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was told he didn’t say a word about the wedding the following morning; instead he complained about something in the food that made him sick.
    His ironic statement about the elderly professors will have to be enough for me to defer, for a few months, my fear of finding myself unemployed. Nevertheless, I record the variation in the probability distribution of my academic future, the standing altered by a few decimals in favor of a move to another city, another country—or maybe a dignified surrender, to finally undertake a less noble plan.
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    The hypothesis involving a foreign move has the ability to upset the family’s equilibrium. Every time I tell Nora about a research center where a group of young scientists are working in a field related to mine and producing “something really interesting,” whenever I reveal to her how working with my supervisor is eroding invisible parts of me and describe the benefit I would gain from getting out from under his influence (being able to sleep again at night, I’m sure of it), her face darkens. She offers a distracted murmur of assent while the silence she counters with immediately afterward implores me not to go any further.
    The period in which we learned of her pregnancy was also the time when the move to Zurich, where I had won a four-year research grant, seemed like a definite decision. I was to precede Nora by a few months to allow her to give birth in Italy, and as soon as the baby’s documents were obtained, we would all three of us settle in the most alien canton of alien Switzerland. We made an on-site visit together to look for an apartment. We visited three in the same district, the area where the majority of physicists land because it guarantees an acceptable balance between the new salaryand the rent, and because there is a movie theater. Nora barely entered the houses. She nodded mechanically to the real-estate agent and stroked an as-yet-invisible baby bump.
    Caught between her strange apathy and my own insecurity, I began pressing her once we’d completed the rounds. So which one did she prefer? Wasn’t it better to give up some square footage for a small courtyard, in anticipation of when the child would begin walking? I listed the pros and cons of each option. She listened to me without saying a word. When she spoke, she did so calmly. “I can’t live with the smell of Indian food permeating the stairs. I can’t live on that carpet, nor on those marbleized floors. And I don’t want to go walking through these streets with our child. By myself.”
    Her eyes filled up, but she didn’t cry. “I’m spoiled, I know. And I’m very sorry.”
    Nonetheless, the plan remained standing for a few weeks, even after Nora was confined to bed and as Mrs. A. was already busying herself around our house, tactfully imposing her new order on our rooms and routines. “Who knows what garbage they eat upthere?” she would comment whenever I dared bring up life in Zurich (many of Mrs. A.’s considerations began and ended with food; she viewed meals as the culmination of her days). I’m certain that she and Nora had discussed the move in detail and had already rejected it, though they merely hinted at it with a cunning that was totally feminine. Nora often exercises that kind of forcefulness in matters that concern us, consisting of a firm but gentle opposition: she enacts her will, bit by bit. With a spirit not unlike that with which she furnishes other people’s homes, she has also furnished my life, which before her was bare and unadorned.
    Both women waited for me to grasp their decision, and then they granted me the benefit of formally making my own. One morning I wrote an e-mail in which I explained in just a few lines that due to complications in my wife’s pregnancy I was forced to give up my grant. My supervisor was scornful of such surrender. “Scientific discoveries are not