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me.
    “All that aside,” Weisz said, “I wonder how I can do this and run around Europe for the Reuters.”
    “It’s your instinct we need, Carlo. Ideas, insights. We know we’ll have to stand in for you, day to day.”
    “But not when it comes to the great moment, Arturo. That’s all mine.”
    “That’s all yours,” Salamone said. “But, kidding aside, it’s yes?” Weisz smiled. “Do you suppose they have a Strega here?”
    “Let’s ask,” Salamone said.
    What they had was cognac, and they settled for that.
      
    Weisz tried for the pleasant day, proving to himself that the change in his life didn’t affect him all that much. The three-course lunch, céleri rémoulade, veal à la Normande, tarte Tatin, was consumed—some of it, anyhow—and the waiter’s silent query ignored, but for a generous tip inspired by guilt. Brooding, he passed up his regular café and had coffee elsewhere, sitting next to a table of German tourists with cameras and guidebooks. Rather quiet and sober German tourists, it seemed to him. And he did, that evening, see Véronique, at her art-laden apartment in the Seventh. Here he did better; the ritual preliminaries pursued with greater urgency, and at greater length, than usual—he knew what she liked, she knew what he liked, so they had a good time. Afterward, he smoked a Gitane and watched her as she sat at her dressing table, her small breasts rising and falling as she brushed her hair. “Your life goes well?” she said, catching his eye in the mirror. “Right now it does.” This she acknowledged with a warm smile, affectionate and reassured, her Frenchwoman’s soul demanding that he find consolation in making love to her.
    Leaving at midnight, he did not go directly home—a fifteen-minute walk—but found a taxi at the Métro rank, went to Salamone’s apartment, in Montparnasse, and had the driver wait. The transfer of the editorial office of Liberazione —boxes of five-by-eight index cards, stacks of file folders—required two trips up and down the stairs at Salamone’s, and two more at the Dauphine. Weisz took it all to the office he’d made for himself in his second room; a small desk in front of the window, a 1931 Olivetti typewriter, a handsome oak filing cabinet that had once served in the office of a grain brokerage. When the moving was done, the boxes and folders covered the top of the desk, with one stack on the floor. So, there it was, paper.
    Paging through a few back copies, he found the last article he’d written, a piece about Spain, for the first of the two November issues. The story was based on an editorial in the International Brigade’s weekly paper, Our Fight. With so many Communists and anarchists in the ranks of the brigade, the conventions of military discipline were often viewed as contrary to egalitarian ideals. For instance, saluting. Weisz’s story had a nice ironic flair to it—we must find a way, he told his readers in Italy, to cooperate, to work together against fascismo. But this was not always so easy, just have a look at what goes on in the Spanish war, even amidst the ferocious combat. The writer in Our Fight justified saluting as “the military way of saying hello.” Pointed out that the salute was not undemocratic, that, after all, two officers of equal rank would salute each other, that “a salute is a sign that a comrade who was an egocentric individualist in private life has adjusted himself to the collective way of getting things done.” Weisz’s article was also a gentle dig at one of Liberazione ’s competitors, the Communist L’Unità, printed in Lugano and widely distributed. Our crowd, he implied, we democratic liberals, social democrats, humanist centrists, is not, thank heaven, afflicted with all that doctrinal agony over symbols.
    His article had been, he hoped, entertaining, and that was crucial. It was meant to offer a respite from daily fascist life—a much-needed respite. For instance, the Mussolini