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back. Obviously he hadn’t done it. He had merely begged to see her again, lain in wait for her, rung her bell at night and talked to her through the entryphone. But the thought of killing her, as a final clarification , a miracle cure for that incurable pain, had never completely abandoned him.
    The only thing that had lightened the nights of sobbing on those pillows still imbued with the smell of her hair, beneath the same sheets that had wrapped her scented body, was to think about the various ways in which he could kill her. Because he could not accept the idea that others apart from him could enjoy her—he was aware that it was a childish thought, and for that very reason an innocent one—which had initiated him into a kind of dionysiac priesthood of bodies.
    Among the various ways in which he had imagined her dead after she had so inexplicably abandoned him, some images had imposed themselves more strongly than others.
    In the dead of night, The Writer, eyes wide open, flew up through the worm-eaten beams of his room, took the roof off her building and flew into her bedroom, where he found The OldFlame’s corpse waiting: someone had already done his dirty work for him. Then he imagined wrapping her naked and still-warm body in a soft Persian rug he saw displayed every day in a shop window on the way from his house to the faculty. As if obeying an ancient ritual, he would wash her in a tub of hot water with a bar of herbal soap, the expensive kind she liked so much, which smelt of sandalwood, musk or cypress, then he would dry her, brush her hair, put a flower behind her ear and give her a last kiss on her cold lips, before wrapping her in a shroud. Only then, like an unscrupulous antiquarian or a seasoned grave-robber on a rainy winter night, would he would load her in the boot of his car and, driving carefully and smoothly, take her to paradise, because that was where she deserved to be, seeing that she had died so young and beautiful.
    At other times, he had only managed to get to sleep at dawn, exhausted, cradled by another terrible image: The Old Flame’s saponified corpse floating just under the surface of the water, her hair spread like golden seaweed, the Botticellian features of the face, her mouth open in a smile of benediction—deep down, she forgave him—and her eyes, those wonderful eyes staring up at the sky, as if waiting to commence her ascension into heaven.
    But now that The Old Flame had come back to him, having passed through all those years and all those feelings unscathed, wrapped in a beauty too tragic to still be convincing, now that she was squeezing his arm in a nervous grip in the stern of this flat-bottomed boat and tilting her head as a sign of forgiveness, now that he had the strength and clear-headedness to bring that long-imagined plan to fruition, The Writer became aware of something really tragic: he no longer felt anything for The Old Flame.
    There had been a time when he had experienced that story in a heroic way, like a stylite stuck up on the high column of pain, indifferent to time, exposed to the rain and wind of love. But now?Everything had changed. He did not love her, nor did he hate her. He did not even want her, as he had at the beginning of that strange morning. What was she to him, now? A fragile legend, a decapitated Venus. That was what she was. An elegant way to say that she had become—simply, odiously and irredeemably—of no more interest to him than the rest of the human race.
     
    In Rome strange things happen that can only be explained by the fact that they are strange and happen in Rome.
    Among the many, some had struck the imagination of The Beginner as soon as he arrived in the capital.
    The flower-sellers for example. An excessive number of flower-sellers . Flower-sellers in the streets, in the squares, at traffic junctions , on street corners, flower-sellers outside schools, barracks and hospitals. Every damned day, at all hours of the day, in all