Now that much of my life is behind me I know that my reaction to that news was overblown, and as I write I realize that I'm smiling to myself. I know many men and many women who can recount experiences that aren't very different: love and sex are unreasonable and brutal. But at the time I couldn't bear it. That fact -- Eleonora is seven months pregnant -- seemed to me the most intolerable wrong that Nino could do to me. I remembered Lila, the moment of uncertainty when she and Carmen had looked at each other, as if they had had something else to tell me. Had Antonio discovered the pregnancy, too? Did they know? And why had Lila relinquished her chance to tell me? Had she claimed the right to measure out my suffering in doses? Something broke in my chest and in my stomach. While Nino was suffocating with anxiety and struggling to justify himself, saying that the pregnancy, if on the one hand it had served to calm his wife, on the other had made it even more difficult to leave her, I was doubled over with suffering, arms locked, my whole body was ill, I couldn't speak, or cry out. Only Franco was in the apartment. No crazy women, desolate women, singers, sick people. Mariarosa had taken the children out to give Nino and me time to confront each other. I opened the door of the room and called my old boyfriend from Pisa in a weak voice. He came right away and I pointed to Nino. I said in a sort of rattle: throw him out.

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