmed signing copies of his new book and smiling at the young actresses who were always in the background at such affairs. “I said, ‘Here’s someone who doesn’t talk, but acts.’ While all the rest of us talk about the books we’ll write, you actually do them.”

Massimo looked pleased at Alberto’s attention and grinned at him. He looked marvelous, Marguerite thought, already tanned and dressed in a cream-colored linen suit with the psychedelic tie she had given him.

“He’s the man to watch, Alberto,” Leone Eccli said amiably, joining them; and Aurelia, smiling at Marguerite, added, “In more ways than one.”

Marguerite stared back; Aurelia’s words weren’t meant to be malicious—only cognizant of something that Alberto had never taken the trouble to notice.

Looking about at the people who made up the firmament of sensibility in Italy in their day, Marguerite regretted the missing. Pavese was dead; Vittorini was dead; Ungaretti was dead; Calvino lived in Paris, discredited in Italy for having refused the five million lire of the previous year’s Viareggio prize with a telegram to the jury in which he said that the time of such events was definitely over. He had cut through the collective vanity of literary Italy with all the candor of the child who didn’t pretend to see the emperor’s clothes, and his honesty was received in a rage.

All the climbers were there at Massimo’s presentation; and all those who, having reached some perch, lived in fear and trembling of falling from it. The dowagers of literature were out in full force. Heavy-girthed lady novelists and poets bore down on Alberto and the other critics whenever a space opened near them.

In a flutter of salutes and handshakes, smiles and appraisals, Massimo’s evening went on. Not only he but everyone present was in the business of being noted, of being remembered when their turn came up, of courting the powerful.

The men were alert and conservative; the women aggressively elegant. There was not an unconventional one among them. It was literariness without ferment or independence. “My beat is beatific,” Jack Kerouac, on tour, had told them not long before, and no one had understood; they were long removed from a state in which poetry, disinterested poetry, was a condition of life. They were, that night, a gathering of shopkeepers merchandising themselves while the market was good.

The chattering went on as if they all hadn’t met in the same place (or a similar one) with the same drinks and the same ideas just a week or so ago for another (but similar) author. Except, thought Marguerite, that Massimo is different if he’ll only hold out. As lights centered on her, she turned to find him near her directing the cameramen to get her in the shot.