What anguish. I would be better off to stop writing. I’m afraid that being tired keeps me from being objective. Sometimes I think that I haven’t loved Michele for many years now, that I continue to repeat that phrase out of habit, not noticing that loving feelings no longer exist between us, and have been replaced by others, perhaps equally valid, but completely different. I think again of the anxiety with which I waited for Michele as a fiancé, of the desire we had to be alone, to talk, of the time that went by rapidly, on the thread of looks and words, and of the tedium that now descends when we’re alone together, and no outside distraction, not the radio or the movies, comes to save us. And yet once I even wished that the children would hurry up and get married, so that we could return to being alone, as before; I thought that everything was still intact. Maybe, if our children had remained children, I would never have noticed this change. Or if Guido had never spoken to me, or if I had never listened to Cantoni. I was really convinced that it was still love, and until Mirella confessed she was afraid that her life would resemble mine, I was also convinced that I was happy. Maybe, in reality, I still am, but what I feel when I’m with Michele is a cold happiness, very different from what I feel when Guido talks to me or takes my hand. These candid gestures are love and the gestures I perform with Michele, instead, are only affection or solidarity or habit, even those rare, more intimate ones: pity, or, rather, compassion for human weakness. I seem to have suddenly understood all that. Maybe Michele has understood it for a long time. He’s much more intelligent than I am, especially in these things. Then I heard Clara say that love has to be invented day by day. I don’t know what that means, in practice, but I sense that I’ve never been able to invent it.