Two or three hours of sleep wouldn’t have done him any good. On the contrary, it would simply have left him feeling woozier than ever. Actually—he thought as he went into the kitchen to prepare another four-cup espresso pot—what had happened to him the previous night was just like a nightmare that resurfaces in the mind all at once the moment you wake up and remains in the memory, though gradually fading, for only a day, so that, after another night’s sleep, the nightmare vanishes, and you have trouble remembering it, as the contours and details blur little by little until it becomes like a mosaic besieged by time, with large patches of gray wall where the colored tesserae have fallen off. Therefore, he needed only be patient another twenty-four hours and then he could forget what he saw in the Palmisanos’ apartment and what happened to him there. Because he simply couldn’t shake off the fright the place had given him.
