I walked under the buildings in the center, inspecting the big shops that were waiting for their first customers. None of those windows or signs were modest and familiar as I remembered them, not the cafes or the cashiers or the faces. Only the slanting sunlight and the dripping air had not changed.

And nobody was just walking, everyone seemed preoccupied. People didn't live in the streets, they only escaped through them. To think that when I used to walk those central streets with my big box on my arm they seemed like a kingdom of carefree people on vacation, the way I used to imagine seaside resorts. When one wants a thing, one sees it everywhere. And all this only meant suffering and barking my shins. What did she want, I wondered, that stupid girl who took Veronal yesterday? A man mixed up in it... Girls are fools. My Venetian was right.

I went back to the hotel and saw Morelli's lean, unexpected face before me. I had forgotten him and his note.

"How did you find me?" I said, laughing.

"It's nothing. I waited."

"All night?"

"All winter."

"That must mean you have plenty of time."

I had always seen this man in a bathing suit on the Roman beaches. He had hair on his thin chest, gray hair almost white. But now his silk tie and light-colored vest had changed him completely.

"You know you're young, Morelli?" I said.

He bowed and invited me to lunch.

"Didn't they tell you last night that I don't go out?"

"Let's eat here then," he said.

I like these people who joke without ever laughing. They intimidate you a little, and just for that you feel safe with them.

"I accept," I told him. "On condition you tell me something amusing. How's the carnival going?"

When we sat down, he didn't talk about the carnival. He didn't even talk about himself. Unsmilingly, he told me a little story about a Turin salon—he gave the name: nobility—where it happened that certain important gentlemen, while waiting for the mistress of the house, stripped down to their shorts and then sat in armchairs, smoking and talking. The hostess, astounded, forced herself to believe that this game was now the fashion, a test of one's spirit, and had stayed there joking about it with them a long time.

"You see, Clelia," Morelli said. "Turin is an old city. Anywhere else this stroke of wit would have come from boys, students, young men who had just opened their first offices or got their first government jobs. Here, however, elderly people, commendatori and colonels, play such tricks. It's a lively city..."

Expressionless as ever, he leaned forward, murmuring: "That bald head over there is one of them..."

"Won't he take me for the countess?" I said lightly. "I'm from Turin too."

"Oh, you're not in the same set; he knows that."

It wasn't entirely a compliment. I thought of his gray-haired chest. "Did you undress, too?" I asked.

"My dear Clelia, if you want to be introduced in that salon ..."

"What would another woman do there?"

"She could teach the countess strip tease... Who do you know in Turin?"

"Busybody... The only flowers I got came from Rome."

"They're waiting for you in Rome?"

I shrugged. He was clever, Morelli, and he knew Maurizio.