is it? You can't kid with those Genoese, you know. I know that. Look! So I looked. No, I said, no, Liliana, no, what are you doing? . . . Don't make such a fuss, she said, a big man like you. I know a man's needs, what a man needs when he's getting married. Take this, for now, take it. Take it, I tell you. Please, do me this favor, don't make me work so hard. You know I don't have much imagination along this line. Take it! I moved away, I didn't want to, I started to run off, I put a chair between us . . . Here! She grabbed me by the arm, and stuck an envelope into my pocket: that one . . ." and he indicated it, with his chain, on the desk, next to the banknotes: "the ten thousand lire . . . it'll soon be two months ago: the twenty-fifth of January, I remember. Then she wanted to give me the chain, too. At all costs. I couldn't stop her, believe me." Ingravallo had grave doubts about the whole story. "We were in the living room." Then, pensively: "But there wasn't anything attached to the chain, I mean, that big bugger of a fob, that bad-luck piece. Tomorrow you must go to Ceccherelli, he's my jeweler. You have to leave it with him, just a couple of minutes, so he can attach the stone to it, you know . . . You know what? Of course, come now, you know that it had that stone attached to it: I've showed it to you dozens of times! But I've had it changed, she said. I had the opal changed for a jasper. It's to match this one, the one in your ring. That's why the week before she wanted me to leave it with her. She took my hand, and looked. She said: it looks so nice! they both look so well on you! the gold, too! it looks absolutely pure. They made such handsome gold things in the old days, before the war. But this was given me by Mamma, I said, a memento ... after a while, when she had married a second time, the engineer, you know. Well, I didn't know, she said, with a kind of grumpy expression. I had a jasper put in. A bloodstone, green, dark as a pimpernel, with two coral veins . . . red! they look like two veins of the heart, one for you and one for me. I picked it out myself, she said, in Campo Marzio. He's probably finished engraving it by now: he was going to mount it this morning: with your initials, like the one you have on your finger. Because I didn't want to see that opal in the family any more. Touch wood! And she touched the top of the table there. She made me touch it, too. She laughed. She was so beautiful!" Ingravallo took this, grimly. "I don't want it in the family any more, that opal. It looks like it's bringing bad luck to all of us. No, enough; I don't want it. By now Ceccher-elli's finished his work. The opal—no, it doesn't exist anymore! (And we both had to touch wood again.)
"It doesn't exist anymore, because I don't want it, even if it did belong to grandfather. They say it's bad luck. And, in fact, poor Uncle Peppe . . . you see? Cancer. And double, at that. Who would ever have imagined such a thing? He was so good, poor Uncle Peppe! Believe me, Doctor Ingravallo. I remember every single word: it made such an impression on me. I can't forget that face of hers. How she laughed, and how she cried! Those presents! A scene between cousins. But it could have been a love scene! No, no love, not on any terms!" he seemed to recover himself. "It was really laughable, too, poor Liliana! So you'll go tomorrow, no, today, she said. Promise me! Yes, yes, to Campo Marzio, to Ceccherelli. Remember. Just before you get to Piazza in Lucina, where there's that pizzeria. Yes, San Lorenzo in Lucina: now don't start playing dumb on me, you know perfectly well. It's on the right, though."
Ingravallo didn't want to believe it; he couldn't But he realized, little by little, that he was being drawn to believe what he would have believed unbelievable.
"Doctor Ingravallo, listen to me," Giuliano implored, "maybe she was crazy. I don't want to insult the dead, a poor dead woman. And after the way she died, too! But listen to me, please ... I... for her I was ... I realized ... I . . ."
"You . . . what?"
"I," Giuliano got a