Page 274

dal Visconti and in the evening to lunch in the pizzerias with Antonio, remaining the rest of the time by the phone, locked in my apartment. This was not the purpose of my coming to Milan...

But what a fool not to have thought of it before! Montale, yeah Eugenio Montale. One day in Venice he had begged me to do him a big favor: he had to write an article about Ernest Hemingway but at that time Hemingway refused to be interviewed. If I could get him an appointment, "it would have been easy for me to persuade Papa, but I had succeeded by pointing out the fact that Montale was not really a journalist but above all a poet and that, as... a colleague, I would have liked to do him a favor.

So I called Montale and he invited me to his house and while sipping a cup of tea I told him that I had come to Milan to show my poems to Alberto Mondadori but that I was never able to talk to him because he was always in a meeting, maybe he could try since he knew him well, and he was more likely to be called back if he was in a meeting again...

And so I began to wait, in vain, for Montale's phone call. Until I took courage and called him, but he had just left. Then he went to rest. Then he admitted that he had forgotten, but he would call soon. Then he went out again. And so the days had passed and having established that it was not at all true that Montale would be "grateful for all of his life," that it was useless and humiliating to prolong beyond that wait, I had begun to pack.

I was about to put away the folder with the poems when I decided to try my last option and I put on the shoes with the highest heels so as to give myself, with the height, a greater sense of security and with the folder under my arm...