The neighborhood was sparsely inhabited, and the inhabitants were not early risers. On the tram there was an elderly housewife, two workmen having an argument, and himself, the contented man. Solid, morning people. He found them likable; he, Enrico Gnei, was for them a mysterious gentleman, mysterious and content, never seen before on this tram at this hour. Where could he come from? they were perhaps asking themselves now. And he gave them no clue: he was looking at the wistaria. He was a man who looks at the wistaria like a man who knows how wistaria should be looked at: he was aware of this, Enrico Gnei was. He was a passenger who hands the money for his ticket to the conductor, and between him and the conductor there is a perfect passenger-conductor relationship; it couldn't be better. The tram moved down toward the river; it was a great life.

For his job, Gnei harbored that amorous passion that, though unconfessed, makes clerks' hearts warm, once they come to know the secret sweetness and the furious fanaticism that can charge the most habitual bureaucratic routine, the answering of indifferent correspondence, the precise keeping of a ledger. Perhaps this morning his unconscious hope was that amorous stimulation and clerkish passion would become a single thing, merge one with the other, to go on burning and never be extinguished. But the sight of his desk, the familiar look of a pale-green folder with "Pending" written on it, sufficed to make him feel the sharp contrast between the dizzying beauty from which he had just parted and his usual days.

He walked around the desk several times, without sitting down. He had been overwhelmed by a sudden, urgent love for the beautiful lady, and he could find no rest. He went into the next office, where the accountants, careful and dissatisfied, were tapping on their adding machines.

"No, my friend, in February," Gnei began, and at the same time he recalled a movement the lady had made, late, in the morning hours, that to him had seemed a new revelation and opened immense, unknown possibilities of love—"no, they already deducted mine then," he went on, in a mild voice, and he moved his hand gently before him, in mid-air, pursing his lips. "They took the whole amount from my February pay, Marinotti." He would have liked to add further details and explanations, just to keep talking, but he wasn't able to.

This is the secret—he decided, going back to his office— at every moment, in everything I do or say, everything I have experienced must be implicit. But he was consumed by an anxiety that he could never live up to what he had been, could never succeed in expressing, with hints, or still less with explicit words, and perhaps not even with his thoughts, the fullness he knew he had reached.

He went to the window. There was a large courtyard surrounded by high walls full of balconies, but it was like being in a desert. The sky could be seen above the roofs, no longer limpid, but bleached, covered by an opaque patina, as in Gnei's memory an opaque whiteness was wiping out every memory of sensations, and the presence of the sun was marked by a vague, still patch of light, like a secret pang of grief.