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depending. She has no idea of the destructive power of the poison that will be introduced into her body, the force with which it will wipe out all forms of life and resistance, good or bad, withoutdifferentiating, like a hurricane. Nora finally manages to dissuade her. She takes the trouble to find the best store to shop for a wig. She consults a client for whom she decorated an apartment in Liguria, a woman who the year before sacrificed both breasts to a malignant cyst and of whom Nora now speaks with a certain admiration, as if that experience had promoted the lady to a higher level of consciousness. The woman refers us to a shop in the city center, and, judging from my preliminary phone call, she has not steered us wrong: the girl who answers the phone is much less embarrassed than I am to talk about wigs for a woman with cancer—in fact, she isn’t embarrassed at all, as if people called her all the time with the same pressing need.
    Mrs. A. comes to our house, and in the kitchen I measure the circumference of her head with the tape measure that was kept in the sewing box, once her exclusive domain. Then I take photos, front, back and profile. The wig will have to be styled just like that forever, a perpetual coiffure for hair that will never grow.
    I take her to the fitting myself, which makes me feel rather weird, almost how I’d feel if I had toaccompany her to the gynecologist. Mrs. A. is jovial—cancer can be defeated—and she seems to be pleased that this part of the day is entirely given over to her, that someone has taken the trouble to drive her car and now even offers her a coffee. No one has devoted any time to her for as long as she can remember.
    Inside the shop they have us take a seat in a corridor from which you can keep an eye on what’s going on in the other rooms. Above us hangs a drop-crystal chandelier fitted with energy-saving bulbs. The ambience of the place falls somewhere between elegant and shabby, though more shabby, actually. Mrs. A. points out the pieces of furniture, naming the style for each one: Empire, Liberty, Baroque . . . “See how many things I could have taught a child?” She sighs. But the child never arrived.
    When Nora and I kissed for the first time, we were both wearing wigs: hers about a foot high, shaped like a pineapple, mine with curly gray ringlets. We both had white makeup on our faces. We were in acting class, rehearsing some scenes from
La locandiera,
none of which would be performed in front of an audience. We dressed in costumes to enhance the experience.
    Every evening the male students and doctoral candidates in the department of physics, myself included, left the austere building on Via Giuria and scattered throughout the city looking for places where there were girls who did not have the same mortifying sobriety in their dress, the same slipshod disregard for their bodies in general. We took courses in photography, Asian languages, cooking, tango and aerobics; we slipped into film-club discussions full of female modern-lit students or pretended to believe in the spiritual potential of kundalini yoga, all to open the door to sex. After several such ventures, I’d landed in the acting class, though I had no interest in theater. At the first session, Nora, who had been studying for over a year, led me through the breathing exercises. My wife-to-be violently shoved her hand into my abdomen, forcing me to emit an embarrassing, spontaneous sound, before she’d even told me her name.
    After class, late that evening, we walked back and forth along the riverfront, orbiting around the stop where a bus would eventually split us up and letting more than one of them go by. Most of the time, Noraspoke about her father and her mother, who at the time were in the hostile throes of separation. She was tormented by the thought of her parents the way one can only be at twenty-five, when you suddenly realize that while you prefer to be