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amazement at the Sacher, and this she found so distasteful that she gave the animal to her housekeeper, who naturally passed it on to somebody else. My sister is always fascinated by anything out of the ordinary, but then, for good reasons and because of her superior intelligence, she never carries it too far, to the point where it might be open to ridicule. Or a holiday, she said. You ought to go away. If you don’t get away soon, you’ll go to pieces and die. I can already see you in one of the corners of your house, first going off your head and then suffering a complete collapse. Travel! It had once been my greatest enjoyment, my only passion. But now I’m too weak to travel anywhere, I told myself, I couldn’t even think of going away. And if I did, where should I go? Possibly, I thought, the sea will be the saving of me. This idea took root in my mind and I couldn’t escape it. I clapped my hands to my head and said, The sea! I’d found the magic formula. However dead we are, we come alive when we travel. But am I in a fit state to travel, never mind where? All the journeys I had ever made had worked miracles. Our parents had taken us with them on journeys at a very early age, so that by the time we were twelve or thirteen we had already seen a great deal of the world. We had been to Italy and France, we had been to England and Holland, we had seen Poland, Bohemia and Moravia, and by the time we were thirteen had actually spent some time in North America. Later I travelled extensively on my own account, visiting Persia, Egypt, Israel and the Lebanon. I had toured Sicily with my sister and spent weeks in Taormina, in the famous Hotel Timeo below the Greek theatre. I had lived in Palermo for a time, and in Agrigento, not far from the house in which Pirandello lived and worked. I had been to Calabria several times, and of course every time I went to Italy I visited Rome and Naples, and every spring I went with my parents and my sister to Trieste and Abbazia. We had relatives everywhere, though of course we only ever paid them the shortest of visits, for, like me, my parents infinitely preferred staying in hotels. My mother had a passion for hotels equal to my father’s: they felt more at home, just as I did, in the best and finest hotels than they did in our own house. I mustn’t think about all these splendid palaces we stayed in. Not even the war prevented us from travelling and putting up in the best houses, as my father often used to say. Of all these hotels, those I recall with the greatest pleasure are the Setteais in Sintra and of course the Timeo. Not long ago I had asked the specialist if I could contemplate travelling. Naturally, anytime, he had said, but the way he said naturally struck me as sinister. On the other hand, whatever condition we are in, we must always do what we want to do, and if we want to go on a journey, then we must do so and not worry about our condition, even if it’s the worst possible condition, because, if it is, we’re finished anyway, whether we go on the journey or not, and it’s better to die having made the journey we’ve been longing for than to be stifled by our longing. It was eighteen months since I’d been away anywhere. The last time had been to Palma, because I always regarded it as the most perfect place. In November, when the fog so cruelly oppresses and depresses us in Austria, I had run through the streets of Palma with an open-necked shirt and drunk my coffee every day in the shade of the plane trees on the famous Borne. And in Palma I’d been able to make my definitive notes on Reger. True, I later lost them, to this day I don’t know where, thus managing to destroy the fruits of two months’ intellectual effort through a piece of gross carelessness. Quite unforgivable! Just to think that I might now be sitting on the terrace of the Nixe Palace, eating my olives and drinking my glass of water, not just absorbed, but utterly captivated by the sight of the