[...] “I understand,” I retorted, “so if reputation doesn’t count and a woman of forty-three is free to act like a girl in search of a husband, if you yourself approve all this, you mean that I, too, could … ” ‘What do you have to do with it?” he immediately interrupted, in an irritated, reproachful tone. “How can you compare your case with Clara’s, mamma? You have a husband, two grown children … Clara is alone, and we all know the world of the cinema … ” He was lying the way one lies to a child, and suddenly I realized that it wasn’t the first time he’d spoken to me like that. He’s always done it, or at least for so many years that I’ve forgotten any other way he has of speaking. And as I answered him compliantly, admitting that my case is different, I, too, was lying, out of fear of him, of his judgment. He came over to me, caressed me. “You understand, right?” he said, and I nodded. But maybe because of the lie or maybe because in a confused way I sensed that he was right, I felt an uncontrollable sadness rising in me. I’m afraid that because my way of being seems natural to him it no longer has any value in his eyes. Rather, he admires Clara, who is so different from me and with whom I no longer have anything in common, not even our past as young wives, which today, with her present life, she denies, derides. I wondered if for Michele I’m still a living woman or already, like his mother, a portrait on the wall. So I am for my children. Certainly, so my mother is for me. I wished desperately to escape the evil spell of that portrait. “I’m afraid,” I was about to say, but he, ignorant of my thoughts, wouldn’t have understood.