We all drift silently in a world of shadows.

The right night, a place I know. The station hunkers in the heart of this city.

Without a history.

We are all without a history, because we are overwhelmed by it. By the lack of reason, in a civil society that is breaking up, forgetting everything.

The Romans were builders of roads. I, who am a foreigner, travel them. I seek a familiarity that I will not find, I already know that, but it is enough for me to seek it: It is an uncodified move, a journey with eyes wide open. Rome is a body whose strong legs and dirty feet are known to me, hands quick to steal money from your pockets, hired sex, soft, dark hair, muscles that slither, breath that stinks of cigarette smoke and cheap liquor.

Roads. The houses like people: They have a worn, dusty nobility, in this Rome, that yields to time unsparingly. And time, silently, crumbles bricks, molds pavement, brushes bodies with the same gentle, profound caress that I would like to have or experience.

Roads. A troublesome object that I do not see on the asphalt, and the car jerks. A tire absorbs the jolt, smashing what lies beneath it and continuing on its way: maybe a small life has ended, perhaps only a shattered object. At the end of life, the two are equivalent.

Roads. Where I ran as a child there was dirt and grass. I splashed about up to my knees, happy. That time is gone.

Roads. The Romans were builders of roads, but that time is gone as well.

It all began right in the middle of that endless season that went down in history as “the Great Summer.” Suddenly, without knowing how, I found myself in Vietnam. I was watching American soldiers fighting and dying in the jungle. Above me helicopters roared amid clouds of napalm. Then I looked up and saw the fan that hung from the ceiling of my room in the Hotel Excelsior.

It was only a dream and I was still in Rome. But it felt like a jungle in the tropics. The fan blades fluttered through the oppressive air of the room without providing any relief. They turned uselessly, like my life.

I was dripping with sweat; I had slept more than eight hours but I was still exhausted. It was an effort to get up. I ate breakfast listening to the same things the radio had been repeating every day for I don’t know how long. The daytime temperature never went below 110 degrees. The health department recommended not going outside before sunset.

I looked out the window as I finished drinking my coffee. It was getting dark, and throngs of foolish Chinese had begun to invade Via Veneto. I observed the rows of red lanterns and the signs crowded with ideograms whose meaning I didn’t know. Another torrid night of hell awaited me in the city of the apocalypse. Hardly the Dolce Vita. Now there was only summer, and Rome had become a world upside down, an enormous Chinatown where the heat forced people to live like vampires, sleeping by day and working by night. I should have left like everyone else when I still had the chance.

I went back to the bedroom and discovered that, just as they say, the worst has no limits. A girl had appeared out of nowhere and was lying motionless in my bed. She was half-naked and lay inert, on her stomach, her legs slightly spread, her arms extended along her sides, palms turned up, her face sunk in the pillow. She certainly looked dead. I hadn’t the slightest idea who she could be; it had been quite a while since I’d been intimate with a woman.

When I tried to turn the girl’s head I made another crazy discovery. Her face seemed to be stuck to the pillow. I tried several times. I finally took her by the hair and pulled her head, pressing the pillow against the bed. Nothing, the face wouldn’t come free. And in continuation of this theme that the worst has no limits, just at that moment someone knocked on the door.

With a corpse in the room it would have been wiser to pretend not to be home. What in the world would I have said if I had found myself facing the police? But I opened it anyway. Something compelled me to. Don’t ask what because I don’t know. Luckily it was Signor Ho, the manager of the hotel.

“I have the bill for the overdue rent,” he said. I glanced at the papers and gasped. He had nearly doubled the rent, holding me responsible for, among other things, the air-conditioning. I protested. The increase was robbery. As for air-conditioning, the system had never worked. Almost nothing worked in that lousy hotel.

“There are new rules now,” said Signor Ho. “Everyone pays for the cool air now. If your system broken, my worker fix it. If you don’t like new rules, you out. If you don’t pay, you out.”

It was pointless to argue, that Chinaman had a head harder than an anvil. Not to mention the business of the dead girl in the bed. I certainly couldn’t risk having him call his lackey in to repair the air-conditioning. So I tore the papers from his hand and told him not to worry, I would take care of everything as soon as possible.

“When is as soon as possible?”

I told him I didn’t know, but before he could reply, I said, “Tomorrow.” Then I slammed the door in his face. I went back to the bedroom with the hope that the corpse had disappeared. Maybe I’d had a hallucination. Unfortunately, the girl was still there. So I lay down on the bed next to her. I realize that lying down next to a dead woman may seem depraved. But I was exhausted from the heat and the stress. I needed to stretch out to get my ideas in order, and that was the only bed available. I spent several minutes staring at the girl’s hair. It was smooth and long. The shiny black made me think she was Chinese or one of the many other Asians who hung out in the neighborhood. Suddenly it moved. The hair, I mean. At first I thought it was the fan. But when it rose, and began to wave in the air like tentacles, I realized that there was something alive in it. The tentacles became an enormous octopus wrapped around the girl’s body. The whole room was now immersed in a blood-red ocean.

The thought that I was still dreaming barely surfaced; fear had gotten the better of me. I would have liked to get up and flee. Go I don’t know where. But I was paralyzed. I don’t mean metaphorically. I couldn’t move in the literal sense of the word. It was terrible being present at such a spectacle while having to remain as still as a statue. Then everything went dark and when I reopened my eyes the girl had disappeared.

I’m not dressed properly. I realize it from the way the other passengers are staring at me.

They’re right. The train headed to Ostia-Lido is gritty, dust-coated, and none of them would dare set foot in it wearing a white linen suit. Here in Rome, dirt has a fascination with soft colors, insisting on the palest tints, and enjoys removing from them every trace of whiteness. My suit will soon be covered by a thin patina of grime, but that doesn’t matter now. I no longer distinguish colors or the faces of the people around me. I no longer hear their voices, I have no desire to listen to their words, what they say, what they think.

English, that man in shorts and flip-flops said when he saw me arrive. And the fat woman next to him nodded her head yes.

English. Of course, that explains everything. My clothes, my composure, even the indifference I show toward the curious gazes of the other travelers. For them, my detachment is not the result of a natural disgust for a rude, vulgar segment of humanity. No, if I’m like this it’s because I’m English. If I act like this, it’s because I was born in a place where to sit silently reading a book is not yet considered a crime. Criminal, if anything, is the insistence with which a girl keeps asking me question after question, in an absurd mixture of English and Italian. She thinks I’m a tourist, she thinks I’m here just to dive into the dirty waters of Rome. And she won’t stop talking to me about the Colosseum, about the marvels of the city, about places that in her view I really cannot do without seeing. Stupid girl. If she only knew how much beauty I’ve seen, and how much pain I’ve felt in the face of its enchantment. But she’s incapable of understanding. She’s young, but already she has the obtuse gaze of an old woman. And, just like an old woman, every so often she loses the thread of the conversation, wanders, and no longer knows what she’s saying.

“You know Pasolini was murdered at Ostia?” she asks. Then, without waiting for an answer, she adds, “Of course, he was asking for it...” Then, as if unconsciously, I got up and left the compartment, overwhelmed by the brutality of that statement, but far more disturbed by the rapidity with which the recollection of a long-ago crime had brought back to mind other crimes, other horrors.

There’s nothing odd about it. The history of Rome was written in blood. Every street, every building of this city conceals within its walls the sighs of executioners and their victims. And if everyone on this train stopped talking, even just for an instant, those moans would be heard here too, on this dirty train. But for now the noise is louder. It covers up the voices. It suffocates the cries. Just as you did, my dear Charlotte. Only you had the power to banish evil thoughts. You did it for almost thirty years. Thirty winters and thirty summers together, the last right here in Rome, visiting museums, walking on the beaches at Ostia, like a happy young married couple. That summer, you smiled, Charlotte. The way the child smiled who came and sat beside me. You, too, looked at me and smiled like that, while Alzheimer’s was already eating away your brain. A simple, pure smile, and yet so distant, letting me understand that I was losing you. And you were losing the power to keep those voices at bay. Soon, my love, your smile would no longer rein in desire, the call of the young bodies that crowded the beaches of Ostia that summer. Male bodies. Bodies of tall, tanned youths. Memories of a past that you, my sweet wife, had been able to erase, giving me the illusion that nothing had ever happened. Yet it took so little to make my confidence crumble. A look, a few words were enough. It was enough that he told me his name.

I get off the plane in enviable physical shape, proud of feeling and above all looking like I’m in sync with the wealth-producing world around me, not at all nostalgic, stylishly dressed, immune to politics, to freedom of the press and freedom of expression in general, to culture, to global warming, to Muslim terrorism, crime reports, the Democratic party, model towns of quiet living where low-level clerks massacre their neighbors and families for no reason, to rampant pedophilia, the never truly ascertained extinction of the first republic, to world championships, soccer bribe scandals, paparazzi who blackmail public figures, to the uncertainty of work, to Family Day, to Rights for Cohabiting Couples and the Catholic Church’s meddling in the political life of the country and the private lives of individuals. I am a man of my time, having achieved a truce with the world. Not that it took that much, a wink was enough to send the signal: You mind your business and I’ll mind mine. We’re all adults, after all.

In the shuttle that brings us to the terminal, I look around (no one escapes the gaze of others in the airport shuttle: find me another public place where strangers pay so much attention to one another) and declare myself the most attractive man on this flight that just landed in Rome. For a moment I fear competition from a couple of young studs who are flaunting their gym-buffed physiques in tight T-shirts, but seeing that an attractive piece of tail with a child is looking at me and not them, my concern quickly eases.

We arrived right on time, which reassures me about the little game I intend to play before putting myself in circulation. As usual when I come to Rome, I group my engagements. Not that any one of them preoccupies me very much, but it’s the sum of them that adds up, as the well-known joke says — and though it doesn’t make me laugh, I find myself citing it often, a little like a bad tune that sticks in your head the more you try to forget it.

I retrieve my suitcase from the carousel (a job I detest, but since the antiterrorism measures have been in force, they make a lot of fuss, even for us) and before the shooting range I go and have a caffè macchiato, because I find the combination of foamy milk and espresso intoxicating. The cashier, a skinny brunette with delicate features, looks at me in an explicitly inviting way when she gives me my change. At first I think it would be fun to tell her that I’d be delighted to pick her up if she tells me what time she gets off, and then not show up, but her soft little face inspires such tenderness that I choose to spare her the humiliation.

When I finish the coffee I go to the men’s room to complete the job, using for the occasion one of the business cards that I got printed on recycled paper, because it rolls up better. I lay the line I do not have out on the sink counter, prompting the silent disapproval of a family man washing his hands a couple of sinks down. I thin it out with a credit card, I snort noisily with my right nostril, tap my nose with my forefinger, throw my head back, stick my left pinkie in the nostril, then rub the fingertip over the upper gum arch, run my tongue over it, and swallow. The man continues staring at me, mesmerized. He has probably seen that there was nothing on the sink’s marble, but ingenuous as he appears, he must be wondering if maybe they’ve invented some new type of invisible cocaine in the years since he gave up social activity. I can barely keep from laughing in his face. He dries his hands and moves away disgusted. I find myself irresistible, I congratulate myself at length, and finally I go take a leak. While I’m at it, I stop to read the little notes stuck to the outside walls of the urinals, handwritten by a semi-literate homosexual. I find them ridiculous and depressing. I give a little shake, I go wash my hands, I hold them under the jet of hot air from the dryer on the wall, curse the photoelectric cell that doesn’t work, use the other dryer, get bored, finish up, open the suitcase, check that it isn’t missing anything. At first I find myself thinking that I wouldn’t mind strolling around the airport with the handle sticking out of my jacket pocket to cause a little outburst of panic and then apologize to the colleagues who would surround me with their weapons drawn (“Hey, guys, I don’t know what to say, I’m really embarrassed, hasn’t this ever happened to you? After you wash your hands, don’t you sometimes just stick it in your pocket without thinking?”; “Never happened to me” — some idiot itching for a fight would surely respond — “you risk getting yourself killed, doing something stupid like that”; to which I would reply: “It depends on how stupid the one who shoots you is”); but I’m forced to reject the idea because I don’t have much time, so I put it back in the holster, wet the palm of my right hand again, smooth my hair back, and finally get out of there.

A black attendant with a cart greets me in English, for some reason. I reply, Bonjour, do a little airport shopping not geared toward buying, reach the exit, head over to the taxis. I locate the first free one, signal to the driver, he nods, I open the back door and am about to get in.

— Excuse me.

— What?

— Your suitcase, please.

I look down at my suitcase.

— What about it? I ask, confused.

— Do you mind if I put it in the trunk?

I shrug.

— No, I guess not, I reply, still not understanding.

— Okay, the guy says.

He gets out of the car. I look him over. Tall, bald, barely fifty, a little overweight, strong jaw, well-shaped goatee, fake Ray-Bans, open-necked shirt, NN jeans, street-market ankle boots. He is chewing gum, a habit that has always annoyed me.

I hand him the suitcase, he sets it in the trunk, motions for me to get in, gets back in the car, says good day, I reply good day, tell him my destination, and eventually we start off.

At first I think I will keep my mouth shut, convinced as I am that speaking to taxi drivers means allowing them to talk your head off until the time they let you out, but then I cannot suppress my curiosity.

— How come you asked me if you could put the suitcase in the trunk?

He rolls his eyes (I can see him in the rearview mirror) as if to say: I knew you’d ask that.

— It’s a precautionary regulation, he says defensively; it’s not as if he invented the rule.

— Precaution against what?

— Accidents.

This I didn’t know.

We take the ring road.

— And how long has it been in effect, this regulation?

— For me, since the day a model almost broke her neck in my taxi.

It’s beginning to get on my nerves, this explanation in bits and pieces.

— See, he continues, she had a big portfolio, you know those ones you put drawings in, like the kind architects use? She probably kept photographs of herself in it. Such a knockout, I can’t even tell ya. So, she puts it there on the ledge, in back. She says: They won’t run into us, will they? Such a looker, I still remember her. Well, to cut a long story short, the model gets the portfolio right in the back of the neck. Her eyes pop out of her head. Such a blow, I thought for sure she was dead.

— Wasn’t she wearing a seat belt?

— The model, yes. The portfolio, no.

— Oh, I mutter. His eyes search for me in his small mirror, probably expecting me to laugh (I think he had some wisecrack ready); but since I do not give him the satisfaction, he goes on.

— Well, now I have to deal with a lawsuit, get it?

Who knows if it’s true.

— It’s not your fault they ran into you, I comment.

— Sure. Go tell it to the model’s lawyer.

Now there’s the kind of answer that makes me see red. A person tells you something distressing, you make a suitable observation showing that you’re on his side, and he answers you as if you were wasting his time. You’re the one who told me all your business, imbecile, what did you expect me to say, It’s your fault, the lawyer was right, let’s hope you lose the case?

— Do you have the number? I ask, irritated.

— What number?

— The lawyer’s. Give it to me, that way I’ll call him and tell him.

He peers at me in the little mirror.

— Oh! he says. I guess he didn’t find my joke amusing.

Score one for me.

He’s stopped talking. Wonderful.

— Excuse me, he then says, as if he is reading my mind.

— Hmm?

— You have to put the seat belt on.

I saw a film, as a boy, where Renato Pozzetto played the part of a poor devil who establishes a fetishistic relationship with a taxi. Like before going to bed he checks the car’s water, oil, brakes, and tire pressure, polishes it, caresses it, falls asleep beside it, and when he goes on duty he subjects the passengers to a series of behavioral rules that border on the abusive (obviously, during the course of the film, the taxi falls apart). The fool behind the wheel of this taxi is unfortunately making me think of that character. Among the things I despise are nasty resemblances. I don’t yet know how, but this involuntary superimposition will end up on my driver’s account.

— The seat belt? I say.

— Yes, of course, this Font of Knowledge replies self-importantly, it’s compulsory.

I lean forward so that he can see I’m raking him with my eyes, observing a not so insignificant detail: He isn’t wearing one either.

— In case they try to hijack us, the jerk says, we have to be able to get out of the car quickly.

The response of a true bumpkin, more tactless than rude, one that would give me permission to become indignant and burst out with a who-do-you-think-you-are-and-who-do-you-think-you’re-talking-to, but at this point I get the urge to have a little fun, so I remain solemnly silent.

After a while he looks at me once again in the little mirror, ascertaining that I have not put the seat belt on.

— It’s become very dangerous work, this job of ours...

The idiot trails off, probably realizing what an ass he’s made of himself.

— Now, see, since they came up with this disgraceful “pardon,” we taxi drivers have become mobile ATMs for illegal immigrants.

I don’t say a word, letting him go on destroying himself with his own words.

— Just think, he resumes heavily after a painful silence, in the span of a week, a couple of Albanians took out seven, that’s seven drivers. A knife to your throat, and you’re done for. One of us reacted. Not that he wanted to be a hero, it’s just that it came to him instinctively. It’s a miracle he wasn’t killed.

I continue to hold my tongue.

— And to think that these sonsofbitches had their eye on us for two months. The police had reports and more reports, descriptions, all the clues you want. Nearly every day a driver would go to the police station to report another one. I ask you, what does it take to catch them, a couple of shitty Albanians? You think they arrested them? Not a chance! It’s not their problem. We’re the ones out on the street, at the mercy of everything and everybody, what the hell do they care? At the end of the month they collect their paycheck. To cut a long story short: The police are asleep, the judges are busy appearing on TV, let’s not even talk about the politicians. So in the end we gotta organize things ourselves, right?

He stops a moment to catch his breath. Naturally, so much crap all at once requires a surplus of oxygen. It’s exciting, though, sitting there listening to him try to provoke me.

From his tone, when he picks up again, I figure my silence is beginning to make him nervous.

— But things didn’t go so good for one of them. He ran into me.

I knew it. Go for it, Rambo.

— When he got in, I knew right away what his intentions were. He had me drive around a bit, Go this way, go that way, he couldn’t make up his mind. I was already losing my patience. At a certain point he goes: Listen, can you take me to Saxa Rubra for five euros? The meter was already showing twelve euros. So I says to him: What the hell, are you kiddin’ me? And he goes: I don’t really give a fuck, you’re the one who’s going to give me money. And I find the knife in front of my eyes.

But... I think.

— Well, I was so mad I couldn’t see straight. I floored the accelerator so hard I still don’t know why we didn’t roll over. Then I jammed on the brakes and made that shitty Albanian go smashing against the window. I got out in a hurry, and grabbed him by the hair: Out, you bastard! And I beat the living daylights out of him, Christ did I give it to him. Lucky for him a police car came by, or else he’d have been pushin’ up daisies instead of sittin’ behind bars. But I left my marks on him, ya know.

I wonder how he can go on talking, given the fact that I haven’t deigned to say a word since he began his pathetic story.

— You can’t work anymore. Believe me, it’s become a jungle. If the police won’t protect us, then they should just say so. No problem, we’ll take care of it. At night, instead of staying home, we team up and do justice on our own. After all, we know who the crooks are and where they live, we don’t need no warrant.

I’m about to say something, but he keeps going.

— Me, when they tell me to believe in the law, I say: Excuse me, what law? Because I know only one law: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. The one that’s written in the courts, the one that’s supposed to be equal for everybody, not even young kids believe in it anymore.

At this point I interrupt.

— Listen, speaking frankly: Have you made any raids yet?

— Any raids?

— Right. Any... punitive expeditions, let’s say.

— What d’you think, huh? the idiot replies.

— Come on, are you serious?

— What, you think I’m jokin’?

— How many are you?

— About twenty, give or take.

— How does it work? How are you set up?

— Helmets, chains, iron bars. Sometimes I even use a corkscrew. And then we go lookin’ for ’em one by one. After a while you get a taste for it, ya know?

— Oh, sure.

— Yeah. It’s a little like hunting.

He chuckles.

I don’t.

— How come you’re interested? he asks me, bewildered by my icy silence.

I let a few seconds go by before answering him.

— Well, it’s nice to know there’s someone who can help you in your work.

— Come again?

I shove the badge in front of his eyes. His jaw drops. He turns pale. He actually pivots around to look at me. We swerve (a pickup truck blares its horn), then the imbecile regains control of the car.

— Watch the road. You’re a cab driver, don’t you know that’s how accidents happen?

— Look, I’m sorry, I was only kiddin’, I swear.

— Imagine that. He was only kiddin’.

— I’ll swear on whatever you want. On my kids. May I drop dead right here in front of you if it isn’t true.

— So then what you told me was a bunch of crap.

— Yeah, yeah. All of it.

— Why should I believe you if up till now all you’ve told me is a bunch of baloney?

He falls silent, terrorized by his future.

I take out the gun. I smooth the barrel with the tip of my forefinger. He spots it out of the corner of his eye and begins to sweat. At a rough guess, I’d say that his saliva flow rate has gone from one to thirty.

— What are you doing, drooling? I say.

— Please, officer, I’m sorry. Look, I’ll get down on my knees if you want. Should I come back there with you? Huh?

— Don’t try it or I’ll shoot you right here.

I mean his right side, into which I’ve just stuck the gun.

He doesn’t breathe. He’s sweating like a pig now.

— Jesus, look at you pissing your pants, aren’t you ashamed?

— Okay, I’m an idiot, a moron, a real shithead, my whole life I’ve been talking bullshit, God Almighty should strike me dead for all the crap that comes out of my mouth.

— There’s no need to trouble God Almighty, I’ll take care of it.

— Excuse me? What did you say?

— You heard me.

— You wouldn’t really shoot me for the few lies I told, would you?

— Why not?

— Listen, let’s be reasonable. I haven’t done a thing. I’m a decent working man. There are a ton of unpunished criminals out there, who act like swine whenever it suits them, and you take it out on me for some stupid boasting?

I shove the gun back in his side.

— What now, back to badmouthing others? So then it’s not true that you were telling lies.

— No, no, I’m sorry, you’re right, I didn’t mean to say that... oh, sweet Jesus.

We remain silent for a while. The imbecile is probably afraid of making the situation worse if he opens his mouth.

— What’s your name? I ask him at a certain point.

— Mar... Marcello.

— Well then, Mar-Marcello, you’re not actually all wrong, since it wouldn’t be very sensible on my part to shoot you. First, because shooting idiots serves no purpose, meaning it’s like shooting mice, and we know that shooting mice doesn’t solve any problem; second, because it would be crazy to risk a charge of willful homicide to knock off a moron who talks just for the sake of talking.

— Right. Exactly, the idiot says, relieved. The return of hope must have reactivated his blood circulation, since he seems to have regained some color. So I quickly move to throw him back off guard.

— Unfortunately, however, it’s turned out badly for you, I add, you know why?

— No, why?

— Because I hear voices.

— What?

— Naturally, I’m a schizophrenic.

— Excuse me, what does that mean?

— You don’t know what a schizophrenic is?

— No.

— Ignorant too, besides being a jerk.

He wipes his dripping forehead with his hand. When he puts his palm back on the steering wheel, it leaves greasy marks.

— Well, let’s simply say that I have a sick mind.

— Oh, holy Virgin, the imbecile says, as hope once more abandons him.

— So, I continue, if the voices I hear give me an order, I have to obey, you see how it works?

He thinks it over a bit, the poor devil.

— And you... can’t you talk to them, to these voices?

— Talk to the voices? That’s a good one.

— Why? Can’t you try?

— No, of course you can’t talk to the voices.

— I see a lot of people in the streets talking to themselves.

— Those people are not schizophrenics. And even if I could, what am I supposed to say to the voices?

— What you told me before about how it isn’t worth it to shoot me. I mean, there’s no reason to shoot morons.

— In other words, you want me to put in a good word for you.

— Right.

I consider this. And I think that I can indeed pretend to give him a shred of hope.

— So you think that if I tell them, I can convince them?

— Yes! Yes! Definitely! In fact, I’m sure you can!

— Could be. Maybe you’re right. Wait, I’ll give it a try.

I wrinkle my forehead, squeeze the bridge of my nose between my thumb and forefinger, forcing myself to appear as absorbed as possible. Out of the corner of my eye I see the imbecile watching me in the little mirror, full of expectation. I let the operation go on until I see the sign for the exit Campo Nomadi, a local gypsy camp.

What fucking luck, I think.

I come out of my trance. I open my eyes.

— I’m really very sorry, Marcè, I tell him with a heavy voice, but your request was turned down.

— What do you mean, turned down? Why was it turned down?

— I don’t know why. It’s a surprise that they even answered me. That’s never happened before. In a certain sense I’m grateful to you, I didn’t know I could do it.

He turns around. He looks at me, desperate. We’re about to swerve again.

— Do you mind watching the road, dickhead? I scold him, even raising my voice a little, I must admit.

— Sorry.

— Don’t worry about it. Drive, go on.

— Please, officer, don’t hurt me, I got a family.

I put a hand on his shoulder.

— No way, Marcè. I have to shoot you in the ear, they tell me.

He instinctively covers the part in question with his right hand, and begins crying like a baby.

— Hey, look, I can shoot you in the ear even through your hand, you know. It doesn’t change much.

But I don’t know if he even hears me, he’s so disconsolate.

— Take this exit, go on, I tell him, indicating the gypsy camp, I’ll shoot you there.

He obeys, with a kind of resignation to the awful day he’s having.

I tell him to drive to a particularly squalid area with some really ugly trailers.

— Get out, go ahead.

He complies. He is still crying, though less than before.

From their ratholes on wheels, a couple of gypsies are watching us like hyenas hoping for prey.

I get out too. I make him walk two or three yards from the car, then I tell him to turn around. Though it is a rotten thing to do, I let a few seconds go by.

I take his place behind the wheel. I close the car door.

The sound makes him turn around.

— Hey, Marcè, I say loudly, do you have your wallet?

He pats his back pockets.

— Y-yeah, he answers automatically.

— Did you hear that? I shout in the direction of the gypsies, who have just stepped out of their shitty vans. — He has his wallet on him, this guy!

Marcello looks at me in shock. He probably hasn’t understood a damn thing, demented as he is from everything that’s happening to him.

I start the car.

I pass alongside him.

He looks at me, incapable of any reaction.

— And now they’re your problem, I say, tossing my head back toward the gypsies who are beginning to approach.

Then I drive off.

In the rearview mirror, I see the hyenas starting to circle.

The two have already become four.

Settled at a table in a café, I check my watch: It’s still early for our appointment, but I’m already anticipating her arrival. I like to stretch out the tension, up until the moment I see her, suddenly, in the crowd, head high, with that unmistakable gait, which distinguishes her, and, I would say, elevates her above all others. Today, however, I know in advance how I’m going to spend the time that separates me from the first glance, the first furtive kiss, the first thrilling moment of the day we’ll spend together. I’ve brought a notebook with me, here to the café, a small book with a black binding, held shut by an elastic band: a handsome object with uncut pages, whose first lines I am filling with an old pen. Now I’ve taken a break, ordered a beer, lit a cigarette. What could be better, on a warm spring afternoon, than to sit in a café in the heart of Rome, have a sip of cold beer, take a drag on a cigarette, and prepare to write about the woman you love, knowing that in a couple of hours you’ll see her?

My name is Jack Galiardo, I’m fifty years old, I’m an American citizen of Italian ancestry: My grandparents emigrated to New York in the early part of the twentieth century — they came from the countryside right around here. I’m a lawyer, a criminal defense lawyer, and I have a professional bias toward writing: When I accept a new case, after studying the details I need to slowly construct the line of reasoning that I’ll use to defend my client, and the only way to do so effectively is to take notes, otherwise I can’t think. Cogito, ergo sum. Paraphrasing Descartes, I could say: I write, therefore I think. It’s valid here, too, at the café table, although the case I have to think about now is my own.

Two years ago, I was sitting on a plane next to a woman, an Italian. I was going to Rome to meet a witness who might be useful in a trial. She was returning to Italy from a short working trip to the United States. The flights from America to Europe generally arrive at dawn, so the majority of the passengers try to sleep; but that night the two of us weren’t tired and we got to know each other. I had recently begun to study Italian, drawn by a sudden curiosity about the land of my forebears, which had never much interested me as a boy; so the conversation unfolded mainly in her language. After a couple of drinks and the initial chitchat, I revealed something about myself: that I had been married and divorced twice, had two children already in college, two houses, one in New York and one in Florida, two cars. “Two of everything,” she commented, laughing. Then she told me that she was a journalist, that she was married, and that her husband was also a lawyer, in Rome; unlike me, he was not a criminal lawyer but, rather, worked in commercial law. They had three children, two boys and a girl, the last still small. Giulia — that was the name of my traveling companion — must have been forty, but she looked at least ten years younger. I soon discovered that she loved to talk: She did almost all the talking, jumping from one subject to another, telling endless anecdotes, little stories, situations — quite entertaining, I think. I can’t be sure, because after a while I had trouble following her, given my limited knowledge of Italian. But the sound of what she said, the tone of her voice, the rippling laughs with which she punctuated her speech fascinated me. I would have liked her never to stop.

The truth is that she could also have stayed silent: The effect on me would probably have been the same. I was in love with Giulia from the moment I saw her. I’ve never believed in the classic thunderbolt. I’ve had a certain number of women, some of whom — including the two I married — I liked a lot at first, but I’ve never really lost my head. I suppose that as a boy I must have had, like everyone else, a crush on the cutest girl in the class, but as soon as I reached the age of discretion I left romanticism behind; love songs, for one thing, have always seemed to me banal, foolish, excessive. I found all those sighs, that agitation, vaguely comical; they seemed a pose, an attitude, rather than expressions of true feeling. With Giulia, however, it was like plunging into a state of adolescent regression. To please her, win her, possess her suddenly became my only purpose in life. Every other concern or consideration disappeared. I had to make an effort, that night on the plane, not to make myself look ridiculous by kneeling at her feet and declaring my love, then and there, in front of stewardesses and passengers.

When we landed, I asked for her phone number, and proposed that we see each other the next time I came to Rome. My stay this time would actually be very short: I had to leave within twenty-four hours so that I wouldn’t miss a court hearing in New York. “I’d love to,” she said simply. And we parted.

Phrases that are repeated an infinite number of times, in an infinity of casual encounters, in the course of a life. We might never have seen each other again. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Giulia, and after just a few days I called her from New York. “Ciao, it’s Jack Galiardo... I’d like to see you again,” I recall myself saying, emotionally. I got immediately to the point: “I could come to Rome next week, if you have time.”

She had a moment of hesitation. “You’d come to Rome just for me?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She paused again, then said, “All right.”

Our first meeting was at Villa Borghese. Sitting on a bench, I made the declaration of love I would have liked to make on the plane. In a mixture of English and Italian, I described my image of her: alone, in a state of crisis with her husband, desperate for affection, for a man who desired her as no woman had ever been desired. And that man was me. Slightly put off, she said that I had misunderstood: She had agreed to see me, but that didn’t mean that her marriage was in trouble. I apologized. I added, however, that this suited me as well. That is, I was still happy to be there, on that bench, near her, even if she wasn’t having trouble with her husband and I was, at most, just slightly likable. It wasn’t a strategy to induce her to yield. I really felt that way: I felt that my love was so great that it was enough, at least at the beginning, for both of us. We got up from the bench and walked in silence for a little while, barely brushing against one another. In the square overlooking Piazza del Popolo she let me kiss her. We had lunch on the terrace of the Hassler. We continued to kiss, and then to touch, on the sofa of a deserted drawing room in the hotel, after lunch. We took a room there at the Hassler, although I was staying in another hotel. We made love until late afternoon. Then we descended to Piazza di Spagna, where she hastily said goodbye and got in a taxi. Walking as if in a trance, intoxicated with happiness, not knowing where I was or where I was going, I got a message on my cell phone: I already miss you. At that moment I knew: I had been knocked down. And I’ve never gotten up.

Rome, from then on, became the fixed destination of my vacations. As soon as I have a few days, I get on a plane and fly to Italy. Every so often, it happens that I can stay for a week, and then I manage to see Giulia two or three times. More often, they are whirlwind holidays: I leave at night from New York, arrive in Rome early the next morning, stay a day and a night, leave the following morning: a weekend in all, including the nine hours in the plane to get there and the same coming back. But it almost never happens that my Roman weekend coincides with an actual weekend. In fact, on Saturday and Sunday she has to be home, except for one weekend a month, when it’s her turn in the office, and so she’s just as busy. On some pretext, she can take a day off during the week as compensation, and devote it to me. Usually we see each other a couple of times a month. It works like this. I arrive and take a double room at a luxury hotel: the Hassler on Trinità dei Monti, the Hotel de Russie on Via del Babuino, the Plaza on Via del Corso, the Raphael near the Pantheon, the Excelsior on Via Veneto: These are my favorites. I earn a good living, enough to afford them, and besides, I love five-star hotels: They’re the only luxury I indulge in. But in this case I choose them for other reasons. They’re in the center, first of all, and Giulia lives in a residential neighborhood in the south of Rome, so it’s less likely that she’ll meet someone she knows. Furthermore, in these hotels the doormen are worldly, used to looking the other way in exchange for a generous tip, if in the late morning a woman accompanies a guest to his room without presenting her documents, as is usually required in Italy. Thus I spare her the embarrassment of disclosing her identity, of leaving traces. Finally, since we spend most of our time together in the room, I like it to be large, comfortable, elegant. I always wait for her in a café near the chosen hotel. When I see her coming, I get up and pay the bill, and she follows me, like a stranger, brushing my hand, pausing to give me a kiss in the doorway of a building, then immediately starting to walk again. Arriving at the hotel, we begin kissing in the elevator, start again as soon as I’ve closed the door of the room, and almost never stop. We take off our clothes quickly, we fall into bed, we make love — in every possible way — until evening. Maybe we fill the bathtub and spend awhile there. Sometimes we have room service: When the waiter comes in with the table, she goes into the bathroom, even though it’s obvious, from what we order, from the unmade bed, and from the Do not disturb sign hanging on the door, that there are two people in the room. Sometimes, at night, we have dinner in a tourist trattoria in the neighborhood between the Pantheon and Piazza del Popolo. Rome is full of these trattorias; they are places where no Roman would ever eat and so there, too, the risk of running into someone who might recognize her is not so high. It’s a system that guarantees eating badly, or at least not especially well, but it’s not the food that interests me. For Giulia and me, it’s enough to sit together in a dark corner, our knees touching, hands seeking each other under the table, letting ourselves be dazed by wine, only to hurry back to the room as soon as we’ve finished eating.

There have been exceptions to the rule of these encounters in the two years since we’ve been seeing each other. Once we went together to the Sistine Chapel, she hidden under a scarf and a pair of big dark sunglasses — well camouflaged among the legions of foreign tourists. Another time we took a car and went to Fregene, out of season, to stroll on the beach. It was sunny, we tumbled among the dunes. We also went to the movies one afternoon, not for the film but for the excitement of finding ourselves in the dark, in a half-empty theater, doing everything that is forbidden. Occasionally, I climb up behind her on her motor scooter and she drives me around, with no set destination: Since we’re wearing helmets we’re both unrecognizable. And since so many Romans travel around the city the same way — two wheels are the only alternative to the slow pace of cars and the inevitable traffic jams, Giulia explained. Protected by the mask of the helmet, holding onto her, I traverse the Eternal City like an invisible man to whom all is granted.

But it is in bed that we spend most of our time together. Partly we stay in these hotel rooms because ours is an illicit, clandestine love, which can’t be lived in front of others. The main reason, though, is that we like it. However nice it is to eat together, walk together, go somewhere together, nothing seems better to us than staying in bed together. I’ve never felt anything like that. I’ve had other women who excited me, but I’ve never spent eight, ten, fifteen hours in bed with one of them — at a certain point, desire always ran out. With Giulia it’s different: It never ends. Even if I’m tired after we’ve made love for a long time, an electric current impels me to caress her butt, lick the inside of her thighs, kiss her mouth, trace the line of her teeth with a finger, bite her ear, and on and on, without stopping. I can never have enough of her. It’s like a universal truth that was suddenly revealed to me: For the first time it seems obvious, as it never had before, that things should always be this way between a man and woman who are in love. That or nothing. No half-measures. The idea that a couple can lie together, I don’t mean for ten minutes but for an hour or two, and that each prefers to read a book, watch television, sleep — that is, do something else — now seems inconceivable, sad, wrong. If two people are in love, if they want each other, love should be the way the two of us live it: uncontainable. Morbid. A disease. Now I believe that the moment this passes and excitement turns into routine, love starts to end. Rather, it’s already over.

Eventually, however, a worm began digging a hole in my obsession with Giulia, very tiny at first, then larger and larger: the thought of her husband. I’m a free man, without ties; I could be with her, if we wanted, all the time. And I would like it to be all the time. But Giulia isn’t free; she’s a married woman. For months, after that first meeting at Villa Borghese when I said that I saw in her a neglected and unhappy wife, we never returned to my mistake. Besides, it seemed to me that the facts expressed our wish to be together. Mistake or not, I thought I had understood everything: Giulia and her husband were the typical couple who married very young, but after twenty years things had cooled. As an explanation it suited me. I had no doubts, residual questions, uncertainties. But the worm, quietly, slowly, continued to dig. The hole got bigger. And I fell into it. I had to admit to myself that the classic roles of the triangle were reversed: I, the lover, was jealous of the husband. Of course, every so often Giulia mentioned his egotism, the fact that he never listened to her or that he dumped on her shoulders as wife and working mother all the responsibilities for the house and the children. But she said it as a simple fact, without much complaint, without expecting to change him or the situation. Of him she never spoke with malice, never.

Now Giulia had someone to listen to her: me. As in our first conversation flying over the Atlantic, it was always she who did more of the talking, telling me an infinity of stories great and small, about the articles she commissioned or wrote for the paper, about the minor incidents of life in the office, petty feuds, jealousies, injustices, the confidences of friends, the problems or successes she had with her children, the things she bought for the house, the vegetables she got at the market, the delicious meals she cooked. There — that’s where my uneasiness made itself felt for the first time, I remember clearly, at the table. One of those evenings when Giulia couldn’t stay with me, but had to hurry home at dinnertime — breathless, in her constant struggle with time — as if she were coming from the newspaper. Suddenly, as I was eating dinner alone in a squalid pizzeria, I saw her at the stove, preparing food for her family, and then at the table, laughing with her children, telling her husband something, receiving compliments from them all for the wonderful meal she had made. I felt a pang of jealousy. From that day, I began to desire Giulia not only in bed. I began to want to share with her the little rituals of daily life: dinner with friends, an outing with the children, a vacation, shopping at the supermarket. I thought how, in all those situations, it was the husband who got to be close to her, who enjoyed her presence continuously: not me. And I wondered how she really was with that man. I wondered if, and when, and how, they made love: odd, I had never thought about this before. Giulia talked so much, she told me so many things, but about him, and what she really felt, she said little. Was it reserve, a need to protect the privacy of her marital relations? Or perhaps only timidity, a difficulty in opening up? I then realized that she had rarely said to me, “I love you,” “I adore you,” phrases typical of lovers. It seemed to me that I could see love in the way she looked at me, but she measured her words, as if she distrusted them. She was much freer with text messages. She wrote: What are you doing to me? I’m yours more and more, I miss you, I want you, I think of you, dream of you, you’re inside me, part of my life. And yet when, having received the message, I called her, I had the sensation that it was a different person who had sent it, that she was retreating, that she no longer wanted to talk about it. And the worm, planted inside me, kept on working. I would have liked to ask her: You, what do you really feel? What is the difference between me and your husband? Would you leave him if I asked you to? How would you react if I asked you, for example, to marry me? Would you run away with me to New York? Or, if I moved to Rome, would we live together? But I couldn’t: It was stronger than me: I couldn’t. These were the sort of questions that, the other way around, women had always asked me, in the various relationships I’d had. Relationships without love. Relationships in which I listened to those plaintive questions — What about you, what do you feel? Do you love me? Do you care for me, think of me? — with an increasing sensation of nausea. With the wish to silence their mouths, flee, never see them again.

A second-class station, a station to put up with, then cast off. So it seems to some: sticky with worn-out expectations, sickening with the sharp odors of sweat, unwashed skin, and rotting food. For me it was vital, I feel bound to this piece of the city, this place of shipwrecked souls, with its sudden drafts, perennial construction sites, gritty, dirty stone walls. You hear the echo of the street outside, only one sound lost among the many in this tangled skein of balustrades, platforms, asphalt, iron, stairs, sad shops, and tracks that end who knows where.

“Look at this crowd, what a mess, this station is a bordello, makes you sick, yes, let’s go sit down, let’s move away, there are Poles, Bulgarians, and Romanians lined up outside waiting for some bus or other, going back to their countries whose capital cities aren’t worth shit, cities that no one remembers, with names too crowded with consonants, they’re going home or to some other country for their deals, and I could say a few things about those deals, things you wouldn’t believe. Deals and relatives go together for the drifters of Tiburtina, but basically the whole world is home, don’t they say? Come on, sister, it’s what they say, it’s pure popular wisdom, pay attention to me, I’m well acquainted with them, these Bulgarians and Romanians, these human rejects running away from everything, who make sweet eyes at you, then become predators — they have a brutality inside, a brutality that they spew in your face, you can’t imagine the violence they inflict, I know it, I bear the marks, but you can’t imagine, sister.”

I don’t even try. I’ve never tried to put myself in someone else’s place, to think like others, and, lucky for me, life has coddled and protected me, it’s spared me the violence you’re talking about, life singled me out from birth, granted me privilege, inserted me among the elite, if it hadn’t would I be here? She’s following me, her high-heeled sandals, really hideous, are noisy and they attract the glances of some Sinhalese. One sticks out his tongue with a lascivious gesture, disgusting, and it’s better if they don’t even notice us. We should hurry. I try to camouflage myself; in the meantime we get to the bar and sit down.

“Let’s have something to drink while we wait, all right?”

“Yes, perfect, I’m thirsty, order some wine, what was I telling you? Damn, there’s gum stuck to my heel, disgusting, I paid fifteen euros for these sandals, to you, a lady, it won’t seem much, for me it was quite a sum, usually I buy shoes at a stall, from Biagio, who charges three euros a pair, four at most, one time I gave him a handjob in his van and he gave me three pairs, can you imagine what a stroke of luck? A simple, quick handjob, just a matter of holding it, not even that bad; he has a hairy stomach but he doesn’t smell, or make you do something you don’t want to. I gave him this handjob and I was all set with shoes for quite a while. Eh... certain kinds of luck don’t happen often. What were we saying? Yes, about these people here, these Bulgarians and Romanians, who now, if I understand it, can come and go without even showing their documents, Madonna, what a shithole politics is. Let them stay in their countries instead. Maybe in those countries, maybe there are even some nice things, but a person with her back to the wall, like me, doesn’t have much time or desire to think about nice things, a person like me, sister, doesn’t have the desire to feel tolerant, trying to understand is hard work, it’s a luxury, a privilege for the rich. For someone who’s alone, drifting, without ties, someone who lost her mother as a child and ended up with a goddamn drunkard of a father, nice things are a cigarette smoked with pleasure or a man who fucks you tenderly, or something like our meeting, sister, I mean it, or maybe something like Biagio and the shoes, those are the nice things, but I’m used to seeing garbage all around me, and these people are garbage. Don’t make a face, I’m not mean, but it’s easier to think of an enemy, to enjoy someone who seems worse off than you at that moment when solitude seizes you by the throat, gnaws at your guts, devours your insides. It’s been years since I’ve tried to hold onto something, to make a regular life, but I always end up skidding off track, something doesn’t work, it slips and slides away, it doesn’t go right, then I have to vent, that’s natural, and I have to unburden my mind, my thoughts. If you don’t they’re in danger of becoming a burden, you have no idea how certain thoughts can harass you, scream in your head, so I start observing those people and doing like everyone else, thinking of them as the enemy, shitty foreigners who come to steal our jobs and our opportunities, that’s how I see them... Instead I should see them as a mirror reflecting my puffy face, the dark circles under my eyes, because — you wouldn’t believe it — but I know I’m not so different, it’s only that I don’t admit it and never will, that’s all. It’s a shortcut and I take it; I hear the newspaper lady who, after pushing away a fat gypsy with a child in her hand and one at her neck, mutters, Disgusting, and if I think the same thing while I drink a glass of wine sitting on this uncomfortable chair, shooing off flies and intrusive glances, if I think the same thing I can delude myself that I’m not the totally marginalized person that I am.”

She points, raising herself slightly from the chair; her body gives off a fetid odor. I look at them through the window, lined up on one of the platforms, in groups, holding tight to suitcases like the ones people used in the ’70s. Some women are leaning against the wall at one of the side entrances to Tiburtina.

“With those packages, those old suitcases piled on top of each other, those boxes tied with string, they make me sick, and the ragged children, little tramps ready to stick their hands in your pocket or your purse. You get to hate them, it’s not out of meanness, sister, you agree? You know, you know better than me that to say a thing is good or bad is difficult, sometimes certain situations impose choices that go back and forth between good and bad, and then what the fuck are good and bad? Sometimes there’s not a big difference, right?”

When she speaks like that she scares me, but I know it won’t last long, luckily; sometimes I listen, sometimes I pretend because her speech is more like a disconnected muttering, anyone would think she’s a poor lunatic with heels that are too high and a confused mind, she eats her words or they’re incomprehensible because of the spaces between her teeth and her pale, cracked lips. Every so often she spits and a tiny drop of saliva lands near my motionless, clasped hands, or on the table; she notices, and dries it with her sleeve, then continues her monologue, which is repetitive, like a litany or maybe a prayer, an invocation, a lamentation. Something indefinable and strange, I would like to shut her up but I can’t. The truth is, she doesn’t want to talk to me but to everyone and no one, and anyone who can pretend to pay attention will do. Outside, the platform areas are blue, a blue lacerated by the colors and noises of the city buses and the long-distance buses that sometimes sit for a while, sometimes arrive quickly, pick up passengers, and leave. Evening is coming, a pink and blue sunset, dotted with the lights of the streetlamps and some advertising billboards. I don’t know if she’s noticed. She asks if she can have another drink, I nod to the waitress, who wipes her hands on her apron, brings a carafe of wine with two glasses, and rolls her eyes as if to say, When are you leaving? But it’s just 7:00 and the bar closes at 9:00, so she has to be patient. I know perfectly well that she’s irritating, her body and her manner are irritating, especially when she raises her voice and speeds up the rhythm of the litany, speaking like a psycho and making the other (very few) customers in the bar turn. I’m sure, in fact, that the waitress is disgusted, and since I’m with her I have the same effect, because that waitress can’t understand what in the world I’m doing in the company of this woman. She shouldn’t speculate, or feel irritation, or ask us why we’re together, all she has to do is bring the wine. All she has to do is take the money and bring back a handful of coins in change. That’s all.

“It’s a while since I felt so relaxed. I’ve had so many bad times and never anyone to give me a hand. I’ve always had clowns instead of men around me, good-for-nothings with no balls who ruined my life, and now their ghosts chase me, their voices echo in that shithole where I live, have you ever seen ghosts? Have you ever been pursued by irritating voices? No, eh, no, right? You’re respectable, you’ve got money and an education, why would you ever be persecuted, you’re a person who’s got a nice life. I’m just unlucky, and, shit, now my nose is running, this damn allergy.”

She sneezes three or four times, opens her purse and rummages for something, with the back of her right hand she wipes her nose, with the left she’s still rummaging around, then, exasperated, she empties the purse on the table. The waitress turns for a second, hearing the sound of objects falling on Formica, but fortunately some customers come in. Two Tampaxes, a glass bead necklace, and two rings that seem like a child’s toys or old prizes from an Easter egg tossed out who knows when, a crumpled package of Winston blues, a red pen with a chewed cap, a felt-tip pen, a bunch of receipts, cards for masseuses, fortune tellers, and cleaning agencies, a wallet and plastic document holder, three matches, supermarket makeup, spilled and half-empty, and a tiny cracked mirror. I think of my expensive foundation in its precious case, tiny grains that make the skin opaque and smooth. I think of my wallet with all the slots for credit cards. I make a rapid mental comparison to reassure myself. I keep my hands away from all that stuff. Finally she finds the package of Kleenex and dumps everything else back into the purse that’s leaning against her feet. I feel a sensation of retching after seeing her worthless things, horror that stinks of rot and sweat, of age and negligence, the traces of her devastated life, the weave of small useless things that mark her desperation. I breathe in and out and it passes. I can’t let myself go, not now. I order another carafe of wine and two slices of pizza.

“Yes, good idea, I wanted to tell you I was hungry, you could have asked me before, when the allergy attacks I get all puffy, my eyes tear, I sneeze, I can’t taste flavors anymore, but now it’s better and I’m really hungry. What, are you eating too? You’re really eating too, keeping me company, you won’t leave me to eat alone like a dog, like the maid who eats in the kitchen? You’re not showing how you despise me, the way everyone always does?”

I nod.

“Good, pizza, then maybe a sandwich. Look there. You see that woman over there? She’s Bulgarian, from a town in the countryside, I don’t know the name. I met her here once, she’s a prostitute, and a client brought her back to the station, she’d been beaten, her face was swollen, she had a black eye, her head bleeding, she was staggering, it was also lovely, the tracks in the early morning, with all the wires, the gray sky, the trains standing there, and only a few souls waiting, it was lovely, and I must have been there watching and smoking a cigarette, waiting for the train to Termini to go home; but, not even thinking about it, I helped that Bulgarian shit whore who was screaming in pain, I got her a pizza, I helped clean her wounds, she told me she needed something strong to drink and I ordered a brandy for her. I paid, goes without saying. You should have seen her, she was indecent, in a miniskirt with orange sequins stuck to her thighs, no underpants, and black boots with very high heels, threatening, like her expression, well, I didn’t think about it, I took care of her and fed her and she, that shit whore who should go back to her disgusting country, she cheated me out of the little money I had when I went to the bathroom. Then they say... they say so many things, that you shouldn’t be a racist, that we need solidarity, but what solidarity are we talking about?”

I order a bottle of water and another carafe of wine, still so long to wait, hours that pile up on one another, in the midst of this construction, it’s already started, that’s going to make this hideous station something difficult to imagine, for the future, glass everywhere. I let my mind wander, trying to picture commercial areas, a radical cleaning, police everywhere insuring the safety of middle-class people, luminous spaces for shopping — it will be beautiful someday. Now it’s depressing, the way her words are depressing, the way even her tone of voice is somehow depressing, a melancholy that enters the bones and chills you. Luckily I just need a little patience, just a little patience and this agony will be over.

“I come here the same hours she does, the Bulgarian whore, not that I do the same work, let me be clear, my dear — I’ve given it away for money only three times in my life and it was a question of real desperation, but I defy anyone to say that Maria Grazia is a whore, I defy anyone to even think it. I come from a town in the south, it’s true, my town is a dead town, all the young people have given up, thrown in the towel. My father’s still there, that slobbering drunk, and four of my six brothers and sisters, but I haven’t seen them for years, that’s my past, I fled as a child. I’ve had two husbands, three, no, five children, given up first to foster care, then adoption, eh, my dear, some people are born with the maternal instinct and some aren’t, and now I’m alone, I’m not hiding these things, but I don’t want anyone to associate me with those people there, those dirty tramps who come to steal bread from us Italians.”

I nod again, I don’t know why but I do. I have the illusion, agreeing with her, that time is passing more quickly. Time has a strange rhythm in this place, it’s like the flow of time in a hospital. The squalor is suffocating, choking, a squalor that, strangely, you soon get used to, it tames you, drugs you, bringing you back to an almost animal stage.

“This pizza is good” — chewing, she drips tomato on her shirt, she doesn’t notice, and I wipe it off with a napkin — “really, they warmed it up, hey, what are you doing? Oh, sorry, oh, oh, okay, no problem, sister, happens to me all the time. I spill things on myself, I know it’s because I’m greedy, I’m hungry, and I don’t always have something to eat, I’ve struggled sometimes to get a meal, my life is a mess, my mother died when I was eight, shit, order something else to eat, look at that slutty Bulgarian, her lipstick is smeared, it’s making me lose my appetite.”

She won’t lose her appetite; at my grandfather’s house she cleaned out the refrigerator after she killed him with that sort of modern statue that he bought at auction in London, the old fool. He was so pleased when he came back from that auction with those horrible, expensive pieces. He was especially proud of that statue — to me it was repulsive the moment I saw it, but I pretended to appreciate it with him. I make a great effort to maintain a certain style of life: I knew that the will was all in my favor, I knew roughly the amount, I mentally calculated what I would soon get my hands on, but I felt an uncontrollable rage for all that money thrown away on a stupid statue. Grazia grabbed it and bashed his head in. She could’ve used whatever she wanted, that wasn’t a problem, all she had to do was kill that disgusting old man who had stopped supporting me, and then plant her fingerprints everywhere. Besides, she didn’t like interference. She urged me not to get involved, and I didn’t, she said that she knew her business. I can’t say she was wrong.

“Look at the tracks when evening comes, this station seems different, there are souls walking on the platforms, dragging themselves, look at them, fragments that have survived, lives torn to pieces and then put back together, like mine, look at the scene, it’s changed suddenly, what a strange effect, the platform must be very slippery, an intercity train just came through, some others should be arriving soon and then your cousin’s.”

“More wine?”

“Sure, sister, let’s have more wine, basically you’re set and so am I. I should be fine, no? And there’s no risk, right? I’ll listen to you, I’ll lie low, hole up in my house and put those things in a safe place, and they’ll say it was a robbery by those disgusting Romanians... Those disgusting Romanians... People like when they make headlines in the TV news, the talk about the safety of the citizens in the balance, about the dangers of immigration. Aaah ahhaha! I mean, immigration is a horror and it’s dangerous too, and those people, look, right there” — she points like a lunatic at a group of women and children getting on a bus — “are criminals, but let’s say that in this case they’ve got nothing to do with it, but who cares, no? One more, one less... Heavens, I’m only forty-two, maybe with the jewelry, the gold coins I took — oh, your grandfather cared about them, they were carefully hidden — maybe with all those things I can reconstruct a scrap of a decent life for myself, get out of this wretched poverty.”

She’s wearing a low-cut gray sweater. Under it you can see a dirty, threadbare flesh-colored bra. A thickset man with a mustache enters the bar, in a horrible brown-checked shirt, a type of man you never see even by mistake in the places I usually frequent, art openings, sushi bars, exclusive parties — a man who must have short, dirty nails and bread crumbs in his mustache, I don’t see them but I’m sure they’re there — passes by, looks at her, ONLY at her, and this causes me, in spite of my horror at this man, a strange pang of jealousy; he stops a moment, casting his eyes on her décolleté, they linger there, bovine eyes the color of eggs fried too long, observing her abundant flesh; I can read in his expression a pleasant excitement, but how is it possible to be excited looking at this wreck? This human refuse that thinks about rebuilding a life when she’ll never have a life, when her life will be so brief she can’t imagine it. Here’s some more wine, she must be drunk, or at least tipsy.

“You want some, dear? It’s good, this wine, I like sparkling white wine, one of my two husbands — wait, ever since they beat me up outside Tiburtina, trying to steal a necklace, I’ve lost my memory. I was three months recovering, you know, I didn’t lose my memory completely, but I have trouble remembering — one, maybe it wasn’t even one of my husbands but a man I was with for a while, told me I didn’t know shit about wine and had a typical woman’s tastes, stupid tastes. Well, I don’t give a fuck and I’ve always, and only, drunk sparkling white wine like this — it’s very good. I was telling you. I could clean myself up, find a job, eh, what do you say, maybe with all those things it might be time for life to smile on me, to start going well, it never has, I’ve always been so unlucky. So unlucky.”

She’s crying. Well, it means she’s getting drunk. I don’t say anything; I’ve noticed that she doesn’t like to be touched, she hates caresses, sudden physical contact, she’s terrified when anyone — man or woman, doesn’t matter — she’s terrified when anyone touches her, she gets defensive, and it’s no good if she loses her total trust right now. Other people’s hands scare her, and it’s understandable, poor thing — if anything about her worthless life can ever be understood — she was badly beaten up years ago. Maybe even as a girl, she took a violent beating on the street, she mumbled something like this the day I met her. Then there were the husbands and various boyfriends, the violence that she doesn’t even count, but they worked her over, they reduced her brain to mush, her whole face is a scar, but all you want to do is hit her, she is so irritating, I’m sure that waitress would happily hit her, me too. And yet I needed a drifter with a residue of innocence. I came here many times, to the Tiburtina station, a neighborhood far away from the one where the “operation” was going to take place. I couldn’t find anyone for my purpose in the wealthy neighborhoods, those chic, fashionable neighborhoods that my family liked, where I grew up protected by a ring of private schools, by the sharp vigilance of governesses, restrained by the paralyzing block of solitude whose echo I heard, room after room, in that labyrinthine house where, as a child, I lost the map of doors, verandas, windows. I was looking for someone suitable to do the dirty work and I found the right person, I was really very clever about it, she was perfect, my grandfather’s house is full of her fingerprints, her traces, I wore gloves and didn’t touch anything. She didn’t ask me why, she didn’t even notice, she carried out my orders with her bare hands, like an idiot. At last I’ll be able to pay back the person who provides the coke, those types don’t have much patience — first they give you the top-quality stuff without a fuss, you spoil your lover, your friends, you all snort it with that marvelous Dolce & Gabbana exclusive designer straw that’s only sold abroad, and not everywhere (I found them in Ibiza during a quick trip for a party, and I bought ten to give to certain friends), they arrive punctually with the white powder, and your parties become the most sought after, your invitations the most in demand; the only thing is, then they present the bill, it’s okay to make them wait a little, then give them a down payment, a diamond necklace, another small down payment, and meanwhile they continue to supply you and your lovers and friends, and then the debt goes up, it rises, that old bastard couldn’t understand how much I NEEDED to have MORE money available, he took the liberty of prying into my finances to make a point about how my lifestyle seemed excessive to him. Come on, excessive? I have friends who go around with Arab millionaires, you have no idea the life they lead, I’m like a bum compared to them, I told him, but he wouldn’t listen, he muttered moralistic tirades about good sense, ethics, growing up, once he even talked to me about a JOB. I started laughing and walked out, but is this really funny? Anyway, now the problem is solved. Good, first the debts, then I’ll be able to buy that splendid apartment the filthy old man wouldn’t give me for Christmas; he wanted to enjoy his money, he wanted to spend his last years in peace, but how the fuck was I supposed to manage? As soon as I saw that apartment I let it be known among the “rich people” that they’d better keep their clutches off it, that it would be mine. Well, I can’t care too much about my reputation now. Even Sandro said he was going to leave. He’s used to spending time in the gym, snorting the high-quality stuff whenever he wants, free access to the joint account, restaurants every night, and I began to find myself in serious trouble — that stubborn old man, all his fault. Really, you could say he asked for it.

“I might try to see my children again, I know it’s not right to go and look for them when they’ve been adopted, it’s not right to disturb the equilibrium of young kids, but they might have the desire too, might like to know me, to understand that I wasn’t in any condition to take care of them when they were born, that I had big problems, and the new families might have a bit of compassion and decide at least to let me see them, to find out if they’re well. We’re waiting for your cousin, right? There’s not much time left, it’s rushing by. I understand, seeing what happened. On the telephone she believed it about the robbery, right?”

Of course she believed it. She believed it so completely that she repeated the special offers of my telephone service provider. There is no cousin to pick up, but in about fifteen minutes we’ll go to the track where the regional train passes, and a slight push will be enough, you might even slip by yourself but I’ll help you, happily, you’ll end up under the train, and they’ll find your foul body mangled and almost unrecognizable. Almost. I’ve managed to stick a couple of Grandfather’s coins in your purse and a card from the restaurant he always went to — it will be easy to connect you to him. I’ll be set, and so will you, basically, you poor derelict, you’ll have stopped suffering. You’ll die knowing you’ve done the world, and especially me, a favor by getting rid of that old man. He terrorized my parents for a lifetime with his despotic claims, he made my father a worm, with no balls and no will power, my mother an unstable neurotic who kept herself going with drugs and clinics, he sent my brother off to the United States. He allowed me, it’s true, a comfortable life, but it was always as if he were giving me a handout, as if I should be content like a dog that picks at a bone with a piece of rubbery meat attached; that’s how I felt, that old man was throwing me crumbs the way you throw birdseed to the pigeons, he thought he could humiliate me with impunity, at his pleasure, with that sadistic, distant little smile. Now he’s lying in the enormous living room of his gloomy but (it’s true) very beautiful villa, all those super-sophisticated alarm systems were of no use to him, I’ve always known the maid’s day off, she’s been with him for decades, more a slave than a housekeeper. I showed up at the gate timidly, saying I was with a friend, half a bottle of sleeping pills in his usual glass of port (incredible how alcohol enhances the effect of benzodiazepine), and everything unfolded naturally, without a hitch. He’s lying beside the desk in the big living room, I don’t know anymore how many floors or how many rooms the villa has, set in its vast park, cared for by a crowd of gardeners, I’ve never been interested, maybe that will go to my mother, but I know for certain that all the real estate, the stocks, and the money in the bank go to me (my brother’s had a trust fund for years). Mama can keep the villa, she and I never see each other, I can’t stand her crises and her sense of victimhood, and I could never live in the same place where he lived, ate, burped, peed, and where now he lies with bits of brain matter scattered over the expensive carpet. Drowned in a pool of red blood. Oh, no, really, I couldn’t.

“Excuse me, have you looked at your watch?”

I was lost in my thoughts. Grazia wipes her mouth and points to my wrist. She’s right, it’s time.

“Gracious, it’s late. Shall we go to the track?”

She nods, sways as she gets up, perfect, she’s tipsy, swaying, and more ravaged-looking than usual. The waitress must have finished her shift because, with my fifty-euro bill, I pay another girl, one I hadn’t noticed, and she doesn’t seem to really notice us either; luckily I put on this scarf. I take the change and head to the exit, I check the track on the board, she’s dawdling, I take her arm, we can’t be late, and in fact we aren’t late, the timing is absolutely perfect, she holds on and smiles at me, she stinks of poverty and empty hopes, and I can’t wait to be free of her.

“I told you my daughter must be fourteen by now? It’s true I don’t have a maternal instinct, but sometimes I wonder how she is, if she resembles me, what sort of life she has, maybe she even has a boyfriend, what do you think? Oh shit, I’m boring, eh, always talking, I don’t shut up for a moment, you’ve offered me a chance to change my life and I’m annoying you, wait, I’m going to trip, don’t hurry so much, please, not so fast. I thought your cousin always goes in first class, here I am, I’m coming, how beautiful Tiburtina is in the evening, it looks like it’s wrapped in velvet. Look, the train’s coming. Which car is your cousin usually in?”

I ignore her, I have to concentrate. The spot is perfect, I feel a drop of sweat beading my forehead, but I have taken a tranquilizer, I’ve got to maintain perfect self-control, I can’t make a mistake now, or it would all be in vain. She’s looking at the train, her back’s to me, she keeps asking about my cousin, I have to shut her up, it’s time, just a little push, I reach out my arm...

“Don’t move, stand still!”

They twist my arms behind me, they’re hurting me, the train’s coming, my heart is pounding, but what the fuck is happening? My plan, my project?

“What’s happening, sister, the police, but what in the world? Tell me...”

There are four of them, they’ve put handcuffs on me, they lead me out of the Tiburtina station, pushing me, separating me from her. Grazia disappears from view, I stagger, I feel lost, then I recover and confront them: I try to say that they don’t know who they’re dealing with, they cannot even REMOTELY imagine who they’re dealing with, that I belong to one of the most important families in the city. They aren’t listening to me, it’s disgraceful, the whole station seems to be blocked off, everyone’s looking at me, I’m a freak to all these derelicts, an amusing sideshow. An itching sensation spreads along my back. I was supposed to carry out an act that would allow me grandeur for the rest of my days, and I’m reduced to an ordinary criminal, even that despicable Bulgarian whore looks at me and laughs, she roars with laughter, showing broken yellow teeth, Grazia was right, she was really right about the Bulgarians, about the Romanians, about this woman who took advantage of her good faith and robbed her, oh, she was right, because Grazia is my friend, no, she’s not human waste, I never thought so, I had respect for her, you shit whore, you hurt her, I’m yelling that she hurt my friend and shouldn’t have, then I spit on her, and I don’t care if the cop on my right gives me a painful slap, my family’s lawyer will take care of her, a prince among lawyers, who will come and get me out of this mess, the spit hits her in the face, when I see Grazia I’ll tell her, I want her to be proud of me; the truth is, I’ve never had a friend like her, not even in high school. Okay, I wanted to push her under the train, help her slip, drunk as she was, but I would have done it unhappily, the circumstances were beyond my control. I’m almost glad it didn’t happen, I miss her company, let’s hope that they don’t put me in isolation, that they let me stay with her. I’m not very talkative myself but I really like listening to her, and she’s never quiet, I unfortunately have this voice that talks to me inside and a different voice that comes out of my mouth and says almost nothing, so I’m confused, but she, Grazia, she’s tough, someone who knows her business, she even got Biagio to give her some shoes, thanks to a simple handjob, a hundred points to my friend. I could never make grandfather understand how much I needed the increase in my monthly check, a bonus and that apartment, I could never explain to him that he HAD to get it for me, otherwise he was going to shatter my life, shatter everything I had, I insisted, I talked, I insisted; instead, life is so simple, a handjob at the right moment is all you need, all you need is knowing what to use when you have to do something, and when you have to do it you do it, she taught me all that, I MUST see her again, hear her talk...

“You’re in trouble, signora, serious trouble.”

Night descends over the tracks at Tiburtina and if you watched carefully you would see that it really looks like velvet.

We’re in an anonymous room at the central police headquarters in Rome. A policewoman is talking to a woman who, it seems, is forty-two years old and is wearing a scarf, along with high-heeled sandals, a low-cut sweater of a light color, under which can be seen a pale bra, and a peasant skirt. Concealed behind a tinted window, several people observe the scene: the lawyer for the woman, whose name is Selvaggia Torri Livergnani; the vice-commissioner; one of the policemen who found the body of the grandfather, the well-known Count Edoardo Torri Livergnani; one of the policewomen who made the arrest; and a psychiatrist called in by the lawyer. The vice-commissioner speaks first:

“Sir, we found Count Livergnani lying on his back on the floor of the living room in his villa. The maid informed us, she’s still in a state of shock. We hurried to the place and found fingerprints all over the crime scene, obvious signs and clues leading to the granddaughter, without the shadow of a doubt. We wanted to be sure, and we located her as she was heading toward the Tiburtina station. We followed her; she sat by herself for more than an hour in the bar, talking to herself, a jumble of disconnected fragments that attracted the attention of one of the waitresses, whose signed statement I have here. Then we understood, with conclusive evidence, that Signora Torri Livergnani intended to throw herself under an arriving regional train that was headed to the Termini station. At that point we were obliged to proceed to the arrest. I hope you see, sir, of course we understand the family’s grief and would like to treat the case with maximum discretion.”

“I understand perfectly,” the lawyer says calmly. “But you see, and you can hear too, that she keeps asking about this imaginary friend Grazia, and when she’s alone she talks to her and she answers, addressing a ‘she’ who isn’t there, as if ‘she’ were the one who had actually committed the crime. What do you say, professor?”

“There will have to be an examination, but it strikes me as a clear case of split personality. If she’s faking, she’s a phenomenal actress — she should win an Oscar.”

“Yes,” the policewoman comments, speaking up, “she should win an Oscar if she’s faking it. While we were leaving the track at the Tiburtina station she spat in the face of a Bulgarian woman, saying it was for what she had done to Maria Grazia, but we found no trace of any Maria Grazia. In the car, as we were bringing her here, she kept asking about this Grazia. Then she became silent for a moment and in a strange voice said, ‘Don’t worry, sister, they won’t separate us.’

“Furthermore, I should add that Signora Torri Livergnani had camped out at the entrance to the Tiburtina station for several nights, and had already been removed once by the transit police, who also checked her documents. That’s it.”

“You can see that this is a very disturbed person, especially with the addition of these details.”

Most of them nod in agreement.

Behind the glass, the woman, left alone, smiles.

“Really, sister? You spat at that Bulgarian whore? I’m proud of you, you were great. Now it looks like we’re going to have some problems, eh, I understand, I’m not stupid, but I’m sure your powerful, wealthy family will get us out of this trouble as soon as possible, filthy rich people like you certainly don’t need a scandal. They’ll give us a hand, right?”

You can be sure of it, Grazia, you can be sure.

It was Christmas Eve, in the vast concourse of Stazione Termini. Marshal Bovio, his mood grim, his hands deep in the pockets of his big regulation overcoat, swam against the current of a desolate river of men and women. Small groups of pinched dark faces; lost gazes and a few laughs — too loud — to summon up cheer; the faces of vagrants, of old women bent over shopping carts, pushing their little piles of possessions. Unmindful — or unconscious — of everything around them. Normal faces, having ended up there by mistake, on Christmas Eve, in the cold of the station rather than the warmth of their own houses.

The marshal leaned against the locked door of the information office, looked at his watch — 7:30 — and took out an MS from the crumpled, half-empty pack, lit it, and inhaled deeply.

Many years earlier, he recalled, he had been on duty on Christmas Eve when a traveler was knifed to death, near the track where the last local for Nettuno departed.

The whole night had been spent interrogating the derelicts who lived in the station because they had nowhere else to go.

The murderer had been an illegal taxi driver, a slightly disfigured little man whose name the marshal couldn’t remember.

The man’s face, however, he remembered clearly — a sick-looking face, the jaw shaken by a silent weeping, an animal sob after the last smack. The first gray light of Christmas Day was mixed with the yellow streetlights and the bitter odor of humanity, of fear of officialdom after a night of interrogation. Robbery and homicide for the disfigured taxi driver. Life in prison. Bovio had heard nothing more of him after the trial.

He inhaled the last drag of his cigarette, smoked down to the filter, and let it fall to the ground.

At home they must all be gathered by now for the big dinner — a southern family, traditions still strong — and for the exchange of gifts, after the flavors of Christmas, fragrance of homemade sweets, brilliant colors, and comforting warmth.

The newspaper seller near the information booth was preparing to close. He chaotically piled up newspapers and magazines inside the kiosk with the unconscious speed of one who fears being excluded from something.

An old woman with a cart approached the newsstand. A vagrant, with those dirty bags, those ragged sacks stuffed full of things. But there was something that set her apart — a strange dignity, perhaps — from the desperate, the destitute who wandered like melancholy phantoms through the station and around the idle trains. She wore a thick sweater and a man’s jacket; underneath was a long bright-colored skirt, cheerful; her hair was gathered under a carefully knotted kerchief. She began to attentively examine the magazines that the newspaper seller had not yet put away. She delicately leafed through one, as if she were looking for an article, or something.

Then she turned to the proprietor. She had a thousand lire in her hand.

“L’Unità,” she said.

The newspaper seller looked up and hesitated a moment before answering.

“L’Unità costs two thousand lire today. It’s Sunday, it has the supplement.” He seemed to be apologizing.

The old woman withdrew the money hand with the banknote but remained in front of the newsstand. She was still there, unmoving, when Bovio’s large hand reached out of his dark overcoat and placed a thousand lire in hers.

She looked up slowly, up to the marshal’s face. “What a kind person.” Her voice was thin but firm. “I hope that you may be granted everything you wish for.”

Then she turned, passed the two thousand lire to the newspaper seller, took her paper with the supplement, and moved along with her cart.

He stood looking at her. He was slightly ashamed of that blessing, so disproportionate with respect to his own instinctive gesture, which now seemed to him petty. He watched her move into the distance, into a remote corner of the immense concourse.

He took ten thousand lire from his wallet, clutched it in his hand, and slipped the hand in his pocket. He would catch up with the old woman, give her that money, and then hurry away, before anyone could see him.

So he began walking, feeling strangely embarrassed.

The old woman, meanwhile, had taken out a small broom and had begun to sweep her corner. All around, against the walls, under a scaffolding in front of the billboards that displayed the timetables, the homeless were preparing for Christmas.

Some were already asleep, rolled up in newspaper sheets, sheltered in cardboard huts, having closed their eyes knowing nothing of tomorrow. Others, awake, scanned the void or tended to themselves like tired old cats. One had his pants rolled up; his calves were covered with scabs that he picked at conscientiously, one by one, concentrating, his eyes, like a stray dog’s, red with some awful disease.

Now the marshal was just a few meters from the old woman. She had her back to him and continued to sweep. Serene, with the air of one who is placidly seeing to her own domestic affairs. Bovio was about to call out to her, when he felt a pang of nostalgia and the blurred memory of some distant Christmas. Corridors, lights, and lost rooms. Voices of excited children, yearnings from the vortex of the past.

Absurdly, he realized that it was not his memory.

Just as absurdly, he thought that he must return it to the old woman.

He took a few more steps, almost staggering, with a buzzing in his head and the hand in his pocket contracted around the ten thousand lire.

“Marshal.”

The voice of the young police officer was like a rock smashing a window. The marshal turned suddenly, with a guilty expression, it seemed to him. He quickly pulled his hand out of his pocket as if hiding evidence; he began walking away in a hurry.

“What is it?” The voice sounded too high, and fake.

He didn’t turn back.

There’s a radio’s playing. It’s coming from one of the upstairs apartments, and it’s got to be turned way up because we can hear it clearly, low but clearly. So much the better. It helps drown out the noise we’re making.

Moretti gives me a look and nods, as if he’s read my mind. This has been happening more and more often recently. He looks at me, nods his head, and says what I was going to say. Either we’ve become telepathic or he can read my face like a book.

“Hurry up, move it!” Moretti says, and Agello pushes the key further into the keyhole. It makes a loud, metallic squeak, but it’s muffled by the music. The click of the lock is even louder, but now it’s a question of moments, split seconds.

Moretti raises the pistol, holding it near his face, the back of his hand against the wool fabric of the beret covering his forehead. He gives the door a kick, straight-on, with the sole of his shoe, and it opens. In split seconds, one split second, we’re all inside, me with the MP5 raised, selector set to rapid fire. Albertino, ready with the twelve-caliber SPAS, Moretti aiming the Beretta with two hands, thumb on thumb, and Agello, with another Beretta and his arm raised to hurl a grenade, the pin already out.

But hurl it where? The apartment is just this, this room behind the door — table, chairs, kitchenette, a fake brick archway from which a transparent curtain hangs, and beyond it a bed. The apartments in Trastevere are usually tiny, but this is extreme.

A split second. Being the closest, I take a step, brush the curtain aside with my arm, turn the barrel of the gun, but I can see right away that there’s nobody here.

No, actually, there is somebody: There’s a sound like a sigh behind a small door in the wall, next to the kitchenette. It’s barely louder than a murmur and it’s muffled in the music that floats down the stairwell to where we stand.

A split second. Moretti kicks the door and the lock in the small door rips away from the jamb. Moretti and Albertino and I step in, weapons raised, and Moretti yells, “Police, stop!” hollering so loudly that the music from upstairs suddenly stops.

The girl sitting on the toilet clearly has no intention of moving. In fact, if not for her lips, which are trembling, she could be dead. She’s sitting paralyzed, a roll of toilet paper in her hand and her underpants at her ankles, eyes fixed on us, in our black body suits and ski masks, crammed together in a bathroom of a few square feet, shower and all.

Moretti raises his fist and we all lower our weapons.

“Shit,” he mutters.

He’d found a room on the Internet in a small residential hotel close to Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II. It was a quiet side street and easy to park, even though he wasn’t sure if the parking space he had chosen was illegal or not. At any rate, he couldn’t be bothered about parking tickets and was confident the Fiat wouldn’t be towed away since it wasn’t blocking anyone, and many other local vehicles were lined up on the same side of the street. The hotel was situated on the fourth floor of a massive apartment building and suited him fine: a clean, spacious, if somewhat Spartan place, just a reception desk manned by a young student busy revising her journalism and publishing exams, she informed him, and a small breakfast salon at the other end of the corridor from his room. He didn’t require anything more. There were bars all across the city, and anyway he didn’t drink. Never had. More taste than principle, even if he found that it led to some people gossiping behind his back back in London, and he was often suspected of being an ex-alcoholic. Print the legend, he thought; it’s miles more glamorous than the truth.

He changed into a clean shirt and walked toward Via Cavour and Stazione Termini. Here, the package he had ordered was left, as promised, in the luggage locker he had been sent a key for the week before. The transaction had not proven cheap, but then again, money was now the least of his worries. The gun had been left at the bottom of a plastic Rinascente bag in which the seller had buried it, with no sense of irony, under a crumpled mess of seemingly used women’s silk lingerie. This was not the ideal place to check the weapon out, but it appeared in good shape, and should contain six bullets. He would not require more. He treated himself to an espresso at one of the station’s cafeterias and watched with melancholy how the two spoons of sugar drifted slowly toward the bottom of the small cup. Just the way espresso coffee should behave, he recalled her teaching him when they were still together. He sketched a wry smile for any curious onlookers. The coffee and sugar boost gave him a fresh sense of purpose, renewed his determination to see this all through.

He walked away from the bar and the busy train station and took the direction of the Campo dei Fiori, past the unescapable ancient monuments surrounded by wide-eyed tourists. Shortly after crossing the Piazza Vidoni, the Roman streets became quieter again, as if foreigners no longer ventured this far, beyond their self-circumscribed tourist enclave, and he made his way down Corso Vittorio Emanuele II until he reached the Feltrinelli bookshop. He walked upstairs and ordered his second espresso of the day and a panini and sat at the edge of the store’s balcony watching the customers mill below as they picked up random books and shopped at their leisure. She had once written to him, a long time ago, before they had even slept together and were still enjoying a mildly flirtatious stream of e-mail communications, that this was her favorite spot in all of Rome to waste time, meditate, observe others, casually do her homework. On his fateful initial visit here, this was also the first place she’d taken him and they had spent an hour here, nervously silent most of the time, knowing that a few hours later they would be in bed together for the first time. He remembered every single moment — the perfume she had worn, the heat radiating from her white skin as their knees brushed against each other and she contrived to make her cappuccino last forever as if scared to move on to the next, concrete and physical stage in their affair.

He didn’t expect to find her here today. She was now studying in a different area, but still he had to come visit the place again. Just in case. To commune with the past. To reopen old wounds. To feel the hurt inside. It was foolish, he knew, but if he had to march down this calvary road of his own making, the Feltrinelli bookshop could not be avoided. The latest novel by Walter Veltroni and the Italian edition of the final Harry Potter book were piled high by the cash registers and staff kept on replenishing the displays on a steady basis. He’d sent her the English-language edition of the Rowling when it had appeared, but by then they were no longer on speaking terms and she had not even thanked him or acknowledged the gift, one of many over the months they had known each other. The first book she had sent him as a gift was a collection of stories by Italo Calvino. Strange how he remembered every single, irrelevant detail.

Finally, his stomach reminded him he hadn’t had a real meal since a dim sum in London’s Chinatown the day before, so he left the bookshop and headed across the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II toward the Campo dei Fiori and the Pollarolla restaurant where he had a pleasant memory of fragole di bosco with a fine dusting of sugar. Of course, he had also taken her there, once upon a time. Because of a stomach condition, she was not allowed to eat any spicy food, which he’d always considered something of a tragedy. But the meal today, insalata verde and risotto ai funghi, could not feed the pain inside, and later, as he walked back to his hotel, he made a detour by Stazione Termini and under cover of darkness surrounded by rushing commuters and loitering teenagers he slipped his left hand deep into the plastic bag he had now been carrying for half of the day and felt the hard grip of the gun down there. It felt real. By Stazione Termini he sat down and wept.

Springtime in Rome, a dawn populated with chattering birds. An impalpable veil of smog that slowly dissipates, as though steadily absorbed by the great sponge of the sun in its methodical climb toward the vault of the sky. White wisps of clouds scattered here and there in the blue that watches over the peaceful city and its outlying areas, still sunk in a stubborn Sunday morning slumber, broken by the din of garbage trucks, the rumble of a bus. “The 105 or the 81,” Quirino murmurs, rinsing the coffee cup under the faucet and placing it on the drain board. He fills a glass, takes some big sips. “Ah, the taste of Rome’s cool waters!” With a mechanical gesture he tightens the tie of his light woolen blue-and-white striped robe and gazes at the beautiful, mutilated structure of the Colosseum, licked by the first rays of the sun: the “big windows,” as he calls them, that run along the circular walls. “Solid,” he murmurs, satisfied, the tip of his index finger following the play of depressions and reliefs carved out of the fake marble with industrial precision, imitating with the touch of a master the irregularities of the stone worn away by time. “Centuries,” Quirino murmurs, drawing himself up and resting the palm of his hand on the edge of the credenza. He slips his bare feet into his slippers, and goes over to the window that looks out on the street, a modest strip closed to cars and flanked by low houses: The cables of television antennae hang down along the façades from the rooftops like improbable, permanent festoons, working their way somehow or other into window frames or cracks in the walls below the sills. “Television... everyone has a television...” He lowers his eyes to the street littered with beer bottles and small shapeless piles of trash. A cat emerges silently from an empty dumpster still sunk in shadow, and quietly licks a paw.

The stillness is broken only by the monotonous swishing of a street sweeper’s broom. The cat turns to watch the almost phosphorescent green plastic bristles, then resumes licking, indifferent to the other paw. It starts suddenly when it sees the broom rise — “Drunken kids!” — and angrily thump the dumpster’s grimy metal, barely missing its tail. “Drunken kids,” the street sweeper mutters again, wiping his forehead with his arm, his hands stuffed into enormous work gloves.

Quirino leans out, nods to him. “Got a bee up your butt tonight?” he says, relishing those first words of conversation. “Nice morning,” he adds, throwing his arms wide in a gesture that embraces heaven and earth.

“Nice morning, nice morning...” the other man repeats, shaking his head and crouching down on the sidewalk to retrieve a bottle stuck between the wheels of the dumpster. He raises it toward the window, dangling it between the black fingers of his bulky gloves. “They’ve trashed the neighborhood, those sons of bitches,” he says, waving the bottle in the air and tossing it in the bag. “You should see the garbage in front of that shitty store, where those deadbeat godless immigrants make money selling beer to young kids until 3 in the morning... A bottle factory? A piss factory!” he adds. He shrugs helplessly, looks around. “Filth everywhere... on the ground, on the walls...” He points to the layers of mimeographed posters pasted on the façades. “A person has his own problems, no place to live... rents here being what they are now... and there, they go and put stuff all over the walls... What a life it would be without rent... What a life it would be without rent...” he reads, stressing each word. “On all the walls... Some like it hot, some like it cold. And they think they’re fascists... social fascists... and there, they go and print these and stick them on the walls! And they still have revolution in their heads... And they go printing that crap about their laboratories for revolution... and there... they go and stick their proletarian solidarity on the walls. Those spoiled brats! To them, going to live in Pigneto seems revolutionary... with money, of course! Not to mention those other... beauties... Chinese, Bengalis, Pakistanis, Indians, Senegalese. Only they know what the hell they are... They come to our country to bust our balls... with their posters... because, what do I know, they have their holidays and they want to celebrate them however and wherever they say. They have houses like this... and they want them like that... Do we have houses like that? Oh, do we? Eight hundred euros a month, yours truly, in Torpignattara...” He holds three black fingers up against the sky. “Eight hundred!” he repeats. “So much for rent control...”

Quirino, with a sudden feeling of embarrassment, puts on a contrite expression. “That’s how it is,” he says, “with these new euros...”

“That’s how it is? The hell it is! Yesterday... yesterday, at the corner of Tor Pignattara, right next to my house... flyers everywhere. And why? Because these kids, immigrant sons of bitches, want to play cricket on Sunday... at Villa de Santis, in the park... and our kids follow right along, now they, too, want to play crick-e-crock... And what does it mean, huh, do you know what We want to play crick-e-crock means?”

Quirino shrugs.

“Not soccer,” the street sweeper continues, carried away by the heat of his words, “everybody knows what soccer is... No! And where do they want to play that crazy game? In Pigneto! In our neighborhood!” He shakes his head again, ripping some shredded paper off a wall. He looks around gloomily. “They can all go to hell, a person has his own problems...”

“His own problems,” Quirino echoes him, watching the man drag the garbage bag and the broom toward the end of the street. Then he sighs. He stays there a few moments longer to watch Sor Pietro come back up the pedestrian strip, dragged along by his mastiff, a coal-gray hulk that devours the street in great strides. He watches the man dig in his heels, tug on the leash — “Tito, heel!” — take off a loafer with a threatening gesture. The man argues with the animal, his small body shaking, his eyeglasses crooked on his nose. The mastiff lowers its head and, docile now, lets itself be pet; it slows its gait, now and then turns to its master, who adjusts his eyeglasses and nods blissfully.

“To each his own problems...” Quirino murmurs with a half-smile, closing the shutters and moving toward the little cage. “Good morning, Cesarì.” He takes out the drinking tray. “Some fresh water, hmm, Cesarì?” He goes to the sink. “A little lettuce... a slice of apple...” He sticks his hand in the cage, arranges everything on the tray. Then he holds out a finger. “Like a ray of sunshine, my little canary!” He begins petting the soft yellow feathers, feels the beak delicately nip his finger. “Hmm, Cesarì...” He slides his hand out slowly, watches the bird cock his head and look back at him. “Good boy, Cesarì!” he exclaims, observing the white cage with the small trapeze hanging in the center. “Go and play, Cesarì, Papa has things to do now.”

The Architect

On May 20, 2006, a hot sunny afternoon, the young architect-in-training Riccardo Tramonti, thirty-one, was completing an exploratory tour of the Pigneto neighborhood. In a few minutes — at 4:10, according to the police report — and just a few steps away (around two hundred meters) from the café where he had stopped (he had felt himself becoming weak, and dizzy, and he wanted something cold), the crime would take place. Of what happened next, which he would witness as the involuntary protagonist, Riccardo knew nothing. At 5 in the afternoon the next day, which is when he woke up, after nearly twenty-four hours in a coma, the first thing the nurse said to him was: You’re in all the papers.

It was, in truth, the only sentence that impressed itself in his memory, at least until, finally, after seventy-two hours in intensive care, he was taken to a rehabilitation ward, where he could have visitors. The first people to cross the threshold of his room (his mother and father; his girlfriend came that evening, just before visiting hours were over) said to him, taking for granted that he was fine, You’re in all the papers. There are even television cameras outside.

Riccardo was supposed to draft a report on “structural changes in the Pigneto neighborhood.” The job had been commissioned by the City of Rome and was part of a larger project of assessing the redevelopment of outlying neighborhoods. The firm (quite a well-known one) where Riccardo had been working for three years now (without anyone having recognized his ideas, Riccardo claimed) had won the contract; as a first step, it was supposed to review “the anthropology of the neighborhood,” and the young architect-in-training had been sent there on this exploratory mission.

Riccardo’s first sensation, as soon as he set foot in the neighborhood, was that of belonging: His appearance was not at all out of place among the inhabitants. Riccardo was tall and thin. He always knew what to wear, how to dress, in order to emphasize the idea that he was an architect — that is, someone who could devote himself to the spaces of others because he was able to devote himself to (taking care of) himself. Although he had undergone a notable loss of hair while preparing for an exam (which covered engineering concepts through difficult and obscure applications of mathematics and physics), he had pretended not to be very concerned about this change in his physical appearance. The reaction to this unpleasant development had occurred in three stages: He had shaved his head, grown a beard, and bought some stylish nonprescription glasses with thin gold frames. He could see perfectly well but thought that the look he had created for himself more closely resembled what people expected to see when they shook the hand of an architect.

The neighborhood was in the process of transformation, this was the first thing he would have written in his report. What had at one time been a neighborhood on the outskirts, in every sense, was on the verge of becoming fashionable. There were fewer and fewer old men playing cards, cursing some saint because luck wasn’t on their side. Fewer and fewer old ladies sitting outside doorways on straw chairs, while hens pecked in the dirt nearby. And more and more young people like Riccardo.

Even if all of them hadn’t lost their hair (although a percentage that Riccardo estimated at between twenty-five and thirty-five resembled him in a striking manner), they could be defined in every respect as young people who were heading toward a rosy future. Young people with ideas, a little like Riccardo, who maybe struggled to express them completely, perhaps because (a little like Riccardo) they worked in cold and coercive structures (even if the furnishings of those structures conveyed the contrary). And yet these young people wanted to react to all this, to create an image of themselves that would nurture optimism. Therefore, the young people seemed truly young, and those who were forty or older did their utmost to seem like young people.

The neighborhood was in the process of transformation, so Riccardo would have written. The houses, built of mortar and stucco, without solid foundations, and once inhabited by poor people who got by as best they could, were gaining value in the real-estate market. Those poor people, since they had reached the age limit (approximately seventy) beyond which it is no longer possible to pretend that everything is all right, were selling (en masse) the houses they owned. With the money obtained they had (almost en masse) decided to move out of that neighborhood (or die in exotic places). The young people who bought (using in part the family inheritance) spent more than the value of the apartments (thus contributing to the distortion of the market) and proceeded to renovate them. Wealth was arriving and the pace of life was changing; the young seemed younger, hence with more future before them.

The neighborhood was in the process of transformation, so Riccardo would have liked to begin and end his report. It was, in fact, the last thought that his mind formed before he came out of the bar in a pitiful state, with his blood pressure falling rapidly and his legs trembling in a truly suspicious manner.

The sports car speeds along the asphalt ribbon. The last mechanic who worked on it said that a car that low brings bad luck; the mechanic is a Jehovah’s Witness and he’s convinced that the closer you are to the ground the farther you are from the grace of God.

He drives looking straight ahead, she tilts her head slightly to the right; her forehead, hidden by blond bangs, hits the window at every bump. An almost constant noise, monotonous, grating.

Jolt.

Thump.

Jolt.

Thump.

He would like to tell her to move, to pay attention, but all he manages to do is grunt. He opens his mouth as if to speak but remains suspended between the last thought and the first word, in apnea. She won’t help; she watches the unbroken stripe that marks the emergency lane and remains silent. At the interchange for the Castelli Romani he takes the ring road; the car points south.

Signal, a glance in the rearview mirror, the engine grinds as he slows down and lets himself be swallowed up in the darkness by the broad asphalt ribbon filled with tires and metal plates.

He’s trying for the fourth time — he’s begun to count the number of times he tries.

He does it partly to occupy his mind and partly to make sure that everything is really happening and that it’s not the fault of some nausea-inducing systemic bug in the universe that spits us out by the billions onto earth.

How are you? he manages to say.

Then, again, there’s that pale forehead knocking against the glass, and the silence.

For one, three, ten interminable seconds.

She opens her mouth, parts her crimson-painted lips, and says, in a very distant singsong, Look out, you should be in the right-hand lane.

Suddenly he feels a crash beneath his breastbone, the collision between a raging and unsustainable irritation and the knowledge that you need patience if you want to be the superman of a woman like this.

For an instant he hates her.

For an instant it seems to him that two yellow eyes are approaching in the rearview mirror and he feels like laughing and shouting in fear.

He doesn’t need a reason to hate her.

He doesn’t need a motive to kill her.

He would give an arm to have her again the way she was at the beginning.

He brings a hand to his heart and feels nothing.

He lowers the volume on the radio with the index finger of his right hand and sighs loudly.

Again he tries to say something, I... but she interrupts him.

Shut up. Shut up. I’ve never seen anyone act as ridiculous as you so many times in a single evening. Why can’t you leave me alone, let me live and breathe? Why are you so incredibly insecure?

Tonight? he asks as if he hadn’t been aware of a thing.

Yes, tonight. Always trying to find my hand, hand, hand. As if you were a five-year-old child looking for his mother... Will you get it through your skull that I’m not your mother? I need a man, a real man, who gives me security but doesn’t suffocate me. You suffocate me, you’re like a murderer strangling his victim. I can’t breathe anymore...

He watches the knuckles of his fingers turn white, he feels the grip of his hands crushing the leather steering wheel. He accelerates, now the car is pressed tight to the road, aggressive and fast.

She continues, Always whining, demanding. First you don’t want me to talk at all and you’re insulted by everything I say, then I mingle at the party and your eyes are following me like radar. I don’t recognize you anymore...

She knows that to end the sentence properly she has to take a long pause and say...

I don’t know.

He brakes in order to avoid hitting a truck that’s traveling as slowly as an elephant.

He sees himself reflected in the sloping windshield of his car.

Thin, tan, curly hair mussed, white shirt at least as tired as he is.

Why do you talk to me like that? he asks, defenseless.

But he knows perfectly well why she talks like that.

Because he’s been transformed into a coward.

Because together they’ve completely destroyed the monument of their story and he can’t bear it.

For months he’s been crying at night, secretly, drowning his sobs in the pillow and getting up every five minutes.

He signals right, he needs gas.

The station is deserted, the self-service pumps work twenty-four hours a day. On the automatic cash register there’s a flyer, the face of a smiling young man in an IP cap. He reads the caption while he inserts twenty euros in the slot. It’s a newspaper clipping.

The boy was a gas-station attendant.

He worked at that station.

He was killed three weeks ago in a robbery, by thieves after the cash.

Two hundred and forty euros.

And so?

And so? she asks.

Let’s get going, I’m tired and my contact lenses are getting dry...

He finishes reading quickly, chooses a pump, and thinks that the kid didn’t deserve it.

Maybe no, maybe yes, but not like that, and anyway he feels bad for him.

He feels bad.

He thinks that she, lustful and fierce as a mantis, would have deserved it much more.

For what she’s doing to him, to them, to the monument of the two of them.

To die a terrible death, the death of a woman who leaves her man instead of caring for him through hard times.

A few drops on the side of the car, if he had a match it would all be easy.

He gets in and drives off, now she’s staring at him.

I don’t know... I think we should talk about it.

He thinks that with a little luck he could make the car crash against the guardrail in just the right place so that the window would shatter and the corner of the trailer would pass right through her without leaving even a scratch. A couple of spins and he’d come to a stop there, straddling the lanes, in a state of confusion. Ready to start again.

He doesn’t want to listen and raises the volume on the radio, she turns and looks silently at the dark outline of the hills, the fires burning on the smaller parallel roads, the shadows of the whores running along and jumping in cars like theirs.

He passes the truck without signaling, locks his jaw, one step away from cramping his facial muscles.

The radio is playing The Police.

This is the song you need. Learn to leave me alone, learn, she says, happy and exasperated at the same time.

Don’t stand, don’t stand so close to me.

He shakes his head. He’d like to have cascades of words ready to pour out of his wounded mouth, legions of truth endowed with conviction, like Christians in the middle of a crowded arena. But not a thing, he can’t say a thing because grief strangles him, and to have imagined her dead has upset him even more.

Weak, he feels weak, and the light of the dashboard projects an orange stigmata on his shirt.

Finally he manages to mutter, Then why are you still with me?

His eyes are shining.

Again she pauses for a long time while she pretends to hum. She knows it, the why, but she says, I don’t know.

He accelerates.

He thinks about jerking to a sudden stop while she’s unbuckling her seat belt: She would hit her head and with a little luck some interesting scenarios might open up.

But he repents.

There is no revenge, there is no redemption, only tears.

You’re driving worse than a blind man, watch out.

She is so beautiful that looking at her makes him feel terribly immoral, like someone spying through the chinks of a confessional.

She shouldn’t exist.

That old adage that the higher you go the harder you fall sounds more and more real.

He thinks of his friends, all absent spectators at this farce. They, too, are ready to stab him, because basically it couldn’t last.

Life is a serious business — if you start thinking about how much pain, you risk swerving off the road. If he weren’t crying silently he would have thought he’d fallen asleep at the wheel.

Five hundred meters to the Autogrill on the ring road.

He downshifts and with his left ring finger engages the right turn signal. He goes into neutral for a moment in the emergency lane because he’s always liked hearing the wheels spin freely, out of control, for a few seconds, it lets him breathe.

He steps on the clutch and puts the car in gear, takes his foot off, and the engine screeches while the revolutions get slower and the wall approaches a little too quickly.

It could end like this. She’s right, everything is unfolding badly, tiredly, for the worse.

He heard her say to a friend, Do something for him, he’s gotten heavy and boring.

He saw her smile several times at another friend.

Friends, how many infiltrated in the ranks of the good...

An abrupt turn of the wheel, and he is calmly controlling the approach to the brightly lit bar.

They get out of the car and separate.

He leans on the hood, which is hot, and peers at the sky; she heads, hips swaying, in the direction of the rest room.

She walks the way princesses of ancient Egypt must have walked.

Slow, sinuous, she glides over the asphalt without touching it, without hurrying. You need nobility of soul or an extreme lack of control to walk like that.

The same voice from before tells him that now, right now she can’t see him, he could take off and leave her there.

Or he could set fire to everything, run away, and let her burn. It would be the bonfire of vanity, the fire of catharsis.

Would a fabulous cunt like her be transformed into a phoenix as she runs maddened into the night, he wonders.

Would the gas station explode?

Would he die too?

Would the poor attendant survive or join his former colleague of a few kilometers and a few minutes earlier?

Would there be a big bang?

And what if he were saved but disfigured for life?

He doesn’t have the stuff of a pyromaniac, not him.

He turns on the engine while she touches up her makeup in the passenger-side mirror.

He puts it in first, drives off with a little jerk, and brakes suddenly after a dozen meters.

She screams.

A deafening, terrifying sound, like a trumpet. A noise not human stops his heart while a divine light floods the car’s interior.

The biggest truck in the world passes by with its horn blasting a few centimeters from his door.

Then it grows distant in the night.

Her makeup is all smeared and she is weeping hysterically, out of fear.

Sometimes it simply happens that the whole universe plots against you.

He is silent, dazed, the car stops along the edge of the road, clouds of gnats in the headlight beams and brave crickets singing of lovely death.

The silence hurts more than death’s scythe.

It’s toxic and humiliating, terminal.

Sorry, sweetheart, he stammers.

Shut up and take me home, she says.

The words bounce first against the window on the passenger side, reaching him only on the rebound.

But they are faraway words, he is alive and this for now is enough. Fear, the sudden terror has distanced him from her. Now it’s as if he has grasped the good and the bad, the drama and the farce. His love finished, and his love with makeup smeared like a clown or a whore at the end of the night.

He scratches his nose.

He starts off again.

He turns up the music a little and, out of the corner of his eye, lets himself glance at the cheap imitation of the woman he’s in love with. He hums, he tries to stay in tune to show that he can do something well.

You lousy shit, you practically got me killed. I can’t deal with you anymore, I’m not happy.

She says she’s not happy and he somehow understands.

To be in love does not imply being completely stupid.

In his new privileged position he manages to feel opposing feelings at the same time, the joy of survival and the torture of abandonment.

He struggles to swallow the knot that rises in his throat, he would like to be able to tell her that everything’s fine, that they’ll be happy, that there won’t be any room for sadness between them.

But again nothing comes out.

He would like to tell her that he’s been struggling for a lifetime, that he’s felt bad for a lifetime, that the only time he feels good is when he sleeps with her, tightly embraced.

If he took the key out of the ignition while they’re hurtling toward the curve they could talk about it in the afterlife.

Now he has so much darkness in his head, so much that she wouldn’t be able to find his face to hit him.

Sweetheart, I’m doing everything and the opposite of everything to make you happy, but it’s so complicated, it’s incredibly painful to never see you happy, I don’t know what to do, he says all in one breath.

She laughs in his face.

Now he stops talking.

Homicide can also be an evolved feeling of mercy, even if he’s not thinking about it anymore.

He downshifts, puts on the turn signal without listening to the music anymore, and musters courage.

Why are we stopping?

She might have said it, he doesn’t know with certainty because he’s not listening.

The place is completely deserted.

He pulls up to the most invisible point and turns the key. The engine sighs and then is silent, only the fan whirs loudly.

What the fuck are we doing here? Now she’s definitely said it.

You know that I love you? he says, staring at her.

Now she’s worried, she gets out of the car, dark and aggressive, so that she seems as never before a dangerous animal, well camouflaged.

Why don’t you accept this very simple, very beautiful thing? I love you and I don’t want to be forced to pursue, to suffer, to always ask...

Now she looks behind him, as if hoping for the arrival of someone, something.

Please, let’s go, she says.

He puts a hand in his pocket and she starts to back up.

I could never treat someone the way you do, I could never humiliate you the way you humiliate me, I couldn’t hate you...

Suddenly the wind rises, strong, violent.

His shirt, open to the second button, swells. She backs up some more and in spite of that his eyes seem to approach, burning.

All I ask is to be able to love you.

She continues to look at his right hand in the wide pocket of his pants.

All right, but you scared the hell out of me and...

He brings his left index finger to his lips, making a sign for her to be silent.

They go on this way a little longer, one step after the other, she retreating and he advancing slowly.

She glances back and notices that she’s getting close to a billboard, the ad pasted to it promoting the wine of the Castelli, a wine that’s good for your blood.

He sees it too.

Blood.

The highway, in the distance, begins to grow light.

On the slight incline the headlights of a truck appear, bright and powerful.

I’ve done everything for you, forever, I can’t understand what I could have done wrong this time. Every time! he shouts.

She stumbles and ends up on the ground, her hands reaching forward, her voice strangled by fear.

Listen, I can’t do it, I didn’t think you would...

The lights are getting closer, and he stops.

This is the scene of the moment when it’s all over.

She is sitting.

He is standing.

The car is far away.

The car is low.

God is distracted because the car is low.

The truck is arriving swiftly.

The truck proceeds toward them, facing him. He takes a step forward.

She cries out desperately.

He takes a step sideways.

The truck hits him directly.

He knows he has always loved her.

She didn’t know that another she hadn’t loved him.

To the police, while the emergency workers scoop up the last shreds of white shirt off the asphalt, she says absently that it was the first time.

That he had paid in advance.

That she had never seen him before.

That he had told her what to do, how and when.

That he had told her what to say.

A policeman gives her his wallet.

Inside is a photograph, there she is.

Another she.

A she who didn’t love him.

Rome, early, brisk May morning. The sky is clear and the air surprisingly chilly. Tension converges in the frigid sunshine, an unperceived tension. Humans, tourists and natives, walk along Via del Corso in dense throngs, their clothing vivid, smiling, thinking about what they have to do, where they have to go, the office, monuments to visit: everyday banalities. What is commonly called happiness. What others more warily call serenity — or indifference. Everyday life: banal, feverish, cheerful, Roman...

Police cars are packed tighter than usual around Montecitorio. Palazzo Montecitorio, seat of the Chamber of Deputies: the political heart of the nation. The old, yellowish Baroque building, which the genius Bernini distilled from an incubus of the imagination, twisting and bending the forms in dizzying abysses, complicating the internal labyrinths, widening the staircases, violating the door of the guarded entrance that faces the hunchbacked piazza. Here there are soldiers everywhere. And near the hotel to the left of the Chamber’s façade as well. This is the hotel where uniforms of American pilots were stolen in 2001, along with their badges: the access source for the terrorists who brought about September 11. It came out in subsequent investigations: a robbery in Rome for the attack in New York.

A butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing can become a tornado in New York, according to fractal theory. A banal theory, a serene butterfly. Don’t trust butterflies, or serene banality.

Montecitorio surrounded by soldiers: Inside, there’s no one. The sessions are adjourned.

Evidently, not all of the sessions are adjourned. The Premier, pale, rushes out of the smaller side door, not intended for television cameras, which for that matter are absent. What is he leaving behind on a chilly, luminous day of adjournment like this one? A rare chat with some listless deputies in the Transatlantico, the excessively Baroque hallway called “dei passi perduti,” the corridor of “lost footsteps,” where the Republic’s intrigues, both transparent and obscure, are hatched.

Outside, the chill does not seem to ease up. The Italian flag, limp in the cold air, hangs over the main door of Montecitorio along with the blue European one: bright in a cloudless sky.

In the narrow streets around Montecitorio: centuries-old dampness, the reek of cat piss, of animal piss. Gaps in the bricks, irregularly set. Some pigeons hunker in the cracks of the wall to protect themselves against the cold: They coo. Cats cross paths with one another. People walk along, some toward the Pantheon.

Saverio Candito, Giancarlo Colasanti, Danilo Giovinazzo. My best friends. We grew up together in the flamboyant prosperity of the last economic miracle. Out of an absurd desire for revenge, or maybe because we were imbeciles, we decided at a certain point to vex our parents by devoting ourselves to an activity that at the time, 1988 more or less, around Rome and all over Italy, still represented a real scandal. And this is our epilogue.