“Tell me, Danny, how did it go with those tractor guys today?”

　　Sometimes it would work, and Danny would cooperate with him. But when the attempt at flattery was too blatant things would get a little complicated. Danny would turn his eyes away from the friend and say something like:

　　“You stupid idiot, why don’t you shut up and leave me alone?”

　　Then the friend would shut up and rack his brains for a different subject. But Danny for the most part didn’t need to talk to anyone and certainly not to the friend, for Danny Brava, after all, had a firm personality of his own.

　　Evenings like this would end with the friend going limply home after he and Danny had not exchanged a single word, and after the friend had smoked half a packet of cigarettes and Danny not even one.

　　In the early years the friend would suffer agonies during the long silences, but after the third year he learnt to find himself special thoughts for these silences. Thoughts, since actual actions were out of the question. When Danny turned his eyes away from him, or stood up and went about his business, he would learn by heart the place of all the objects around him, so that next time he came to see Danny he would be able to tell by the changes what Danny had been doing in the meantime and who had been to visit him. When this amusement paled, he would stare without moving at a point on the white wall and try to force himself to think pleasant thoughts, about lakes in Switzerland, for instance, which he had never seen in his life.

　　With Brava too there had been developments over the years, and he permitted himself to retire to other rooms, to hold long telephone conversations, to cook himself light meals, to pour himself a drink. The more Brava isolated himself, the more difficult it became for the friend to exercise his imagination, and he searched urgently for new views, buildings, country landscapes. Always inanimate and always in daylight. If he failed to find any such picture he would simply count sheep, and sometimes he would ring the changes and count cows, or amuse himself and count snakes hiding in the rocks and waiting to pounce on innocent bathers on the sea shore.