[...] She knew the world of people who anxiously hunt down pleasures and don’t know how to wait for them to arrive on their own. And it was so tragic: you only had to look around a nightclub, in the half light: it was the search for pleasure that doesn’t come by and of itself. She’d only gone with some of her men from the past, maybe two or three times, and hadn’t wanted to go back. Because the search for pleasure, when she’d tried it, had been bad water: she’d put her mouth on the tap, which tasted like rust and only gave two or three drops of lukewarm water: it was dry water. No, she’d thought, better real suffering than forced pleasure. She wanted Ulisses’s left hand and knew she wanted it, but she did nothing, since she was enjoying the very thing she was needing: being able to have that hand if she stretched out her own.