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when it comes to his manners. His one shortcoming, if you leave aside his heavy Roman accent, is his punctuality. Which is an unforgivable defect in Italy’s capital. Do you know the kind of maniac who, if you arrange tomeet in a restaurant at one o’clock actually shows up at five minutes to one? Or the kind of guy who’s already waiting outside the movie theater when you get there, and has bought tickets for everyone? Or even worse, if you invite him over to dinner, when he shows up on time he catches you still in slippers and bathrobe, wandering around the apartment?
    Umberto can be an inconvenient presence because most of the population of Rome lives about half an hour behind the rest of the world in time. I’m habitually late, and Umberto has always made a point of complaining about it. He claims that he’s spent a total of one year of his life waiting for me. His life is just a series of wasted time periods spent waiting for other people, and so he’s gotten organized and decided to find a way to fill in these stretches of dead time. He opted for the age-old but immortal lifesaver: reading books. He always carries a pocket graphic novel with him, and he calculates that the time it takes to read it perfectly matches my average delay.
    Umberto often spends evenings with us. My wife and my daughter have a special relationship with him. Paola considers him sort of like the brother she never had; she confides in him and coddles him, serving him pans of eggplant Parmesan and lethally rich dishes of tiramisu. Little Eva calls him uncle and chats eagerly with him about their shared love of nature. It goes without saying that he is the trusted veterinarian of our little domestic farm. Sometimes, like so many latter-day Cupids, we set him up on blind dates with schoolteachers who work with Paola, but without ever seeing any dazzling showers of sparks.
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    Corrado, as I mentioned before, is an Alitalia pilot. In fact, he’s a caricature of a pilot, a perfect archetype: tall, handsome, with a neat goatee, a gentleman, with a full mouth of straight gleaming teeth, and muscular without overdoing it. In short, any stewardess’s dream. He’sbeen divorced several times, he has no children, and he has a tendency to set the hearts of all the women he meets afire, only to abandon them, leaving them heartbroken and depressed. To hear him tell it, he hates women because of his two stormy divorces, which have left him with nothing except the obligation to write alimony checks to his two ex-wives, whom he refers to as “the parasites.”
    His main hobby is just having fun. His chief passion is statistics, and has been ever since our high school days together. We sat at adjoining desks: I had a C minus minus average, he had an A minus/A average. It was just a matter of statistics, he used to say. He never studied a bit, but he managed to foretell, with the accuracy of a Nostradamus, the day he would be given an oral exam and even the likelihood that he’d be asked this or that question. He remembered everything and he’d compute it all and draw the necessary conclusions: he invariably nailed it exactly. He applied this same method to everything, especially to women, who, as you must already have guessed, were and remain his weakness. Corrado has always gotten more girls than the Fonz. On account of statistics. This is his personal technique for hooking up: as soon as he gets to a party, he will always start chatting up all the girls there, in decreasing order of attractiveness. He’ll go over to the prettiest girl there and ask her, with an overabundance of sheer nerve: “Do you want to have sex with me tonight?”
    Courtship whittled down to the minimum, he gets straight to the point.
    The answer is almost unfailingly: “Have you lost your mind?”
    But as he checks off girls and works his way down the ranking, by the time he gets to the tenth or fifteenth