Tuesdays and Thursdays

I went down to Menaggio on the tenth of December to have Serena draft my refusal to Gruppo Vallese, which I wanted in her words and not mine, because mine would have had something in them she would have made me take out.

I was on her stairs at nine, in a good mood.

“Sit. Coat off,” she said. “You have come about Vitali and you are going to tell me you are refusing her, and I am going to write it in three lines and you are going to want four.”

“Three is fine.”

“Three is never fine with you.” She took the cap off the pen. “And before that, so the file is straight. I have the variation from the branch. It came on Tuesday.”

“The what?”

Serena Nardi does not have a face that does much. It did something then.

“The variation of the loan,” she said,…