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“How much do you pay for this room, Don?”

“I’ve been here so long. The owner’s an old friend of mine. I’ve known him since—”

“How much do you pay for this room, Don?”

“Two hundred.”

“And how often do they clean it?”

“Sometimes.”

“How often?”

“The problem is I have to clean it myself before the cleaner dares come in.”

We carried on our conversation out on the square. He took a sip of gin and tonic.

“Just before my father died,” he said, “he summoned me to his study. It was the first time we’d spoken to each other since he took me out of school. Well, to say ‘we spoke to each other’ is an exaggeration. He gave me a file. It contained all the paperwork for his pension, his life insurance, my mother’s, and my pension, all perfectly documented and ordered and all of them with one of the most traditional and reliable banks in England.”

A waitress went past so he ordered ice and a lacrima.

“Barings Bank.”

He paused for a moment.

“I don’t know if it made the news in your country at the time. In England it was a drama. Ten thousand respectable, honest, hardworking people lost all their savings in one fell blow.”

His eyes filled with tears.

“Nick Leeson. I’ll never forget his name. It was 1995. He was a trader for Barings Bank in Hong Kong. He had gambled away millions of their capital on the stock market and then billions more in an attempt to make good on his loss, then he fled to Thailand in his Ferrari. They got him in the end, tried him, and sent him to prison. He did his time. Then he wrote a book that became a bestseller and made him a multi-millionaire again. But Barings Bank was bankrupt. And do you know what it means when a bank goes bankrupt? I know you know what it means.

“If I add it all up, what with my time in the army, my work as a Cambridge professor, everything I did in Italy after that — not to mention the work I carried on doing for certain British contacts, but I can’t tell you anything about that unfortunately — and then my father’s money and a little from my mother on top — if you’d added it all up, I’d have received a pension of more than eight thousand pounds a month. How much is that in euros? But I lost the lot. I’m one of the Barings bankruptcy victims. I’m one of Nick Leeson’s victims. And now I live on a small state pension of a few hundred euros. Just enough to pay for that shithole I live in. And the rest goes on drink and cigarettes. And every month I have to choose whether to take my shirts to the drycleaners or get my shoes resoled. That’s how tight things are.”

He took a large sip of gin and tonic.

“That’s how tight things are. But you can also look at it another way — imagine if I’d had eight thousand euros a month to drink, I’d have been long dead. Cheers, big ears. Here’s to Nick Leeson.”

6.

We began to worry about Don. The crowds that filed past his table every evening to embrace him and kiss his ring couldn’t see it. They saw the clown they hoped to see, and he delivered on cue. We were a handful of foreigners — a Scot, a Paddy, a couple of Brits, a Pole who’d married in, a Czech — who saw him most days on the square. It was a group of good friends, from whom I often distanced myself because the language of communication was English. And that wasn’t even the real problem. It was the kind of small, expat community that talked about the test match results, the Queen Mum, and the best place in Genoa to buy Marmite. The aftershocks of British colonialism. Speaking their language allowed you into the club — but let’s see if you really are civilized and know the cricket scores. And in the meantime, have a laugh about the Italians who happen to have the privilege of temporarily welcoming you, with your superior culture and your superior irony, to their corrupt and endlessly inefficient country, at which you shake your head pityingly, because there is still scaffolding up that was there six months ago and your doorstep hasn’t been repaired yet. I didn’t come south to listen to superior shorts-wearing northerners cracking jokes about the south in their superior language, with all kinds of puns on the names of English cricketers and little else that was of importance that day in the Commonwealth. But they were friends of Don’s. And they were nice people. So I couldn’t and didn’t want to keep ignoring them.

We had a crisis meeting in a place Don would never find us: the Mandragola. Rebecca, the owner of Caffè Letterario was there, too, because as manageress of his favorite haunt, she was best placed to pass judgment on Don’s situation. The meeting was opened by our Scottish friend, who thanked us all for attending and emphasized that this meeting should never come to Don’s attention. We all nodded obediently. Then he explained in a nutshell what our problems came down to by describing Don’s skin color. He said it was “olive green.” At this, a lively discussion sprung up. The lobby for “moss green” seemed to gain the majority stake at first, but after a veto from the Eastern Bloc countries, a compromise was reached: “puke green.” The next item on the agenda was his physical health. A small minority described him as “skinny.” But they were overruled by a majority who considered him “emaciated.” The debate finally moved on to his many injuries and their failure to heal properly and the cause of his strangely swollen stomach. Our Scottish chairman suggested a compromise: that Don, despite the differing interpretations the various parties might have, was looking unhealthier by the day. This motion was unanimously approved.

At that moment, Rebecca took the floor. “I love Don,” she said. “He’s a living legend. I don’t mind if he drinks himself to death on my terrace. He’s an adult. It’s his choice. And in some ways, I feel honored, although perhaps that’s the wrong choice of words. I mean—”

We nodded understandingly. We knew exactly what she meant.

“What I mean is this. On an average evening, he easily drinks a whole bottle. Gin. A liter. That’s forty euros, retail price. And he can’t even pay the cost price. Sorry to be so prosaic. Don is a poem. But I still have to cash up at the end of the night.”

There was a silence. And suddenly all of Don’s friends had places they needed to be. I stayed behind with Rebecca. “The most important thing,” I said, “is that Don never finds out that we met up to try and help him. He has his pride. It’s the only thing he has left. He would never forgive us.”

Rebecca didn’t say anything.

7.

“After Malaysia, I was posted to Japan and Korea. Japan was a doddle. It meant drinking G&Ts with the Japanese. I’ll give you two guesses who won. And in Korea I had a kind of admin job. For a month. And after that I was at a secret British naval base in Saudi Arabia for a while. It was so secret, even in the upper echelons of the British Army there weren’t many people who knew of its existence. But the Israelis knew about it. And they demonstrated that by flying over on a weekly basis and bombarding the runways. Symbolically. With flowers. As a warning. To make it clear that they were keeping an eye on us and that nothing would stop them if they did decide to bomb us because we weren’t keeping our heads down. Sometimes they’d come a day earlier or later. And once the Saudi pilots had just gone out to train when they came along. All the pilots were princes. Terribly spoiled. And terrified of the Israelis. And two of them were so terrified they used their ejector seats and let their expensive fighter planes crash in the desert. We laughed a lot about that.

“But Malaysia was tough. That was real. We were given a jungle survival training course in Kuala Lumpur. What was edible and not. How to make drinking water from your own piss. There were these plants with huge leaves. Really. This big. We called them elephant’s ears. They’re poisonous. If you eat them raw, you die. But if you soak them for a night in your own excrement, they become extremely nutritious. And in case of emergency, I always carried a bottle of gin in my rucksack.