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I looked at my mother and only then did I realize how pale she was." Let's go back to Venice." she said.

"To Venice? But it's not time to leave yet and then we have to drive around the United States and then..." 

"We have to leave. Now." 

"But mom..." 

"You still don't understand? In Venice they say that Renata is you. Renata and..." I sit up, look into my mother's eyes, "Renata went in a gondola with the colonel."

"And what's so strange about riding a gondola in Venice?" I burst out laughing. 

"This is no laughing matter. Today I reread the chapter and even if I don't know English very well, I finally understood that that Renata has... she made love to the colonel, in a gondola" my mother said with visible effort.

"You know I'm not that Renata, that we went in my gondola, you know we didn't do anything wrong." 

"I know. But I also know that you are still a girl and that I have to defend your reputation." 

"And I don't give a damn about my reputation! I am as I am, only the truth counts and I will tell everyone. I will tell everyone that Papa and I have only helped each other, even Mary said it..."

"Leave Mary out of it." my mother said.

It was as if a cyclone had hit us. My mother stayed more and more often in the Casita, lying on the bed. Gianfranco nervously repeated that one should not give weight to gossip. Mary said she had foreseen it and it was a pity that Papa hadn't heeded her advice to give the girl red hair and blue eyes and have her born in Trieste. Papa wandered around anxious and depressed, all this was absurd, a novel and if one arbitrarily compared a novel with reality every time they were written, where the hell would the freedom of a writer have gone?