Momo’s visits to her old friends turn a private effort to understand their absence into a quiet challenge to the habits remaking their lives. She finds Salvatore trapped in work he despises and Nino sacrificing the warmth of his tavern to financial pressure. By listening rather than lecturing, she gives Nino room to change course; his old customers return, and a scattered community begins to gather again. The Men in Gray have not yet been noticed, but Momo’s reconnections are already upsetting their plans.

Why Momo Goes Looking

After realizing that her friends need help, Momo spends the next few days calling on them, eager to ask what has gone wrong and why they no longer visit. Her search is personal: she wants to understand the distance that has opened between them and the companionship they once shared. The visits also test what remains of that companionship in a city where people increasingly claim they have no time for personal things.

The contrast is apparent from the start. The friends have not simply forgotten Momo; their working and domestic lives have changed, and those changes have consequences for the people around them. Momo does not arrive with a plan to reform them. She asks, waits, and listens, allowing the friends’ own accounts to expose the costs of the new pace and priorities.

Salvatore and the Work He Cannot Stomach

The first person Momo visits is Salvatore, the bricklayer. He lives in a little garret beneath the roof, but he is away when she calls: the other tenants say he now works on a large housing development on the far side of town, earns a great deal, seldom comes home, and is often out until the small hours. They also say he has taken to drinking and is difficult to get along with. Momo waits on the stairs outside his door rather than leaving without seeing him.

When Salvatore returns in the middle of the night, he is hoarse and embarrassed at being found in his present condition. Momo tells him she has been waiting. He says he had meant to visit her but no longer has time for personal matters, then describes the development’s relentless pace: a whole floor is put together each day, and every movement is organized. As he talks, he becomes less enthusiastic; eventually he falls silent and rubs his face with his work-roughened hands.

Salvatore admits that he is drunk again, and that he often drinks because it is the only way he can bear the work. His account makes the quality of the buildings concrete: in his view, they contain too little cement and too much sand, and may last only four or five years. He calls the tenements unfit for people to live in, comparing them instead to hen coops. The speed and wages do not erase his professional dismay: the work goes against the standards of an honest bricklayer, and building something worthwhile used to give him satisfaction. He imagines quitting once he has earned enough, but the imagined escape remains conditional on making more money first.

Although he promises to visit Momo the next day or the day after, Salvatore never comes. His failure gives the promise a painful weight: even after speaking openly about his isolation and dissatisfaction, he remains caught in the life that keeps him away. Momo’s patience has made space for his confession, but it cannot by itself release him from the work he says he cannot bear.

Nino’s Choice and the Return of the Old Men

Momo next visits Nino and Liliana at their little tavern on the outskirts of town. At the back of the house, she hears them arguing in the kitchen while their baby cries in a basketwork crib. She quietly takes the baby onto her lap and rocks it until it stops; only then do the adults interrupt their quarrel and turn their attention to her. When Momo asks why they have not visited, Nino answers that they have enough worries already. Liliana points to one of those worries: Nino has thrown out the old men who used to sit at the corner table.

Nino’s decision has an economic rationale. Rent has risen by thirty per cent, other costs are increasing, and he believes he cannot keep the tavern going by serving old men who can afford only a glass of cheap red wine. He resents being expected to go easy on others when no one goes easy on him. Liliana counters with the particular human cost of that calculation: one of the men Nino dismisses as a down-and-out is her Uncle Enrico, a decent and respectable man, even if he is not wealthy. Their argument is therefore not only about the inn’s prospects, but about whether financial pressure justifies treating long-standing customers as disposable.

After Liliana leaves the kitchen with the baby, Nino sits in silence, turning a cigarette between his fingers. He admits to Momo that he liked the old men and feels bad about sending them away. With them gone, the tavern feels cold to him too; he no longer likes the place himself. He has followed what everyone seems to be doing, yet asks whether he should instead be the odd man out. Momo answers with an almost imperceptible nod. Nino catches her eye and nods back, and the two smile.

Nino says he has forgotten the old invitation, “Why not go and see Momo?” He promises that he and Liliana will visit on their day off. Two days later they arrive with their baby and a basket of food. Liliana reports that Nino has apologized to Uncle Enrico and the other old men, one by one, and asked them to return. They have come back. Nino gives up his plans for the inn, but says he likes the place again; Liliana reassures him that they will get by. Their decision does not remove their financial difficulties, but it restores something the calculation had obscured: the tavern’s atmosphere and the relationships that gave it meaning.

A Community Reassembled

Nino and Liliana’s return visit is one instance of a wider round. Momo also calls on the carpenter who made her little table and chairs from packing cases and on the women who brought her a bedstead, as well as the people she used to listen to. Those friends had once grown wiser, happier, or more self-assured through being heard by her. Now some cannot find time to keep their promises, while others do come; enough familiar faces return that life around Momo becomes almost as it was before.

The qualification matters: the community is not wholly restored, and Momo does not know the larger consequence of her actions. The Men in Gray have not yet aroused her suspicion, but they cannot tolerate the way her visits are disrupting their plans. In this sequence, listening is not an abstract virtue. It gives Salvatore a chance to articulate what his work has done to him, and it helps Nino recognize that the people he expelled were part of what made his own place worth having. Momo’s search begins as an attempt to recover old friendships; its effect is to reconnect people with one another, against a social pressure that has taught them to put time and money ahead of personal ties.