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limpid and copious in spite of everything. I am convinced that her vitality is inexhaustible, that nothing, not even the ultimate sorrow, not even the gravest loss, would be able to deter it. In the end we are almost never happy or unhappy because of what happens to us; we are one or the other depending on the humor that flows inside us, and hers is molten silver: the whitest of metals, the best conductor and the most merciless reflector. The consolation of knowing that she is so strong mixes with the fear of not being truly indispensable to her, with the suspicion that I might be sucking the life out of her, like a kind of gigantic parasite.
    One night we were talking about Mrs. A. and herlife marked by sacrifice. Right in the middle of it, just when her body was at its most vital, she had enjoyed five years of perfect happiness with her husband, before his kidneys faltered. Five years that had left no visible traces except in her, five years of marriage plus one of engagement during which she had distanced herself from who she’d been before and accumulated enough memories to endure the sight of Renato dying before her eyes, day after day, inexorably, in hundreds of dialysis sessions that changed his blood and his disposition and his love for her. Five years that had been enough for her to get by for another forty of them.
    â€œCould you do it?” Nora had asked me. “Would you be able to stand it? Would you have the fortitude to stay with me until the end if I got sick?”
    â€œWe both swore to it, if I remember correctly.”
    â€œWhat if the illness lasted as long as Renato’s? Would you stay with me all that time, wasting the best years of your life?”
    â€œYes, I would.”
    I knew I shouldn’t turn the question around, because people whose lymph flows freely are as unstoppable as a rushing stream. But there are someconversations between people in love that, once you cross a certain threshold, inevitably draw you into their dark center.
    â€œAnd you?”
    Nora’s right hand went to the lock of hair that curls behind her ear, a strand that remains hidden except when she gathers her hair back, and that my fingers always go searching for. She started twisting and tugging it. “I don’t know. I think so,” but for a moment she had hesitated. For the rest of the evening, we kept away from each other.
    On the plane headed for the temperate latitudes of the Middle East, a few hours after midnight on Christmas Eve, with my family asleep and nothing out there to threaten us at the moment, I feel like I am at a high point in our lives. I wonder how long it will last and how best to savor it fully. Certainly not by trying to dull my senses with more wine, which I didn’t even want. Then, too, Nora and I are always so busy, so distracted, so tired. We live in anticipation, constantly waiting for something that will free us from the burdens of the present, without taking into account new ones that will arise. If these really are our best years,I’m not satisfied with how we’re using them. I’d like to wake her up and tell her that, but I know she wouldn’t take me seriously; she would turn around in her seat, snuggle up even more, lean her head against the darkened window and go on sleeping.

The Seven-Times Table

    A mong the articles pasted inside Mrs. A.’s credenza were a few that had particularly intrigued me: An American, Terry Feil, had died thirty years after absorbing radiation in Nagasaki, where he landed soon after the explosion of the bomb. In Britain, in the seventies, fifty thousand people a year died owing to pulmonary and cardiovascular disease, the theory being—according to the article—that the consumption of nicotine had something to do with the deaths. In Italy a harmful drug had remained on the market for more than five years. Ionizing radiation, pulmonary carcinomas, drugs—it was as if theshadow of death, which at