Miramare, August 1957

For the first nine years of my marriage I was, if not happy, at least perfectly calm, and I confused the two with a good faith that astonishes me today. The question of whether I loved my husband had never arisen. Not that the answer went without saying: our life was furnished in such a way that no question could find a place in it. I want to tell here how, over ten days in August in a hotel on the Riviera, that question finally arose. Not because of a man, as I long believed, and as perhaps you will believe in reading me. Because of a sum of money I had never counted, and a camera I did not know how to use.

The money first. Every Monday morning, before leaving for his office on Corso Venezia, Vittorio placed a white envelope, unsealed, on the hall table. It held my money for the week. I took it without opening it and slipped it into my bag, with a gesture so habitual I no longer saw it. I did not know how much was inside; I only knew there was always enough. That ignorance seemed to me then the very form of marital tact: he did not ask what I did with his money, I did not ask how much he gave me, and we called it trust. If anyone had told me then that I was being paid, I would have protested. I would have answered, quite sincerely, that a woman who does not count cannot be paid, since she does not know her price.

The camera next. It was my father's Rolleiflex, in a square case of brown leather, its strap worn at the corners. He had given it to me on my thirtieth birthday, when his eyes had begun to fail. 'You look,' he had said. 'You have always looked. Do something with it.' I had thanked him and put the camera on a shelf, between a dictionary and a crystal bowl, where it stayed for two years.