AN UNSETTLING IDEA HAD BEGUN TO GERMINATE IN MY mind. An idea that was made even more unbearable by the fact that it was entirely plausible; indisputably logical, even. Once it had surfaced, it proved hard to shake.

G. was the only person in our social circle whom I’d never suspected of being behind the series of anonymous letters. Yet their frequency and their intrusiveness conferred on the beginnings of our love affair a dangerous, novelistic glamour: we were alone against the world, united in the face of the revulsion of decent, law-abiding people; we’d had to brave the suspicions of the police, submit to their inquisitorial looks, we’d even suspected all my friends and acquaintances, who’d turned into a single enemy, a monster with a thousand pairs of jealous eyes trained upon us. Who other than G. would these letters have benefited? Not only did they bond us to one another better than the hatred between two Sicilian families ever could, but, after having definitively alienated me from every person who might be even vaguely critical of him, G. would be able to recycle them into his next novel, and publish them in their entirety in his diary (which is precisely what he went on to do, as a matter of fact). Of course, it was a risky endeavor. He might have been sent to prison. But even that would have been worth it: what a plot twist, what a coup de théâtre, what material for a book! If he were arrested, he could count on my devotion; he knew I would shout my love for him from the rooftops, I’d shriek at the top of my voice how in a more tolerant country we would be allowed to marry, I’d demand my legal independence from my parents, alert officials and celebrities who would rally around our cause. What a fabulous spectacle it would have made! In fact, as it turned out, the police were rather less suspicious than one might have imagined, and all the decent, law-abiding people returned to their daily lives without worrying unduly about “little V.,” and the occasional fits of indignation of those around us gradually faded away. Thinking about it, it seems obvious to me now—though my memory might be playing tricks on me—that it was precisely during this period, when the police, at last, began to leave him alone, that boredom, and the incipient, though initially imperceptible, loss of interest in our relationship, began to worm its way inside him.