the adventure of a photographer

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The aduenture of a PhotograPher inhabitans, by the hundreds of with a lcather case ovcr their on Sundays go out thousands, shoulder. Aia tney photograph one another. They come b:ck as happy as hunters with bulging gam+tags; thcy spend days waiti-ng, with swect anxiery, to see the devclopc! nicturl (anxicf to which some add the subde pleasure ofalchcmistic maniputations in the dark-room, forbidding any in9siol by -.-L.r, of the family, retishing the harsh acid smcll), and it is only when they have thc photos before their eyes that they seem to take tangiblc posstssion of thc day they spentt gr-rl-y thcn the ,rrort t"ii srtei-, the movement of the child with his pail, the glint of the sun on the wifc's legs takc. o1 th-e irrevocabiliry ofwhrt has becn and can no longer be doubted' The rest can drown in the unreliable shadow of memory' Seeing a good dcd of his friends and colleagues, Antonino Paraggil a non-photographer, sensed a growing- isolatiorr' Eve[-week hc discoveicdthat thc conversations of those who praisi the sensitiviry of a filter or discourse on the number of bffVr were swelted by the voice of another to whom he hed confidcd until yesterday, convinced that they were shared, his sarcastic t -.ikt about an activity that to him seemed so unexciting, so lacking in surprises.

Professionally, Antonino Pareggi ocnrpied an execudve position in the disrribution department of a production firm' Lut his red passion was commenting to his friends on current

WHrx

spRrNG comes, thc ciry's

events large and small, unraveling the thread ofgeneral- reasons from the iangle ofdetails; in short, by mental atritudc, he was a

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The adventure oJ a

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philosopher, and he dcvoted all his thoroughncss to grasping the significance of even the events most remote from his own experience. Now he felr rhat somerhing in the essence of photographic man was eluding him, the secret appeal which made new adepts continue to join the ranks of the amateurs of the lens, some boasting of the progress of their technical and arristic skills, others, on thc contrary, glving all the credit to the efhciency of the camera they had purchased, which was capable (according to them) of producing masterpieces cven when operated by inept hands (as they declared rheir own to be, bccause wherever pride aimed at magnifying the virrues of mechanical devices, subjectivc talent accepted a proportionate humiliation). Antonino Paraggi understood thar neither the one nor the other morive ofsadsfacrion was decisive: the secrer lay elsewhere.

It must be said that his examinarion of photography to discover the reasons ofa private dissatisfaction - as ofsomeone who feels excluded from something - was to a certain extent a trick Antonino played on himsel(, to avoid having to consider another, more evident process that was separating him from his friends. What was happening was this: his acquaintances, of his age, were all getting married, one after the other, starting families, while Antonino remained a bachelor. And yet between the naro phenomena there was undoubtedly a connection, inasmuch as the passion for the lens often develops in a natural, virtually physiological way as a secondary effect of fatherhood. One of rhe first instincts of parents, after they have brought a child into the world,,is to photograph it; and given the speed ofgrowth, it becomes necessary to photograph the child often, because nothing is more fleeting apd unmemorable than a six-month<ld infant, soon deleted and replaced by one of eight months, and then one of a year; and all the perfection that, to the eyes ofparents, a child of three may have reached cannot prevent its being destroyed by that of the four-year<ld, the photograph album remaining the only place where all these fleering perfecrions are saved and juxtaposed, each aspiring to an incomparable absoluteness of its own. In

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42

Dilficult Loves

the passion of new parenrs for framing thei.r ofGpring in the sights to redrrce them to the immobiliry of black-and-white or a full-color slide, the non-photographer and non-procreator Antonino saw chiefly a phase in the race towards madness lurking in that black instrumenr. But his reflecrions on the iconography-family-madness nexus were summary and reticent: otherwise he would have realized that acrually the person running the greatest risk was himself, rhe bachelor.

In the circle of Antonino's friends, it was customary ro spend the wcekend out of town, in a group, following a tradirion that for many of them dated brck to their studlnt days and rhat had been exrended to include rheir girl-friends, then their wivcs and their children, as well as wet-nunscs and govemesses, and in some cases in-laws and new acquaintances of both sexes. But since the continuity of their habits, their Bctting togerher, hed never lapsed, Antonino could prctend that nothing had chrnged with the pessage of the years and that they were still the band ofyoung men errd girls of thc old days, rather than a conglomeratc of femilici in whicJr hc remained the only surviving bachelor.

More and more often, on those excursions to the sea or the mountains, when it clme timc for the family group or thc mulri-family picture, an ousider was asked to lend ihand, a pesser-by perhaps, willing to press the button of the camera alrcedy focused and aimed in the desired direction. In these cases, Antonino couldn't refuse his services: hc would take the camera from the hands of a father or a mother, who would then run to rssumc his or hcr ptace in the sccond row, sticking his hcld forward benrccn two hcads or crouching among thl Iittle oncs; and Antoninot ooncenrr:lting .[ tris strcngttr ii thc 6ngcr dcstincd for this usc, would prcss. Thc first Emes, ur awkward sdffening of his arm would make the lens veer to capture the masts of ships or thc spires of sreeples, or to decapitate grandparents, uncles and aunts. He waiacorsed of doing this on purpose, rcprordrod for alrkc in poor tastc. lt wasntr mre: his intcntion was to lcnd the use ofhis frrg, o docilc instrumcnt ofthe collcctive wish. but elso to ocpliit his

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tcmponry position. of privilege to admonish borh photo_ Qraphen and theirsubjoar.r. f,,. rig"ifiLo of rheir actioru.

As soon as the pad ofhis fng.r ....f,Jir,. desired condirion ot detachment fiom tq."f p.rron and petsonality, he 9. his lir was free to communicate theories in wcll-rcaso"i ilr:?u1.., framing ar rhe same dmcwell_composed httle gro,rfs.

(A few accidental successes had suf'ced to give hfr;;-

chalance and assurance with finders and light_rieters.) ". . . Because, once you've begun," he tiould preach, ..therc is no.reason why you should sto-p. The line ben*t,,

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that is photographed because it seems U*rUf"fi"';il;: reality rhar seems bea_uriful because it has been pfrotogr"pt.Ji, very.narrow. If you take a picture of pierluca U.Ir,rr. h.i, building a sand-castle, there ii no reason nor ro take his picrure *lril. he's crying because the castle has colJapsea, "t rl,.r,in while the nurse consoles him by herping him find a'sea-shelr the sand. You onlv have to rir.t,"yiig of something, ;Ah: how beautiful! We must photograpfi itf you are alreadv "na :;il;;;-d; close ro the view of the person *ioirurk.,h., not-nho.toSraphed is lost, es ifit had never cxisti, ani that ftherefore in order really to live you must photograph * ;;;; and to photograph as much i, you can you must ll^.yor.g"": crtner lrve tn the mostphotographable way possibfe, or else consider photographab[e cvery of your lic. 'ihe n.ri ',,o,,,.nt courseleads to stupidiry; the sicond, to madness.,, "You're the one who's mad and srupid," his friends would r.L:o him, "and . p1rn h rhe ass, into ihe bargain.,, . 'jFor-qhe person who wans to caprurc cveqrfhing that passes before his eyes," Antonino.would ixplain, cven iff.b.d; ;;; listening tohim any more, "the onry coherent way hc can'rct is to snap at least one picnrrc a minute, from the moment he qP.* his eyes in the moming to when he goes to sleep. This is thc only way the rolll ofexposcd film wifr represent fftnfrt " taking diary ofour &ys, wirlrlothing left out. If I wire to start pictutcs, I'd sce this thing through, even ifit meanr losing m| The rest ofyou,, on the contrary, srill insist on ry".d.

-"klng " choice. What sort of choice? A choice in the idyllic ,*1,

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\ U

Dfficult Loves

apologetic, consolatory, at Peace with nature, the fatherland, the family. Your choice isn't only photographic; it is a choice of life, which leads you to exclude dramatic conflicts, the knots of contradiction, the great tensions of will, passion, aversion.

So you think you are saving yourselves from madness, but you are falling into mediocrity, into heberude."

A girl named Bice, someone's ex-sister-in-law, and another named Lydia, someone else's er-secretary, asked him please to take a snapshot of them r*'hile they were playing ball among the waves. He consented, but since in the meanwhile he had worked ouc a theory against snapshots, he dutifully expressed it to the two friends: "What drives you rwo girls to cut from the mobile continuum of your day these temporal slices, the thickness of a second? Tossing the ball back and forth, you are living in the present, but the moment the scansion of the frames is insinuated between your acts it is no longer the pleasure of the game that motivates you but rather that of seeing yourselves again in the future, ofrediscovering yourselves in twenty years' time, on a piece ofyellowed paper (yellowed emocionally, even ifmodern printing procedures will preserve it unchanged). The taste for the spontaneous, natural, Iifelike snapshot kills spontaneity, drives away the present. Photographed reality immediately takes on a nostalgic character, ofjoy fled on the wings of time, a commemorarive character, even if the picn-rre was taken day before yesterday. And the life that you live in order to photograph it is already, at the outset, a commemorarion of itself.

To believe that thc snapshot is more true than the posed portrait

isaprejudice..."

So saying, Antonino darted around the rwo girls in the water, to focus the movements oftheir game and cut outofthe picture the dazzling glints of the sun on the water. In a sanlHe for the ball, Bicp, flinging herself on the other girl, already submerged, was snapped with her behind in close-up, flying over the waves. Antonino, so as not to lose this angle, had flung himself back in the watert holding up the camera and nearly drowning.

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"They all came out well; and this one's stupendous," they commented a few days later, snatching the proofs from each other. They had arranged to meet at the photographer's shop.

"You're Bood; you must take some more of us."

Antonino had reached the conclusion that it was neccsary to return to posed subjects, in ardrudes denoting their social posirion and their character, as in the nineteenth century. His anti-photographic polemic could be fought only from within the black box, settingone kind ofphotography against another.

"I'd like to have one ofthose old box cameras," he said to his girl-friends, "the kind you put on a tripod. Do you think one could still be found?"

"Hm, maybe at some junk-shop . . ."

"Let's go see."

The girls found it amusing to hunt for this curious object; together they ransacked flea-markets, interrogated old strcetphotographers, followed them to theirlairs. [n those cemeteries of objects no longer serviceable, lay wooden columns, scroens, backdrops with faded landscapes; everything that suggested an old-fashioned photographer's srudio, Antonino bought. In the end he managed to get hold of a box camera, with a bulb to squeeze. It seemed in perfect working order. Antonino also bought an assortment of plates. With the girls helping him, in a room of his apartment, he set up thc studio, all fitted out with old-fashioned equipment, except for two modern spotlights.

Now he was content. "Ttlis is'where to start," he explained to the girls. "In the way our grandparents assumed a posc, in the convenrion that decided how groups were to be arranged, there was a social meaning, a custom, a taste, a ctrlrure. An offrcial photograph or one of a marriage or a family or a school grouP conveyed to what extent each role or instirudon was serious urd important but also how far they were false or forced, authoritarian, hierarchicd. This is the point: to make explicit the relarionship with the world that each of us bears within himself, and which today we tend to hide, to make unconscious, be lieving that in this way it disappears, whereas . , ."

"Who do you want to have pose for you?"

46

Dffiailt

"You two come tomorrow

Loves

and

I'll begin by taking some

pictures of you in the way I mean."

"Say, what's in the back of your mind?" Lydia asked, suddenly suspicious. Norr', as the srudio was all set up' she saw that everything abour it ha,d a sinisrer,'threatening air. "If you think rve're goi.ng to corne and be your models, you're dreaming!"

Bice giggled u,rth h,er, but the next day she came back to Antonino's apartmenc, alone.

She was wearing a white linen dress with colored embroidery on the herns of the sleeves and pockets. Her hair was parted and gathered over her temples. She laughed, somewhat slyly, bending her h.ead to one side. As he let her in, Antonino studied h.er w'ays, a bit coy, a bit ironic, to discover what were the traits thar defined her rnre character.

He rnade her sit in a big armchair, and stuck his head under the black cloth that complemented his camera. It was one of those boxes whose rear wall was of glass, where the image is re 6ected as if already on the plate, ghostly, a bit milky, deprived of every link with space and time. To Antonino it was as ifhe had never seen Bice before. She had a.dociliry, in her somewhat heavy way of lowering her eyelids, of stretching her neck forward, that promised something hidden, as her smilc seemed to hide behind the very act of smiling.

"There. Like that. No, head a bit further; raise'your eyes.

No, lower them." Antonino was pursuing, within that box, somcthing of Bice that all at once seemed most prccious to him, absolute.

"Now you're casting a shadow, move into the light. No, it was better before."

There were many possible photographs of Bice and many Bices impossible to photograph, but what he was seeking was the unique photograph that would contain the former and the

latter.

"I can't get you," his voice emerged, stifled and complaining from beneath the black hood, "l can't get you any more; I can't nranage to get you."

Iftirai ii;ir

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L The ailumture

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PhotograPher

47

He freed himself from the cloth and straightened up again.

He was doing

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wrong, from thc beginning. That ex--

prcssion, thaticcent, that secret he seemed on thc very point of caphrring in her 6ce was something thet drew him into the quicks"rids of moods, humors, psychology: he too was one of t:hose who pursue liG es it flees, a hunter of the unatteinable, like the takers of snapshots.

He had to follow the opposite path: aim at a Porrait completely on the surhce, evident, uncquivocal, that did not elude

conrri.,tional appearance, the stereotype, the mask. The mask, being first of all a social, historical product, contains more truth than any image claiming to be "mle"; it bcrrs a quanqry of meanings that-will gradudly be revcaled. Vasn't this precisely A-ntonino's intcntion in sctting up this fair+tall of a studio?

He observed Bice. He should start with the exterior elements ofher appcarance. In Bice's way ofdressing and fixing hT:f up - he iliought - you could recognizc the- somewhat nostdgic, somewhat iionic intention, widcspreed in the modc of thosc years, to herk back to the fuhions of thirty years earlier' The photog."ph should underline this intention: why hadn't he thought ofthat?

Aitonino went to find a tennis racket; Bice should stand up, in a three-guarters nrm, the racket undcr her arm. hcr face in the pose ofa scntimental postcard. To Antonino, from under the'black drape, Bice's imagc-in the slimness urd suitability to the pose and in the unsuitable and dmost incongnrous aspecs ihat the posc acccntultd-scemed very intcrcsting' He several timcs, snrdying ttre geomctry -.d" h.t change position of legs and arris in relation to rhe racket and to rn element in the b"ackground. (In the ideal postcard in his mind th*c should have bec-n thenet ofthc tennii court, butyou couldn't demand too much and Antonino made do with a ping-pong table') But he still didn'c feel on safe ground: wasn't he perhaps trying to photograph mcmories, or-rether' vague-cch"t.of reto[".ctio, surficiog in the memory? Wasn'this refusaltolive the prcscnt as a futuie memory' es thc Sunday photographcrs

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Dfficult

Loves

did, leading him to attempt an equally unreal operation, namely to give a body to recollection, to subsrirute it for the present before his very eyes?

"Move! Don't stand there like a srick! Raise the racket, damn it! Pretend you're play'ing tennis!" All of a sudden he was furious. He had realized thar it w'as only by exaggeraring the poses that hc could achieve an objecrive alien-ness; only by feigning a movement arrested halfway could he give the impression of the unmoving, the non-living.

Bice obedienrly follou'ed his orders even when they became vague and conrradicrory, with a passivity that was also a way of declaring herself out of the game, and yet sotnehow insinuating, in this game that was not hers, the unpredictable moves of a mysterious match of her own. What Antonino now was e xpecing of Bice , telling her to put her legs and arms this way and that way, was not so much the simple execution of a plan, as her response to the violence he was doing her with his demands, an unforeseeable aggressive reply to this violence that he was being driven more and more to wreak on her.

It was like a dream, Antonino thought, contemplaring, buried in the darkness, that improbable tennis-player frltered in the glass rectangle: like a dream, when a presence coming from the depth of memory advances, is recognized, and then suddenly is transformed into something unexpected, something that even before the transformarion is already frightening, because there's no telling what it might be transformed into.

Did he want to photograph dreams? This suspicion struck him dumb, hidden in that ostrich refuge ofhis like an idiot, the bulb in his hand; and meanwhile Bice, left to herself, continued a kind of grotesque dance, freezing in exaggerated tennis poses, backhand, drive, raising the racket high or lowering it to the ground as if the gaze coming from that glass eye were the ball she cantinued to slam back.

"Stop, what's this nonsense? This isn't what I had in mind," and Antonino covered the camera with the cloth and began pacing up and down the room.

It was all the fault of that dress, with its tennis, pre-war

:;.j**k;r,

The ailuenture of

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49

connotarions . . . It had to bc admitted that in a srreet-dress the

kind of photograph he described couldn'r be taken. A cenain so-lemniry was needed, a certain pomp, like rhe olficiel photos ofqueens. Only in evening drcsJwoula Bice becom." iho,ographic subject, with the d6collctâ&#x201A;Ź that merks a distinct tinc between the white of the skin and the darkness of thc fabric underlined by the glitter of jewels, a boundary benveen an essence ofwoman, almost atemporal and almost impersonal in her nakedness, and the other abstracrion, social thii time. the dress, symbol of an equally impersonal role, tike the drapery of an allegorical statue.

He approached Bice, began to unbutton the dress at the neck, over the bo'som, and slip it down on her shoulders. He had thought of certain ninereenth-cenrury photographs of women in which from the white of the cardboard the facc emerges, the neck, the line of the bared shoulden, and all the rest disappears inio the whiteness.

This was the portrait outside of rime and of space that he now wanted: he wasn't quite sure how it was achieved, but he was determined to succeed. He sct the spotlighr on Bice, moved the camera closer, fiddlcd around under the cloth adjusring the apernrre of the lens. He looked into it. Bice was naked.

She had made the dress slip down to her fcer; she wasn't wearing anything underneath it; she had taken a step forward; no, a step backward, which was like her whole body's advancing in the picture; she stood erect, tall, before rhe camcra, calm, looking straight ahead, as if she were alonc.

Antonino felt the sight of her enrer his eyes and occupy the whole visual field, removing it from the flux of casual and fragmentary images, concentraring time and space in a 6nite form. And as if this visual surprise and the impression of the plate were two reflexes connected among themselves, he immediately pressed the bulb, loaded the camera again, snapped, Put in another plate, snapped, and went on changing plates and snapping, mumbling, stifled by the cloth: "There, that's right now, yes, again, I'm getring you fine now, another.'

':

4, IJ 50

'Dfiultlovcs

He hed nrn out of plates. He cmetgod from dre doth' Hc was pleased. Bicc was bcfore him, nalccd, as ifwaiting. , "NIow you crn drcss," he said, arphoric, but drerdy in a hurry. "Let's go out."

She looked at him, bewildered.

"I've got you now," he said.

Bice bunt into tears.

Antonino realized that he had fallen in love with her that same day. They started tiving together, and he bought thc most modern c2rneras, telescopic lens, the most advanced cquip' menq he instailed a dark-room. He even had a set-up for photognphing hcr at night when shc was aslecp. Bicc would wake it drc flash, annoyed; Antsrino went on taking snapchots of her as she discnangled hersclf from slecp, ofhcr bc@ming furious with him, of her trying in vain to find sleep again plunging her face into the pillow, ofher making up with him' ofher recognizing as acts oflove these photographic rapes.

In Antonino's dark-room, strung with films and proofs, Bice peered from every frame, as thousands of bees peer out of the honeycomb of a hive, dways the same bee: Bice in every atdrude, at every angle, in every guise; Bice posed or caught unawares, an identiry fragmented into a powder of images. . "But what's this obsession with Bice? Can't you photograph anything else?" was the quesrion he heard constantly from his friends, and also from her. "lt isn't just a matter ofBice," he answered. "It's a guestion of method. Whatever person you decide to photograph, or whatever thing, you must go on photographing it always, cxclusively, at every hour of the day and night. Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images."

But he didn't say what meant most to him: to catch Bice in the strect when she didn't know he was watching her, to keep hcr within the range of hidden lenses, to photograph her not only without letting himselfbe seen but without seeing her, to surprise her as she was in the absence of his gaze, of zny geze.

Not that hc wanted to discover any particular thing; he wasm't

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The adventure oJ a

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51

jealous man in the usual sense of the word. lt was an invisibte Bice that he wanted to possess, a Bice absolutcly atone,. Bi; whose presence presupposed the absence ofhim and.;ryo;; a

else.

Whether or not it could be defined case, a passion

as

jealousy, ir was, in any

dillicult to put up with. And soon Bice left him.

Antonino sank into deep depression. He began to kcep a diary: photographic diary, ofcourse. With the calm.r" rlrr,i ".ound his neck, shur up in the house, stumped in an a.mlheir, he compulsively snapped picrures as he siared into the void. He was photographing rhe absence of Bice. collected the photographs in an album: you could sce .He ashtrays brimming with cigarette butts, an unmade bed, a 9.-p stain on the wdl. He got thc idea of composing a ceralogue ofeverylhg in the world that resists photograpffy, whar is systematicdly omined from the visual 6eld -not Uy "nly cameras.bur also-by human b.i"St. On every subject he sp."t days, using up whole rolls, at intervds ofhours, so:ls to fo[ow thechanges oflighs and shadows. Oneday he bccameobsessed frl!, . completely empry corner of the room, containing a radiator pipe and nothingclse: he was tempted to go on phoie grapiing that spot and only that till the end of his lays. ' The apartmâ&#x201A;Źrt was completely ncgtected, old r,.*rp.p.o, .l-etters, lay cnrmpled on the floor, photographj ,t.-. "r,Jh. The photographs in the papers were phttogapl,ea as well, and an indirect bond was estabtishcd benryeen trii rcns and rhai of distant news-photographers. To produce those black spots the lenses of other carrr.ral had been aimcd on police "rr.rl,r, charred au tomobiles, running athletes, ministers, de fcndan ts.

Antonino now felt a specid pleasurc in pormying domesric objects flamed by a mosaic of telephotoi, violintlatches of ink on white sheets. From his immlbiliry he was surprised to find he envied the life of the news-photographer, who moves following the movements ofcrowJs, bloodshed, tears, feasts, crime, the convenrions of fashion, the falsity of official cerenronies; the news-photographer, who documents the extremes a

I-FF--

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Di!fiait

Loves

of society, the most rich and the mosr poor, the exceptional

mOments that are vet t produced at every moment and in every

place.

Does this mcan thar only the exceprional condition has a meaning? Antonino asked himsetf. Is ihe news_photographer the true antagonist of the Sunday phorographe.l AIe iheir

worlds murually exctusive? Or does on. giJe a meaning to the

other?

.And

reflecing like this, he bcgan ro tear up thc photographs

wttn utce or wrthout Bice that had acormulated during the months of his passion, ripping to pieces the srrips of ploofs lylg "n the walls, snipping up the celluloid of the r,.g.tir.r,

jabbing the slides,

*J piti"g ihe remains of this mciirodicai dcsrruction on newspapirs sfread out on the floor.

Perhaps rrue, total. photography, he thought, is a pile

of

-

of pri vate i- rg"t ] the crealed' backg'.o, J of massacres and coronarions."j"i.rst He folded the comcrs ofthe newspapers into a huge bundlc ro bc thrown into the trash, but first he wanted to phltograph it.

H-e arranged rhe edges so that you could ctearly,o r*i hrtres of photographs ofdifferenr newspapers that in the bundl. huf pencd, by chance, to 6t togerher. In f"ct he reopencd thc pac[age a litde so rhar a bit ofshiny pasteboard *ould stick oui, the fragment of a torn cnlargemeni. He tumed hl wanted it to te possible to recognize in his"nphoLgoit ",p",fighr,',h. halt-cnrmpled and tom images and at the same tim. tJf..t th.i, unrediry as casual inky shadLws, and also at the same ti-. thei, con crereness.as objects cha rged with meaning, the strength with fra gm enrs

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rhey clung to the attenrion that tried to drive them away.

To get all rhis into one photograph

he had to L extraordinary tcchnical skill, but tniy then would ".q,rir.

Anronino quit taking picturcs. Having exh"urt"d evcry possibiliry, at the moment when he was coming full circle, Antonino realiied that photograp-hing photographs was the only course that he had lett, or rarhcr, the true course he had obscurely sought all this time.

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The aduenture of a traueler Froenrco V., who lived in a Northem ltalian city, was in love

with Cinzia LJ., a resident of Rome. Vhenever his work

permitted, he would take the train to rhe capital. Accustomed to budgeting-his time strictly, at work and in his pleasures, he always traveled at night: rhere was onc train, thi last, which was not crowded - except in the holiday season and Federico could sretch out and sleep.

Federi-co's days in his own city went by nervously, tike the -hours of someone benveen trains who, as he goes'about his business, cannot stop thinking of the schedule.-But when the evening of his deparrure finally came and his tasks were done and he was walking with his suitcase towards the station, then, even in his haste to avoid missing his train, he began to feel a sense of inner calm pen ade him. It was as if a[ the bustle around the station - now at its lasr gasp, given the late hourwere part of a natural movement. and he also belonged to it.

Everything seemed to be there to encourrge him, to give a spTng to his steps like the rubberizcd pavcminr ofthe stlation, and even the obstacles, the wait, his minutes numbered, at the last ticket-window srill open, the ditEculty of breaking a large bill, the lack ofsmall change ar the newsstand, seemedlo .*i-st for his pleasure in confronting and overcoming them.

Not that he betrayed any sign of this mood: a staid man, he liked being indistinguishable from the many travclcrs arriving a-nd leaving, all in overcoats like him, .ur. ir, hand; and yer hI felt as ifhe were bome on the crest of a wave, because he was rushing towards Cinzia.

The hand in his overcoat pocket toyed with a tclephone 53