While he was putting the greasy knife into the cutlery drawer, in the fork section, upside down, it had all already happened. At the junction with Via Torino, in a collision that ended in fire, seven hundred metres away. He would learn of it two hours later, or rather: they would make him understand. That was the time it took to free the bodies, to identify them, and to find someone willing to tell him that his wife Iris and his granddaughter Nina were dead, and that it was best he didn’t see them; there was little left of the bodies. Nurse Lorenzi, who had worked in the emergency department for twenty-eight years and happened to be on duty that day, would tell two colleagues from Paediatrics, taking a break at the coffee machine, that she had never seen such carnage on a body, poor old woman, and the little girl, ah, the little girl looked like an angel sleeping, but without legs. A porter waiting by the lift overheard and later told his wife, who worked part-time in the tobacconist’s and liked a good chat, so within a few days the whole town knew how badly mangled…