“You’re a great sentimentalist after all,” she said to him. “Is this shot supposed to be a souvenir for you?”

“Antipatica!” he said, laughing, in good spirits, before hurrying off to greet new arrivals.

“May I greet Signora Morosini,” said a voice behind her. Marguerite turned into the half-embrace of Roberto Nardini, a public relations man whose first book, published the year before, had become a best-seller and just missed winning the Strega prize of that season.

“Ciao, Roberto,” she said. “I see they’re making a film of your book—you must be making a fortune. Are you writing another one?”

“Never again! Once is enough, like taking a cruise. To write seriously, to take one’s self as a writer seriously is a vice, a sickness, like an itching that takes all your attention. Anti-life.”

“That’s what they all say. Look at Parise: He’s always saying he’ll never write another word and every week there’s a report from him on some battlefront of the world, and every year a book.”

“You can count on me to keep my word about not writing. There should be fines for writing books, just as there should be fines for those who add to the nightmare of our automobile traffic. Or at least a preliminary test to eliminate the really incapable if they haven’t the good taste and elegance to do it themselves.”

Everyone was there. Actors, astrologers, neurologists, and Vatican curia lawyers who specialized in expensive annulments for the rich and well connected. The towering Clotilde, accompanied by the dwarflike creature who was her secretary and attendant, stood pontifically in the middle of the room smiling her benediction. Another lady poet, known as La Béchamel for the white-sauce blandness of her verses, had managed to get hold of Alberto. The critic whose last name was the same as that of a laxative and whose slogan, they said, was “I work while you sleep” had come in. And Maria de Maria, the wild beauty of three decades past who still thought, with dark hair streaming over her curving shoulders, she could pass for a girl-writer of promise.

“Just what Italy doesn’t need,” Roberto muttered to Marguerite, “another Maria. Especially a black one like the Madonna di Loreto.”

Trim as a Swiss au pair in her tailored black suit, with a coral penis dangling in the open neckline of her white blouse, Lalla arrived with the Great Man not far behind. And, ominous, like a slithery Carmine De Sapio, the publisher of a weekly scandal magazine circulated silently behind the thick glasses, like headlights, that gave him the nickname of Limousine.

“Always the same faces,” Marguerite said. “Even the barmen are the same.” They went to the table to get drinks from men who had poured for her all over Rome at public and private parties. Her own parties, too.