Piranesi

PIRANESI JOHN J. PARMAN

“Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.”

John Berger

Part one: Luca

Piranesi, the city is called , with its high, expansive plinth looking down at a harbor bracketed by jutting rock formations, the twins, that mark the southmost part of the peninsula the city terminates and defends. I was born here and have only left at others' bidding.

Matrilinear descent is a long line of courtesans, great beauties of legendary skill. Patrilinear is a perpetual counting house, managing the ascent, the prime, and the afterlife of these thoroughbreds. Not surprisingly, there are parallel activities in the breeding of bulls and horses, serving more or less the same clientele as the women did. An appellation attached itself to us: Piranesi is our calling card in the wider world that sporting's pleasures and wagers attract. We took our city's name and others gave it a touch of rubbed-off aristocracy.

Offspring of such a family, immersed in its callings, fall across a spectrum of identity that in turn determines a specific one felt apt for her or his talents and appetites. Felt is the instinct of one generation considering the next, but its feelings enter into it, starting at the first moments of birth when those present at one of life's sacraments make an assessment of the babe taking in a new life from the standpoint of the one lately deserted.

The family's beliefs are esoteric. Returning is assumed and each revisit moves the returning one incrementally in a given direction, the ends of which are polar opposites. And Piranesi is Triton's concubine, opening out to the sea, the hills her bedstead.

It's my fate to be less tethered to our enterprises, but useful to them as an envoy, detached and thus discreet and convenient. I carry the psychic cargo of my lineage, but lightly, even happily.

1.

Some days I might linger at the docks and then pay for the services I've just received from a sailor needing money. This speaks to my androgyny, which falls in, when coupling, with the role the other prescribes for it. Like a courtesan, pleasure is in the taking in; like a dealer in bulls and stud, pleasure is hardening and being taken in, the procreative trigger a woman pulls. These are my distractions. As was foreseen, a journey toward womanhood recently begun, and so a bodily preference for pure types, whereas my mind loves the mix of beauty and intellect that is women's unique attraction. These pure types vary, the sailors stoical, aroused like dogs by the scent of coins mixed with balm to smooth the passage. They are like bulls, also set in train by the patterns of coupling. Women are entirely animated by their minds, and sparking them provokes and sustains the bodily pleasure they give and receive. In a brothel, a man who does this reliably while still paying is a desirable client. The older men they dote on are quite happy to set them laughing; with sailors, few words, an immediate reward for a job well done.

"We are Phoenician," my mother sometimes declared, as good an explanation as any for a family that curates its bloodlines casually but not without design. What's clear is the dominance of traits like beauty in the women, an intuition attuned to the angles the outer world presents the attentive and also to the revelations, lightningfast and illuminating everything if only we can keep it all in mind.

If we are Phoenician, I've arrived here an ill-equipped swimmer, sinking like a stone as a child and now doglike compared to those who swim as if born to it. No, my roots are landbound, a rooted and local cosmopolitan on whom the larger world descends. Yet the water holds my eye when I see it brooks and ponds too, but the sea is Piranesi's view and boundary. As we might have to flee again, it's also an exit. When I occasionally set out on it on someone's errand, my storehouse of memory is enlarged with sensory fragments of ships and ports. In transit, books and reverie contend with tedium. In strange towns I soak up what arises, scenes from others' daily lives their days and nights as they touch on mine. This is not so different from Piranesi, but long familiarity gives it a context in which strangers stand out. Abroad, much more is new and the context can be overwhelming.

"We are Sephardic," my father said, sottovoceso as not to contradict my mother openly, "with the contributions of our porthopping. Alexandria figures and then Tangier, Cadiz, Greek and Berber mixed in. A mobile people, then, who assimilated readily with each move, yet Mediterranean first and foremost. Your mother is right in that sense: the sea and the cities on which trade depends shaped us, while curiosity and affinity across the sexes gave us the beauty and acumen our women pass along and trade themselves."

Breeding bulls and horses can be approached in different ways , but our family extends a benign fatalism, what we would call destiny, to these creatures, setting them in open pastures to find each other and couple happily as if it were their own idea. This is a slower process, but the family believes the progeny benefit from it, as its own have.

I have had almost no involvement in these activities, but I spent summers with my cousins, staying near the field where the horses coupled, and I watched them as they nuzzled.

"Love can't be coerced," my uncle told me. "If the horses fail to mate, it's better to accept this than to force the issue. If we did that, the trauma would be passed on, just as it is for women during a war This we cannot countenance. A prize racehorse and its rider share risks so they both come through, victorious and alive. That trust begins in a field like this, the horses well-fed and entirely free."

That freedom is illusory, of course. The horses may ignore each other, but their presence in the field isn't accidental. The family's marriages and arrangements aren't contracted despotically, but the terroir is what it is. This includes the port itself, of course. Not a stranger, our intuition says, when destiny hands us someone.

What we call destiny is a pure randomness in which luck and skill figure. When men write their memoirs, they thank Fortuna ritually and then attribute their success to their own efforts, not her favors. Effort and skill matter our lives depend on them but luck matters more. Hence our credo: "Keep a low profile and avoid hubris." The women never flaunt their beauty, but wear it naturally, drawing the affection of others, not their envy. The family is always at the service of the city in ways that rise above its patrons' factions and disputes. "There are no guarantees, of course," we add superstitiously.

The courtesans naturally also figure in our unusual history. When and where did that begin? In Alexandria, my father said, where hetaerae served that largely Greek port and married into the family, giving rise to our tradition. Any children fathered in such arrangements were raised by the family as its own, thus insuring both parties against any liabilities. Our women were famed for a lasting beauty stemming from character as much as nature, and for their élan. Theirs was a bespoke art, theater for an audience of one, often, tailored to mood and appetite less a theater than serious play. The occasional offspring of these grandees made the family a kind of shadow aristocracy, with a charisma it used in its typically indirect way, denying any such connection, never naming the patron or claiming any lineage. The tiny theater of patron and courtesan is its own world whose anticipated dissolution, planned and financed, can be forestalled again and again by mutual agreement.

The play of two humans in love gets short shrift in most societies. Its outcomes may eclipse its pleasures, and it's easily frayed by the shortcomings of its players. The Greeks grasped this, recognizing how our minds and bodies are one in the course of it, engaging each other in what amounts to a four-way conversation. Receptivity is the heart of an art that builds on an opening move or moves itself to set out a theme, elaborating its variations and fugues. It begins and ends with the art of being consciously in the world, absorbing its lessons in giving and receiving as the object–subject of pleasure.

5.

Persephone winters with the dead, returning in spring to restore the earth's fecundity after the cold and arid seasons. This was the deal that Demeter struck with Hades following her daughter's abduction. It accounted for Persephone's eating a pomegranate in Hades' palace, tying herself partially to him. We take the myth to heart as depicting a courtesan's situation, set apart from the rhythm of nature as normally lived, but not entirely. Late fall and the dead of winter drive men indoors. Trade is curbed owing to the sea's heightened terrors. What was stored up is tapped. Households gird themselves against the wind and austerity.

Persephone is Hades' relief a river still flowing that would turn to ice in the outer world. This is the courtesan's role, dedicated to the goddess. In keeping with Hades' promise to Demeter, spring finds her and her devotees back among their own people.

Our year is mainly agricultural, with vineyards and fields to supply our own needs and those of our patrons and their families. All is bespoke, the bounty nature grants us when Fortuna is favorably disposed. The flow of time, set by husbandry and offset by progeny, clears the air, and stirs imagination and desire.

6.

" Envoy" covers many functions . Some are factotums, doing tasks that fall within our broad capability. Others have particular skills or aptitudes that are tapped when needed, often qualifying and practicing in a relevant profession. Envoys are tactful truthtellers whose value hinges on their acumen and flexibility in light of events. Strategies are set in motion by an idea or insight, then played out.

Writing this, I realize how an envoy in some ways resembles a courtesan, devoted to her patron but willing, perhaps even driven to influence him in the direction that she intuits will give him greater satisfaction. Her own pleasure serves as a compass, a prompt for her imagination, knowledge, the repertoire of skills she possesses. I see this confirmed when from time to time my presence is sought by one of these women, a sister or a cousin, known since childhood.

We still speak the secret language of children, rooted in the way we traded hypotheses about the adult and natural worlds around us. Courtesans and envoys share a benign tolerance, defending the slighted but also excusing the slights on the grounds that they're as helpless to do otherwise as you are, dear slighted one. Affection runs through us, and only true wickedness is excluded. There are such people, we know, but we contrive to keep them at bay.

My sister , guessing a distraction I indulge in , asked me to explain a few things that she sensed were on her lover's mind. Men are odd creatures, I said physically imposing, but vulnerable in ways women aren't. With a bit of training, a child can flatten an ungirded man with a well-placed kick. Women can be taken again and again when aroused, but nature only goes so far. Obtaining the necessities for her, I went over the regimens and precautions. I find aspects of myself in Homer, a favorite poet. I love the way he stitched his stories together and left two epics that were recited and recited until finally written out, much altered, I imagine, in the retelling. The Greeks were everywhere along this sea. In every port I visit, I find remnants of them, especially the small heads of men. Who were they, I wonder? I give them voices sometimes, a bit of commedia for the children that draws on the stock characters of the theater more than it draws on Homer, but his Iliadstrikes me as a better guide to Piranesi's leading and would-be leading men than Machiavelli's handbook. In Homer, they sulk, lash out, sacrifice in the name of glory while the women wait them out. Entirely realistic.

8.

It's odd in a way that a family that ended up in a port town of modest size like Piranesi not only made a commercial success of its tenure, but devised what outsiders might find eccentric. As I've implied, all of it is of a piece from the family's viewpoint. It reflects experiences most of all with humanity itself the ways it organizes fundamentals that, in a more primitive state of nature, might happen otherwise. I could cite the accounts of traders, describing peoples they've encountered who are entirely open about things to which we attach rules, assumptions, and judgements. Where we condemn others, they don't such matters barely figure. What draws their attention is whatever affects them directly. They are on intimate terms with their immediate environs, the way sailors know the sea. Cooperation is their first rule and openness the second. They have prodigious, collective memories.

I think that we share their close attention. We bear in mind what keeps the peace and what disturbs it, how hierarchies make men envious, how worldliness takes them beyond themselves. I was born here and will probably die here, but none of us ever takes that for granted. In the past, we allied ourselves with rulers, then suffered in their downfall from being seen as their agents. What, we wondered, might insulate us to some extent from such changes in fortune? Our idea of bespoke is never purely for the wealthiest or most powerful. Our patrons have the wit to share their largesse. Racehorses are an example they know the punters take a proprietary view, favoring evidence of good breeding and handling, the best riders. It’s money well spent, they think, joining in willingly because a share of what's bespoke is offered them, win or lose.

We take this view. On the feast days, housewives also get their portion, set aside deliberately for them. They pay more for it than they normally would, but it's a luxury they can grant themselves, not least because we know what their consciences will allow. We want them to be happy proud they can afford it and praised at home for a meal worthy of the day celebrated, a memorable one.

My dear and beautiful sister , I added, a man takes pride in his erections and his use of them, but what he remembers is what he heard, saw, tasted, smelled, and felt. The hands are an extension of his mind, arousing her and also observing her. His thumb and forefinger can take certain measures only a woman has. It's through touch that he knows how the river's flowing. If she's had children, his whole hand can be taken in if she hungers for it. Despite the bedshaking, a man is close to superfluous at points. The best he can do is to hold on.

Men are also aware, if they have fecund wives, that just prior to pregnancy's seasickness, women are overcome with desire, so aroused that sleep is impossible. We breed like the animals we are. Being human, we layer our denials and perversions over this. Men, some of them, long for what women experience. Slow it down is a shared request: grant us a long afternoon, unmolested by events. Most times, we rush to get it done: the docks, the brothels, wives taken before the morning starts or even after, reluctantly giving in.

Whether they're saints or not , the gods of the different walks of life continue to get our deference if not our active prayers. Candles burning in the side chapels are the tip of mankind's tendency to hedge its bets. We pay homage to the lord of the universe, the prime mover of what looks to be a gigantic apparatus, entirely random although evidently following laws that we struggle to shake loose and give predictive value. Most of what we know is reduced to sayings and truisms that keep us out of daily trouble or reduce our mishaps across our waking hours, but are less helpful when for example we board a ship to some distant port. We know basic facts about the seasons, the state of nearby patches of sea and ground things gleaned from travelers' gossip and the passed-along reports of those sent out to learn what they can. Everything is a generality or a guess. In these circumstances, our particular gods shore up our spirits. We bow to whoever set it in motion, but we need others who are closer, who can allay our fears or bring us through them so we don't succumb utterly to terror. Superstitious as we are, we need to feel their presence, imagine their intervention. The eons of lore and strictures the Church carries aim at a good harvest and a fecundity that's palpable. Those brave shepherds of young women's religious lives herd them toward marriage in hopes of keeping it all going.

"Love they neighbor as thyself" is easier to follow than Moses' shall nots, suggesting among other things to keep your sinful nature in bounds within your family and your neighborhood. Jesus called out the malevolent spirits that took possession of people. He could send them packing, but his earthly successors appear to lack this ability.

Machiavelli bemoaned the religion that emerged after Jesus's death as unfitting for what had once been an empire secure in its sense of the order of things and how citizens upheld them in their everyday, raising Roman families and building Roman towns and cities. Even the farms were Roman, as Virgil wrote. If emperors were worshipped as gods, this was merely to exemplify the benevolent order they upheld. They were a varied lot, but this is true of the powerful in general, rarely rising from merit and without luck and backing, often some faction's least-worse option. Yet it goes on and on, more orderly than not. Who arranged this? Beneath the trappings of power, the fluidity of who's on top, there's a riverbed that, even as the river floods and shifts, still revives the fields and supports ordinary people as they get on with whatever life requires.

The great and powerful fit themselves into this picture. If they fail to do so, fate stalks them and their luck changes. People start to despise them and this encourages their rivals. Their backers keep their distance. That all this can be avoided by honoring the mores and exercising discretion is lost sight of in hubris's stealthy fog.

The Decalogue instructs us how to stay out of trouble. If it strikes people as infringing on their freedom, this is the wrong lesson they learn in childhood. Parents make and enforce rules to preserve household order and keep children from harm's way. Cities have the same obligation. Laws are meant to help them, but people skirt them, preferring to be the judges of their own actions, whatever society may think about it hoping, of course, not to get caught.

Brothels and procurers find customers because men grasp the dangers of adulterous love. Posterity may make allowances, but those affected by adultery are often less inclined to do so.

Unwilling to make other arrangements, adulterers find they aren't alone in their frustrations. Men and women can reach a point in their lives when they wonder, "Is this all there is?" This can lead to socially useful changes, but often what's bothering them is a sense of boredom or failure that they imagine an affair can alleviate. Most affairs blow over, so the wives wait it out. Men are less inclined than women to fall out of love, but affairs can alienate a woman's affection, causing havoc at home unless she can hide it. Jealousy arises, too. Driven by desire, affairs range beyond whatever the lovers imagined when they began. Tragedy, comedy, gossip, and cautionary tales ensue, but only rarely is any effort made to acknowledge human trajectories and arrange things differently.

I write in this manner , but sometimes we just want to fuck or be fucked after a period of unrelenting, mentally taxing work, for example. There's also something physical about the desire for it why we use a word like hunger. Whatever it is, we want it. To embellish it with theory or speculation is unnecessary, pointless.

Why I write in this manner is a separate question. I do theorize and speculate, as most things in life require this in order to work with them. The family's unusual specialty grew out of a "what if" we realized we could make happen. Behind it, as I've noted, is a commitment to the bespoke goods that serve the few, although with a small surplus we set aside to offer the many. This makes me think of Jesus washing the feet of the poor. The loaves and fishes also come to mind, turning water into wine. He knew how and when to throw a party not as a caterer, but as a source of miracles. There are feast days when the whores come out in droves, kissing babies and giving themselves to men who take their fancy. Authority turns a blind eye and even the priests wink as they shake their heads. Like Saturnalia or Carnival, it's part of the pageantry of Piranesi.

On these warm evenings, the streets teeming, these fancied men sailors or laborers, unwed, unchurched let themselves be swept up, pleased for once to be singled out, taken by the hand, to sing, to dance, to be genuinely loved. Miracles happen just often enough to inspire belief and keep hope alive. Jesus is the patron of this.

When an arrangement ends, we take every last piece of the setting to a nearby convent, where the nuns give it all away to women who lack frocks, bedclothes, chairs, beds, rugs, drapes, blankets, sheets, plates, flatware, serving dishes, art, and items of the toilette. The nuns distribute it or give it to a woman deserving in their eyes. If the latter, the patron sometimes adds anonymously to her dowry as a token of his own good fortune. And we match whatever he gives.

The courtesan can do as she pleases with her private income. She is independent of the family, although loved and protected by it. In fulfilling the arrangement, she retains the right to end it if her patron mistreats her or makes demands to which she can't agree. In this respect, she has more rights than a married woman, but more obligation to honor the arrangement, body and soul, once agreed.

To be a patron of such a woman is not a casual thing. There's a desire for it that's very like these men's love of horseracing, a love that extends to the thoroughbreds on which they dote.

Independence means that what follows is the woman's decision. What transpires between two people is their affair and they're both bound to discretion, but attraction has a life of its own. There may be offspring who, despite having no claims on their fathers, are often in their affectionate thoughts.

Bespoke is largely by word of mouth, and the patrons talk among themselves, recounting visits to the horse farm or the bull pen, who caught their eye in the countryside as they mixed with summering young women, those remarkable cohorts of sisters and cousins. And they form their own cohort eligible men who for reasons of state, property, or enterprise are destined for dynastic marriages.

Every husband has experienced his pregnant wife denying that he had anything to do with it. The mother of Jesus is a special case, a truly bespoke arrangement that required marrying her off so her husband could attest to her virginity, as we're still called to do. And then, animals that they are, women live or die trying to perpetuate us. Fortuna reigns. Beautiful racing horses stumble and break a leg, or they win races and end their days happily in pastures. Sporting men, given to racing, love a horse that's spirited and not easily sated.

17.

It's up to her how she proceeds, but when she does, it reflects a mutually agreed-on understanding. This is contrary, in my experience, to how it works in most affairs owing to the human tendency to form emotional ties and then elaborate on them as a parallel life that tries to supplant the original one. If divorce looms, the parties to it are often shocked to find their assets haven't doubled to cover the cost of a second household. An arrangement can sidestep these complications, sustaining pleasure instead of miring it in raised expectations and awkward conversations.

Télos must number among the gods , a weaver of stories that strike us as personal, our destiny, and resemble river currents the way they carry us along. If we resist them, Télos obliges us with another that vies with it. Sometimes it's more like a riptide. Eventually, we try to write our own stories, truer to ourselves and our experiences. Consider gender. We're born into one sex or the other, bear its nature, but find from our lived experience that this is a clear fit, a fit more or less, or no fit at all. In the cauldron of youth, those who fit well present themselves as the standards and look down on those who don't measure up anyone whose ambiguity earns their disdain or worse. We emerge from these terrors to find our places in the order of the adult world. A port like Piranesi is a relative haven for apostates, not aggressively persecuting them for being true to their natures so long as they exercise discretion. What men and women do in relative privacy is their own affair, most people feel.

As we get older, our real natures appear more evidently complex than we realized. We surprise ourselves in dreams and thoughts, but the frisson or shame of our own rule-breaking diminishes. We are just someone's aunt or uncle, some child's parent, some neighbor's familiar face. Within, we are ever more clearly who we are. Even if we know others we resemble, no one is quite like us, in reality.

To know is the pertinent verb when it comes to this other who gives herself to us. Women can put men out of their thoughts entirely who they knew in this sense, but men cannot. Women infect them in the course of knowing with their particularity. Conversation is part of this, as knowing frees the knowers to speak in the same register.

Young children, primed to soak up life, know it with their senses. A remembered smell or sound takes us back to a place and moment. In ordinary, harried life, we curb our senses and navigate by habit, then something jars us and we light up, remembering ourselves. To know another leisurely is to revive our childhood self, not simply to grant license but forget the concept. We aren't primitives, but our play is like a child’s, pursued for its all-consuming sake.

Against this is the reality of most women's lives their monthly bleeding, the necessity of bearing and raising children, running a household. Men heedlessly take their sons or force them and their families to flee or be subject to tyrants and invaders. Some men see women as their inferiors, but we would be nowhere without them. We share a common fate, the family believes, and their condition is one sure measure of the actual enlightenment of a city or a people.

To know is mutually subjective, yet also two subjects interacting with two objects. Unavoidably, because we can only know so much. Yet we intuit, and this is the source of our mutual subjectivity. I’ve been challenged, using the phrase “I understand." It’s true that I didn’t, and yet I knew well enough. Everyday speech, the phrases we say to one other, is pragmatically sufficient. At other times, I’ve been accused of using rhetoric when plain speech would be better, and of being hurtful when I’ve spoken plainly. This is the downward slope of a love affair, a descent in stages.

Fecundity attracts men, despite their being aware of how it will disrupt things. Within a love affair, tension gathers around this shared dilemma, the télos nature hands us and the reality that surrounds us. We struggle to resolve it. A man has to reach an age when he is supposed to be dispassionate to escape it, although I doubt there is any complete end to desire for another. What tempers it is the realization that affairs are hopeless and something short of consummation is the only possible way to befriend a fecund woman.

When we set up our peculiar sideline, we considered the situation of powerful men, on whom so much depends. A small circle of them drew our attention patrons of artists and artisans, bespoke tailors, architects and masons, horse breeders and trainers, composers and musicians. Their interest in them is personal, friendships rather than dealings. We saw how they value what we know and look to us to put this knowledge at their disposal, enlarging their lives’ canvases.

When Caterina was young , I took her for walks at the harbor. It was in early autumn, the sun warming us, when an older man, his clothes worn but not terribly so, came up to us. He asked if we were natives. Yes, I said. “I’m no longer of much use, but this was decided here rather than in my own city, which I was in the habit of leaving. I work a bit, but it’s soon spent not enough left over to pay for the trip back or at least subsidize it. I try to find ship work from the sailors, but they see me as an unlucky portent. In this respect, I’m useful a negative example but it isn't helping me get home.”

Tell me where you work, I said. He named three places, three people. I knew them fixtures of certain alleys around the harbor where sailors congregate and those needing sailors can find them.

At no point in our conversation did he ask for help from me. He just wanted to talk. Adrift in the cosmos, he was aware of his place in it. Conversations like this can be worth having. Done with us, he walked off after saying a kind farewell.

From time to time, I’m sent off on errands. What they involve depends on what’s at stake, the means employed, the atmosphere between the parties, the season. What’s at stake determines a lot.

Even exotic ports resemble each other in that they support trade, with all it brings along, open to others and yet simultaneously wary of them, closed off and defensive. It was said of Genoa that the leading families never understood how its bankers made their money, financing the Spanish crown and able to set up almost anywhere. This was beneath the dignity of the grandees of their home city. Piranesi isn’t like this. Trade comes along with a fertile countryside and a local talent for manufactured and bespoke goods. Everyone here understands how the one hand feeds the other.

When sent, I go. This is an envoy's lot. As I gained experience, the errands changed. Let’s take him, because the situation is delicate or tenuous or explosive. He’s so remarkably calm keeps his head, figures it out, will help us pull one more rabbit out of one more hat.

It can take as many good minds as we can muster, some errands. It has to be pulled off in a way that brings credit to the man or men on top. The risk of failure and being blamed are attendant dangers. At school, teachers and your fellows can inexplicably round on you I learned early on to sense and sidestep these irrational flareups.

The important thing, therefore, is to keep everyone’s mind on the reason for the errand what we’re here to do and how, as reality presents itself in its mostly partial way, we improvise accordingly. Most important of all is to make the top man or men part of this, so he or they will accept some responsibility for these adjustments.

As I’ve noted, considerable ambiguity exists between the pure types of our species. Our outward forms reflect major and minor themes where people settle relative consistency roiled by invasions, armies billeting in a city or simply marching through, sampling as they do. Our inward forms float between the poles. We may deny this, yet we’re aware of our contradictions, how desire catches us out.

We fall in with what nature gave us: the body of a boy or a girl. Household ideas of what comes along with one body or another its télos attach to us, but life’s situations put these ideas to various tests. Nothing, it turns out, is final. Households get caught up in the need to get through another day. Emotions flare, but pragmatism usually prevails. Most of my skill in the world stems from this.

This is why some households survive upheavals of a personal sort that would break others. There’s a sense that the root cause is unavoidably how life itself works its pressures, its shortcomings. It makes everyone a little mad and in need of healing. The afflicted wander in and out, yet the household lurches on. Some of them appear just often enough to be counted present, and they usually don’t discuss their absences, because really what’s there to say?

A household has other concerns and we, the pragmatic ones, fulfill this familiar aspect as a ritual of sorts, honoring the minor deities who guard our doorways, hearths, children, and prosperity. A little madness now and then, yes, but we don’t lose our grip.

Some of it comes from trying to fit our ambiguous selves into a generality that thwarts whole categories of personal expression. Partial selves struggle to find and express themselves, to cast against their outward form and assumed inner life, at odds with their mad impulses. Households give rise to this. In a way, it’s one of their principal exports damaged goods to be sent back or sent away.

Social mores acknowledge what we share with other s: birth, propagation, raising progeny (ours and others’), decline and death, prematurely or due to natural causes, and so forth. You’d think this basic commonality would unite rather than divide us, but no, our acknowledgement is partial: you may also experience this, but our rites, what we grant or fail to grant, are entirely our own.

Those who set themselves against prevailing orthodoxy are the most likely, in their self-assertion, to be inadvertently solipsistic. As public celebrations royal weddings, births of scions, their official birthdays, particularly in their dotage, and funeral rites remind us, sovereigns set the tone for how to mark these sacramental events. In the rungs below, local prominence follows suit. Seeing the bride, the babe in arms, the patriarch or matriarch, alive or dead, we doff hats or otherwise note the tangible sign that each personifies. Such signs suggest they're like us after all, but of course our hats are doffed. Orthodoxy saves us from ourselves. It’s seen it all, and can rise to truly awful occasions with time-tested nostrums that enable life to flow on without doing the injuries the less experienced can inflict. It also proves to be remarkably accommodating unless pushed to be what it’s not. Surrounding orthodoxy is everything it tolerates or passes over. It puts up with a lot, believing that time will sort it out. The grandees are nominally orthodox. We count prelates as clients.

Piranesi for me is a tableau, a drama, and I’m loathe to give up on anyone, since there’s no way to know how it ends except to live it out and even then, I’ll die speculating. Despite knowing firsthand how the discontinuous deal with life, it always shocks me when the extent of our time together counts for nothing against their displeasure. If there’s a narrative, it’s the one now being handed us a denunciation waiting to be said, apparently, across all that time when things between us seemed to go better.

Am I deluded? Very likely. It's not that the discontinuous lack a narrative, but its focus is their personal trajectory, which others either help or hinder. That’s how they pragmatically divide their world. Narrators like me are incapable of losing anyone to whom we’re emotionally tied. Even minor characters still figure. It follows that we think and write about others' lives narratively.

The discontinuous are wary of any narrative they don’t control. They want their letters back or burned, imagining those who wrote them will turn on them and use them as weapons But we rarely go back to what's already in our heads. Letters are for historians, but will they be interested in us? Our descendants may be a thread of narrators runs through such families, curious about their lineage.

The family takes great care to understand its patrons first, serving them as valued clients in situations that reveal a sympathetic nature. We're not in the business of supplying them with courtesans. On the contrary, we're intermediaries for a certain kind of woman. Other families would make her life hell. One such woman’s needs led us to respond differently She mentored those who chose to follow her and guided their intermediaries. Others have succeeded her.

I emphasize the word “chose.” The family’s women, when they come of age, are offered an income sufficient to live independently. They are free to pursue their own interests, take lovers, live openly or privately exactly as they wish. Or they’re given a dowry to marry. All these roles are in view, experienced growing up in our large and rambunctious family, a sisterhood in reality, almost a matriarchy.

Family trees are inexact about the so- called bloodlines that mark the generations’ descent through time. Historians of the powerful stray from their official acts to dwell on other conquests and the resulting progeny, whether or not they were acknowledged, what became of them and their mothers the part of history that draws readers. Not much of this shows up in family trees, but ours scrupulously records, in the manner of the Old Testament, every fruitful liaison. Thus, we know that certain matriarchs were paired with men of higher status, several of whose offspring prospered owing to their fathers’ support. Our family’s prosperity both benefited from these relationships and gave them the right context in power’s orbit but no threat to it.

The beautiful Giulia makes an analogy to the horses we raise so lovingly. It's her sense that the sheer excitement of the race gives them immense pleasure, a more than sufficient reward for their earthly lives. Those that survive go on to breed, to pasture, yet she feels they remember all of it that a kicking, frolicking colt brings it back to mind, the heady pleasure of the rider and the ride.

The analogy to riding is true of long afternoons. We shift to the time our bodies keep, unmoored or unconstrained, each moment slowed.

Our bodies have their own desires, connecting us to that primitive ground from which all life arises. At points, they take over, coupling in the sense of mating our bodies want this, beneath all the rest.

A season of lovemaking is shortened or prolonged by fate in its several forms. Fertility varies and timing is all. This is life’s context. Pregnancy outside marriage causes tension. Many couples believe themselves immune a common delusion. We plan for progeny

A patron’s life is steeped in risk. He learns early to tip the odds in his favor by prowess. Sports are a training ground for power, giving immediate lessons in the perils of inattention and hubris. A patron shapes his life around attentiveness and receptivity, not just skill. To focus on skill alone distorts a man. Prowess is much more than skill. It's a kind of generosity about life, accepting its randomness, being grateful for pleasures it affords and mindful of what comes along. It is most of all a realism buoyed by confidence in self and others.

To be ones in whom the patron can be confident this is the heart of the family’s relationships. The main risks are known. Fate doles them (and others) out, but the presiding spirit remains the same.

Love and war are paired in the maxims men repeat, few hearing the warning conveyed therein. Beneficial as it might be to their young and heedless lives, we wait until they're old enough to know what they want. We live in seven-year increments that, gathered up as 21-year cycles, define us loosely from coming of age through middle and old age. Each has its tasks and themes along with its traps and perils. Télos and fate divide our lives between them, and we do our best with what nature and context give us. Our creativity is sparked by the dilemmas that powerful men face in life. We do our best to support them and this requires us to break with tradition.

Tradition has its place as collective wisdom, but some of it is tales. Moreover, history and myth both explain how tradition soaks up life’s unfolding, absorbing gods and goddesses, recognizing unions that orthodoxy frowns on, crowning talent that forces itself on it. All talk of purity, of bloodlines, is made up to impress the credulous.

Giulia was in her early thirties when I visited her country house. Her son Paolo, my cousin, and I were friends. This was the first time I was asked to join them for tea. I often saw her outside with her sketchbook. On a wall in her house, I noticed a portrait of a man who I thought resembled Paolo but wasn’t him.

When I mentioned it to my father later, he told me, “A painting in someone’s house is theirs and yet, because visitors can see it, it belongs to a slightly wider world. This can pose a conundrum when our intuition suggests its importance If we give in to our curiosity, what we learn may deepen our dilemma or prove to be the key to something we need to know. But when should we ask? Reticence invites us to let the matter rest, possibly until it's too late. Or we ask too soon and offend the one who could tell us. I would wait a bit, Luca, as life itself may provide an answer or the beginning of one."

Love makes people incautious, but the need to hide love brings them up against the stories they tell themselves about their destiny with another, so momentarily important. As their stories are crushed by events, those believing them are left bereft. Women in particular hold against former lovers any knowledge of themselves they shared with them. It matters not at all who set desire loose.

If love ends, if a particular story is ground out, all possibilities seem to die with it the loved one an unwanted reminder of this. Yet love leaves traces, small fragments of affection that can be fleetingly sparked. This is disconcerting when one believes the past is safely the past. Some enforce this belief with an implacable will, crossing the street or leaving a room, but the gods of these things sport with us or, more charitably, remind us of what we had, what magnificent love we made when it had no barrier and we both believed in it.

Part two: Giuli a

The father and the son resembled each other less when both were older. Paolo favored me enough that people thought he was Carlo’s, like his sister Natalia. She was our concoction, proof that a man who in general prefers the young men who model for him and assist him in his studio can fulfill his role as my husband and father of our household. It was my own father who suggested Carlo to me, admiring his work and spirit. Carlo has always worked near the harbor, the source of his models and most of the materials he uses.

Natalia is proof that I fell in love with Carlo enough to lure him to bed. He told me later that our romance was so singular for him that he recorded it. After she was sparked, after I’d passed through the hunger for a man that women get early on, our lovemaking became more occasional. Natalia was easier than Paolo to carry and birth. As we imagined, she's quite remarkable Carlo's sculptor's head and gorgeous eyes mixed with the family's womanly beauty.

I didn’t intend to have Paolo, but his father deserved him to mark the fireworks we set off together, this man who took me for a season the way his kind take to horses for the sport and pure enjoyment, yet lavish on them immense care, affection, generosity almost childlike in its immediacy and intensity, but with an experienced man’s sense that nature sets life’s rhythms and limitations, and we have to fall in.

I got what I wanted, which was to be with a man as his equal, as I foresaw as a girl in my country summers, wanting that freedom. When Matteo visits me, other memories can arise. Paolo can spark them too owing to their physical resemblance. The rest is sensory, and for me at least it resulted in self-knowledge and self-confidence.

Across his adult life, Luca has shared his theories with me. His word for us, courtesan, is misleading, as is the way he conflates our bespoke businesses with the arrangements we occasionally make. My way of looking at this reflects my determination from a young age to follow what I hoped would be a life shaped by intention, the way an artist sets out to make something concrete of her encounters using the skills, tools, and materials at her disposal. The normal sequence of a woman’s life seemed in the wrong order, postponing everything the way the Church points to Heaven. When and where could I give free rein to my love for a man whose desire for me was palpable? But desire is no simple thing, for all our experience of it. Luca has some knowledge of this, and his theories address it. Cures for love are scarce and unsure, the French say. Our arrangements, as Luca calls them, surely derive from our sense of love's contingencies. I infer from some of Luca's poems and a handful of encounters that a crisis of some kind occurred in his marriage, perhaps Laura's reaction to his many quirks, but in the end they carried on as before.

God help you if you take no pleasure in everyday life. Humanity is facile in making the most ordinary things its means: the market, the kitchen, the children to be bathed, dressed, and raised, the meals we share, the rounds that farms and towns necessitate. The humblest human part of this ties a woman to all the rest, gives her a place to stand and a purpose, and the higher arts begin and end with her, an individual within a landscape or a scene, anchoring it to her reality.

Sensory pleasure also begins and ends here. In the country, the seasons unfold minutely, variations on ancient themes. Old people speak of the sheer range of what they’ve experienced how the crops withered or the fields were flooded, but also how the bees lavished this or that bush with their attention, and how their kitchen garden fed the family. It’s harder in town, although the sea tempers the extremities. Winter’s great swells make journeys perilous and men idle whose livelihoods depend on the constant flow of trade. A kind of public works ensues to set their hands on repairing things, moving things, storing things. It’s true at home, too, if one has a home, but winter brings out the vagabonds that warmer nights conceal. The churches, following the teachings of their founder, shelter them. Others leave them to their suffering.

There used to be a public display of charity, a sense it rebuked the city’s overseers if suffering went unchecked. This meant that the churches were supported in their efforts, but then another order of things crept in that saw the sufferers acting out a different drama in which some won and others lost possibly lost everything. A sense of their numbers leads the marginal to press against their fate, which stirs reaction. In the midst of these tensions, I make my art.

3.

Christ took on our suffering, we saw. Painters made it their subject. Yet suffering continued. Part of me wanted to capture this, and I still have the small sketchbooks I carried with me to record things seen. If we’re aware of it, the streets are filled with signs of frailty and death. In the countryside, domestic life struggles with nature, lulled by its patterns and undone by their irregular, implacable violation. For several years, I sketched only this, seeking to shed the academic training I’d received the subjects and motifs suitable for a woman.

Some painters rub the faces of the powerful in the suffering at the margins. They call this realism, but it seems like parables or lives of the saints what we grew up seeing in church or in books. It’s not that the powerful are unaware of the suffering in their midst, but they’re prone to make empty gestures and let winter clear the streets.

In the past, religious paintings foregrounded the sufferings of Christ and his followers, but gave them a recognizably local context. Certain realist painters brought this context forward and some of them kept what’s painful in life in plain view so pertinent others were forced to see it and, their consciences pricked, try to help.

Carlo has little time for this. He sees his art as a bulwark against time’s depredation, pointing to antiquity for proof. But bronze and stone are still subject to human whims, melting the sculptures down or robbing them of noses and other body parts. Sculpted friezes, being more like frescoes or mosaics, use the motifs of ordinary life to suggest the continuity underlying change. I sympathize with this.

Misfortunes causing widespread suffering are taken as signs that the powerful have broken the tie to beneficence that justifies them. This too can find a place in a painting a mood that underlies it so subtly that the mind only registers it later. As the suffering of the powerful is primarily in their heads, this is the best way to do it.

4.

What is our remembered pleasure? Or, we could ask, what forms do pleasures take that we’re capable of remembering? It’s notoriously hard to capture love’s physicality. There are famous paintings of the Church’s female saints enraptured in their sacred marriages. The painters and their models at least knew their subject firsthand, although displaced from the convent to the studio and its divan.

I remember the role small rituals played that signaled what lay ahead, and how they echoed childhood games that did this too in that we reacted similarly, had the same sense of daring each other. So much of life consists of sequences of anticipation and sating. If we paint the everyday, meals and their preparation inevitably figure. When I look at paintings of society, I see a similar arc, attended of course by a different cast of actors, depending on who’s paying, but with a visual quality in keeping with who’s looking. Is the painter’s audience society itself or the artist and her moods? With society, splendor is the rule, whatever the setting. With the artist, ambiguity reflects ambivalence, as with self-portraits. She can be for or against what she sees, depending on her experience.

Men remember differently, I imagine. An observant man’s aware of the landscape of his lover. It’s both a tactile awareness and an appreciation of difference, of what distinguishes her from all others. Do I remember men in this manner? Yes, but in a more general way, as an aid to recognition, and often more by manner than detail until we’re face to face. Specific to lovemaking, what I remember is how intuitively he improvised to stretch anticipation out, delay its sating through half a dozen courses served raw, cool, or hot, depending.

I should ask Carlo what he remembers of those different men.

Men misinterpret why women ride for pleasure. I think they identify with horses and envy them, but if I can generalize from myself, a woman loves to make these animals, substantial enough to be quite dangerous, do her will despite their high-strung nervousness and irrational fears. A horse bred to race has to be walked across even familiar terrain to assure him there are no snakes, no dogs, nothing to spook him. At speed, horse and rider are one the horse is her extension, awaiting the signs she gives him, a vocabulary of sound and touch, perhaps also of smell as her excitement builds. Men ride similarly, the best ones. We could call this dominance, but it’s really the attachment of two minds that trust each other. One is readily disturbed, so the other must be able to recall it from its confusion.

That horses are all emotion is another way to put it. This can be bred up or down, of course, although never completely eliminated.

6.

In novels, women’s lives unfold on set paths and the woman reader compares their experiences with her own, as lived or anticipated. Age gives her a stronger sense of reality. What she finds credible will vary, although the best novelists are credible always and so reread. This may reflect the ambiguities and deviances that tie their fiction to life as we come to know it and perhaps learn to see through it.

People are often superstitious, prone to dread ordinary things for their potential to go wrong while ignoring randomness. It could be said that the potential for things to go right is wrapped up in this.

Luca believes that women are ruled by stories they’re told early on about destiny, reinforced by rituals and social pressures. We judge ourselves by how well we fit in or, conversely, fail to do so, with the extremes of fitting in or not fitting in becoming items of particular pride. To step out of this dichotomy is one kind of not fitting in This being society, roles are provided that enable women not to fit in fittingly. I’d say that our family excels in this. Art offers a cover I use the term broadly. To not fit in can of course prove detrimental; to be an artist is not much help if the atmosphere turns leaden.

Art though is what I do, what Carlo does. It has a necessity. We are the same in this regard, prepared to sacrifice a good deal to have what we need to make the art we make. It seems true though that artists treat the making of art as ordinary an everyday undertaken for their art’s sake. And artists are quite ruthless, without regret.

Fittingly not fitting in is to carve out space within a reactively touchy society, dealing with it by camouflage a marriage and a household with children, a respectful distance that avoids rousing envy or enmity, never a bad word. This is my way, not Carlo’s he has a demeanor that warns off questions. We both make an art of experience. Is this artifice? It feels real enough.

“He fucks like a dog,” Natalia told Paolo , quoting a friend. For many reasons, horses more often feature when men describe making love to a woman. Dogs are saved for whores and rent boys. If Carlo fucks his assistants like a dog, he hasn’t told me. He comes on like a husband in bed, tender and dutiful. Matteo, the chosen partner of my contractual bliss, gave the lie to these animal allusions.

Matteo saw lovemaking as conversations in which body and mind took turns speaking in their native tongues. Arousal sets women on an arc that is as long as the situation permits. Matteo saw in this an analogy to music made up by two virtuosi, playing together. His desire for this was inflammatory. It also made it easier to think of it as a season to know from the start that we would end it with elation. My painting of him was a coda or an encore, like Paolo.

Women are erotic planets, fecund and self-sufficient. Any desired partner can arouse them and they can arouse themselves. Beauty runs through women just look at the paintings in museums and on dynastic walls, the men with their hooked noses and the women consistently gorgeous. The leaders among men can be striking, but in general it’s far better for men to have character and bearing.

That Matteo loved me I had no doubt, but the bliss lay in the fact that we wouldn’t marry, we would fuck, memorably. That we made Paolo was an accident, although a wonderful and tangible sign.

9.

What tradition hands us are life’s sacraments. The Church names them and gives them seasons and rituals. We distinguish among greater and lesser ones, each with its greater or lesser saint. We learned, growing up, how to direct our prayers efficaciously. A figure like the Virgin wraps a universe in her flowing robe saints with actual histories and others who stand in for goddesses whose altars can still be found in rural estates where the help know better than their current masters who they should be propitiating.

Life’s cyclical nature gives the Church's calendar its reality and pertinence. We grow up observing the ocean and the fields, and they reveal to us that we’d best pray to sustain our good luck. Not that we ever can be certain if our luck is changing for better or for worse.

Take Paolo, an obvious outcome of lovemaking, yet not. Where was the angel to tell me? He may have felt it unnecessary, but I was caught unaware. Imagining a child would keep me from my work led me to panic and resist, the way the old expect death yet also see it as inconvenient. Babies proclaim their season, their birthright They're so remarkable, these beings we make who aren't us. Oddly, I was never afraid for them. The Virgin and her saints with or without provenance gave me a sense that my fate and theirs was taken seriously, that we had our own small measure of dispensation.

Carlo works from life as the raw material of what he envisions heroic, Apollonian, intended for civic spaces or their private equivalents. The life from which I work is here around me and the scale of what I paint is suited to its subject matter: the head of Matteo, a field of horses, the standing young Natalia. These aren't formal, civic works, like those Odes of Horace that paid his bills. They're what he and I noticed while taking in the world.

Women are said to be objects, but to ourselves we are subjects who play with and to this audience even and perhaps especially in our nakedness, all adornment set aside or bathed away so we’re left with our heightened sense of self. We know early on what to do with it the boys too when young, but then most suppress it as unmanly or are told to suppress it. And this may be useful, as a man has to lose his self-consciousness to play the part again, or perhaps he has to learn a new kind of awareness of this other, this subject.

Around me, life moves more deliberately. Farm life starts early, but trade is also up at dawn, despite the taverns the night before Not precisely sober, country folk are aware of their responsibilities to other living things. They don’t need churches or convents to enforce the point. Dionysus is my god of choice. Not that I share his temperament, but he’s the patron of an awareness I try to practice.

Like Carlo, I give form to what I see, and what we form is meant to go beyond us, to pass into life, where it lives on independently.

I wonder sometimes if I would think differently of Matteo, of my time with him, if Paolo hadn’t resulted from it? I could say the same of Natalia they both gave form to specific times in my life and in the lives of their fathers. There was an art to both encounters, but we were still humans who played our parts. That Natalia was a girl was a relief to Carlo, just as Paolo’s history led him to be familial and kind rather than competitive. That Paolo resembled Matteo never bothered him. If it came up, he shrugged it off: “Takes after his mother.” And he does, although his manner is very much his father’s.

But I’m avoiding my own question, which is really if the love a woman feels for a man innately wants to be given form. In reference to Matteo, I would say that it enabled us to be friends. The nature of our encounter may have done so anyway, but Paolo honored our tie without tying us together as a couple. He’s the result of the love of two friends a commission, Matteo called it later, but really we were two artists temporarily collaborating. Parting, our intimate experiences were all we possessed except what we made together.

Friendships are the long art of living, part of its everyday but the part that, being episodic, stands out as weft against the great warp of familiarity. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that friendships are the insertions the weaver makes against patterns that catch the eye.

At convent school , as we were coming into our womanhood, one of the sisters raised the topic of the Incarnation. Through Mary, the Holy Spirit became human, she explained. The Angel Gabriel asks the Virgin’s consent, that she will be the vessel, because God will know her as a man knows a woman a bodily knowledge. The Wise Men arrive and worship Him, but what draws them is the Holy Spirit. In Bethlehem, they find a newborn like any other. The nun contrasted Him to the minotaur, the result of a Cretan sun goddess being taken by the white bull coveted by her husband, who properly should have sacrificed him to Poseidon, whose gift the bull was. He caused the sun goddess to fall obsessively in love with the bull, coupling with him through artifice and then bearing his child, who, unlike Jesus, resembled his father all too well. The king can only blame himself. He locks the minotaur in a maze, a life worse than any bull’s and unworthy of a man. Jesus grows up and we learn that the Holy Spirit He embodies is in the world to free everyone who lacks power there. He speaks to them plainly. For the powerful, His replies and rebukes make clear how far they’ve strayed from the covenant God made with them. They turn on Him, using the Roman invaders as their means, but He meanwhile is the yeast that sets the poor uprising. His followers speak of His resurrection, but what He embodies is what survives. We carry Him, each of us, she said. We are also vessels. This is what I remember her telling us.

I sometimes thought of this after Matteo and I were together. Did we profane the Holy Spirit, mingling our two bodies mixed with Him? And later, when Paolo seemed so evidently his father's son, I thought of the minotaur how the Cretan sun goddess too wanted this tangible sign of shared knowledge, however wasted on the beast. And the minotaur, with his odd parentage, must surely have had a mind no doubt crazed by isolation, alone in his maze. It may be due to our familiarity with bulls, but I could never do that.

13.

Women and men serve each other and God, the nun told us, but she was clear that women were inherently more creative than men. If we marry them and bear their children, this is a creativity unique to us, but our whole being also differs, both in spirit and as a body. As children, these differences are less obvious, but then they appear. We resist, not least because the world has its own plans for us.

She counseled us not to resist the world directly, but to live in it as we live with snow in winter and the sea in summer, as springtime labors give us the harvest. God made Eve and Adam from dust, she said, but we carry them. This frees us to trust we’ll know what to do when the world crashes in through man’s folly or children underfoot.

Art for me is looking, sketching, bringing to mind how a place, person, or object struck me not just seen but felt or loved and wanting to give it form. Her sense of our creativity stays with me.

If we fail to serve each other and God, the nun added, we can be caught up in arrogance or, restless, grow desperate for distraction. Some manage to see through this and repent, reclaiming their true selves, but others grow monstrous, siding with the Devil.

Does our family , bourgeois as it is , seek exemption? We live at a calculated, shifting midpoint, serving power and enjoying its protection while living modestly in the everyday, hidden to some extent in plain sight. Natalia sees most clearly the position of the family. Luca argues that it shows that it’s possible to live according to one’s lights within a society bent on conformance. I think he misconstrues or overstates what society can really do about it. True, some leave for what they take to be a more cosmopolitan world, but only a few prosper. They may come around in their finery to rub local noses, but usually they cover their tracks, being in their own minds self-invented. A rare few are themselves in both places.

Natalia is attached to her work, her household, her husband and their children, particular friends. What convent school gave her was an abiding sense of life’s transience, which she finds unnerving. This may also come from my family. For whatever reason, I have innate confidence in my life and my place within it. Convent school only cemented this, but my real schooling was summers in the country. Natalia likes the countryside, but her mind works so differently than mine. Carlo was right to see her as a lawyer. I didn't see it. It makes her more visible than I imagine she expected, but an earned visibility can offer its own protection, if Carlo is any example.

I do think we seek exemption, to come back to my question. This is a bourgeois trait, though, as much as a trait of the family.

Luca is really describing an economic order within which the family fits an order that aligns with the desire of the powerful to separate themselves from the everyday in part as a testimony to their power. The family is one of many enablers of this separation, and I wonder if my season with Matteo wasn’t an example of this?

The family carefully positions itself below its patrons, yet close enough that they recognize and value our proficiency. (This was certainly true with Matteo!) Bespoke is the word Luca uses to describe our enterprises. It’s true that the world in general is increasingly awash in dull sameness. Piranesi’s distance from any metropolis, along with its undiminished self-regard, save it from the dead hand of commerce. Even our whores are originals.

No, I was inspired. Matteo brought that out in me. It’s best to get past this, singular as it is, and turn to or return to family life, memory firing your art and your dreams. I can’t speak for Matteo. He’s lived by our agreement, is unfailingly affectionate when I encounter him. The fact of Paolo is also a tie, a denouement. I was the perfect age. We thicken, unavoidably, or perhaps life layers itself on us, gives us the experience we lacked or shifts what we imagine is important. A great tragedy for a woman is to feel she’s missed out. I was lucky: I missed nothing I deemed significant. Natalia would say that I’ve skirted, that we all have skirted, the perils that befall others. In saying it, her tone mixes wariness with admiration. She knows her limits, my Natalia, and has a healthy sense of peril. Paolo, like his fathers, never thinks of such things except as they come up as table stakes in the games that others force on him. Luca is more like my Natalia, a rabbit in fox’s clothing or maybe it’s the reverse?

16.

In museums, we see fertile maidens and mothers. This is what the past left us, along with heroes. The mothers' stone caskets are like baths and the maidens are abundantly desirable. The message is clear that we live to be loved, to prove our fecundity, to be honored for it when, exhausted, we slip into our eternal baths to rest.

Before God called on the Virgin, other gods had their way with women. Evading them was never pleasant you could end up as a river or a tree. Of course, the goddesses were perilous to the men. I used to sketch sometimes at the museum, and I still sketch at Carlo’s studio the young men and the sculptures both. A museum is like a beloved house from childhood, the rooms melding these memories with their current reality. If a painting is missing or is found in a new place worse, if a gallery is altered it’s jarring, yet I accept it as it’s not really mine. In the everyday, we’re constantly immersed in our surroundings, so these changes are part of it, barely noticed. If our encounters are episodic, we notice them more. We compare here and now with here and then, here being a rough constant. This is also true with people we measure our absences by what time has done to them, marveling if they’re more or less as they were. That we’re seen similarly we tend to overlook. We reassure each other, but no one is fooled. Yet we believe it to some extent.

One thing about making art is that there’s always more to do. You grow old, your vision and hearing falter, yet there’s still resonance and the urge to set it down. If something doesn't work, then I start again or make something of the mistake, playing with it. This has always been my method, especially in bed.

Luca is for artifice and against exchange, if I grasp his meaning. In the end, though, we women interact with men, and they with us, in the everyday. In the household and the family, for example, Carlo is a husband and father, fulfilling these roles. Matteo and I pressed ourselves to be the other’s complement, but unconsciously, like a river and the ground it covers, both in flux. Artifice belongs in the theater. But I agree with Luca’s insistence that no trade’s involved, even if agreements are made. We fit within the domains of power like the old retainers Homer describes. It was as a desired familiar that Matteo sought me. As with Paolo, the favor he showed me is affectionate largesse That favor is and was uniquely his to bestow. For artifice I would substitute an instinct for what gives pleasure. Women are aware of pleasure’s seasons and schooled, if raised properly, in a repertory of connection for this is what pleasure is. Women live more consciously with the changing rhythms of their bodies, while men live out their natures, adjusting awkwardly. A pleasure a woman affords is to ease this process, if the man is lucky.

If a man is the woman’s complement, and vice versa, in the places they share through marriage and other circumstances, then how they are with each other in the countryside and the city is as natural to them as any other familiar thing. Between the generations, it’s breaking down. Natalia’s world isn’t mine and her places carry other meanings. They overlap, these worlds of ours, but are drifting apart.

17.

When the grandchildren are here, I find them irresistible and they run me ragged. Carlo absents himself. He takes a certain pride in them, but if he had his way, they would appear at family feasts and otherwise remain at home. But the countryside is heaven for them, as it was for all of us growing up. Matteo knows this, because his father brought him along when, as a favored client of the family, he visited to see the most promising of the next generation. I suppose I was one of them, come to think of it. Pietro loved children in a way that’s rare among men. Luca once read to me from a polemic against women by Schopenhauer: “Leave a man with a child and in five minutes, he’ll be looking around frantically for a woman, but a woman can play happily with a child for 30 minutes.” Even longer than that, in reality, as women get caught up in children's games.

Luca loves his children. He loves his wife too, but he makes his life difficult by being endlessly of two minds about most things. It makes him wonderfully competent as an envoy, as he can see all sides of some controversy and often figure out how to get free of it by some formula acceptable to the different parties, but it makes him hopeless about small things that can be solved by a yes or a no. I gather than envoys try to avoid choosing clearly, leaving ambiguities and contradictions in their wake that only they can sort properly, in their own view. This works less well at home.

But Luca’s love of the family each and every sibling or cousin is pure and simple. He believes in our peculiar genius at getting on. In the presence of children, he tells stories of his sea crossings and the ports where he’s stayed. He has an ear for sailors' tales, their songs, their jokes, their odd ways of talking. He’s a good mimic and his listeners roar with laughter, even if they’ve heard it before. I’ve listened with half an ear long enough to know that he tells the same story differently every time he trots it out. His characters, scenes, and lines are snippets of a mighty epic he recalls and recites.

Matteo’s portrait always brings him to mind. A portrait is inevitably a mix of artist and subject a subjective view, despite wanting to capture a likeness. Matteo sat while I sketched a series of sketches to which I referred when I began to paint, but I found that I looked at them less and less as he possessed it the way he did me.

Matteo can sit perfectly still and yet not lose the strength that motion reveals, the gracefulness. I see this also in Paolo, a sureness about his immediate ground. Carlo finds his strength in relation to the materiality of his art, whether stone or bronze. The whole of life for him is material; he has no expectation of paradise. Yet his work seems animated by it.

Luca gave me a sheaf of his poems. His odd nature makes him a good poet, observant as any painter and alert to the way human nature spills out from its supposed confines how the pleasure of transgressing is followed by a painful undoing. There’s no sense of judgement. This is how it is, he says. This from our great theorist, convinced of the family’s genius in taming the most human of human afflictions. Well, he may be right. When I look at Matteo on the wall or Paolo in the flesh, I have to agree with Luca that something like genius was in play. Had we not arranged it, I’d attribute it to luck. Genius isn’t the right word for it. It’s alacrity and close observation, like horses, actually. If you have a feel for them, you know it early on.

Luca is close to his sister Marta, who sometimes confides in me. In the world of his theory, we’re paired two examples of the family’s mutually beneficial arrangements. I don’t agree with this pairing, although I can see why Luca asserts it. I loved Matteo, and our arrangement was what I desired. Marta wanted to be broken in that was how she put it to me. Carlo said once that she reminded him of certain men. They’re a headache if their appetite for this continues, he added, but Marta was in search of a cure.

She hid all this behind a display of modesty she honed at convent school. It was a look that ensured depravity when the right partner found her. At least there was no danger of pregnancy! After barely making it through a season, she married and lived blamelessly, a mother of four, calm and devoted. What pairs us in Luca’s mind is that we both acted on our desires and the family made this possible. Yet “it’s not a business.” This is true in that what the family does is done in the name of self-preservation, personal or familial, a dance with power that takes place at the edges. Horses and bulls are our main lines, but much else can be negotiated within relationships that reflect a long history of discretion, of intuiting what’s needed.

A prize horse has one season. Luca’s racing analogy is apt to me and Marta. She once looked at my painting of Matteo and said, “I barely remember his face, but some other things I’ll never forget.”

When you’re sick enough to lie in bed, your world shrinks to the body itself. You watch with half an eye as the illness plays out. Age gives you a sense of the stages you pass through, and if you feel any alarm, it has to do with unexpected variations the way the illnesses of their children disconcert young mothers unless older women are present to voice their opinions. Even if we’re raised with younger siblings, it’s not the same and we’re unprepared. Boys fall into this territory but then grow out of it, taught to be stoical. If a man is sick, his sickness fells him there he lies, almost comatose. The doctor visits, if the man can afford it, and the women bring him their remedies, to which he adds his own whispered requests. Men tenaciously remember whatever aided them in these dire periods when their bodies turned against them. They often have it on hand if it’s not readily available. Women suffer from chronic debilitation, and of course from the pain of childbirth. If they experienced such pain, men would call it torture! We share with them what arises seasonally a summer or winter cold or influenza but they seem to pass faster through us, while the men wheeze and cough for days.

Perhaps it’s those moments when we’re free of it, heads clear and bodies again at ease, that compensate us. Even as children, we’re aware of this, and it buoys us up into old age. Feeling horrid, we retain some memory of this, some confidence in reviving.

The countryside and the sea both have nights of abundant stars . You name the constellations if you know them, aloud for the benefit of children, retelling their stories or making them up. One way to think of the family is as a constellation minor, perhaps, yet catching the eye of man. Luca would dispute this, but I think it’s true, that catching that eye is the point and it happens very much as a constellation is viewed. If the family made a spectacle of itself, it would invite envy or derision, but a constellation is part of nature. Beauty is like a comet. Men marvel and feel themselves lucky to have seen it, sensing its rarity and heat. Are we comet-makers, then?

Marta sought out her tamer, but Matteo knew me long before we were both raised under the same starry sky.

To paint this cosmos is my ambition, and every portrait, every landscape is a fragment of it, a piece of space and time I’ve snatched. Carlo constantly measures himself against competing sculptors and his own ambition art for him is a climbing, measured progress. My art records what I’ve taken in. If I wrote poems, they would sketch this same terrain, while Luca’s poems tell where his heart has been.

Still, if you ask Luca about a particular alley or an odd old warehouse you happen to notice, he’ll have anecdotes about it and you’ll sense that much more could be said.

If our family is a constellation, the planets rotate in and out of it . I look on carefully, noting things of interest a marvelous face or a torso set off by the peerless taste of whoever dressed it. I also note the furnishings, the objects, the colors, the mix of smells and scents. I paint what I see, but other senses cloud my sight.

Matteo told me once that when a woman is genuinely desirous, she leaves a trail of signs that are hers alone. If another sparks a comparable desire, then the signs will be theirs alone, I replied.

Matteo’s head is also a constellation, a torso implied, a mind and sinew dancing. All this and yet a painting. Set it down, I think. Luca has words, but I have something more tangible. Paolo will be long dead when they look at Matteo’s head and wonder who he is, knowing nothing of his son. And that woman’s head, found in the same place and painted in the same style who was she? Those small Greek heads Luca collects raise such questions.

“So soothing ,” Luca has it in a poem, said by a woman who throws her lover over. This is how it is with infidelity: they discount what their lovers gave them. I count myself lucky to have known intense desire, freeing me to have Carlo as my husband, quite satisfactory. When I look at my portrait of Matteo, it brings him to mind in the entirety of our experience together. I feel the same heat flashing up the instant he sees me, watch him calm himself, remember who he is and where. And I forget myself too.

The family's farmstead is a relief from the city, artificial as any theater but the props are bucolic and of course the activities are real enough. It’s the countryside of wealth’s imagination, populated with imposing bulls and horses proudly bred to race and stud or whelp the next crop. This is where I’m most myself, despite seeing through it. I’m at peace with the one who loved and bred, who paints as she ages. In town, age is more burdensome. Here, it’s all of a piece, unfolding, life plain and simple.

The Church interferes with our need to be women in a bodily sense. Such clerics relate to us unnaturally, taking pride in their celibacy and the many ways they test their consciences. We have to know our bodies early, love and be loved purely from desire. Then a family this is the proper order, or else desire will derail us later.

My studio is a long, utilitarian space with high windows on two sides. The walls are whitewashed. There's a stove, canvas slots, and shelves and drawers for the rest. I mostly sketch and then work from them later, which is to say that I spend more time in the world than in my studio, the world giving me my subjects. I use the studio to try things out. At my request, Carlo added a pottery kiln to his, and I sometimes work in that medium. I follow how art unfolds, its long exit from narrative and realism. Sometimes I let form, color, and shading dominate or the hue and tone vary just to see it.

I don’t really think of myself as an artist, but as one who makes art the way Luca is one who makes poems. He doesn’t think of himself as a poet, either. He doesn’t sketch, of course, but he takes life in like I do and then finds the words and lines. I sketch in part because my visual memory needs that prompt. It also starts the composition. What is this dance I do with life to intuit its shifting rhythms? It applies as much to love as to art. Both lead us to get past the surface of things, wonder at their sheer variety, and hold all of it in affection. I always thought, growing up, that Jesus felt this way, expelling the devils that took people over so they could be our neighbors again.

My paintings summarize all these sketches , my impressions of their subjects. My landscapes are also the result of years of living with them. If I’ve portrayed my household, it’s because its denizens are so familiar. Lately, I've tried to combine more than one vantage point in a single composition. At first, I placed them side by side or in a sequence, but then I started overlaying them. Landscape can be overlaid by shifting the viewpoint. When I walk up from the harbor, the walls of the town above it are in motion. As the fog burns off, the great stone walls, textured by slanted sunlight, and the northern sky are in motion How to paint this, I wonder? And what exactly am I painting? It reflects how I move through a place and see it changing. I could mix the different seasons or the same person at 10 and 30 the raw material in my sketchbooks and my head.

I suppose this is why I return to a given terrain again and again, always seeing some new aspect. Within the household, I see the same unfolding, each one a past within a present. Not everyone sees it this way, I’m aware. It always shocks me if people see the present as the past’s possible negation. Our lives in time should support us, ground us, give us the narratives we tend so faithfully. That two people can remember the same event differently is only natural, and both versions have to be admitted, I think, not made into a quarrel.

27.

I think of Natalia as conventional, but then so am I , despite having done exactly what I wanted, or perhaps because of this, because it was convenient to be conventional this could be the family’s credo.

On paper, there’s Carlo and our two children, Paolo and Natalia, part of that useful family, the source of so much that makes the lives of wealthier families so pleasant. Paolo was like this, a gift on top of the thoroughbreds, the breeding bulls, the provisions. Matteo loves his wife and their family, but men who love women crave a certain kind of woman. Reverse this, and he fit that description for me.

Am I really conventional or am I fooling myself? It’s interesting how some painters who are men wear suits as often as smocks, in contrast to their naked or half-undressed models. Nothing if not normal, they tell the world. Convention is a defense, a screen.

Natalia has a prodigious memory for texts, scenes, conversations, everything. At unexpected moments, she will recount something overheard or vividly describe an experience. Awareness for these things isn't unique to her, but her powers of recollection amaze me.

The countryside is more aware of the earth's jeopardy. We think of Demeter’s daughter in this connection, but the weather is a god of sorts. Peasants propitiate it, especially if it turns against them. The priests know this and their hearts are with them. Every village has its local saints whose roots are older even than the Romans.

Matteo spoke sometimes of the way power is easily distracted from the things that really matter. He admired the family for its attentiveness to what he called husbandry, which I suppose is the role of Persephone’s man, unlike the sterile god she winters with. This, Matteo said, is the hell of power when it fixes on self-display and sees the world around it as a mirror. Saying this in the midst of our liaisons became a joke between us, how love is magnanimous when it's there and overflowing. It’s true that love opens your heart. It’s not just pleasure you feel the usual limits of things loosen.

Peasants live in the different ordinary of their country year, aware of portents that city folk wouldn’t notice. I’ve lived here long enough to hear their fears directly and watch them try to guard the life they know from calamities embedded in country memory.

Fishermen and traders also have their particular saints, and priests who understand their daily terrors, some inherent in the work, others just bad luck. The harbor is as alive with shrines and talismans as any country village. Superstition, some might scoff, but it’s very like the rituals of children, kept as fervently in both cases.

I shouldn’t overlook the women of different natures. Cosima, another of Luca’s sisters, is an example. She also chose a man who liked women for what they had in common with men. Carlo was bemused. “It must run in that family.” But she liked it. I had this from Luca, who helped her accommodate the man’s taste. He hosted parties for others who interested him Cosima held her own in this circle, and when their arrangement ended, she took herself to Milan, attracting an impresario involved with La Scala.

They married and she acquired a title. The Count, as Cosima’s late husband was known, was in the thick of theatrical and operatic events, and she immersed herself in that world, knowing everyone. She drags me along sometimes, but I prefer to wait for her return then listen to her vivid impressions, which she sets down later in a notebook, apparently. “I have shelves of them,” she told me.

What is Piranesi to me ? I mean the whole of it , from the ocean to the hills that catch its storms and fog. Where do I fit best, and why? Our house on the estate, the use of which the family granted us when we married, is typical of others in Piranesi’s countryside, with grounds that pay for its upkeep produce from the estate sold on and prized by those who know the locale by taste. This working of the land happens around me a cohort of familiars that lives with me as equals in the sense God intended, all of us being human.

Piranesi has an endowment from nature that men respect despite the dictates of commerce and fashion. It makes the showing off you see elsewhere seem out of place. These men have seen everything, like their fathers and uncles before them. Living with the ocean and the weather, their women see life as tenuous. (Consider their saints, Matteo once told me.) What is Piranesi to me? Its beauty is constant and fleeting. I sketch it as fast as I can.

Immortality is a game with which we torture ourselves. Carlo makes things he believes are likely to endure, but they could be broken up or melted down, the way the remnants of Piranesi were put to other uses, even as other parts live on, worn by use but not otherwise molested. For artists, the game begins in childhood when our work children’s work is invariably of a high order is praised and sometimes kept. Or we keep it because someone liked it and, by extension, liked us. Then there’s the market, if the artist’s ambitions range beyond making art to selling it as proof of being seen, of worth a gallery and the pull of a public.

The world prompts me to make art, I seek it out and sometimes it comes to me. Love, marriage, households, children where does art fit with them? Does it measure up to them or are they separate? Are they woven together, giving form and substance to both? This is life as we live it all the ways we find calmness in the wake of passion or effort or ruinous flood or drought or war. This calm finding it may be our family’s genius. We can take a blow to the balls, as Carlo puts it, and stagger on, if only at a crawl at first, hobbling back and rebuilding. Piranesi’s saints, not the ones we hope will ward off evil, are the guardians of this persistence. Perhaps they're angels.

There’s an art too of loving, as Matteo and I proved exceptionally.

Part three: Natalia

1.

At some point, I realized that it’s impossible to hide. Not that I don’t make a constant effort to blend in, to be one more among so many others, but this never completely forestalls my sense of foreboding. This may make me modern in contrast to my parents and even to my brother, the Apollonian Paolo.

A bulwark against calamity is there ever such a thing? When I studied history at convent school, it was clear to me that life regularly divided into two partisans on each side who loathed the other and wished them only death. The nuns, bless their innocence, spoke of how God healed these divides, but then studying law at the suggestion of my father brought home to me the atmosphere of strife that attaches to humanity. Carlo, secular and pragmatic, saw in me a lawyer. It seems a contradiction; a woman in a man’s profession is a sure way to stand out, but I find it beneficial to be in the world of the courts, grasp its mechanics the way Luca grasps the world of trade and its negotiations. They’re related. We sometimes discuss the points of overlap how the powers of a given day seek to bend the world to their devices. “It’s odd,” he says, “how they misjudge the balance of things, being used to local deference.” In the courts, the balance tips toward them, but even then there are rules, some written and some not, that are dangerous for the powerful to transgress. Men who do seek to overthrow convention. It works for a time, causing upheaval, and then it doesn’t. Such men are ignorant of history, or if they know it, believe it won’t dare apply to them.

My sense of foreboding waxes and wanes depending on the presence of such men on different stages of possible action. To be modern is, I think, to have a feel for the pulse of things. My mother’s awareness is fixed on the land and seasons. Carlo has a wider vision.

I was seduced by the gowns t hat students wea r, a tradition lawyers and academics maintain. A gown is a protective guise. The law too has been a refuge for me in a life less well arranged than my parents’ lives, despite their oddities. I’ve made ordinary an art, a state of neutrality much like a gown affords me. To be ordinary is to stand within life inextricably, hoping to avoid what it throws at you its capacity for surprise and reversal. My mother speaks of this in relation to the countryside, but hers are a painter’s observations, her love of places and their inhabitants. I’m more often in the thick of men’s affairs, as we call them, although women too are caught up in these disputes. Luca attributes them to bad planning, but ordinary life is rarely planned beyond the plotlines we learned growing up. The sacraments give each section its title, some longer than others.

I always try to find a language suited to my ordinary state, but my thoughts run away with me. This doesn’t happen to my artist parents, although I have no memories of being in the room with them when they made love. As makers, their thoughts are focused.

The law courts are demanding when a case goes to trial, and even the petitioning that’s part of it is time-consuming. The rest of life becomes the background. A client’s story can be like a serial, the details emerging piecemeal despite my questions. Even those given to candor talk in layers, not knowing themselves what’s important. We’re both wallowing in anecdote and incident, but my task is to find a narrative that serves the trial necessarily taking account of the law as context and support, and the court as a mechanism, a relentless machine that sometimes kills or ruins people.

Is this what causes my unease? It prods me to prepare far better than most, to scour the lawbooks for precedent, to press the client for lacunae and discrepancies any small opening, because I never know how it will go. Whether the case is civil or criminal, animus is always in the mix, warping arguments with raw emotion.

Intuition has its place in court. Opposition and doubt have to be checked and countered without harming anyone’s amour-propre. If I trample on a man’s, I may lose the sympathy of crucial others, so instead I have to let my narrative do the work and set traps that force admissions or expose the frailty of counter-arguments. An art to this is what I mean, with intuition guiding how I put it forward.

4.

The mind may be the seat of all erotic life, but it’s a nervous creature, “like a thoroughbred,” as my mother puts it. I suppose that dressage and the steeplechase are what the practice of law demands of me in predictably uncertain combinations the need to adhere to an array of conventions and nuances, recall from memory the tracts that are the courts’ terrain, and yet also jump over hedges and hurdles at high speed, careening almost recklessly in order to prevail.

If I have a mare’s perseverance, I’m saddled with the need to feign interest or at least hide my boredom or disdain unless its disclosure is a card worth playing. Breeding, that family fixation, makes such cards talismanic. Even as children, we grasped that life has rules the elders set out in parables and looks.

Wisdom though is more reliably gained by narrow escapes and cautionary tales. The Luca who occasionally skirts disaster in his affairs is like that stock character of commedia, the servant of two masters. That he skirts it is part of the fun. As on the stage, Luca in these situations can be hapless, inexplicably lucky, and altogether human we grasp that his hunger is harmless, a source of his charm and his poetics, rooted in the way he lives, one wobbling narrative serving as a counterpoint to another he knows in his heart will prove more enduring his marriage and the family as he idealizes them. But this knowledge is episodically set aside in search of another.

The courts face their own dilemma their combination of accrual, everything handed down to us, and temporal intervention. Cities too face this tension between was and is. Luca knows the wider world, but sees it as an extension of the Piranesi that for him is its anchor. My mother’s world is smaller, but she’s more secure in her sense of self. She’s a kind of lioness, knowing instinctively what the lions want of her. I lack this confidence. Like a thoroughbred, I have to walk a path first to be sure there are no snakes, and even then, I’m never completely convinced. If Luca has qualms, he ignores them.

Piranesi was once a Greek outpost, I learned from the nuns. It was a polis, they explained everything was decided out in the open by its citizens. And even if they were in fact an elite, they had to persuade their peers before, having all agreed, they would act.

I see remnants of the polis in the courts and the marketplace. In both, we see how life gives people luck or undermines them, and how, faced with this, they learn early on how to talk, bluff, and brazen their way through it. They live amid signs and portents they interpret and propitiate. Yet they continue to treat the polis and the marketplace as more or less unchanging, an order they rely on, exploit, hope to make their way through unharmed.

My parents believe in their art. Will it save them? I don’t think they’ve ever asked themselves this question. I’m the one asking it, but I’m a lawyer, not an artist. I would argue for them, but I doubt I could make an effective defense, should one be necessary. “Should one be necessary”: this is a pessimist talking. Luca has the optimism of a charmer, one who’s long studied the bluffers and the brazen.

It should have bothered me a little that Matteo was on our wall and Paolo resembled him, but Matteo has always treated me with great affection. My nature is like Carlo’s, seeing the form of things, then rendering it convincingly so others can see it. Giulia sketches preliminary studies that she puts away “for later.” Her studio is like a pantry that she episodically empties to make her art. Carlo’s studio is like a workshop, filled with assistants. Giulia has her models, but only for sketching. Her real work is done alone.

5.

Luca and I have always been candid with each other . Paolo is a straight arrow. He has a sixth sense about commerce, whereas Luca’s intuitions go deeper. Thus, he grasped the depth of my attachment to Nora, my lifelong friend, first met in convent school.

There’s an old divan in my mother’s country studio, covered with a cowhide throw. On a hot summer afternoon, my school friend and I found ourselves alone. The heat was considerable and we shed our clothes. “We should go out on the terrace,” we told each other, but no, she began exploring the terrain she’s known better as our lives were rearranged by marriage and children, by time itself. These encounters, barely planned, arose from the outset within a friendship that shares the everyday that Piranesi provides us both. Did anyone but Luca notice? We've left no trail, except on my body. My mother’s comings and goings have often provided a place and distance. Does she know? She thinks of me as a convent girl, and I’ve always used this as a subterfuge.

6.

“I br ought him with me,” Matteo said, gesturing at Gio, and there he was, this man I married, the father of our children. I knew at once that he was taken with me, and it’s true that I was striking. Yet Matteo had picked his moment to introduce us, in the countryside where he knew I’d be most myself.

Most men are outwardly focused. Matteo, Paolo, and Gio are men of action. The introspective Luca is an exception. After we married, our children drew their grandmothers, Giulia and Alma, and throngs of cousins and chums. Women can be subsumed by their households, but my profession brought me out of it.

Why did Matteo introduce us? I’ve never asked him, but would guess that he felt our temperaments were compatible, that we’d find our way as a couple without ever losing a deep affection. Laura and Luca’s marriage has been stormy, but they seem tied to each other.

After Gio met my parents, my mother told me that his mother, Alma, “is some sort of apothecary" and from an ancient family, like Matteo’s, that was here before the Greeks.

7.

My mother and I were both convent girls. It was where my interest in the law began. The Nicene Creed, how it was taught to me and how it actually read I can trace it there. Law mixes traditions, Roman and Canon. At school, the latter predominated and the old ecclesiastical conservatism still cast its long shadow. Both my parents are fearless in the sense of truly lacking a sense of fear. Luca and I are rooted in it, but he responds with a subtle boundary that enables him to stay calm. I mastered authority's guiding texts and mechanics with an eye out for any and all exceptions to its givens.

I once discussed the Incarnation with my mother. “Mary was filled with the Holy Spirit,” she said, referring to Jesus's conception. As she continued, I realized she was conflating the Holy Spirit with God. “No, no, that’s heresy!” I warned her, as the nun drilling us had emphasized that Mary incarnated God’s son. “But that stream of gold! Yes, God, but He got her pregnant! It’s not like Zeus, playing the swan or bull. Leda and Europa weren’t virgins after he was done with them.” This was the first time she'd broached conception in such physical detail, and she went on to elaborate as the nun did not. But I was struck by her emphatic look. In her mind, there was no confusion: “Look at the paintings!” Yet the nuns made it clear that people had been burned for this. It could happen again! Giulia’s catechism must have been like mine, so she misremembered, not that this would bother her. The sins and afflictions of the world are real to her, but her belief that she'll die peacefully in bed and not from malevolence a pact she made early on with God, Nicene Creed be damned gives her a buoyant attitude.

I read and reread the thing, trying to figure it out. But laws too can be like this. If they weren’t, justice would be even more rulebound than it usually is. Judges become blind and deaf from the quantity of human chaff thrown at them, and it’s a miracle when real justice is done. Jesus spoke forcefully against this, which must be why we were discouraged from reading the Gospels on our own.

“A port city is where exiles like us wash up,” Luca said. “Coupling with the locals, we hope in time to make our histories less visible. We restart our chronicles on arrival, stripping the past of specific ancestors. Yet we keep them assiduously.” What will happen to them, I wondered, if the family has to flee again?

Successive generations embed themselves in the local culture, suppressing any differences. If there’s a weakness to this strategy, it lies in the tendency to ally with power so closely that any cataclysm that topples it makes our own lives perilous. We share this risk with the bourgeoisie as a class, but ruptures like this can quickly split it.

Luca felt I’d be protected by my relative distance from the family, but my profession might be a problem. My mother is protected by Matteo and Carlo; others are more vulnerable him, for example, but not Laura, given the way bloodlines would likely be parsed.

“Where are we from?” I once asked Giulia. “From Spain,” she said.

The gossip of the court is worth following. I know the bailiffs, and they’re a good source. They joke about the lying that goes on, how those who apprehend are also caught up in the vices they suppress. Nothing gets by them, including occasional moments of truth and revelation. The reputable judges take note if a bailiff’s courtroom mask slips. They're barely noticeable, these lapses, because these are practiced actors. Most lawyers identify with the judges, but I see myself as part of the same troupe as the bailiffs. When they realized this, they warmed up to me, joking and teasing at first, and then saying more. I learned to decipher minute signs of emotion that surfaced of their own accord in court, suppressed as soon as felt. Taking this in without drawing attention to it is a skill I acquired watching the nuns. They never gossiped in our presence, and yet we knew by constant observation what lay in their heart of hearts.

Nora is plainer, more mannish, and yet, as she notes, more feminine than me. We’re each other turned inside out, I think, and we play with our dissonances. When people feel that their lives are constricted, they try to pry them open, sometimes desperately. So, a piece of luck that we found each other.

Luca wishes the family’s flair for arrangements that leave no trace, that fold up into themselves, included him He's forced to be the impresario of his affliction, while Carlo runs his private theater. Like Matteo’s painting on my parents’ wall, Luca’s poems and Carlo’s sculptures could be read into, should someone choose to do so, but both men love women in their different ways. unlike other men who disdain women as lesser beings, parodies of their own perfection. Doubts would arise, then, if they were accused of unorthodoxy, and enforcers of orthodoxy hate ambiguous cases, in my experience.

Lovemaking and friendship between men and women are incompatible, Luca says. Is it true? Giulia managed it with Matteo, but he feels their situation is unique.

Girls can be brutal to each other, a cruelty that reflects their anxious vanity. Nora lacked this and my anxieties never took this form. Nora is like Carlo in that her evident physical strength is tied to a volatile nature that, if challenged, she checks only with obvious, mounting effort. Once, walking home from school, she was set on by three or four of our classmates. Her actions made it clear that she was too dangerous, unchecked. After that, they kept their distance.

I suppose I put myself at risk, loving her, but she's in no sense possessive except when actually possessing me, that lashing in that’s the other side of her lashing out. God help me. This too traces back.

Childhood is where we form our tastes for certain things, where our narratives begin, our sense of self and others. Luca is a literary man, and he maintains that literature is to one side of life as lived, an effort to make sense of it. We conflate people and events because it makes a better story, makes the life we lived coherent or forgivable.

Early on, Nora saw that she could possess beauty and make her shake with pleasure. Her man is strong like her, but calmer, more purposeful, and patient. Carlo is like this at home. When naturalists discuss lions, the domesticity of their family lives in between mauling gazelles, scrapping with other lions for dominance, or fucking is emphasized. That lions maul, scrap, and fuck is barely mentioned. No need. Like us in this respect.

“He fucks like a dog,” Nora told me. It was so a memorable that I repeated it to Paolo without attribution. He passed it on to Luca, who told me later that men like it because they can see a woman’s backside, which excites them. Nora likes my backside, I reflected.

Luca is someone you can tell anything and he takes it in and says something useful or nods and a week later says something useful. When he’s with you, it’s as if there are no gaps between all the times he’s been with you. It’s a trait of Nora, too, but her “no gaps” are bodily. Nothing escapes her.

Lovers have their private lexicon, a means of conveying affection. Families have this, too, and the habit passes from parents to their children, and from siblings and cousins to each other. What the lovers take away is bodily memory. That Nora is easily aroused was clear to me early on, but she stays on that high plateau throughout. My theory is that in the aftermath, everything resurfaces and finds its denouement. My aftermaths are sleep, the pain of scraped skin in a hot bath scrapes owed to other causes, plausibly.

Nora is the naturalist of my body, the range of which astonishes us when she applies her knowledge. Gio is aroused like any married man. I really only need one such with women, infidelity reflects dissatisfaction with the marriage. With men, maybe with life itself. Luckily for my life in court, I’m not especially fertile. This is the hazard of marriage. I love Marco and Franny, but I have work to do. Gio does his part, holding us in his affection. He’s a good man, just as Matteo understood. If he knows about Nora, beyond our long friendship, he’s never mentioned it. He never interferes.

13.

“We’re Etruscan, " Matteo said. “ We were here before the Greeks, before everybody. When everyone else is gone, we’ll still be here. Compared to us, they’re just parvenus.” The sea is here and my family traveled over it, but his people are rooted here like old vines that continue to produce prized vintages. The man I take to bed is of this same ancient stock. Bits of the past surface momentarily and we grasp their potent originality. This gives Gio and Matteo their confidence: others threatened to sweep it all away and yet it wasn’t. The trick is to live through it and thrive again in each aftermath.

My nature is the residue of exile, the thoughts that come with it. If both my children are confident, I could say it comes from Giulia and Carlo, but it’s from Gio. Nora is also one of them, an Etruscan, as she told me when Gio and I were betrothed. Her husband, also.

When we studied history in school, the Etruscans were treated as a mystery, a civilization that went to ground. That they deserved the term was evident in the archaeological remains, but who were they? They take on elemental forms that combine with others yet remain themselves. I see this in my children. Matteo, who’s known me from childhood, understood my fundamental wariness, so Gio was his gift to me and them, to break that chain

Luca claims that the outer poles of males and females, his "pure types," bring out their opposite, and that the ambivalent crave those extremities. Is this true for Nora and me? Our pairing was at our own initiative, an elixir that, taken episodically, keeps us whole. I think Luca’s still looking for it. I’m not sure it’s possible for him.

Justice is a woman, blindfolded and impartial. I grew up with this image that civilization calls for this, marked progress from less enlightened eras. Something of this idealism persists in courts of law, just as faith persists in churches. It’s part of their orthodoxy.

Brazen or lurid crimes and anything that frightens the powers that be have a public dimension. Public means that it can be swayed by hearsay and the newspapers' framing, but what follows, being in the public view, exposes the courts' machinery. Most of my work is civil, but I’m assigned other cases or implored to take them on.

Passion can win leniency or exculpation. The accused is crucial to this, as are the witnesses, if any. What’s said has to be emotionally true, which often means telling a story full of pathos. While this can be enacted on a stage, the court is too closed in for any but the most human drama. Life has to speak for itself in harrowing detail, as Justice isn’t really blind and definitely has ears.

This is the excitement that law affords me, why it’s my calling, although I'd rather be at my desk, searching for precedents on which to hang my theories, or questioning my client and any friendly witnesses to unearth whatever might convince a judge. Also, I have to be convinced, both that it’s credible and that it’s compelling.

“Thoroughly conventional,” Luca said, quoting my mother. Then he laughed. “I wonder if she means the convent?” I asked, as much to myself as to him. Luca was doubtful. “She sees you in relation to their lives as artists. Carlo knows what you’ve accomplished, wondering where this talent for the law came from, but Giulia thinks it’s a wall you erected in an effort to calm yourself.’” It's true along with Gio’s name and our Etruscan children I wanted the law and the law courts close by, their officers on a first name basis.

Luca is as observant as my mother, but what he sees fuels his theories and his poems. He’s like a barometer about Piranesi, or maybe a meat thermometer stuck deep into the body of the place. Life sticks mostly to its patterns. The trick is to sense disaster.

Luca lives an outwardly normal life, onto which he layers his own necessities and those that others impose on him. He describes himself as a fixer who knows how to get things done and how to deflect trouble. It’s not always possible, but he does his best.

This is the way of the world, is it not? Trouble arrives anyway.

Assimilation is an art rooted in hope and fear. In this sense, I’m a true daughter of my mother’s family, although my mother lives neither in hope nor fear, in my view. While I tell myself I’m securely embedded here, doubts arise. I have in common with the family its strategy of being close to power but hewing to fair dealing and probity. Power is shared between the potentates and the street, both unpredictable and possibly dangerous. The family joins the former in being visibly generous, but a mob may not remember this once the existing order is supplanted. When things go haywire, the machinery freezes and those who operate it may change sides, making the courts for example less fair, crueler, more lethal.

Gio sees this from the other end, an order supplanted long ago His people are indigenous, as the anthropologists say, but a backdrop rather than marked out in any sense. My family is not exactly visible, either. Our watchword is discretion, everything handled privately, “bespoke,” as Luca puts it, which lets us choose our clientele. All our dealings are personal and some are almost hereditary, since dynastic wealth here is relatively stable.

Our arrangements reflect the contradictions of the established order. Class, custom, and orthodoxy work against the natural attraction that arises between two people like Giulia and Matteo, unable to marry and yet drawn to each other. Matteo’s arrangement began as a conversation between his father and my late grandfather, according to Luca. Had she demurred, that would have been it. Instead, she got Matteo, her painting of him, and their Paolo.

17.

Giulia is in Milan with Luca's sister Cosima, so I’m in the country. Nora came with me, but has now gone back. The divan is still there with its cowhide throw. It’s convenient that my mother's studio is isolated from the rest of her house.

Now it’s just me and my mother’s helpers. They live on the farm and come up in the morning to prepare the meals my mother heats up when she feels like eating. Her horses are stabled elsewhere when she’s away, so I haven’t gone riding. Since Nora left, I’ve spent time in Giulia’s studio, going through her work. I looked carefully at the walls of the house, too. It’s her gallery, I think. There’s work by others, including my father’s sculptures, uncharacteristically small, and a surprising number of his sketches studies, mostly, that reveal his careful observation and his feeling for his subjects. They have this in common, I realize. She has this way of building up her point of view sketch by sketch, then with small gouache paintings, testing the colors, how the light changes. She waits for a place to tell her what it’s about. Her painting of Matteo, is it similar?

This isn’t the first time I’ve made this pilgrimage here mainly to see the house and her work. Nora was a vacation from everything, my Nora who leaves me so sated that my mind is clear and opened. What strikes me is how good the work is, whether dashed off or brought finally to a conclusion. It has the kind of audience the family acquires word of mouth. She occasionally exhibits with Carlo. If interest is expressed, she’ll give the work in question to that person.

Luca thinks Matteo burned away most of Giulia’s desire; Carlo gets the rest. I doubt she ever made love to a woman. She just loves those two men, her children by them, and her art, taking them in along with everything else that merits her close attention.

“ Cosima feels Milan has changed, ” Luca said "The glitter is still there, but cultural life is under siege." This wasn’t what I heard from Giulia when she came to see me. She talked about being immersed again in Cosima’s world, which she finds both a spectacle and hard going---as usual. She’s always liked her cousin, who’s long urged her to move to Milan or at least spend the season there. Next time I saw her, I mentioned Luca's comment. “Commerce sets the pace in Milan and the money spills over. Most of it is spent on distraction, but there’s an art to that livings can be made. Artists find patrons, there are galleries, fashion, design raffish, deliberately provocative. The grandees tolerate it, but there’s a risk of a reaction. Loose rules are tightened and then used against the artists. Mobs appear, egged on by politicians. Cosima sees this and it makes her anxious. Thank God we live in Piranesi. Only the paraded Virgin draws a crowd."

At court , e verything is as it’s always been . I ate lunch nearby, at a place frequented by the bailiffs. As it cleared out, the most senior of them lingered older, rotund, always kind to me even when I started out. He came over to my table. “You seem anxious,” he said. “Forgive me for saying so. It made me worry.” I gestured for him to join me. “Everything is fine,” I told him. “But the political situation concerns me.” He nodded. “Rome is far away. It takes time for change to rattle through the formal channels, and then someone has to come here to see if it’s taken seriously. That’s usually how it goes." He sighed. “We have a small farm. My hope is to live there peacefully, but our children and grandchildren, what about them?” He got up from the table, slow and almost ponderous. “God put us all here to try our luck," he added He pressed my shoulder. “Don’t worry, Natalia! Piranesi is older than Rome. We’ll survive.”

“Cosima is coming,” my mother said. “A visit?” I asked. “No, she sold the house in Milan and is moving back. Luca has been helping her find quarters. She finds Milan oppressive ‘too modern.’ “ Later, when I finally tracked Luca down, he confirmed what Giulia told me. “The society she loved belongs to the past. Milan wants to be the capital of business, the young men in sharp suits, their women skipping La Scala for nightclubs. To them, Cosima is a relic."

I wondered. She seems as single-minded about her social life as Giulia is about her art. What comes next for such a person? I posed this question to Giulia. “She kept a diary. If it records the sorts of things she noted whatever struck her as ‘splendid,' the pathos, all recounted with animation if that’s in her diary, it’s worth reading.”

I asked Luca about Cosima’s new place. “She was specific: not large, not in the center of things, but close enough that she can walk to shops, to church, and to see the family. Quiet, with a room where she can work. She’s ordered bookshelves and a desk. There’s enough room to have people over, but not for big occasions. ‘If I decide to have a party, I’ll rent a restaurant,’ she told me. ‘It shouldn’t remind me of Milan. Oh, and Luca,’ she added, ‘I want the sea and ships to be visible from one of the rooms just a slice, not a panorama.'"

“I want to be visible,” Nora said. “I want us to be visible.” It came out of the blue. There was a pause, almost a minute. “Not just us. I want all of us who hide ourselves because we’re made to hide to live openly.” Another pause. “Islands exist where people love openly. We love each other, and we have to find rooms out of sight and hearing. I want to parade our love, to parade with everyone else whose love is also hidden to celebrate ourselves, for once, as all we really are.”

We were in Cosima’s flat, furnished for her impending arrival. I’d been asked by Luca to have a look, and brought Nora along. There was just a sliver of a view we could see it from the bed, a slice of the harbor and the sea through one tall and narrow window, placed so the privacy of the room was undisturbed. Nora spoke again.

“I dreamt that my people threw off all those layers of conquest and stood again on our own ground, welcoming others like us Romani, men in women’s clothes, men embracing men, women with their arms around slim beauties, more tattoos than pirates on their arms. It was summer and most of them wore next to nothing.”

“Rooms like this are where we overlap like that divan in your mother’s studio. I want to pin a note on it: ‘We were here again. Natalia came seven times, each more splendid than the last. You have your painting of Matteo, Giulia, and I have Natalia’s gasps.’" She laughed. “We should leave Cosima a gift.” She passed two fingers under my nose. “Maybe I'll bottle some of this for her.”

She arrived, Cosima, helped by Luca, visited by Giulia. I listened to their accounts, but then I received a note asking me to call on her. So, I went back to this furnished flat with its narrow view, the bed on which I’d come seven times by Nora’s count. Cosima received me, dressed simply, barely a trace of makeup a spareness that suited her, as her face, her whole demeanor really, is striking. The summons had to do with legal matters: could I suggest someone? They fell mostly into what a clerk could do, but needed a lawyer to prepare a final version. “I’ll organize it,” I told her. She thanked me, stopped to pour us tea, then looked up. “It wasn’t just Milan that drove me away, Natalia, although in truth it became unbearable. I came here to write about it my life from the time I arrived there until I left.” She motioned to what Luca told me was her writing room. “I have shelves of notebooks. Without thinking much about it, I wrote whatever struck me people, events, their settings, the conversations. I realized I have the raw material for a history one woman’s story of one era giving way to another. My task is to make something of it. What it is a novel or just a record doesn’t really matter. I’ll see as I write it what it needs to be. This is a better use of my time than living on in Milan. Culture breaks with the past, that’s its nature, but so much that's happening there is just reaction decked out in the latest clothing. So, here I am. Piranesi is my refuge, at least for now, and my writing place.”

“I suppose one could think of us as courtesans,” Cosima said, several conversations later. “We thought we chose them, but little was left to chance. And we were the lure.” She paused to pour us some tea. “God knows, we were bred for it, not just for beauty but for desire. We loved intensely in that brief season our breeding brought us.”

She waved her hand toward her desk. There was neat stack of notebooks. “I’m rereading them,” she said. “I owe it to Francesca, Natalia she took one from a shelf when she visited me and kept reading. It made me realize that I write in the same way that Giulia sketches. This is the freedom we won for ourselves. It’s different now I mean, you have a career as a lawyer, a profession. I’m not sure we could have done that, even if we’d had the opportunity. We went where our interests lay. When I came back, I saw immediately why Giulia stayed here it’s her subject matter, as Milan was mine.”

I asked Franny about the journals. "When I talk with Giulia, I see how she takes everything in and then uses it in her art. I think Cosima is like this, too. She's a writer, not a painter, but the attention she pays is the same. The journals are her sketchbooks."

As for my life here in Piranesi, it takes place at home, in court, in Giulia’s house and studio, on the street or at the harbor. So, half a dozen sets and how many characters? Even in the courtrooms, it comes down to the client, bailiff, and judge. Intimacy is a theme. What do I do with this, I wonder? Is it a life anyone would read?

“No coincidence ,” Nora says. It's one of Alma’s catchphrases. Gio is untouched by anything mysterious, but his mother’s roots go deep into the primal ground that gives her certain insights. When Franny came of age, she visited Alma and came home with a chart: columns of symbols, faint lines indicating how one column related to another. I described it to Nora, who nodded, “I have one, too.” I called on Alma after Franny’s visit. “Making charts is passed down among the women. Mine was made by Nora’s grandmother and Franny’s by me. Nora will make charts for Franny's girls if she has any and teach her how to make them, just as I taught her. Franny's chart suggests if she'll marry in or out, if her desire will be fully for that person or split, and if split, how. The central column is hers. The inner two are her closest connections. The outer two are important, but how? Men's charts only have three columns. You figure in Gio's and also in Nora’s. You and Nora are split, but life has made you whole. You square your chart with life as lived. People and situations seem to fit but don’t. Connections can be good or bad. We only see this clearly, if we see it at all, in retrospect."

I think about desire in a bodily sense, how I immerse myself in it, carried away, and how I’ve embodied it, too. We attribute to our hearts the feelings that arise, how we give form to what we’re given. I come from a long line of women who produce marriageable daughters whose nature and bearing strike others, not least in their nonchalance about their looks, their native ability to pull themselves together and rise to occasions. Where does this come from?

Giulia would say that it always comes out well in the end, that life is like her endless sketches and, episodically, we pull them together. She has remarkable equanimity, but also a finely tuned sense of what she wants and doesn’t want; and the courage to make it happen. I tell myself I’m more fearful, less single-minded, but then I have all I ever desired, am complete on that score, as Alma observed.

I want to ask Nora to show me her chart, the column and symbols that describe this peculiar woman, Natalia. But will this help me? My fears are always to do with what’s ahead, my tendency to extrapolate a malign universe based on rumors and portents. I suppose this is the legacy of my family, that I'm so easily set off, but I’m enough part of Gio's family that I resist the idea of fleeing. And fleeing is being discussed now in our family "as a precaution," Luca told me. "Istanbul, Haifa, and even Johannesburg have come up, but Paolo thinks Argentina. He and Matteo are in conversation."

Luca lets me use his harborside bolt hole when he's away. It's been years since the sailors brought him to the docks, but he kept it as a place to write. It looks a poet’s quarters. One morning, Nora joined me, noting a divan “very like your mother’s,” and then wringing me out over several hours. Did Luca choose this place for its isolation?

Nora’s rhythms take me over, as elliptical as Mars’ orbit difficult to calculate yet reliable in its wobbling way. Her hunger builds slowly; my fate to be its occasion and the well of her knowledge.

After she left, sitting at Luca’s desk, I thought about my strange life. Am I just my work and my receptivity to others? I've lived according to my lights, though, working in a bodily pleasure I’ve managed to stretch out. Not even death seems really final, oddly. This may be the nuns' doing their sense of the porosity between life and the Afterlife, whatever it is, however we find it or it finds us.

Inflamed by my brother, Franny dreams of Argentina . I foresee that she’ll soon be an ocean away. Does her chart predict this? Does someone await her there, Piranesi just an address for letters and occasional photographs? I mentioned this to Alma. “You lack possessiveness so, in your mind, Franny is free to come and go, despite your love for her. Not many have this. You pick up where you left off, no gap. Nora isn't possessive, either, but she hungers."

Death is part of country life, unhidden, as natural as the animals rutting and whelping, their offspring savoring their brief, joyous lives. In town, such aspects of life are mostly private. What makes me anxious is the way people visit death on each other, not just in anger, but also at a remove. It’s bad enough that vengeance is meted out by the courts, but strife wells up so easily, stirring up mobs and old hatreds. Perhaps the world is divided between those rooted in a place regardless and those never truly at home. If things fall apart, they move on. Have I lived my way from one to the other, so rooted here now that Franny can pull our tendrils to the ends of the earth without breaking them? Or will her absence not figure for either of us as separation, unnoticed until we meet again? Perhaps it's both.

It’s hard to square Cosima as I see her now with the doyenne that we knew in Milan. She’s made the premises of this new era, its simplifications and stripping away of ornament, her own a spare figure in a setting that's also consciously minimal. It's a version of Giulia’s country life, like her studio with its whitewashed walls When Carlo took up painting, he became a more regular presence at her house, shedding the apparatus and detritus of his former life including many of its distractions. Alma made me more conscious of a person's divided self and how it evolves. Painting is what Carlo brought with him, or the impulse to paint. You age out of eras of your life, I think, and then look around for what you’ve aged into.

I dreamt that an angel defeated an evil one threatening Piranesi . “Shouldn’t you kill him publicly?” I asked. a lawyerly question. The angel shook his head no. I took from this that we speak of God as a shepherd but He lacks control of things except in the sense of having made our world and given it seasons and its tendency to be fertile and habitable despite its catastrophes, including us. Yet there's a rough justice built into it, which must also be His doing.

In the countryside, the greatest sin is cruelty, the one malign trait that inspires others to move on the perpetrator, hunt down and cull what’s universally seen as an aberration. Like death, cruelty in other settings is locked away or shopped out to third parties. War is terrible in large part because it gives license to these brigands.

We sat with Alma interpreting my column and its symbols. “I saw this when we were 12," Nora said later. "You have your gown, your profession, but I can't be a man in Piranesi." I nodded. "Situations tell me who I am, so, who am I, really? But every old divan makes me amorous for you and then you hand me back to myself again."

Suppose that Paolo and Franny went to Argentina , and Matteo became its honorary consul here? Suppose I gave up my practice and, as his deputy, ran a consulate in Carlo's old studio? Piranesi is a place of arrivals and departures. Even the Etruscans must have felt this, the inevitable fate of a port among others serving farms, quarries, or what have you whatever's traded, coveted, changes hands. Anyone in trouble with this “new order” could with our help quit it for a safer place that’s already half Italian. Matteo's immunity and visa-granting will make life less anxious. And then, with her grandmothers and Nora in tow, I can travel to Argentina to see Franny vessel, means, and lure and her progeny, as foreseen.

Classes with Clare Wigfall led me to write this novella, the first in a trilogy that includes Argentinaand Modena , a family saga in nine acts. Laurie Snowden read it in draft and made helpful comments. The making of books and pamphlets is an activity I share with my daughter, Elizabeth Snowden Michael Parman, her oldest brother, once left a note on my desk expressing confidence that I'd eventually write a novel. This trilogy is to repay his optimism a novel in parts.

Berkeley, September 2023

(Photo left: Elizabeth Snowden at Pallas.)

Piranesiis the first of a novella trilogy, "a family saga in nine acts," as recorded in the journals of its protagonists. Luca, his cousin Giulia, and Giulia's daughter Natalia live in Piranesi, the Italian port town from which the family took its name. As they ponder their everyday, the rise of fascism begins to cast a shadow. Yet their lives go on, very much their own behind a carefully constructed scrim of orthodoxy.