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panel. The woman who rents the garage space next to ours was asking the careless driver who had nearly bashed in the electric door to step forward and give himself up. The sign had been left there to curl up in the wind, ignored. Nora had sworn to me that she’d had nothing to do with it, knowing full well she was high on the list of suspects, not only because of thearrangement of the parking spaces but because of her irreverent, often out-of-control driving. The only one who used the parking garage besides us was Mrs. A. So as not to waste piles of coins in the parking meter each day, she took advantage of the space that I left vacant in the morning. I had asked her if by chance she had been the one to crash into our neighbor’s garage door—it could have happened, it certainly wasn’t anything serious, and in any case I would take care of the damage. She had barely turned around. “Of course it wasn’t me. She must have done it herself, that one. With that big car she drives around in.”
    â€œThat must be it!” Nora says, convincing herself and me both about the version we just came up with. We’re lying in bed, eleven o’clock at night. “Naturally that’s what happened. You know how touchy she is.”
    â€œThis suggests that she really was the one who bashed in the garage door.”
    But Nora silences me. “What do we care about the door? We have to call her.”
    So the next morning, during a break in the group-theory exercise in which, judging by my students’ glazed looks, I was more confusing than usual, I callMrs. A. I extend an apology for the accusatory, indelicate way in which I addressed her, assuring her that if that’s the reason she doesn’t want to work for us anymore, I understand, but that we are all eager to make amends. I refer to Emanuele and how much he misses her.
    â€œThe garage has nothing to do with it,” she cuts me short. “I’m worn out, I already told you.”
    It is toward the end of that phone call, when we are about to say good-bye somewhat sullenly, that I hear her cough for the first time. She coughs in a way that’s different from how you cough when the seasons change. She coughs sharply, gasping for breath, as if someone were playing around, snapping his fingers at the mouth of her trachea.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” I ask her.
    â€œThis cough. It won’t go away.”
    â€œHave you seen a doctor?”
    â€œNo, but I will. I will.”

Insomnia

    M rs. A.’s defection is soon visible in our house, made clear by multiple signs of neglect, in particular on Nora’s desk. The stacks of paper whose loftiness had already been defying the height of medieval towers now reach alarming altitudes, toppling over one another to form a single disordered heap. Some important ones must certainly be hidden in there: bills to pay, notices from Emanuele’s school, phone numbers that Nora insists on jotting on Post-its and decorating plans that will cause her to have a mild nervous breakdown when the clients call for them and they can’t be found. Not thatMrs. A. ever laid a hand on the documents—better yet, she pretended not to—but often, after she had straightened out the piles so that she could clean, the envelope that my wife had spent days looking for miraculously reappeared: Mrs. A. would leave it on top of the others, as if it just happened to be there.
    â€œThey’ve contacted me about fixing up a chalet in Chamois,” Nora says one Sunday afternoon. She’s talking loudly to be heard above the roar of the vacuum cleaner she’s angrily pushing over an area that doesn’t seem to need it. “It’s a good job. It would be a good job. Too bad I’ll have to turn it down.”
    â€œTurn it down? Why?”
    â€œWhy? Just look at how things are! I don’t have time to breathe, let alone be able to carry out a project in Valle