Finally the moment seemed auspicious, it was a long time since we'd had our old harmony. Only this time the harmony really was confined to a tangle of vibrating breaths along the telephone wires. We hadn't seen each other for a long time. She didn't know what I looked like after two pregnancies, I didn't know if she was still pale and very thin, or had changed. For several years I had been speaking to a mental image that the voice was slowly reviving. Maybe for that reason, the murder of Don Achille suddenly seemed like an invention, the core of a possible story. And once I got off the telephone I tried to put order into our conversation, reconstructing the passages on the basis of which Lila, fusing past and present, had led me from the murder of poor Dario to that of the loan shark, up to Manuela Solara. I had trouble sleeping, I pondered for a long time. I felt with increasing lucidity that that material might be a shore from which to lean out and grasp a story. In the following days I mixed Florence with Naples, the tumults of the present with distant voices, the comfort of now and the struggle I had had to pull myself out of my origins, the anxiety of losing everything and the fascination of regression. As I thought about it I became convinced that I could make a book out of it. With great effort, with constant, painful second thoughts, I filled a graph-paper notebook, constructing a web of violence that welded together the past twenty years. Sometimes Lila telephoned, she asked:

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