As soon as the elderly waiter placed before me the fish I had ordered, it began to stare up at me with its one flat, iridescent eye. I feel sorry for you., it seemed to say, eating alone in this awful restaurant bathed in such unkindly light and surrounded by these dreadful murals of Sicily. And I feel sorry for you, too— yanked from the sea and now lying dead next to some boiled potatoes in Pittsburgh— I said back to the fish as I raised my fork. And thus my dinner in an unfamiliar city with its rivers and lighted bridges was graced not only with chilled wine and lemon slices but with compa**ion and sorrow even after the waiter removed my plate with the head of the fish still staring and the barrel vault of its delicate bones terribly exposed, save for a shroud of parsley.