An elegant, languid, timeless almost noirish tale of how we fuck each other up in the name of love and how money fucks everything, the absence of it, poverty perverting our relations with those we should love, and what is love anyway. As only the Italians can write, timeless.

First published in English in Festival Night, Peter Owen, 1964, then in The Leather Jacket, Quartet, 1980 and The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, Penguin, 2019