A man begins a conversation with a client who has just missed his train. This man is ‘l’uomo dal fiore in bocca’, or the man with a flower in his mouth: he has a malignant tumour in the corner of his mouth and his days are numbered. A strange conversation takes place between these two people: the client, a father who has just done some shopping for his wife and daughters, talks about the ordinary events of his day, and the man with a flower in his mouth listens with the heightened intensity of someone who does not have long to live.During a long monologue, the client reflects the ordinariness of daily life, which the man looks upon with a distant and external view; he clings to life with the force of his imagination, ‘like a plant climbing the bars of a fence’. His wife appears during the conversation: she irritates him with her concern and her sound advice. The man with the flower in his mouth refuses to resign himself to staying at home. He delights in the memory of the taste of juicy apricots and asks the client to count the blades in a tuft of grass the next morning: ‘The number of blades you count will be the number of days I have left to live.’