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picture him, hurrying through the airport, flustered and petulant, banging his fist on the ticket counter and shouting out his name, demanding attention, insisting he must have a seat on the very next flight; he was famous for the violence of his temper. A tremor of excitement ran through her and she shivered. The only face she could put on him was the one from the newspaper cutting, with its youthful grin. He would be angry, and frightened, too, perhaps; he might offer her money; he might even threaten her. But she was not afraid. The prospect of his rage, his threats, did not alarm her; on the contrary, it made her feel calm, as if she were flying, somehow, suspended on firm air, unreachable, beyond all peril. What did she want from him? She did not know. There was something to be desired, certainly, she felt it inside her, like a vague and not unpleasurable distress; it was the feeling she imagined of being newly pregnant. She held his fate in her hands, his future; she had found him out. Yes, he would come, she was sure of it.
    It was after midnight when I got into the city at last. There had been flight delays and missed connections, and the limousine that had been supposed to meet me at the airport was not there, the driver having tired of waiting and gone away. Then they told me my suitcase had not arrived, that it must have been sent on to somewhere else. At the lost luggage desk a swarthy clerk with his cap pushed to the back of his head and an unlit cigarette tucked behind his ear pretended not to understand my Italian – which, I might have told him, I learned from Dante – then shrugged and said the bag could be anywhere, and gave me a sheaf of incomprehensible forms to fill in. I threw the papers back in his face and for a horribly thrilling moment it seemed, from the truculent way he lowered his already low brow and scowled, that he might turn violent, and I took a step backwards and hefted my stick defensively. He only shrugged, however, and jabbered into a telephone, and told me someone would come, and turned contemptuously away. There was another wait then. Fuming, I sculled myself up and down the arrivals area, cutting a swathe through the press of tourists and noisy families and self-important businessmen with their slim briefcases and too-shiny, tasselled shoes. Presently a uniformed young woman from the airline arrived and informed me with a musical little laugh mat yes, the Professore's luggage had indeed gone to another destination, but that it would shortly be brought back and sent directly to my hotel. She had a large bust and a faint moustache and unpleasantly protrusive eyes, and reminded me of a celebrated operatic diva of the immediate postwar years whose name I cannot for the moment recall. I swore at her, and she blinked rapidly and ventured a glassy smile, not trusting that she had heard me correctly. She went off and found a taxi for me, and I was driven at astonishing speed – one always forgets how they drive here – through the humid night, into the city, where the last of the Saturday evening crowds were still promenading under the stone arcades.
    Then at the hotel I found that my room had been given away. They pretended to have no record of my reservation, but from the evasively vacant look of the bald old body at the reception desk I knew it was a lie. I raised my voice, and made threats, and stabbed at the floor of the lobby with my stick. The manager was summoned, a preposterously handsome, heavy-set, ageing dandy, mahogany-coloured and shiny-haired, with the puffed-up chest of a heroic tenor – this entire business was turning into opera bujfa – and advanced on me, unctuously smiling, with hands outspread, and assured me that everything would be arranged, everything would be fixed, in just a little while, if I would be patient. So I went and sat on a squeaky leather chair in the deserted bar, under the resentful eye of a tired barman, and drank too much red wine, and when at