These episodes, one after the other, led me to suspect that the book was selling because both the hostile newspapers and the favorable ones had indicated that there were some risqué passages. I went so far as to think that Nino had alluded to Lila's sexuality only because he thought that there was no problem in discussing such things with someone who had written what I had written. And via that path the desire to see my friend returned. Who knows, I said to myself, if Lila had the book, as Carmen did. I imagined her at night, after the factory -- Enzo in solitude in one room, she with the baby beside her in the other -- exhausted and yet intent on reading me, her mouth half open, wrinkling her forehead the way she did when she was concentrating. How would she judge it? Would she, too, reduce the novel to the dirty pages? But maybe she wasn't reading it at all, I doubted that she had the money to buy a copy, I ought to take her one as a present. For a while it seemed to me a good idea, then I forgot about it. I still cared more about Lila than about any other person, but I couldn't make up my mind to see her. I didn't have time, there were too many things to study, to learn in a hurry. And then the end of our last visit -- in the courtyard of the factory, she with that apron under her coat, standing in front of the bonfire where the pages of The Blue Fairy were burning -- had been a decisive farewell to the remains of childhood, the confirmation that our paths by now diverged, and maybe she would say: I don't have time to read you, you see the life I have? I went my own way.

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