Gustavo doesn’t reply to my occasional texts—“What did I do?” or “I’ve stopped eating,” or “I am the one who can give you what you want,” or “I sleep in your blue shirts.”
I KNOW FROM his notes that James loves the way I smile in bed. Should I feel lonely? I don’t know the meaning of her smile; it might just be that she’s able to godere. He himself is incapable of godere (he’s mesmerized by the Italian verb): he may find himself content, but nothing more, he cann…
“Nico, would you stop it?”
“If you ask me to stop one more time I’ll throw my keys off the bridge.”
“But I only told you once.”
“I’m throwing the keys off the bridge.”
“Berengo, what the fuck, you’re forty!”
“I’ll throw them.”
“The doormen have spare keys.”
“I’ll throw myself i…
“I wish,” I start again, “I wish that at some point you could try to do a week of office work. The whole thing: one-hour commute in the morning, one-hour commute in the evening. And then after you got home you’d have to indulge your love of books not by walking to McNally and hearing some imperiali…
A middle-aged woman: “I’m looking for a book that’s like The Name of the Rose? Could you suggest something similar? It’s my favorite book!”
“Ma’am, if there were other books as good as The Name of the Rose, you’d know about them already, and their authors would be super famous and super popular.”
