Dora reacted with terror–more than disgust, real terror. First she grabbed Raceni, holding him tight, her fragrant hair beneath his chin; then she ran to the alcove, shouting to Raceni behind the door that she wouldn’t come back in the room until he chased the fly out the window or killed the horrible beast.

“I’ll leave you there and be on my way,” Raceni said calmly, taking the new list from the desk.

“No, Raceni, for heaven’s sake!” Dora entreated from the other side.

“Well, open the door then!”

“There, I opened it, but you . . . Oh! what are you doing?”

“One kiss,” said Raceni, his foot holding the door open the crack allowed by Dora. “Just one . . .”

“What’s got into you?” she shouted, straining to close the door again.

“Just a little one,” he insisted. “I’ve practically come from a war. . .. A tiny reward, from there, come on . . . just one!”

“The fly might come in. Oh, dear, Raceni!”

“Well, do it quickly!”

Through the crack in the door their two mouths met and the opening gradually widened, when they heard the newsboy’s cry in the street outside: “Third edition! Four dead and twenty wounded! Clash with the military! Assault on Palazzo Braschiiii! Bloodshed on Piazza Navonaaaa!”

Attilio Raceni withdrew from the kiss, ashen: “Did you hear? Four dead. For God’s sake! Don’t they have anything to do? And I could have been there smack in the middle. . . .”


4


It had already struck twelve and only five of the thirty guests who should be coming to the banquet at Castello di Costantino had arrived. These five secretly regretted their punctuality, fearing it might make them seem overanxious or too accommodating.

First to come had been Flavia Morlacchi, poet, novelist, and playwright. After the other four arrived they left her alone, standing to one side. They were the old professor of archaeology and forgotten poet Filiberto Litti; the short-story writer from Piacenza, Faustino Toronti, affected and chaste; the overweight Neapolitan novelist Raimondo Jacono, and the Venetian poet Cosimo Zago, rickety and lame in one foot. All five stood on the terrace in front of the glassed-in hall.

Filiberto Litti was tall, thin, wooden, with a large white mustache and a smudge of hair between his lower lip and chin, and a pair of enormous fleshy, purple ears. He was speaking, stammering a little, about the ruins there on the Palatine (as if they belonged to him) with Faustino Toronti, also elderly, but less obviously so with his hair, combed over his ears and dyed mustache. Raimondo Jacono, his back to Signora Morlacchi, was compassionately watching Zago admire the cool green countryside there before them on that sweet April day.

The poor fellow had just arrived at the terrace railing, still wearing an old overcoat green with age that billowed around his neck. He placed a large-knuckled hand on the decorative top of the railing, his fingernails pink and deformed by the continual pressure on his crutch. Now, his sorrowful eyes closed behind his glasses, he repeated, as though he had never in his life enjoyed such a feast of light and color: “How enchanting! How intoxicating, this sun! What a view!”

“Yes, indeed,” ruminated Jacono. “Very beautiful. Marvelous.