I liked hearing him say he’s alone, even if he was speaking indifferently, in a slightly cynical tone. Yet, shaking my head, I persisted in saying that he has a great business and the opportunity to have a comfortable, easy life. He replied that that’s not important, either; it’s other things that count, he said, and in a flash Venice passed before my eyes. “At a certain age,” he continued, “everything we’ve done is no longer enough. It was useful only in making us what we are. And just as we are, now that we’re truly ourselves, what we’ve wanted to be or could be, we’d like to start to live again, consciously, according to our current tastes. Instead, we have to continue to live the life we chose when we were someone else. I’ve worked my whole life, I spent thirty years becoming what I am. And now?” He addressed this question into the void bitterly. Then, as if regretting he’d let himself go, he added, laughing, that an age should be established—“forty-five, let’s say”—past which we had the right to be alone in the world, and to choose our life from the beginning. “Besides,” he observed, “no one understands what we do, the effort it costs us, no one, except those who work with us.” I felt that he was criticizing his wife; maybe Michele is similarly critical of me sometimes. I said to myself that I wasn’t asking for anything, I bought only shoes for the children, clothes for the children, food, and no mink coats. But I wondered if there was a difference; and concluded yes, to my disadvantage, because Michele can’t even complain. “Still,” I said with a mischievous smile, remembering what Mirella had said about Barilesi, “if someone invited you to give up the effort that the work requires, would you give it up?” As we were talking, we had stood up and gone to the window. Shadows were falling on the garden below, a melancholy garden of palms and oleanders. “No,” he confessed candidly. We laughed. “But maybe precisely because I have nothing else,” he added in a lower voice.