I slipped between the sheets a few minutes before three, opened my eyes at five on the dot and got up feeling strangely refreshed.

I had no commitments that morning, so I thought I’d go for a walk. I had a shower, shaved, put on some comfortable old cotton trousers, a denim shirt and a sweatshirt. I wore gymshoes and a leather jacket.

Outside it was starting to get light.

I was already at the door when it occurred to me that I might take a book, stop and read somewhere. In a garden or a café, as I used to do years before. So I looked over the books that I’d never arranged but were there in my flat. All over the place, scattered provisionally.

I had a momentary thought that they were provisional there just as I was, but immediately I told myself that this was a banal, pathetic notion. I therefore stopped philosophizing and returned to simply choosing a book.

I picked up Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story, in a cheap edition that fitted easily into the pocket of my leather jacket. I took some cigarettes, deliberately did not take my mobile, and left the house.

My flat was in Via Putignani, and immediately to the right as I went out I could see the Teatro Petruzzelli.

From the outside the theatre looked normal, with its dome and all the rest of it. Not so inside. One night nearly ten years ago it had been gutted by fire, and since then there it stood, waiting for someone to rebuild it. It was inhabited meanwhile by cats and ghosts.

It was towards the theatre that I turned, feeling on my face the cool, clean air of early morning. Very few cars and no pedestrians at all.

It reminded me of the time towards the end of my university days when I often used to come home at that hour.

At night I used to play poker, or go out with girls. Or simply stay drinking, smoking and chatting with my friends.

One morning at about six, after one of these nights, I was in the kitchen getting a drink of water before going to bed, when my father came in to make coffee.

“Why have you got up so early?”

“No, Dad, I’ve only just got home.”

He looked at me for only a second, measuring me up.

“It is beyond my comprehension how you get the urge to make idiotic jokes even at this time in the morning.”

He turned away and shrugged with resignation.

I reached Corso Cavour, right in front of the Teatro Petruzzelli, and continued on my way towards the sea. Two blocks later I stopped at a bar, had some breakfast and lit the first cigarette of the day.

I was in the part of Bari where the finest houses are. It was in that neighbourhood that Rossana used to live – my girlfriend in university days.

We had had a rather stormy relationship, all my fault. After only a few months it seemed to me that my freedom was, as they say, jeopardized by that relationship.

So every so often I stood her up, and if I didn’t stand her up I almost always arrived late. She got mad but I maintained that those were not the things that mattered. She said that good manners did matter and I began, with a wealth of sophistical arguments, to explain to her the difference between formal good manners – hers – and real substantial good manners. Mine, of course.

At the time it didn’t even remotely occur to me that I was being no better than an arrogant lout. On the contrary, as I was so good at twisting words to suit my purpose, I even persuaded myself that I was right. This led me to behave worse, including in the meaning of “worse” a series of clandestine affairs with girls of dubious morality.

I came to realize all this when we had already separated. I had several times thought back on our relationship and come to the conclusion that I had behaved like a right bastard. If I ever had an opportunity I would have to admit it and apologize.

Perhaps seven or eight years later, I came across Rossana again. In the meantime she had gone to work in Bologna.

We met at the house of some friends during the Christmas holidays, and she asked me if I’d care to have a cup of tea with her the next day. I said yes. So we met, we had tea and stayed chatting for at least an hour.

She’d had a daughter, was separated from her husband, owned a travel agency which made her a pile of money, and was still very beautiful.

I was glad to see her again and felt relaxed. It therefore came quite naturally to me to tell her that I’d often thought of when we were together and that I was convinced I’d behaved badly towards her. I just felt like telling her, for what it was worth. She smiled and looked at me in a rather strange way for a few moments before speaking. She didn’t say exactly what I expected.

“You were a spoilt child. You were so intent on yourself that you didn’t realize what was happening around you, even very close to you.”

“What d’you mean by that?”

“You didn’t so much as suspect that for nearly a year I had someone else.”

I’d like to have seen my face at that moment. It must have been a pretty picture, because Rossana smiled and the sight of me seemed to amuse her.

“You had someone else? Excuse me, but in what sense?”

At that point she stopped smiling and began to laugh. Who could blame her?

“How d’you mean, in what sense? We were together.”

“How d’you mean, you were together? You were together with me. When did you see each other?”

“In the evening, almost every evening. When you took me home. He was waiting for me round the corner, in his car. I waited in the doorway and when you’d gone I went round the corner and got into the car.”

My head started spinning rather weirdly.

“And where ... where did you go?”

“To his place, on the Walls in Old Bari.”

“To his place. In Old Bari. And what did you do on the Walls in Old Bari?”

Too late I realized I had said something too stupid for words, but I wasn’t connecting very well.

She realized it too, and did nothing to ease matters.

“What did we do? You mean, at night in his flat on the Walls?”

She was tickled to death. I wasn’t. I had gone to have a cup of tea with an ex-girlfriend and found I had to rewrite history.

I discovered that his name was Beppe, that he was a jewellery salesman, that he was married and rich. The place on the Walls, to be precise, was not his home but his bachelor pad. At the time of these events he was thirty-six and had a sterling wife.

At the time of these events I was twenty-two, my parents gave me 40,000 lire a week, I shared a bedroom with my brother and – I was now discovering rather late in the day – I had a whore for a girlfriend.

By now it was daylight, the air was fresh and clean, and it was an ideal day for a walk. I continued as far as the Castello Svevo and then further still towards the Fiera del Levante, to arrive perhaps two hours and several miles after leaving home at the pine wood of San Francesco.

It was practically deserted. Only a few men running and a few others seated, preferring to let their dogs do the running.

I chose a good bench, one of those green wooden ones with a back, in the sun. I sat down and read my book.

When I finished it, about two hours later, I was feeling pretty fit and thought I’d take another ten minutes’ rest before setting off for home. Or perhaps for the office, where they certainly must have begun to wonder what on earth had happened to me.

It was starting to get hot, so I took off my jacket, folded it up into a kind of pillow and stretched out with my face in the sun.

When I woke it was past midday. The joggers had multiplied, there were pairs of young boys, women with babies, and old men playing cards at the stone tables. There were also two Jehovah’s Witnesses trying to convert anyone who didn’t show them a sufficiently hostile front.

Time to be gone. Very much so.