"It's a fair question. Normally, I don't talk about private things to anyone but my cleaner, Marta."

Kathleen laughs.

"Why is that funny?"

She takes Kathleen's shirtsleeve and leads her onward, farther still from the paper, prolonging this conversation, even if it means dragging the younger woman all the way to Piazza Venezia. "During that period in 1994 when Cosimo was gone," she proceeds, "I got a call from the bank asking about several withdrawals. They told me the amounts, which were staggering-you don't want to know. I still can't understand how he spent that much that fast. Then the police called: a man in his sixties, arrested for cocaine possession. I went to get him and he was talking nonstop. There was an Australian woman he kept mentioning. He'd picked her up during his time away and demanded that we drive around and find her. He had broken a tooth-he'd been in a fight, if you can believe it. Somehow I got us home. He kept talking and talking. He wanted to celebrate. 'Celebrate what?' I said. He poured a full glass of brandy and made me drink it. He wanted to make love. I didn't want to. But we did."

She tugs Kathleen across the tram tracks at Largo Argentina, to the pedestrian island around the Roman ruins. "Then he got angry," Ornella continues. "Said how I was ruining his job prospects. I tried to understand, to follow. He pulled me around the apartment, shouting. He was going to start a painting studio and fuck lots of girls-he told me that, said that to me, his wife. He grabbed me by the bra strap and shoved me, and it ripped. I kept trying to look him in the eyes. When I did, they were blank-it's one of the most awful things I've ever seen. And he choked me that afternoon, April 24, 1994. I remember thinking I was going to die. He choked me so long that I blacked out.

"He wasn't there when I woke up. My throat felt as if it had caved in. I splashed water on my face and tried to cry over the kitchen sink. But I couldn't get full breaths. It was a strange sort of sobbing-lots of swallowing and coughing. Then he was there, laughing at me.

"I'd been holding the handle of the kitchen cupboard to balance myself. He stuck his face close to mine, and I swung the cupboard door into his head as hard as I could. The bang shuddered the door; my hand buzzed; he fell. His hands barely stopped him, and his face hit the floor. His cheek split and blood came out. It dripped on the floor. I remember him putting his finger in the puddle."

"Jesus, this is a horror story," Kathleen interjects. "I didn't know any of this. All I remember was Cosimo being admitted to the psychiatric ward. But Dario told me it was depression."

"Well, there was depression, too. That came later." She lets go of Kathleen's sleeve, her confessional urge suddenly dissipated and replaced by a wash of guilt. "Don't tell any of this to Dario," she says. "Don't mention this if you see him. He doesn't know these details."

They turn back toward the office.

"Actually," Kathleen says, "I remember blood on your kitchen floor that night. Dario and I got there after you'd taken Cosimo to the hospital. We let your maid in. What was her name? Rina? She didn't know what to do. She didn't want to get blood on the mop-she thought you'd be angry-so I wiped it up with a copy of the paper."

"I know," Ornella says. "It's the copy I'm missing. I need you to give me a new one."

"A paper from 1994? I don't know where you'd find one. We threw away our hard-copy archives years ago. It's all digitized now."

"You can't be serious."

The women walk on in silence, arriving outside the office finally.

"Do you remember our conversation at the hospital that night?" Kathleen asks. "When I said I was thinking of going to Washington but that I was undecided. You told me I should. That I should leave Rome, and Dario, and take the job."

"I never said that."

"Yes," Kathleen responds, "you did."

On Tuesday morning, Marta knocks four times and waits. She has keys, so she enters. Ornella appears in her nightgown.

"Oh, sorry," Marta says, bowing her head.

"You left me in a terrible situation Sunday without my paper," Ornella says. "Absolutely unforgivable!" She wants to retract this. Instead, she retreats into her bedroom.

She dresses and returns to the living room, shifting framed photographs as if her outburst had not happened. "If I sit here," she explains to Marta, "I can see Massi when I look up from reading the paper. And if I sit over there, I can see Cosimo. Or should I put Dario here? You know, if you don't move pictures about, you stop noticing them."

Marta, who is brushing rubbish into her dustpan, nods politely.

Without another word, Ornella withdraws to her room.

"You want paper today, Signora Ornella?"

"No," she says through the closed bedroom door. "Thank you."

She hears the front door shut, and so emerges. Marta has left a note, asking for a particular brand of cleaning fluid and more paper towels. "How on earth," Ornella says, "does this girl get through so many paper towels?" She checks for dust under the sofa. While she's bent down there, snooping about, a drop of liquid plops onto the wooden floor. She touches her face; it was a teardrop. With a hard sniff, she gains control of herself. She wipes off the floor with her bare hand, dabs her eyes, stands.

Dario will come if needed, but she won't beg him. Her other son, Filippo, avoids her totally-he picked up his father's intellectual contempt for Ornella. And the grandchildren? They seem to be afraid of her.

She misses Cosimo. Their last decade together consisted of doctors and medicine, moments of hope and months of hopelessness. (She never told Dario and Filippo how their father really died, that he was discovered with a note saying, "Enough." She informed everyone that he had died of heart disease. In a corner of her mind, she knows that her sons know. It is the same corner into which she has secreted all manner of knowledge that she, at once, knows and does not know: about the existence of mobile phones, about the Internet, about what people think of her.)

She opens the stepladder below the storage space. She reaches the top and the two doors, behind which lie her papers. She has never climbed up here. She opens both doors and inhales-the storage space has a metallic smell, a scent she had vaguely considered to be that of her fingers. The space is high and deep, and filled nearly to capacity. More than ten thousand papers. Over a hundred thousand pages. A half-million articles. All those labored lines, placed up here to wait their turn.

The turn of tomorrow has come, and it has gone. Nowhere will she find a copy of April 24, 1994. She must move on to April 25. But skipping a day has a peculiar effect: these stacks seem far less authoritative all of a sudden-less like the paper and more like plain paper. She smacks a pile on the left, the side she has read, and yanks out a few copies. She tosses them down from the storage space.

In the air, the folded pages separate; sheets float gently to the floor.

She pulls out more, a thick pile this time, and drops them. They hit the floor with a thud and splay out. She pulls out still more. She dumps newspapers until her arms ache and the floor around the ladder is heaped high.

She considers the piles still remaining in the storage space, the unread papers. She slides off the one on top, April 25, 1994, and tosses it to the floor. She hauls out a handful more, then another.

She keeps this up for almost an hour until, her hands black with ink, knees wobbling on the top rung, she is done. The storage space is empty; the floor is an ocean of black-and-white.

She climbs down, unsure how to step off. She treads on papers and, losing her footing, thrusts out her arms, jewelry tinkling, and flops gently atop the lot. She slides a little way down the heap, gasps, then comes to a halt, laughing. "Silly girl!"