A.’s credenza were a few that had particularly intrigued me: An American, Terry Feil, had died thirty years after absorbing radiation in Nagasaki, where he landed soon after the explosion of the bomb. In Britain, in the seventies, fifty thousand people a year died owing to pulmonary and cardiovascular disease, the theory being—according to the article—that the consumption of nicotine had something to do with the deaths. In Italy a harmful drug had remained on the market for more than five years. Ionizing radiation, pulmonary carcinomas, drugs—it was as if the shadow of death, which at that time had already darkened Renato’s field of vision to some extent, were advancing toward Mrs. A. and her husband was aware of it. Looking at the newspaper clippings he’d so meticulously preserved, I wondered if he’d had a premonition about his wife’s end. Perhaps he feared it more than his own—and in those seemingly disconnected accounts he had been searching for a way to save her. Instead, thirty-five years later, Mrs.
