Frau read me her Sunday poem, an ancient Persian poet, she says. In my opinion it isn’t Sunday, this August has too many Sundays, Frau’s tacking on some more Sundays, maybe that’s her way of prolonging my life, adding on Sundays … Young sir, she says, the poem starts like this: Don’t think about the rotation of the Earth, Saki, first think about my head … Saki’s the manservant of the old Persian poet who brings him cups of wine, part servant, part philosopher, just like Frau … Oh Saki, where did the old days go?… Tristano would have his own way of continuing the poem, something like … I’m stretched out on my deathbed, Saki, they’ve stuck a catheter in me that I pull out just to be spiteful, as for me, besides my voice, there’s nothing left, or almost nothing left, a profile on the pillow, sharp as a razor, and some breathing that at times turns to a rattle, your master’s lying out there, dear Saki, outside the window it seems like an August so still, broken only by the frenzied cicadas, how long until tomorrow, Saki, is it still a long way off?… why is it always today?… an entire month of today, make tomorrow come and carry me away, there’s a big fly that keeps hitting the mirror, trying to get out, stupid fly, it can’t find the way out, like me, it needs morphine, like me, I lie here and talk and talk, but why insist on digging up old days, Saki … please, don’t let that young nurse in, the one Frau hired, she’s here with my urinal so I won’t piss the sheets, I can’t bear how she slips it so delicately into that glass container, like a dying flower … Saki, it was a beautiful May day, the zephyr had returned, and Tristano was sitting on his motorcycle near a newsstand, and it felt like Italy was cured, and the whole world alongside Italy, and he was humming our fatherland is the world over, our law is freedom, and even for him, life was returning … the sap was rising, after all that wartime adrenaline, all the carnage and blood, and now, sitting on his motorcycle, he was saying, how beautiful. It was May of forty-five, I remember it like it was happening this very moment.