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or custard, and he eats her up.
    The Little Girl: he bathes her in the tub with lots of bubbles and washes her all over and out of gratitude she gives him head.
    The Muse: he photographs her in the most obscene poses, legs apart, as she masturbates and squeezes her tits.
    The Bitch Woman: she wears only suspenders and brings the man the newspaper in her mouth, and he caresses her sex from behind, or her hair or her ears, and says, ‘Good bitch.’
    The Servant: she brings him his coffee in bed, dressed in modest clothing but showing her boobs almost completely, and she lets him milk them, then she gets up onto the cupboard to dust and she’s not wearing any knickers.
    The Lazybones: she’s tied to the bed to be punished with the strap, but Nonno never really hurt her.
    Nonna had always done an excellent job. After every service, her husband would tell her how much it would have cost at the bordello and they would put that amount away for when they rebuilt the house in via Manno, and Nonna always wanted a small amount to be reserved for pipe tobacco. But they continued sleeping on opposite sides of the bed and never talking about themselves. Perhaps that’s why Nonna never forgot the emotion she felt on those other nights, with the Veteran’s arm across her head, his sleepy yet present hand seeming to stroke her hair.
    The Veteran said he thought her husband was a truly lucky man, and not, as she’d put it, a poor wretch who’d ended up with a madwoman. She wasn’t mad, he said; she was a creature made at a moment when God simply didn’t feel like making one of the usual style of women: He got a poetic urge and created her. And Nonna laughed a lot and said he was mad, too, and that was why he didn’t notice other people’s madness.
    One night later on, the Veteran told Nonna that his father had not died during one of the bombings of Genoa, but after being tortured by the Gestapo. They’d thrown his brutally disfigured corpse into the street outside the student residence. But his father had never revealed the whereabouts of his daughter-in-law and the partisans who’d been telegraphing the Allies from his house. He had stayed in the house so that everything would seem normal to those who were watching them after the tip-off, and because of this the others had been able to escape into the Apennine mountains. As he said goodbye and sat down to wait for the Gestapo, he told his daughter-in-law that he wanted her and his son to be able to have a family.
    The Veteran’s little girl had been born in the mountains. But maybe it wasn’t true. He felt she was the child of a German. He couldn’t even imagine his wife in love with another man; that’s why he felt that the father of his little girl must have been a monster who maybe took his wife violently, most likely when she was trying to save her father-in-law. And he was never able to touch her again; that’s why they had no children. He, too, had become a visitor of bordellos.
    The Veteran burst into tears. He was dying of shame because as a boy they’d taught him never to show pain. And then Nonna started crying, too, saying that they’d taught her not to show joy and maybe they’d been right, because the only thing that had gone well for her — marrying Nonno — had left her indifferent, and she didn’t understand why all her admirers had run away. But what do we really know about other people? What could the Veteran know?
    Once, speaking of not understanding, she got up some courage, and with her heart beating like it was going to leap out of her chest, asked Nonno if now, having got to know her better — not that knowing her better was any big deal, of course, but anyway, having lived with her all this time and not having needed to go to the bordello — he cared for her.
    Nonno had sort of smiled to himself without looking at her, and then given her a slap on the bottom, and not so much as dreamt of answering her. Another time, during one of her services,