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to discuss with her the problems of my heartbreak by Enrico and those of Across the River since, in addition to being intelligent, not being from the city she could judge with objective detachment.

I was about to turn off the light when she walked into my room and brought me her present, Whitman's Leaves of Grass. She sat on the bed and began to explain the beauty of the book to me. Moved by the gift, I did not dare to say that I would have preferred to postpone the dissertation until the following morning.

She was sure I would understand and appreciate Walt Whitman because I was so delicate and sensitive, she said in a voice cracked with strange tones. I opened my eyes, already half closed from sleep, and I saw that even her gaze was strange and since she was stroking my arm, she quickly threw it under the sheets and I was thinking "what the hell is she doing?" Then I observed that it was time to sleep.

But she said that it was indeed a great privilege to have the friendship of a person like me, who understood everything; it was so sweet, so sweet to be with me and since now she was caressing my shoulder I stuck my shoulder under the sheets and in the meantime I thought that I did not understand a damn thing of what was happening and my drowsiness turned to bewilderment when she put her arms around my neck, as soon as she leaned towards me, it made my head spin, I jumped out of bed and ran into the adjoining room just in time to avoid her lips, having finally understood, and double locked myself in and removed the key.

And so she had spent the night in my room, in the company of Walt Whitman, and I in the bed prepared for her, in the company of bitter thoughts. In the morning, after noting that the world was a complicated and filthy place, I remembered an article that appeared in the "Gazzettino" which spoke in laudatory terms of the arrival at Danieli of a...