The road leading up to the villa was illuminated by candles, though I’d have preferred pitch darkness. In front of me there was a procession of convertibles and sporty two-seaters. Fuck, I’d told my father. Better to show up in a taxi. No, not at all, he had insisted. You can use my car, what do you need a taxi for? Sure, a beat-up old Fiat Uno, with the bumper half hanging off because a next-door neighbor didn’t know how to park. One time she’d crushed his side door, another time his trunk. And my father, incapable of showing anger to the world at large, had practically apologized to her. Oh, no, don’t think twice, it hardly matters. (“What can you do, it breaks my heart, she insists on continuing to drive, even though her eyesight is basically gone.” “I understand, Papa, but she must have an insurance policy.” “With all the damage she does, they keep raising her premiums, poor thing. I don’t want to take it out on her.”)
A gentleman in uniform, standing in the middle of the lawn, was showing the guests where to park. When he waved to me to come on ahead, a wave of shame swept over me. Oh my God, what must he think of me, with this beat-up old Fiat. In certain situations, you might be more afraid of the servants than of the masters. Because you can’t fool them. I rolled down my window and smiled at him.
“Is this all right?” My elbow stuck out of the car window, and I was trying to make up for my inadequacy with a brash manner. I revved the engine of my little car, just for the pleasure of the noise it made, as if I were pressing down on the accelerator of a Ferrari.
He tried to get a better bearing on me, bending severely forward and turning a flashlight straight into my face—a party crasher? Nervously, I tugged at the bow tie of my tuxedo. There’s something about me that’s not adding up, I decided.
“Valerio?”
I stuck my neck out the car window. He was the Morganti family chauffeur, whom we had dubbed the Authority, because he would spout out his opinions during our dinners in the kitchen, hypnotizing one and all with his stories overflowing with plots and conspiracy theories.
He was a hardline Communist, and he’d churn out propaganda, even to us four-year-old kids. After the elections in June 1979, when the Socialists gained in credibility and the Communists took a historic shellacking, he’d decided to focus all his energy on the younger generations. “Communism is super-simple, children,” he’d explain to us, “if you have two swimsuits, then you just give one to someone who doesn’t have any.” Olivia just loved these kind of lectures, which we were also treated to at the parish church. Only she was very particular about hygiene and, especially, obsessed with other people’s saliva. In fact, she wouldn’t even drink from her own mother’s glass without first wiping off the edge of the glass with a napkin. Therefore, before promising that she would vote for Berlinguer, she’d done her best to get more detailed information: “So, if I have an ice cream cone, do I have to let everyone else lick it?” Her own personal fear of Communism, which took the form of a series of wet tongues authorized to slobber all over a pistachio ice cream cone, had greatly amused the grown-ups, domestics, and homeowners, militants and Christian Democrats. They all laughed, with broad and shared understanding.
I got out and threw my arms around him: “Ugo! It’s been such a long time…”
“Let me take a look at you, Valerio. Jesus Christ, you’ve become a man!” He walked around me, contented.
“A man, huh? You may be overstating the case. And how about you? You haven’t changed a bit.”
“Mo va’ là,” he replied dismissively in dialect, “I’ve put on a gut—una buzza,” slapping both hands on his belly. “I’m almost seventy years old, you know. How is your father?”
“He’s in good shape,” I replied through clenched teeth. I’d just seen him, looking run-down, fat, and puffy, drinking cheap wine every evening in front of the television set to keep from feeling too miserably lonely.
“Give him my regards and tell him to come visit us in Budrio, I have a Nocino that my wife makes that’s just spectacular. And if he comes on a Sunday, Marisa will make tagliatelle al ragù. Do you remember Marisa’s tagliatelle?”
“Of course I do.”
“Oh, now you’re a grown-up, too. So make sure you vote. I’m serious.”
“Certainly!” I replied, and gave him a wink.
My first experience voting, actually, wouldn’t come until the next year, in the spring of 1994, when the Italian people would overwhelmingly acclaim the candidacy of Silvio Berlusconi, inaugurating the Second Italian Republic. But no one could have known that that’s the way it would go. Aside from my Emilian childhood and education, with a bright red, leftist political preference by very definition, I had grown up in the only Roman borgata that was historically and traditionally left-wing, and I had no need to be told how to vote.
“Well, now you’d better run along, Valerio. You’re late, you know. They’ve already served the buffet, if you don’t get moving you won’t have a bite to eat, those locusts won’t leave a crumb for you. You’re so skinny, you’re all skin and bones. If my wife could only see you.”
In fact it was ten o’clock. Because before I could work up the nerve to drive through that gate, I’d driven the circuit of the hills above Bologna not once but four times, listening to Lucio Battisti and using up all the gas in my father’s Fiat Uno’s tank. As I drove, I sang out loud like an idiot, too. A fari spenti nella note…Tu chiamale se vuoi emozioni, mmm. (With my headlights out, driving through the night…You can call them emotions, mm-hmm.)
“All right then, I’d better get going. Ciao. It was a pleasure to see you.” I couldn’t seem to drag myself away.
“Go.” He waved his hand in a broad sweep. “And vote the right way!”
But I wasn’t destined to arrive until much later. Because at the entrance I ran into the cook, who was manning the coat check that evening. She would take your overcoat and give you a number in exchange, just like at the discotheque. But I didn’t have a coat of any kind, because it was May. Only the young women were handing her shawls and scarves, which had to be carefully stowed away, to keep from ruining their décolleté.
“Valerio?” Incredulous.
I was a little annoyed: I’d hoped that I’d become a grown-up, and therefore radically different. But everyone recognized me at first glance. There really was no getting away from myself.
“Nana?” I hugged her back.
Nana would heap a burst of words all over you and with her Tuscan accent she’d aspirate you away, with all those breathy h sounds, in a whirlwind of quite tangled chitchat. She was allergic to names and nouns, preferring to use “whatsit” or “whosis” or “what’s-her-name,” all fairly indiscriminately. And you’d be forced to guess from the context. The “whatsit upstairs” was the party. “Whosis over there” was the chauffeur. The “what’s-her-name who watched you grow up” could have been either the nanny or Manon herself.
“Give me the whatsit.” I handed her the gift. “Is there a card? If not, I’ll have to write your name on the giftwrap, because what’s-her-name won’t open her gifts till tomorrow and she wants to be sure she can thank everyone.” She pulled a felt-tip pen out of her pocket. “So how’s whosis?”
“My papa? He’s fine, thanks.”
Christ, I really had come home. My legs were shaking. Luckily my mother hadn’t taken in Costantino’s tuxedo too much, and she’d left some room for my excitement.
While I was climbing the stairs, a woman came running down in the opposite direction, slightly out of breath, and bumped into me. At first we both apologized, hastily. Then she looked up: she studied me, trying to place my face, remember where she’d seen me before. I recognized her, even if she was now an attractive thirty-year-old, rather sophisticated.
“Nanny?”
Cecilia narrowed her eyes, as if she were nearsighted, trying to summon up my identity. Was I someone who had attended elementary school with Olivia? A long-lost cousin?
“It’s me, Valerio,” I stammered.
“Valerio who?”
Now my feelings were hurt.
“Olivia’s Valerio?” she asked me a moment later.
Irritated by that definition of my person, I hardly knew what to say. In the course of a few seconds, Cecilia had already thrown both arms around my neck and was kissing me on the cheeks.
“Oh my God, Valerio! How handsome you’ve become,” and she looked me up and down, from head to foot. “So you came after all, we’d really given up hoping.”
Oh, hell. Répondez s’il vous plaît: I’d completely forgotten.
Caught in the anguish of responding, actually seriously responding, I hadn’t so much as made a phone call.
Cecilia took me by the hand and dragged me to the kitchen, she wanted me to come with her so we could make a phone call to her husband. Her daughter had a fever of 104. She certainly couldn’t miss Olivia’s birthday party, another daughter of hers in a certain sense, but she was still anxious and concerned.
“I married a physician. And still I can’t stop worrying.”
She gripped me tight by the arm, she wanted to know all the latest news, and that with a certain frantic quality: about her daughter and about me, at the same time, and with the same urgency.
“Has she already taken the drops?” She held the receiver away from her head for a moment. “Which high school are you attending, Valerio?” She listened to both answers simultaneously and then immediately fired back: “Classical high school? Well, good for you. Did she eat the pablum? And are you going to enroll at the university? Majoring in what?”
The topic was of keen interest to her, maybe because she identified with my prospects. She, too, had managed to secure her high school diploma, by attending night school. And while she was pregnant, she’d made up her mind to enroll in the university, even though she was already thirty years old.
“To become a teacher myself,” she told me, with pride in her voice. “A degree from teacher’s college might not be particularly useful, but it doesn’t matter to me. I haven’t taken a lot of exams, because with a daughter of my own, you can imagine. But it’s so nice to study.”
After the phone call we went up together, using the back stairs that ran out to the garden, more or less by the portico. Cecilia sat down on an Etruscan sarcophagus that Manon had filled with cyclamens, and we started chatting.
“You could at least have sent me a postcard, Valerio.”
I explained that in the past nine years, I hadn’t gone anywhere to send a postcard from.
Then she rummaged through her purse and pulled out a picture of her daughter, to show me.
In the background of that picture, I saw Manon’s unforgettable boudoir and was more captivated by that than by the sight of the little girl. You could see the eighteenth-century table upon which Manon kept her lipsticks and rouges, the large mirror framed in gilt scrollwork, the blond wall-to-wall carpeting, the wallpaper with its busy flowered pattern, and the ottoman where she’d sit, erect and focused, with a hairnet on her head, doing her makeup. Olivia and I, when we were small, would watch hypnotized by her preparations, rapt and motionless, finally budging only when Manon threw a light cape over her shoulders to keep from getting smudges on her dress, and then proceeded to tease her hair with an ivory comb. The smell of hairspray meant that the elaborate operation we found so utterly seductive was finally over and she was ready to leave the house.
I was dying to hear news about the Morganti family. Perhaps Cecilia knew something, since she still saw them regularly.
She lit a cigarette and explained that, leaving aside the spectacular celebrations, these were difficult times for the Morgantis.
“Yes, I heard.”
“We’re waiting for the trial. But Signor Morganti is still behind bars, to prevent any chance of manipulating the evidence, they say. That came as a tough blow to Olivia. And her mother is next to no help at all, obviously.”
“Why not? Isn’t she well?”
Cecilia shook her head. “She has that drinking problem.”
“Elena?” Incredulously, I asked, “She’s an alcoholic?”
In a low voice, she told me that Elena was in the other room, unfortunately, and that it was her job to look after her. Olivia had asked her this favor.
“Let’s hope she’s not already drunk. She’s capable of dancing on the dining room tables with a boy her daughter’s age, if I don’t keep a constant watch on her.”
I listened to her, eyes wide open. I really was having a hard time picturing Elena as some latter-day Zelda Fitzgerald. Elena, always so silent and composed, so compliant and conformist and fearful of what other people might think of her. What had happened to her? But Cecilia had no time to talk.
“I’m sorry, I have to get back to her.” Again, frantic and out of breath, she gathered purse and shawl. “Let’s hope things go smoothly, at least this evening.”
I stood up alongside her. Maybe the time had come to wade into the fray.
“Olivia is going to be happy to see you. It wouldn’t have been the party she’s been dreaming of, if you weren’t here.”
In the living room, Manon enjoyed dominant pride of place. Standing in the doorway, I looked at her. How pretty she was. She could even afford to wear a white dress, just like her debutante granddaughter. She was seventy years old, and she cast a shadow over the fresh-faced young does that clustered around her, all of them struck dumb with admiration and anxious to learn the mysteries of seduction that she had so completely mastered. They even stood very erect, shoulders thrown back, in an effort to rival her regal bearing. The young men, intimidated, buzzed around her at a safe distance. The most shameless among them tried to kiss the back of her hand, and Manon laughed, though with a hint of annoyance. Good heavens, what buffoons. I could read that thought in her cocked eyebrow.
I slowly approached her, cautiously extending my hand. I was a little scared. What if she doesn’t recognize me? Instead her face lit up.
“Valerio?”
Eminently courteous, amiable, she lavished me with attention, far more than anything I’d been expecting. With a half-turn from the waist, she abandoned the little crowd that had been boring her and instead spoke directly to me.
“Tell me everything, I’m all ears,” she said. She was happy to learn that my mother had enrolled me in the classical high school. “So they’ll let you study the Divine Comedy. Excellent, that’s excellent. Do you remember when I made little puppets for you with the characters out of Dante?”
How could I ever forget that little cardboard puppet theater and Manon on her knees on the hardwood floor, hidden behind it, both arms raised, staging the story of Paolo and Francesca.
“Of course I remember.”
Her enthusiasm for me was understandable; after all, I was an eyewitness to that golden age to which I often and willingly harkened back in my thoughts. When her husband was still alive and we all vacationed together in Versilia, when Olivia was small and always turned to her for help, when her sons were still speaking to each other, and Giulio was a young industrialist on the rise and Dado was studying in America, letting his parents imagine who could say what future, and Elena was still staying in her place, trying to learn from Manon how to behave. I really hadn’t been looking to make her cry.
“I’m such a fool, I’m starting to tear up. What a stupid old woman I am.”
Had she become so fragile? Manon apologized, dabbing at her eyes and trying to laugh it off, to make fun of herself a little, but it was no good. Without at all meaning to, I had unleashed an inferno inside her. So much so that she’d been forced to hurry upstairs, to redo her makeup. I stood there, frozen. I was uneasy because people were looking at me, wondering who I was and what I’d done to make Signora Morganti burst into tears like that.
At that exact moment, Olivia appeared. She was striding briskly toward the portico, holding hands with a girlfriend. Suddenly she stopped and turned her head in my direction.
“Astrid,” she said. “It’s the little boy I fell in love with. I have to introduce you.”
Her friend, yanked unexpectedly in my direction, barely kept from tripping over her high heels.
I raised a hand in greeting.
“Ciao, Astrid.”
I looked at Olivia and Olivia looked at me. I still couldn’t say exactly what flashed between our eyes in those few seconds. Neither one of us seemed capable of opening our mouths. Then she broke out laughing, loudly.
“Aren’t you cute in a tuxedo, you still look like a fool, the way you did when you used to go to Calvi’s niece’s birthday parties.” Another burst of noisy laughter. She lifted a swatch of cloth with two fingers, calling my attention to her Pauline Bonaparte dress: “You can’t begin to imagine how badly this fucking thing itches.”
She turned her back on poor Astrid, who still hadn’t managed to get out a word, and took me by the hand.
“Come on, let’s take a spin around the party. I’ll introduce you to some folks. Tonight everybody must have fun.”
She hadn’t changed all that much, actually. Her hairstyle made her look a bit like a bride, and it had certainly cost her hours and hours at the hairdresser’s, bobby pin after bobby pin—but it was already half collapsed, dangling askew down the back of her neck. Despite the refined elegance of her dress, she hardly seemed to have stepped out of a painting by Gérard or a sculpture by Canova: she strode with determination, taking long steps, but also with a certain lack of coordination, as if she were wearing a pair of mountain hiking boots and not a pair of sandals made to measure, with the same material and the same embroidery as her dress. Every so often she’d adjust the collier necklace her grandmother had given her for the occasion, the way a dog scratches its collar. And she often shook her head, because she had no idea how to manage the weight of her earrings, which dangled to her shoulders.
“Look, there’s Calvi’s niece. She’s turned into quite the babe, so I’m not going to introduce you, because I’m jealous. And look, there’s Jacopo, remember him? He’s the kid you taught how to blow up dog shit.”
With one excuse or another, she didn’t introduce me to anyone, or else she’d drag me into the midst of a small knot of people, quickly rattling off a series of names, often strange ones, or names assembled with a perverse burst of imagination—Esmeralda, Olimpia, Gianbattista, Pierfrancesco, Mariasole, Guiberto, Lucetta, Orsetta, Altea—and then she’d quickly say: “This is my friend, Valerio” and suddenly whisk me off toward some new Ginevramaria or a Simonluca.
I would just say to each, “Ciao.”
That alone was enough to make me feel like a trained monkey, but still, I was a happy young man. Because Olivia continued holding me by the hand.
“But my real friend is Astrid. Huh, what became of her, anyway?”
“You dumped her in the other room.”
“Oh, yeah, you’re right, poor thing. Let’s go see if we can find her.”
But the search for Astrid was just an excuse: a short while later we fetched up in the garden. Far from the lights of the portico and even of the torches, Olivia continued walking on the lawn, her fingers intertwined with mine. Now she wanted to sit down on a bench amongst the lemon trees and take off her shoes for a moment, because she couldn’t stand wearing high heels any longer. My heart was thumping, racing. What did she expect? A kiss? Or was I supposed to act like an old friend? Bent over, as she rubbed her feet, I didn’t know what to say. Valerio, what kind of a man are you?
I’d only had one girlfriend, and come to think of it, maybe she hadn’t even really been a proper girlfriend because, the next day, she’d pretended she didn’t remember a thing. That was the full and complete extent of my experience: this Ludovica, who, during a party in Costantino’s house in Fregene, with the excuse that she was deliriously drunk after downing one rum and Coke, had kissed me in the room where we’d all left our overcoats. And so, sprawled out on down coats and hats and scarves, I’d managed to get a hand inside her panties and then I’d even got my mouth down there, licking her for a little while, even though she laughed the whole time as if I was tickling her. Something I’d masturbated to for months afterward, as if who knows what had happened. We hadn’t gone any further than that because Ludovica had a steady boyfriend. She’d confessed that to me, while she was searching for her panties, which had vanished under a mountain of jackets.
“You know, I’m still a virgin,” Olivia told me, still massaging her feet. “In theory, I have a boyfriend, we’ve been dating for a few months and I promised him that after I turned eighteen we could make love, but I really don’t feel like it. I don’t feel like doing it with him, is what I mean.”
“Starting tomorrow, you mean to say,” I stammered with legalistic precision, worried about the deadline, unable to focus on any other details of the conversation.
“That’s right, starting tomorrow. But maybe he figures midnight is technically the starting point, I couldn’t say.”
“So you’re saying you have another half-hour of virginity, right?”
“Right,” she replied, shooting me a glance.
I’d understood, but I didn’t know how to handle the situation. I rocked my shoulders back and forth, twisting my fingers in embarrassment. Then Olivia turned around and stroked my nose.
“Could you do it without ruining my dress? Afterward, I’m going to have to cut the cake and dance waltzes.”
This challenge, I mean, keeping the dress intact, worried me greatly.
“What if we stain it?”
“Oh, we just have to be careful. We could lie down on your jacket, for instance. After all, it’s black.”
“Ah, good point.”
Instead of kissing her immediately, I sat there thinking how glad I was that I didn’t have to return the tuxedo to Costantino and other things like that. While waiting to hear what I had to say, Olivia was humming the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” A song that would later become our personal soundtrack, in the cover by Cathy Berberian.
Olivia had a nice voice. She wasn’t off-key like Manon, who even butchered the Hallelujah when she took us to Mass on Sunday morning, beautiful, erect, in her mink coat, always in the front pew as if it were the royal box at the opera. She’d remove her leather gloves and take our hands—her long fingers with the well-tended nails were icy, but we held them all the same and sang with her, doing our best to cover up her flat notes.
Suddenly I remembered the task that had been set me. With a certain solemnity I placed a hand on the back of her neck, where various hair clips hung, and I bent over to give her a kiss. But then the fireworks went off. Olivia leaped to her feet.
“Oh, Jesus, I’d better get going. They must be looking for me. Manon has prepared some insanely grandiose production, she’s willing to burn the villa to the ground for me. If I miss the show, her feelings will be hurt. Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus, there’s no time to waste.”
And while the spectacular fountains of light were bursting over the three-century-old cedars of Lebanon, charring a few branches that had survived all the various wars but not Olivia’s birthday party, I thought to myself that I’d just missed my great opportunity.
I had mingled with the crowd, watching Olivia as she got ready to blow out eighteen birthday candles surrounded by her girlfriends, holding hands with the usual Astrid, her favorite. Then someone touched my shoulder. I whipped around, in part because I was scared. That touch didn’t seem like a greeting, and the person in question was leaning on me with all their weight. It was Elena, and she could barely stay up on her feet.
I was trying to contain my astonishment at seeing the condition she’d been reduced to, but I probably didn’t do much of a job of it, because she mumbled out a series of phrases, as if angered.
“What, don’t you recognize me? So I got fat, so what? The Morganti family always has to be attractive, slender, and youthful, believe me, I know. But I’m not really one of them.”
“Signora, you are always, invariably…” I couldn’t think of a single nice thing to say to her.
Her face was so puffy that her features were distorted. Her eyes were a pair of bubbles wobbling around narrow slits, and every so often her hair would slide over them, no longer blond as honey, but stringy and dyed. She was only fifty, but she looked at least ten years older.
I struggled to put a smile on my face and tried to encourage her to look at the cake, as everyone else was doing, to take in her daughter as she blew out the candles, possibly making a wish as she did so. But that sideshow was of no interest to her.
“I know, I know,” she kept saying, “I’m ruining their reputation, looking fat like this. Winding up behind bars is nothing in comparison, believe me. Everyone still thinks the world of my husband, for example. Much worse to be overweight, you know?” And she staggered and swayed, sloshing her glass of red wine all over the other guests, who moved away from her in annoyance.
I was very embarrassed, and I didn’t know what to say.
“I did it on purpose, though,” she was saying. “I got fat because I knew how it would annoy the Morgantis. I wanted to shame them.” She laughed, unsteady on her feet.
Meanwhile Olivia, to a round of applause, was cutting the cake. Champagne corks popped in the air. And the birthday girl’s friends, bottles in hand, were spraying people like Grand Prix champions celebrating on the podium.
“Aren’t they wonderful?” Elena cheered sarcastically, spilling more wine on her neighbors’ shoulders. “I think they’re little assholes, don’t you? They think they’re proving some point by using champagne bottles as if they were lawn sprinklers. They think of themselves as gods who’ve been exonerated by their very fall. I put the blame entirely on their mothers, for raising them this way. I’ve always told my daughter the way things are, loud and clear. Life isn’t…”
But just then “The Blue Danube Waltz” started up, summoning the guests into the living room, and she veered away from that line of conversation.
“Humph, time to start dancing,” she laughed. “The debutante is bound to follow tradition, far be it from me to interfere. Even if she has to dance a waltz with that queer uncle of hers because her father is in prison, and doesn’t exactly enjoy full freedom of movement. Well, it is what it is.” She wheeled around, mimicking the steps of a waltz. “One-two-three, tra-la-la.”
I was upset to see her looking so angry and disputatious, as if she were the one who’d just turned eighteen.
“Valerio, would you take me home, please?”
Maybe Olivia had taken it badly, Elena hadn’t even gone over to give her a kiss or wish her happy birthday, not a single kind gesture. Or maybe that was just a relief for her daughter; at least this way, Olivia wasn’t worried she might have to watch her mother dance drunkenly with her classmates or find her vomiting in some bathroom, being helped to her feet by some of Olivia’s girlfriends from school.
“Well, actually I—”
“It’s just a matter of getting across the grounds, but it’s dark out and these high heels are hurting my feet.”
I was at my wit’s end, this was certainly the last thing I’d expected. The clock had just struck midnight, and I had a small piece of unfinished business to tend to, rather time-sensitive.
“Don’t be mean, Valerio. After you drop me off you can hurry back to the party and have all the fun you want.”
Meanwhile she was dragging me toward the door, without leaving me time to wish Olivia a happy birthday and explain that I’d be right back, just a matter of minutes.
It ought to have taken no time at all, there and back in a flash, in my beat-up old Fiat Uno. Two minutes to get to the end of the road, two more minutes to get Olivia’s mother out of the car and up her front steps, and then another minute and a half to get back, in fifth gear. I’d never have dreamed that Elena would pass out, sick to her stomach, just as she was unlocking the door, and that I’d be spending the rest of the night at the emergency room.
When I realized that she’d stopped breathing, that she was pale, her eyes rolling up out of sight and her eyelids trembling, I was seized by a wave of panic. I tried to shake her, bring her out of it with little slaps in the face, but it was no good. What was I supposed to do now? Disappoint Olivia by failing to keep that promise, or let her mother die? I couldn’t even speed her over to the hospital and drop her off and then rush back to the party as if nothing had happened. Phone her daughter and ruin her birthday party? It was probably better to call her later, once the danger had passed.
“Are you a relative?” the doctors asked me.
“Why, uh, no. No, no I’m not, oh, I mean, listen,” I answered in annoyance, and then I tried to clarify the situation.
To be perfectly frank, I wasn’t much worried about Elena’s state of health, seeing that she’d decided to choose Olivia’s birthday party to bloom as a hardened alcoholic. Though I guess we owed her a debt of gratitude for not fainting a few minutes earlier, while the cake was being cut, in front of three hundred guests. She could just kick the bucket, as far as I was concerned. I rested my face in both hands, my jaw clenched in rage, my teeth cutting into my lip, in search of any kind of pain that would be easier to take than jealousy.
“Please just keep me posted on how the signora is doing. I’ll be waiting out here.”
Hunched over in a plastic chair, under the fluorescent lights of the Sant’Orsola Hospital, surrounded by people on gurneys who had been injured in car crashes and dying old men moaning and complaining, I listened to the noise of the fireworks still lighting up the hill, explosions that could be heard all the way out here, and I thought to myself that Olivia, not having found me, would by now have thrown herself into the arms of her official boyfriend, if only for revenge. And I would no longer be the first man in her life, I wouldn’t get a chance to kiss her and make love to her in a dark corner of that beautiful garden illuminated by candles, while the DJ put an LP of a cover version of “Over the Rainbow” on the turntable.