This news upset me. When Lila told me about her wedding it was June, just before my oral exams. It was predictable, of course, but now that a date had been fixed, March 12th, it was as if I had been strolling absentmindedly and banged into a door. I had petty thoughts. I counted the months: nine. Maybe nine months was long enough so that Pinuccia's treacherous resentment, Maria's hostility, Marcello Solara's gossip -- which continued to fly from mouth to mouth throughout the neighborhood, like Fama in the Aeneid -- would wear Stefano down, leading him to break the engagement. I was ashamed of myself, but I was no longer able to trace a coherent design in the division of our fates. The concreteness of that date made concrete the crossroads that would separate our lives. And, what was worse, I took it for granted that her fate would be better than mine. I felt more strongly than ever the meaninglessness of school, I knew clearly that I had embarked on that path years earlier only to seem enviable to Lila. And now instead books had no importance for her. I stopped preparing for my exams, I didn't sleep that night. I thought of my meager experience of love: I had kissed Gino once, I had scarcely grazed Nino's lips, I had endured the fleeting and ugly contact of his father: that was it. Whereas Lila, starting in March, at sixteen, would have a husband and within a year, at seventeen, a child, and then another, and another, and another. I felt I was a shadow, I wept in despair.

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