Salon Reading

From the pier came the sound of the bell for departure. On our last boat trip in Venice, Michele had laid his hand between my thighs and kissed me for minutes in the sea off Nettuno, then steered me along the beach by the neck, without once loosening his grip. “So that you don’t stray from the path, sweet slave girl,” he had said, and the pain and the suffering had been hidden beneath it. The importance he gave me had made me hope again... In Siena at the Palio, in the contrada “Giraffe”, where the ambulance building stood, we had looked at each other the way Oliver Kahn and his wife looked at one another on the front page of Bild shortly before the official end of their relationship, under the caption: “If looks cannot deceive and tell the truth, these two will still have a great deal to say to each other even after the separation...”