Still, I promptly smoked the last cigarette; and it wasn’t yet midnight, only eleven o’clock, an impossible hour for a last cigarette.

I opened a book. I read without comprehending, and I actually had visions. The page on which I had fixed my gaze was occupied by a photograph of Dr. Muli in all his glory, beauty, elegance. I couldn’t bear it! I summoned Giovanna. Perhaps if I could converse, I would calm down.

She came, and at once gave me a suspicious look. She cried with her shrill voice: “You needn’t think you can persuade me to neglect my duty.”

Meanwhile, to soothe her, I lied, assuring her I wasn’t thinking any such thing, but I no longer felt like reading and would rather have a little chat with her. I made her sit down opposite me. Actually, she repelled me, with her old crone demeanor and her youthful eyes, shifty like the eyes of all weak animals. I felt sorry for myself, having to put up with such company! It’s true that even when I’m free, I can never choose the company most suitable for me; as a rule it’s the others who choose me, as my wife did.

I begged Giovanna to entertain me, and when she insisted she could say nothing worthy of my attention, I asked her to tell me about her family, adding that nearly everybody in this world has at least one.

She then obeyed, and started telling me that she had had to put her two little girls in the Institute for the Poor.

I was beginning to enjoy her story because her brisk way of dealing with those eighteen months of pregnancy made me laugh. But her temperament was too argumentative and I simplv couldn’t so on listening to her when, first, she tried to convince me that she had no other course, what with her scant wages, and then that the doctor had been wrong, a few days before, to assert that two crowns daily were enough for her, since the Institute supported her entire family.

She was shouting. “And what about the rest? Even after they’ve been fed and clothed, they still don’t have all they need!” And out she came with a whole stream of things she had to provide for her daughters, all of which I have now forgotten, since to protect my hearing from her shrill voice, I deliberately directed my thoughts elsewhere. But I was distressed all the same, and I felt entitled to a reward: “Wouldn’t it be possible to have a cigarette? Just one? I’d pay you ten crowns. Tomorrow, that is. Because I don’t have a penny with me.”

Giovanna was hugely frightened by my proposal. Then, speaking purely at random, just to be talking and to maintain my composure, I asked: “In this prison there must at least be something to drink, isn’t there?”

Giovanna responded promptly and, to my astonishment, in a genuinely conversational tone, without yelling. “Yes, indeed! Before leaving, the doctor gave me this bottle of cognac. Here it is, still unopened. You see? The seal hasn’t been broken.”

In my present position, the only avenue of escape I could then envision was drunkenness. To such straits had my confidence in my wife reduced me!

At that moment my smoking habit didn’t seem worth all the effort to which I had subjected myself. Already I hadn’t smoked for half an hour and I wasn’t even thinking about it, concerned as I was with the idea of my wife with Doctor Muli. So I was entirely cured, but irreparably ridiculous!

I opened the bottle and poured myself a little glass of the yellow liquid. Giovanna watched me, her mouth agape, but I hesitated before offering her any.

“When I’ve finished this bottle, will I be able to have another?”

Still in her pleasant conversational tone, Giovanna reassured me, “As much as you want! To comply with your slightest wish, the housekeeper must get up, even at midnight!”

I have never suffered from miserliness, and Giovanna immediately had her glass filled, to the brim. Before she could finish saying thanks, she had drained it, and she immediately cast her bright eyes on the bottle. So it was she herself who gave me the idea of getting her drunk. But that was no easy undertaking!

I couldn’t repeat exactly everything she said to me, in her pure Triestine dialect, after she had drained all those glasses, but I had the profound impression of being with a person to whom, if I hadn’t been distracted by my own concerns, I could have listened with pleasure.

First of all, she confided to me that this was precisely the way she liked to work. Everybody in this world should be entitled to spend a couple of hours every day in just such a comfortable chair, facing a bottle of good brandy, the kind that doesn’t cause any ill effects.

I also tried to converse. I asked her if, when her husband was alive, her work had been organized in this same way.

She burst out laughing. When her husband was alive he had given her more beatings than kisses and, compared with the way she had had to work for him, any job had seemed a rest, long before I arrived at this place for my cure.

Then Giovanna became pensive and asked me if I believed that the dead could see what the living are up to. I nodded briefly.