An author – the narrator – meets his heroine. Her outfit is from a bygone fashion, and her charm seems straight out of a black-and-white French film.

The four nights of their meetings, her life stories told through the fumes of alcohol, and the narrator's feelings being questioned by a figure from the past.

Until that fateful day when I saw Kalli ring her doorbell, or rather until later, at dusk the same day, with the unbearable ringing in my ears, instead of the front veranda I preferred to go out to the small balcony facing the north, hoping for a cool breeze, if possible.

And I saw them sitting and talking like two good friends, side by side, where I saw Kalli holding her hand and looking at her large palm – the palm and hand of a physiotherapist – staring intently and carefully as if studying the lines of life and the heart; until then I had eyes, but not for her.

Invisible to me until then, the physiotherapist, just as undoubtedly I was invisible to her.

Excerpt from the book