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d’Aosta. You see those magazines on the couch? They’ve been sitting there all morning. I intended to read them, but I won’t be able to.” She ventures too far from the wall—with a snap the vacuum cleaner’s cord detaches from the outlet. The sudden silence startles her. She goes on staring at the magazines. “And there are articles in them that interest me,” she says. “They really interest me.”
    _____
    We ask her mother to help out. She comes a few times, grudgingly. When she enters the house, she goes through a series of propitiatory rituals: she makes a cup of coffee that she then sips drifting between the balcony and the kitchen, insisting someone keep her company, meanwhile sucking on a cigarette; then she pins up her hair, takes a pair of gloves and a clean apron and puts them on in front of the mirror, studying the effect. Transformed into the perfect domestic helper, she turns to her daughter. “So . . . what needs to be done?”
    At that point Nora loses her patience. “
Everything
needs to be done, can’t you see?”
    They argue so heatedly that her mother quickly leaves the house, offended. After less than a month, we stop asking her to come, and she doesn’t offer to return.
    A brief experience with an au pair doesn’t work out any better. Nora finds her slow and apathetic; she complains that the girl doesn’t know Italian well enough to understand her instructions and that she has no sense of order.
    â€œAnd she looks at you.”
    â€œShe looks at me?”
    â€œShe’s got a crush on you, it’s obvious.”
    â€œYou’re crazy.”
    â€œThat’s why she does those things to spite me, like when she broke the teapot. She knew I was particularly fond of it. I’m not saying that she did it on purpose. Not really. It was a kind of subliminal disrespect.”
    I keep telling her that we’ll find someone eventually, we just have to keep looking, but Nora is hardly listening.
    â€œNo. We won’t find anyone,” she murmurs to herself, “no one decent. No one like her.”
    _____
    While my wife vents her dismay during the day, in increasingly bitter and erratic ways, I hold back until night—another difference that has always distinguished us (since I’ve known her, Nora’s ability to sleep is a perpetual miracle). My insomnia has not been so acute since the days of my doctorate, when I accepted the fact that there was a four- or five-hour difference between the rest of the city’s biorhythms and mine, asif I lived alone on a meridian in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean or had a job that involved night shifts. In recent years the disorder had moderated to little more than a nuisance to be managed judiciously, worsening slightly between seasons. Now, however, I reach a new alarming regularity: every night I wake up at exactly three o’clock and lie there for hours, sometimes until dawn, staring at the subtle play of light on the windows. Whereas at the time of my doctorate I could make up for some of the lost sleep, now, with Emanuele and my classes, the alarm is set for seven-thirty; the sleep deficit builds up, and that’s that.
    To keep my anxieties at bay, I mentally continue the calculations that I’d left in midstream that afternoon. I’d like to get up, look for a piece of paper and a pencil to jot down my ideas, but I don’t dare. Nora forbade me to work at night ever since I confessed that if I do, numbers, letters and functions continue to dance before my eyes, making things worse. During my enforced vigils, I caress my wife’s hip in the hope that she will open her eyes for a moment at least. These are also times when I happen to think of Mrs. A. and feel a sense of loss, of sadness.
    As a child I, too, had a nanny. Her name was Teresa, “Teresina” to us, and she lived across the river. I don’t remember much about her; I