tacks and a scarf out of place. Who knows how happy she was. If it hadn't been for her, I would probably have solved my existential crisis by becoming a missionary nun in Patagonia. But it would have been selfish to leave her alone. Who knows where Patagonia was. I wonder if being a missionary would get me out of my apathy. Yeah, only a deep apathy could prevent me from watching with interest the Begum pushing the Aga Kan wheelchair over a bridge, after all I had been rude not to offer her my help the other day... Apathy had prevented me from going to Malamocco to see my drawing "couple embraced with sea and moon" reproduced 2 meters by 2 as a billboard for a new dance club. Suddenly they had given me forty thousand lire. Even the "drawings" for the Sidarma Cruises brochure had done well, plus I had fun drawing them, perhaps the best was that of the sailor who, distracted by the fluttering skirts of a beautiful passenger instead of the porthole, soaped the captain's face, oh yes, drawing and writing was not enough to give meaning to life, you could be happy only by coming out of your selfish self, but where to get out if the world was all but a complicated mess and now even women began to get in the way, like if it weren't complicated enough with men, at least in Patagonia I would have been away from everything and could have lived in peace. And thinking so I kicked Walt Whitman, who from the table where he had been left, flew into the pins-scarf.
I got up and went to collect everything. After all, what was his fault, poor book... I opened it at random, I read: "At this moment I am pining thoughtfully, sitting all alone." Look* look! He guessed right.
Ofelio came to tell me that I was wanted on the phone from the Danieli hotel. "I'm not here." I said. "Okay."
* "Toh" is an Italian colloquialism which means "look here"
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