"Why?" he asked.

Viola looked at him askance and then turned to Alice, with an expression that said I told you he was mad.

"What do you mean why? Obviously because we feel like inviting you."

"No, thanks," said Mattia. "I can't come."

Denis, relieved, quickly added that he couldn't come either.

Viola ignored him and concentrated on the boy with the bandage.

"You can't? I wonder what could be keeping you so busy on a Saturday evening," she said provocatively. "Do you have to play video games with your little friend? Or were you planning on cutting your veins again?"

Viola felt a tremor of terror and excitement as she uttered those last words. Alice gripped her hand harder to make her stop.

Mattia reflected that he had forgotten the number of roofs and wouldn't have time to count them again before the bell.

"I don't like parties," he explained.

Viola forced herself to laugh for a few seconds, a sequence of piercing, high-pitched giggles.

"You really are strange," she teased, tapping her right temple. "Everyone likes parties."

Alice had withdrawn her hand and unconsciously rested it on her belly.

"Well, I don't," Mattia snapped back.

Viola stared defiantly at him and he blankly held her gaze. Alice had taken a step back. Viola opened her mouth to give some kind of reply, but the bell rang just in time. Mattia turned around and headed resolutely toward the stairs, as if to say that as far as he was concerned the discussion was over. Denis followed, pulled along in his wake.

Since entering the service of the Della Rocca family, Soledad Galienas had slipped up only once. Four years ago, one rainy evening when the Della Roccas were out to dinner at a friend's.

Soledad's wardrobe contained only black clothes, underwear included. She had spoken so often of her husband's death in a work accident that she sometimes even believed it herself. She imagined him standing on a scaffolding sixty feet off the ground, cigarette between his teeth, as he leveled a layer of mortar before laying another row of bricks. She saw him trip over a tool or perhaps a coil of rope, the rope with which he was supposed to make a harness and which instead he had tossed aside because harnesses are for softies. She imagined him wobbling on the wooden planks before plummeting without a sound. The image panned out so that her husband became like a little black dot waving its arms against the white sky. Then her artificial memory ended with an overhead shot: her husband's body splattered on the dusty ground of the building site, lifeless and two-dimensional, his eyes still open and a dark pool of blood oozing out from under his back.

Thinking of him like that gave her a pleasurable tremor of anguish, and if she dwelled on it long enough, she even managed to squeeze out a few tears, which were entirely for herself.

The truth was that her husband had walked out. He had left her one morning, probably to start his life over again with a woman she didn't even know. She had never heard anything more about him. When she arrived in Italy she made up the story of her widowhood to have a past to tell people about, because there was nothing to say about her real past. Her black clothes and the thought that others might see the traces of a tragedy in her eyes, a pain that had never been assuaged, gave her a sense of security. She wore her mourning with dignity, and until that evening she had never betrayed the memory of the deceased.

On Saturdays she went to six o'clock mass, in order to be back in time for dinner. Ernesto had been courting her for weeks. After the service he stood waiting for her in the courtyard and, always with the same precise degree of ceremony, offered to walk her home. Soledad shrank into her black dress, but in the end she gave in. He told her about the post office where he used to work, and how long the evenings were now, at home alone, with so many years behind him and so many ghosts to reckon with. Ernesto was older than Soledad and his wife really had died, carried off by pancreatic cancer.

They walked arm in arm, very composed. That evening Ernesto had shared his umbrella with her, allowing his head and coat to get soaked so as to shelter her better from the rain. He had complimented her on her Italian, which was getting better week by week, and Soledad had laughed, pretending to be embarrassed.

It was thanks to a certain clumsiness, a lack of coordination, that instead of saying good-bye to each other as friends, with two chaste kisses on the cheek, their mouths had met on the front step of the Della Rocca house. Ernesto apologized, but then he bent over her lips again and Soledad felt all the dust that had settled in her heart whirl up and get in her eyes.

She was the one to invite him in. Ernesto had to stay hidden in her room for a few hours, just long enough for her to give Alice something to eat and send her to bed. The Della Roccas would be going out soon and wouldn't be back till late.

Ernesto thanked someone up above for the fact that such things could still happen at his age. They entered the house furtively, Soledad leading her lover by the hand, like a teenager, and with her finger to her mouth she told him not to make a sound. Then she hastily made dinner for Alice, watched her eat it too slowly, and said you look tired, you should go to bed. Alice protested that she wanted to watch television and Soledad gave in, just to get rid of her, as long as she watched it up in the den. Alice went upstairs, taking advantage of her father's absence to drag her feet as she walked.

Soledad returned to her lover. They kissed for a long time, sitting side by side, not knowing what to do with their own hands, clumsy and out of practice. Then Ernesto plucked up the courage to pull her to him.

As he fiddled with the devilish hooks that fastened her bra, apologizing under his breath for being so clumsy, she felt young and beautiful and uninhibited. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again she saw Alice, standing in the doorway.

"Cono, " she blurted out. "?Que haces aqu'?"

She slipped away from Ernesto and covered her bosom with one arm. Alice tilted her head to one side and observed them without surprise, as if they were animals in a zoo.

"I can't get to sleep," she said.

By some mysterious coincidence Soledad was remembering that very moment when, turning around, she saw Alice standing in the study doorway. Soledad was dusting the library. Three at a time she pulled the lawyer's encyclopedia, the heavy volumes with dark green binding and gilded spines, off the shelf. While she held them with her left arm, which was already beginning to ache, with her right she dusted the mahogany surfaces, even in the most hidden corners, because the lawyer had once complained that she only pushed the dust around.

It was years since Alice had entered her father's study. An invisible barrier of hostility kept her frozen in the doorway. She was sure that if she placed so much as a toe on the regular, hypnotic geometry of the parquet, the wood would crack under her weight and send her plunging into a black abyss.

The whole room was saturated with her father's intense smell. It had seeped into the papers stacked neatly on the desk, and drenched the thick, cream-colored curtains. When she was little, Alice would tiptoe in and call her father for dinner. She always hesitated for a moment before speaking, enchanted by her father's posture as he loomed over his desk studying complicated documents from behind his silver-framed glasses. When the lawyer realized his daughter was there, he slowly lifted up his head and frowned, as if to ask what she was doing there. Then he nodded and gave her a hint of a smile. I'm coming, he said.