The Télos Trilogy

TÉLOS TRILOGY

JOHN J. PARMAN

Introduction

Classes with Clare Wigfall led me to write a novella that became a trilogy. Piranesi , Argentina , and Modenaform a family sage in nine acts. The Piranesi are the family in question. Sephardic, they saw themselves as Mediterranean traders when they took the name of the Italian port town where they settled. They also became Catholic and matriarchy of sorts.

The TélosTrilogycharts the family’s fortunes over a century. In Piranesi in the 1920s, they sense the rise of fascism. Some leave, others stay. The story traces its movements and its leitmotifs. The Piranesi are bourgeois and, in their own minds, conventional, but they use their orthodoxy as a scrim so the women especially can get on with their work and address their desires.

Contents

PIRANESI

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

John Berger

Part one: Luca

1.

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.

2.

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.

5.

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.

6.

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.

7.

" 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.

8.

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.

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.

10.

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.

13.

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.

14.

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.

15,

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.

16.

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.

18.

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.

19.

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.

20.

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.

21.

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.

26.

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.

27.

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.

30.

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."

31.

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

1.

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.

2.

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.

3.

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.

4.

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.

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.

6.

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.

7.

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.

8.

“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.

11.

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.

14.

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.

15.

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.

17.

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.

18.

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 that 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.

19.

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.

25.

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.

26.

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.

29.

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.

31.

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.

3.

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.

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.

5.

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.

6.

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.

7.

“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.

Gio mother, Alma, is an herbalist and apothecary, from an ancient family, like Matteo’s, that was here before the Greeks. Every woman in Piranesi sees her about something. "An adept," my mother says.

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.

9.

“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.

11.

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.

14.

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.

15.

“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.

16.

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 our grandfathers, according to Luca. Had Giulia 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.

18.

“ 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."

19.

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.'"

21.

“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.”

23.

“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?

24.

“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 our women. A 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."

25.

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.

27.

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.

30.

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."

31.

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.

"All means are sacred which are called for by the inner need."

Wassily Kandinsky

Part One: Leo

Leonora' s the name they gave me, but it's Leo, thanks , an inbetween brevity fitting for one like me in a place like this at a time the newspapers celebrate as a new beginning. It's not the worst moment to be half European and half Mapuche.

Some mise en scène: my family here splits its time between the agrarian pursuits of my uncle Paolo, based in San Rafael, and the businesses managed by his cousin Luca in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Luca's wife Laura owns property in Montevideo, home also to Luca's sisters Cosima and Marta. Luca brought Cosima's Milan trilogy, edited by Natalia, my grandmother, to Latin American readers. I met her in San Rafael before the war, and in Piranesi afterward. Maria and Guillermo, my Mapuche grandmother and father, are Paolo's partners in San Rafael. making wine and breeding horses.

Much closer to the Andes than Buenos Aires, San Rafael lies within Mapuche territory. After a treaty ended the strife that killed my grandfather, Maria ran the farmstead Paolo bought. My mother Franny learned Mapudungun from her, then fell in love with her son. This was anticipated on both sides of my family, although their divination methods differ. The Etruscans make charts, while the Piranesi intuit the infant's nature at birth. Mapuche adepts like Maria go into a trance to read a child's character. All agree it's not exactly predictive. What this means in practice is a bit unclear.

To call a place in time a midcentury is to divide a longer expanse in two, leaving me among others to look back and ahead, extrapolating from my own and reported experience what it meant and might mean, this lived and unlived thing whose midpoint is here and now. I find this odd, arbitrary, yet fitting given that I'm unclear exactly where I'm headed.

Luca, friends with an exiled Polish writer, quoted him to me on how we find our way only by trial and error, weighing things and acquiring tastes. Luca is reliably forthcoming on certain topics, good at citing from life the foibles we bring to our encounters, and Exhibit A, as my grandmother Natalia might put it, of the charm that foibles give people, despite their efforts at propriety. I take courage from him when, ambiguously dressed, I swagger into a bar said to harbor women of a rougher sort to understand how they disport, what they discuss, how they size up the trade. In such a sizing up, I honor my Etruscan lineage, Luca tells me.

I'm a bit exotic, mixing two very different ideas of beauty. My namesake Nora has a bit of this a full Etruscan with a temper, "docile as a volcano" (or a crocodile). Hunting gave me the patience to stalk and an endurance honed by Andes passes I've crossed with my father and my cousins.

When my parents wed, Paolo invited Matteo over to bless their marriage. His presence awed the local gentry a real grandee as opposed to their provincial facsimiles. They were viewed thereafter as landowners with a touch of aristocracy, natural and otherwise, that led our European neighbors to grant them a certain latitude. I also benefited, half-breed that I am, accentuated by Guillermo's raising me to hunt and trek. He did so at Maria's behest, she says, based on her reading of my nature. Accurate, I think.

A huntress like Diana? My mother brought me up on stories of such goddesses, told in her family's Piranesi dialect. Luca and I speak it with each other. It lends a bit of protection to our frankness. When Franny and I speak it, though, it's our personal version a mix of Piranesi Italian, Mendoza Spanish in its San Rafael variant, and Mapudungun, with the addition now of the Spanish of the capital and even the Spanish of Luca's capital, especially the slang. Languages come easily to us, but I'm a magnet for catchphrases, odd phrases, and the jingles I hear on the street and the radio snatches of songs, bits of poems and novels. The Mapuche have local dialects that my father and my cousins taught me, growing up, but they have a rich vocabulary that runs parallel to words. It's also true in the city, how much is conveyed by look or body. Hunting involves silence and attention to things like scent, including your own. The wind is a screen and also a revealer.

Yet I also fall into the matriarchal lineage of the Piranesi, a convent school girl who's now at the university in Buenos Aires, following my mother's example once she made up her mind to advocate for the Mapuche and others like them. She could have been a lawyer like her mother, but her interests are sociological and political. Natalia went into the law with the encouragement of her father, but Franny charted her own path. "She has the selfconfidence of her grandmother," Luca says. Can our ancestors' traits reappear in their descendants? Natalia told me in Piranesi that my mother is so grounded because her father Gio is of Etruscan stock, able to hold his ground no matter what blows through. But it's really Natalia who's rooted in Piranesi. My mother's roots are portable.

4.

I wrote the previous three entries in 1950, when I was 20. It was a heady moment in the capital, filled with promise, but Luca suggested I move to Manhattan, "a better place to end up than Brazil," as he put it. (I was intrigued by its daring architecture.) He and Marco did business in New York, so they helped me get a visa. I presented myself at the Cooper Union, a venerable institution, focused on engineering, with a small architecture school. I noted my background and my lineage of artists, including Carlo, a maker of monumental artworks, and his wife Giulia, who I described as an Italian cubist. They knew Marco, who comes to Manhattan episodically and is also a fixture in the revived trade fair that draws the architects to Milan. They let me in. My studio mates taught me the ropes, but I have an affinity for form, materials, and fabrication. I envision a form and then work out how to make it. I spend time with the fabricators. I also went to Italy to visit quarries and see the aged Carlo at the country house near Piranesi he shares with Giulia. A miracle being with them and reading his invaluable notebooks.

Carlo admires modernists of pure form, "like sculptors." He counts some structural engineers among them. (The engineers were among my most interesting teachers.) "If I were starting again, I would design buildings," he told me.

5.

As the last entry suggests , I found this notebook and began adding to it. There are others an account of my nights out hunting in the bars and clubs of Buenos Aires, written in a kind of shorthand; topical ones made at school; quarrying and notetaking in Italy; and "miscellany."

My university in Buenos Aires gave women a great deal of freedom, believing that most of us would end up married. Professions were in the picture and it also produced serious scholars like the Church did for women prepared to devote their lives to it. I studied eclectically, believing that what came readily was likely right for me. The engineering school in Manhattan was idiosyncratic about architecture and content to leave me to my devices. Speaking in ersatz English to my models and drawings, I demonstrated how my ideas could be realized the materials and fabrication and why.

Nightly hunting in my university days led me to foreswear this deadly sin. What's deadly about a sin is its repetition, as shown by the shorthand of my entries and the blurred nature of what I remember. Manhattan is a different terrain, a place overpopulated with lions, every young thing a gazelle to be quarreled over. There are lionesses too, but it's exhausting.

My interactions with Luca were a window onto a family of women who in different ways arranged their lives around their desires. In this same picture were the men who aided them. Together, they formed a persistent lineage, not so much dynastic as attuned to the need for desire itself, as if this cosmic motor kept the world going, which of course it does.

6.

Luca observed the paradox at the heart of our family, its ability to root itself convincingly, marry into whatever was oldest in every new place Etruscans or Mapuche and have children whose names and parentage reflected this grafted-on older stock, like Paolo's vineyards. I'm one such, alive to my individuality among the indigenous. Yet the family is ever on the verge of moving. Part of our mobility is the elasticity of our roots, tendrils that are more like radio waves, my mother thought, enabling her and Natalia to feel connected despite the distance and the gap in time that the war imposed.

"Rooted cosmopolitans" is Luca's twist on the accusation laid at the Jewish diaspora by those who consider them to be outsiders. No, he argues, we turn up and turn ourselves into insiders. For my own initial foray into architecture, I attached myself to one of the lions as a form-maker. Not the only one, of course, and my presence was resented by some of the men. It made me see how remarkably free of this my school was. These men view women as accessories to take to parties, to fuck, to raise their children, to run the house. It's also true of the city's artists and writers, mostly lions or would-be lions.

I have no patience with these situations. When a fabricator I knew, Tino, asked me to join him, I accepted. He knew Marco in Rome before the war, a friendship they revived. I met him while still a student. He taught me how to bring beauty and strength out from the materials. After Carlo expanded on this in Piranesi, I brought his lessons back to Manhattan, intent on applying them.

7.

We fall into two categories that usually overlap and less often are distinct. What marks the family is its awareness of this and its constant efforts to find ways around it or mitigate the damage it can cause to self and others, unresolved.

The categories have to do with self-interest and whether it is seen in a narrow, parochial sense or more broadly. The former can be individual or tribal, while the latter sees past these identities to acknowledge how bound up we are in the lives of others. The former prowl the territory they hope to dominate; the latter view it as artisans and gardeners do: a future engendered in a fertile, collaborative present.

It means thinking of time itself as the unfolding of seasons and of our lives within them. Modernity in Manhattan shrugs this off, muscling through its brutal winters and summers with heat, airconditioning, and lubricant. Elsewhere, life adapts, collectively remembering times of abundance and stress. Such living accumulates and contributes knowledge. The locals favor modesty over hubris for self-protection.

Is this Manhattan or is it any big, modern city where men and women, full of themselves, disregard others, even their own children, fueled by alcohol, cigarettes, diet pills, the rest? A few are monsters. Most are just people I want to avoid.

The cosmopolitan nature of our family leads us to be local wherever we make our landfall, to look for openness "heart" as Cosima put it, describing Milan, a local culture in her view despite presenting itself on a grand scale. I see it here too, the best of it, like Tino, talking with his clients the way Paolo talks wine or my father horses. These men see women and children (and lovers and friends) as family, not possessions. The atmosphere is supportive and they make room in their lives so that new things, like our workshop, can take form.

The overlap I mentioned comes with experience. Few of us are saints (and saints are a pain in the ass, Luca observed). A lot of our self-awareness comes from others' responses to our behaviors. We learn from this, although occasionally too late.

8.

Carlo described how his studio became a factory, now run by Marco as a workshop of artisans. Marco cultivated a network of architects and designers, extending fr0m manufacturing to bespoke fabrication. Tino and I turned to him to transform our small workshop into something more substantial. Marco gave us capital and his imprimatur. Tino suggested we open our new workshop in the Brooklyn Naval Yard, a vast set of redundant buildings that, he reasoned, would be undisturbed as Manhattan grew. We kept the old workshop as a staging area and meeting place with clients. I built a tiny studio for myself in the Brooklyn workshop. I live here, which is illegal and quite conducive to my work.

For an architect, or whatever it is I've become, scale is an issue. Most architects apprentice with practices that work at the scale that interests them, often with a specialty. When I produced forms on demand for the lion, part of the tedium of it was the repetition of buildings in response to the market. Materials were dictated by cost, so conflicts arose between ambitions for form and the means to achieve it. If one begins a project with a clear sense of its constraints, it's possible to produce something good, but the reverse situation makes at best for compromise and at worst disaster.

What Tino and I have in mind is to tie form to fabrication so the conversations with clients are always about what it takes to realize the desired ambition. Experimentation is also in play, trying out new materials to understand them a lab in collaboration with others and a testbed for manufacturers.

Form is partly illusory its effects can depend on distance or vary depending on one's vantage point. Stage sets and film sets exploit this, a fact not lost on architects and decorators. If a form is tied to momentary fashion, its fabrication should focus on effect. If endurance is the object, then the form itself is the focus and everything has to serve this.

9.

When I finally received my Etruscan chart from Nora , she explained how those five columns of symbols were made and what they meant. "We think of it as a commentary on the game we're born into, among a cohort of people who are also players." Everyone, she added, finds herself in similar straits, but we have the benefit of a chart that isn't predictive, no, it's more about our nature and that of significant others. It's not clear if their significance is good or bad, nor can we even be sure that this one or that one is significant. "Life throws facsimiles at you," she said. "It's why we consider it a game. There must be some other plane where everyone meets to sort out who was who and make up the next one. But having a chart is an advantage that we pass on to our descendants.

I'm 30. Since arriving in New York City, I haven't had a lover. The lions put me off. I spend my days with my clients and collaborators, and spend my nights dreaming of forms. Episodically, I immerse myself in my sources. The churches at home were early ones, but form is everywhere. Lineage is another given vines that emerge through the floorboards when I set my forms aside and dream of other things.

Piranesi after a long while, the culmination of a journey that began when Marco telephoned. I flew Alitalia to Rome and we met. He plans to shift to Milan and wants me to head it up. What about New York? "It will be okay!" arms waving. Okay, let me ponder this, I said. In principle, yes, I added, to my own surprise. A big smile and nodding head. I took the train to Piranesi, where I'm staying with Natalia. I visited Giulia and Carlo, who both seem much frailer.

I called on Nora. She's so open and frank about life, how we try to fit into it and at the same time exert our will to get what we need. "All the arrangements your family has made for you are about your work, because that's your ruling passion. When I was in San Rafael before the war, I spoke with your grandmother Maria with Franny's help. She said that some hunters lose their taste for game because they know their prey too well. Their prowess leads them to disdain any power that assumes they owe it deference, not from pride but self-confidence. She was glad your father raised you as he did. 'Just as I was,' she told me."

I've turned myself inside - out, I note. Holed up in my little studio in Brooklyn has given way to holding court in Milan. Not that I was a recluse exactly, but my role has changed. I now run the creative side of the business Carlo established. Here I am at 33, an industrial designer. I still think of myself as an architect, free under that title to design whatever, but I like this new title's factory connotations. At my suggestion, we put ours in Modena, where they originally made airplanes and then switched to making sports cars. Like San Rafael, it has two rivers and a mountain range nearby. I bought a country house there, inserting another small studio into the factory. We bought a flat in Milan big enough to entertain that serves as a showroom for what I generate in the office/studio below. I'm teaching at the polytechnic. Every two months, I go back to New York to tend to things there. Thank God for jets!

Postwar Italian workers are Communists, but their party is splintering. Our family is bourgeois, ever and always, relying on fair dealing and epic flexibility. Artisans are their own men and their products are bespoke. I want to bring some women in and start designing for the mass market. Bespoke induces a wider desire is what I'm seeing. We need to do both.

I need a wife. A husband is optional. Perhaps a couple who could raise the children? I daydream about this. I'm not sure it matters if the children are mine or theirs. I crave domestic life the way I crave the countryside. This is where my desire's gone. Where is my Nora? Natalia's arrangement made such sense, but I don't actually crave another lover, just affection.

I'm on the hunt for one or ones, or open to that. Is this hunting, to be open? It's not an idle question. Hunting, my father taught me, is a long game. It's one we play together, hunter and hunted, and neither of us is exclusively one or the other, despite our delusions. I suppose that yes, it's hunting.

Everything is a long game I think all my lines of descent would agree with this. We play to keep the game going. And children are part of this, aren't they? We need new players.

Recently, I read about William Morris. He tried to extend bespoke to ordinary goods, to give solidity and beauty scale. His only real success was Liberty, fabrics anyone could buy. Wallpaper, too. I read his NewsfromNowhere . He loved women, but they were unreliable, so, back to his loom or to Iceland to heal his wounds. Not a lion, a man. I want one. (We'll both need a wife if I'm going to get anything done.)

In Brooklyn, I worked out as I drew or modelled them how to fabricate a variety of forms. That process drew as much attention as the forms themselves, because the art of making there is hit or miss. In Italy, that form-giving and form-making are tied together is a long tradition, part of the culture. How to give it scale is the issue, as it was for Morris.

13.

My polytechnic colleague Alessandro asked me to dinner and I met a young Japanese couple, Yukiko and Hiro. I was struck by her, so flamboyantly Italian. Sandy told me that Hiro is on some Japanese company's long leash. "They send them to Milan for two years and then they reel them in."

I was so taken with Yukiko that I asked them to stay with me in the country. Meanwhile, I asked Marco to take Hiro to lunch, show him our office/studio and the current line, note our factory in Modena. When I fetched them, we stopped off there to look around, then had lunch with the couple who run it for us. It was a holiday, so their return to Milan could wait.

They had a cottage to themselves and came over for meals. Ludo, half of the Modena couple, took Hiro into the back country to hike. Yukiko and I had lunch together on her little terrace. Unexpectedly, she burst into tears. The return home weighed on her like a death sentence. "You don't know," she said. "Here, we're both free. There, I won't be. My life will narrow down to nothing. Hiro will soon forget me, coming home late and drunk like the others, likely having a mistress." It seemed melodramatic, but it was clear she meant it.

Ko and Ro, as I call them, are part of what's forming in my head, a cooperative of many parts linked by mutual trust and shared ambition. I picture an enterprise focused on what we need, what we want, what we desire, what we dream "what we," in short, with couples like Ko and Ro personifying it, "it" being their young lives, but with others appearing over time as we add to our lines.

"No," I said, "I won't stand for it! You'll stay here with us."

14.

Form, my preoccupation, is nothing without a context. At any scale, what we notice is what's around it, how any one thing is part of something larger, or isn't too different from the rest or unworthy of them or they of it. My sense that my Milan flat is a showroom is exactly right what appeals to people is the total picture, the effect a place provides, more than the objects, more even than the enclosure, but each one fits even if it's added later, as we bring it to life, living in it. The tendency of designers is to linger on the object, details thought to be important, and of course they are important, an art to their making, proof of proficiency all we hammer into students at the polytechnic but animation wins the day, the eye seduced by beauty in motion, which life itself brings out.

When I realized this, I called Marco to tell him we have to revise how we present it all. Nothing without its place and no place without a family that suits it, a couple, a child or two as proof of happiness and fecundity, the coziness of winter, spring's reopening, warm summer, autumn's harvest. Our products can live with others, with artwork, houses, any plausible thing to fill out a picture, tell a human story.

It liberates me, this shift. I feel so much is cold, but life is warm and colorful, softer, slower. Yes, city life, but a balcony and greenery, a country place. They're bourgeois at heart, these moderns, dreaming in spite of the industrial nightmare. It takes me back to Morris, holding art up to the factories, giving women Liberty, patterns steeped in effusive nature. I think that everything is about to heat up. Not always good.

15.

Thirty - eight. My son Trent is four, his sister four weeks. I named him Trent after my favorite of his father's works. Gianni gave our daughter a name from his family, Carolina, so a family now, presided over by the WhatWe co-founders, this coop and emporium whose ads run in magazines and on the tele, our ideas and his photos and films. Everything we make arises from the laboratory we've created with Ko and Ro, this incidental couple I encountered at the polytechnic like Trent's father, stopping off to give a lecture. Was it luck or estrus? Both, probably, and he rose to it. Not the first, I learned, but I never followed up nor did he inquire. It's fine. Trent is his own man, solid as his lineage suggests.

Natalia is ecstatic. Nora, too. Both baptisms were held in Piranesi. Gianni is very familial, better than me on this score, never rushed by time. I lost some of my famous patience, but he's given it back to me, barn cat that I seem to be, or barn lioness. I needed that old lion to give me a son, while Lina was from pure affection for my children's father.

A laboratory, I call it, because the ideas emerge from the lives of these others, a network loosely or tightly involved in the coop. Ro is one of the main designers, but Ko is a genius at needs, wants, and desires. We raise our kids together. Her babies drew their grandparents, inevitably, and all was forgiven. Even Ro's old company now pays him homage.

A few years ago, I saw the film RedDesert . Everything I do aims to be the reverse of that and to reverse it, since it has a certain truth about where postwar life has brought us. Most designers read Domus , but I prefer Abitarebecause it seeks out what's alive amid these horrors. It takes courage to make architecture these days and imagine it will be used in an optimistic spirit and not as background to something more appalling, even as we look on, decked out in the latest style.

My students pass tracts around declaring work is bunk and society a spectacle. They eye me suspiciously, maker of ads to seduce unwary housewives, agent of the bourgeoisie, yet the Czech spring came and was suppressed. Ex-colonial wars continue, and they idealize one side and demonize the other. I throw them off, talking about the Mapuche and the Jews in my lineage. Jesus has a high standing in the family, though, even with my father, owing to His willingness to point to the heaven within us, our neighbor as ourself, loaves and fishes if they're needed. Our allegiance to this reformer has kept us modest, wary of hubris, grateful for our good fortune in the midst of life with its constant potential for the opposite.

I gather ideas, dream of forms and reforms. I'm still an architect, ready to do anything, and an optimist indeed, a mother of two, keeping humanity going despite the papers, the news as hawked by the different parties. Ko is happy, so that's one good thing I've managed to do. At least, she seems happy. The Japanese have their own nightmares, which she sometimes recounts. Aware of what's suppressed at home, she makes herself read about it. I admire her for this. When bad dreams put the rest on the side for a moment, when these remembered terrors get to her, we talk about it.

In the film NeveronSunday , which I saw when I was 30, the Piraeus prostitute played by Melina Mercouri gives tragedies a happy ending "They all go to the seashore." I remembered from university that Euripides had two versions of Iphigenia , unable to leave her to her wretched fate. The postwar order is unraveling and people are taking to the streets. Life dogs us and yet the beach is still there.

Ko and I corral our children, tend our kitchen garden, feed the animals some pets and others here as food, or both, as a child makes pets of everything, including objects like a pencil to which he apologizes and even cries if in rage he breaks it. I take out my notebook and we talk, I sketch. We ask ourselves what might relieve even for a moment the gravity of living, lift us a little from the floor, the bed, stove, sink the everyday in which we live, a scene of pleasure if we can bring it out a bit.

Recently, unexpectedly, I was asked to design a creche. It came not long after I made a pilgrimage to a grove said once to be the site of a temple to the huntress. No sign of it, but it must have been there since I got the call. Yes, I said. Yes.

Putting my notebook down, I said to Ko, you must come with me. I need you there like I need you here, to give words to the forms that come to me from God knows where, attach them to the way you catch reality, as this helps me see it too.

In these moments, I realize that I love Ko as I'd longed to in my hunting days when I only saw their slim bodies and heard the songs they sang to me as they shed their flimsy clothes. I no longer hunt, but my affection is boundless. In this spirit, we're designing a creche for the working women of Modena, a gift of the namesake maker of sports cars.

I forgot that Ko is instantly recognizable from the ads, so why exactly was she here? But then, "We'll need eight staff, eight mothers, and eight children as informants, first on their own and then mixed groups," said crisply, like an order, in Ko's perfect Milanese. Yes, they nodded. I was impressed.

18.

My father and I took the children and flew to Santiago, then went inland to the Andes. Maria joined us at the compound they use to hunt or when San Rafael is too hot. I wanted Trent and Lina to know them. We spoke a mix of Spanish and Mapudungun. The children have heard it before. Like me, they have an ear for language.

I also wanted Maria to read my children, which she did, slipping into a trance and then speaking while I took notes.

The journey let my past seep in as dreams of trekking and my father teaching me to hunt. I was a predator then, hungry but patient. In Buenos Aires, the sight of flesh only made me hungrier. Back in Modena, Diana appears in my dreams to remind me of my vows, even if I gave myself to men. She speaks the same Milanese as Ko, I realize, only showing up after I understood that Ko was my much-desired wife.

The creche is nearly finished, a ring hovering above the old building and its courtyard. They loved it, they said, but it was too small. What a shame to move although the donor offered them a site. I saw a solution. To convince him of it, I noted that a Turin carmaker has long had a racetrack on its roof.

19.

Letters from my mother and Luca. Military coups are likely. Paolo can likely ride it out, but my mother's visible activism will make her vulnerable if the government shifts rightward. Her work is backed by liberal Catholic reformers, who are at odds with the military. My father is subject to the colonial assumption that the natives will turn treacherous. (We were never conquered!) Luca has a different problem a denizen of cafés in both cities, he's befriended many intellectuals, publishing some of them, and has had run-ins with their opponents. As always with Luca, he's the odd man out not unlike what he faced in Piranesi long ago, so it's time for him to move on. My mother has a standing offer from the UN in Paris. Paolo assured my father that they race horses and play polo in France and England, so he'll be in demand. Luca will return to Piranesi with Laura and his sisters, but their sons will stay on in Montevideo.

Milan is unsure what to do next. Broad license was given to its postwar rebuilders and the results are mixed, as the Milanese have noticed. Politics is again cynical and corrupt in turns. In the midst of this, the industrial designers set out their wares: desks, chairs, typewriters, wall calendars with their nubile women. Sports cars drive quickly past the blank suburban towers while the train takes me back to Modena. Soon after, I'm again in the countryside's slower tempo.

My parents are in Paris. My father is much in demand in the same circles he catered to in Argentina. He's very striking in his tailored suits. My mother finds the UN sluggish and subject to Cold War politics, but is popular with her peers. As a precaution, they've both become French citizens. At home, if I can still use that word, things are getting worse. Heavy, someone said the atmosphere is leaden: melts in the heat, but not immediately; accumulating, it induces madness. Paolo bought a vineyard in Santa Barbara, my mother said, fulfilling a dream Luca had decades ago to extend the family's enterprise to California.

Our creche wins an award. At Ko's suggestion, we reduced our fee in exchange for access to the creche in operation as a source of ideas and testbed for new products. Its publication had led to new commissions, including a maternity clinic that we intend to design in our conversational way, ferreting out what's needed and how to support it. I want to make it an open-ended vessel, as the field is changing rapidly. How do you accommodate these changes in such a sacred space? Medical science aims to thwart outliers like infertility, the tendency to miscarry, premature or hard births, defects. A clinic will be in constant motion, but I want a calm like the old hospitals attached to convents. Its garden's grove will honor my personal virgin as well at the Holy Mother.

These mothers and babies distract me from the terrorists. Public gatherings draw them, and airplanes attract hijackers. It's mostly inconvenient unless you end up tortured or in pieces. I tell myself it will get better. Bourgeois optimism is in my blood, despite my cocktail of lineage.

21.

My father visited. " A Frenchman now," he said. "They call me Guillaume. They like horses and also eat them, like us," meaning the Mapuche, whose language we mostly spoke together, throwing in the other languages we've acquired. We're all sponges in this respect, taking on the trappings of wherever in the cosmos we find ourselves.

We spoke of hunting and how readily I took to it. His mother told him to take me. "She was right, you were born to it." My father knows horses like a country doctor knows his villagers. It doesn't occur to the horses to be afraid of him. He's like a barn cat, only interested in the mice or a nap. A hunter, they grasp, but not of them, so unthreatening, calm.

"An odd life," he said. "Our land seemed endless, then we lost it, then it was restored in part. I went along. I had good luck Paolo and Franny were gifts to a landless peasant. And I went along when Franny found her way to Paris. 'There are horses in France,' Paolo assured me, and there are. Many."

Is this Luca's "flexibility"? My father meant something more the flux we live in, how a territory we took for granted slipped away, yet it's there and we slip back in or recreate it. Flux is a horse from colt to pasture or glue or a meal. Not so different for us. Go with it, I think, but what, who, where? Born to it, my grandmother said. A huntress or a barn cat? Estrus works its magic on the cats, but Diana was a virgin, patroness of wild animals, protectress of women giving birth.

The forms of things well up in me and how they might best be made follows along. I have a talent for finding others who fill out both sides of my endeavors. Fill in is more accurate, as I'm constantly leaving them to run what I've started so I can move on to something else. I still cross the ocean to spend time in Brooklyn but I'm so close to my colleagues there that a great deal is transacted by long distance, cheaper than the flights, and by sketches and notes air-freighted between us.

In Modena, we work things up from sketches and conversations. Ro runs the products end. The buildings Ko and I do with a small team, working with the best builders I can find. My approach is simple: create a volume to contain the constant variety of human experience, flexed as it is by human progress. Since everything inside will change, the vessel has to appear solid but remain open and porous.

Aldo Rossi categorizes such buildings as artifacts, able to accommodate new uses over centuries, beloved by their communities, yet not monuments. A creche or clinic has this same possibility of evolving in ways that no one anticipated.

I continue to design embellishments that add beauty to the settings where people gather. Form plays off form here, an elaboration or a counterpoint to my work or another's. Part of the pleasure of this work is exploring materials and their possibilities. We have to ask them, as the maestro says.

Dear maestro, your letter awaited me at the polytechnic, written on the stationery of your hotel in Calcutta, mailed from there. You needn't have apologized for the long silence. It was enough to know that I was in your thoughts, that our memories proved coincident around your central theme.

Thank you for that compliment and also for noting how much you liked the creche. I like your "affinity," better than influence. Had you made it back here I could have shown it to you and introduced you to your son, but your letter reached me a day after I read that you were dead, a death almost anonymous apparently until it wasn't. It makes your letter more of a treasure, doesn't it? A son is one way I remember his father, gave him a different form that, being human, surprises me with gestures and ideas that speak of influence, to use that word appropriately what you gave him at the outset of his making, this remembered encounter.

You saw our creche in Casabella , you wrote, praising the photos. My husband did a remarkable job of bringing it alive. My anticipation led me to agree to a marriage with a suitable father, as our son would need one and you, maestro, were elsewhere. My elders are dying off and now you've joined them, constant motion foreshortening a life that should have run on forever. Your helpers will see through any work that's pending. I have them, too. We didn't write there was no need still, wonderful to get this unexpected letter, to know that in a Calcutta hotel, reading a magazine you brought along, I came back to you. To give our affinity human form I needed your collaboration, so, thank you. I couldn't live without our boy Trent, a credit to us both.

24.

My parents bought an old farmhouse in the foothills east of Modena, higher up, its grounds opening out to woods. I helped them renovate it and often go hiking with my father, on our own or with the children. When it's just us two, we reminisce about the Andes. He misses them, but appreciates the Apennines as equally old territory. He's himself in the mountains, calm amid predators and prey, assuring the locals they need both to keep the balance nature intends this said in Italian with a trace of Piranesi, which confuses them until they meet Franny We sometimes break into Mapudungun, then explain that we're discussing hunting in the Andes. This lends added authority to our recommendations, as it should.

My mother is helping Natalia pull her papers together the record of a respected lawyer and judge, editor of her cousin's famous trilogy and keeper of a journal that goes back to her convent school days. They're all getting older Paolo sends Franny snapshots from California and when she sees them, she asks aloud if things will ever change in Argentina. News reaches her from there and it's mostly dreadful.

How far back into childhood does my vow go? Is Diana the patroness of every wild thing, even the ones in the hedges? I suspect so. And where does childhood end? Too few carry its spirit into adulthood, resisting its mechanical stupor. We get inquiries from schools that follow children over an extended period and base their pedagogy on careful observation. I admire their pragmatism, grounded in a spiritual sense of what childhood is, the miracle of being here at all. Most schools are museums, preserving an idea of schooling that is frighteningly old, despite their modern wrapping. There's a sense that modernism is at an impasse. I'm not entirely convinced, but occasionally you have to throw a big thing over to see if it can right itself. While it lies there, waving its legs, we'll get some terrible buildings, I imagine, but some interesting decoration, a pastiche of the past simplified or overlaid, collages made without much understanding.

Whatever we design, we imagine people living with it. Technology changes, but the form it takes can still persist. Talking with the clinicians, we saw how to redesign their equipment to make it easier to use and less intimidating to their patients. Not long after, we were off talking licensing with the Swiss. We stayed at the Kraft, where I gazed at the Rhein. Terror passed through Mulhouse, "but that's in France," our hosts assured us as we haggled over terms.

26.

My mother sees the Malvinas War as a spat about honor as the protagonists understand it. "Argentina will lose, which may hasten the revival of democracy. Only idiots like them, possessing arbitrary power, would start a war like this, thinking they'd get away with it. The English, Mrs. Thatcher in particular, are offended, which provides her own hotheads with a shining moment." Meanwhile, Chile cements its dictatorship. Is this the fate of these countries?

For the Mapuche, there's no border they still hunt on both sides of the Andes, come and go as always, yet the countryside is more dangerous guerillas and partisans, some local and others fleeing there to regroup. Mendoza is vulnerable, but San Rafael probably isn't, she thinks.

In the capital, I imagine life goes on despite crackdowns and violence. What sparks the desire to talk, dance, and have sex is inertial. The atmosphere is likely more destructive. Some will selfcombust faster who would otherwise drink and smoke themselves to a slower death, but the survivors will write their novels, poems, and memoirs. Truth will out.

According to Luca, our family's women burned through desire in something like an organized way. (Is the lion in this tradition? I think so.) In the past, it was organized for them. In my generation, I had to do it myself, although much else was organized for me. And our Carolina, will she be left to her own devices? She won't have Luca to help her, alas!

Women can hunt each other, but with men, we're expected to allow ourselves to be hunted. This is how I would restate my youthful practice as an axiom. Thoughts in this vein come to me when I take a train. The rhythm of the tracks triggers it. Freud associated trains with penetration, yet that's not exclusively gendered, is it? Slender hands and long fingers these thoughts don't induce me to haunt bars as I once did.

An architect, a woman, won a competition recently with an entry that drew my attention. It looked challenging to build, and I started sketching how I'd do it. Such thoughts also arise on trains I do a lot of work between these two cities. The architect's entry is all form, I noted. I never stop there, but wonder about form's raw matter as well as its poetics. These notebooks are my cookbooks, filled with what I've gleaned from visits to quarries and factories, from the conversations Ko and I have with informants, them talking, me sketching.

28.

Two years ago, Calvino spoke at a Buenos Aires book fair. My mother noted it, a sign of Argentina returning to normal. He died a year ago. I like his books. Some are fables that we read to the children when they were young. We've done well. I could afford to stop, but I get new commissions that spawn new lines of products, while Gianni's projects find backers. His telenovela of Cosima's trilogy is a big hit here and in Latin America. I wish they were all still alive to see it!

We only take on a building project if a group of people is identified who will spend a good part of their future in it. Whatever form it takes will arise from a context fleshed out with opinions and interpretations by those who best grasp what matters: how they live with each other and with their surroundings, including nature, such as it is these days. They know the coldest cold, the hottest hot, and all the pleasures in between. We generate the building together, along with a host of product ideas prompted by talk and observation.

My father decided in favor of the Apennines. "The family has infected me," he said, in that ironic voice that mixing with the Europeans has given him. As my mother predicted, the war over the Malvinas ended up toppling the regime. The horrors may be over, but the nightmares will continue. She blames it on Peron good for Argentina and then bad for it as he was blind to or unable to resist the military's corrupt, reactionary, and ultimately treacherous rule

Any discussion of Argentina reminds me of Luca. When I was adrift in Buenos Aires, which was often the case, there he was at the dock or rowing out to find me. Less a question of desire, I was thrown by an unexpected death, inexplicable to me and yet demanding that I unravel it. I was disoriented, which was also an entirely new and unsettling feeling. Luca promised me that it would pass, that I would find the thread like Theseus in the labyrinth. He also pointed to my talents and told me it was high time to take them on the road.

An academic couple lectured at the polytechnic and then visited me in Modena. Their term for my work is "critical regionalism." But no, I protested, surely I can claim to be cosmopolitan? From their replies I gathered that one foot in the cosmos permits the criticality, while the other foot rests securely in the local. After they left, I thought about it. The creche has two antecedents the beloved old building, with its stone walls, and the bespoke carmakers. Ro and I have engaged them in a running dialogue about the potential of the new materials. Modena's carmakers built airplanes before the war, and race cars have much in common with them.

For the upper half of the creche, lightness and strength were paramount to avoid overloading the original building, not just physically but visually. Stonework's solidity is partly an illusion, as earthquakes remind us. The clinic is almost a stage set for this reason. Is it postmodern, I wonder, in its conscious inauthenticity, or simply modern? Is it regional?

Ettore Sottsass's gorgeous Olivetti is on my desk. He's part of a movement that makes colorful sculptures that double as household furniture. Memphis, it's called, splitting with function but not quite. Function, like a Catholic wife, doggedly opposes divorce no matter how flamboyantly her husband provokes her, cavorting with Sottsass's strumpets.

When I look around me, I conclude that "late modernist" best describes me among the labels the magazines paste onto architects. It's a return to form after a fling with exposing the parts, reviving the engineers' aesthetic Paxton and Brunel favored. Reyner Banham was its theoretician, but Archigram and the Metabolists got there first. I like Piano and Rogers' one in the Marais, but I resisted turning buildings inside-out.

What makes me late modern is the way I cleave to purpose and plumb the depths of materials and assemblies as I give it form. Form is how a building comes together, just as humans do. Beauty is in the form and the possibilities it embodies.

This last sentence also captures what I sought in bars and bedded in rented rooms, moving from one to another to hide my tracks and then retreating to the women's dormitory to cool down, a typically doubled life in a city just big enough to pull it off. From what Luca told me, this wasn't so unusual among the family's women. "Your mother is the exception."

Whenever I see a crescent moon rising, I think of my goddess in her grove and the babies, mothers, and wildlife she protects. No virgin, clearly, I still honor her when I can. Recently, asked by my father, I designed some huts in the Apennines, shelters for hikers and larger quarters for its stewards, as it needs them now to give voice to its wants and complaints. I'm out there listening, letting what I see and hear give form to these small buildings, built traditionally by locals and then filled with whatever's useful, containers for life itself. Is this what they mean by "critical regionalism"?

Part Two: Luca 1.

"A memoir isn't an autobiography. " Time differs between them, Walter Benjamin argues, and I infer that he sees the former as more faithful to time as it is, despite our tendency to gather it up into narratives rather than leave it as anecdotes or even random thoughts we jot down. Having lived it all, we feel they're somehow connected, the way a familiar place lulls us into imagining we know it. My sister Cosima's elaborate journal entries came together as a trilogy in part because she wrote like a journalist who was also an insider, often a critic. As her reader, we trust her veracity and also her judgements.

I have the advantage of retrospect. I'm distant in space and time from past lovers, who live on in memory but are unlikely to read this, should it ever find readers. Not that there were very many, but when I look back, these episodes stand out. No woman is like any other, yet inevitably we recognize types, categorize. A reader of novels or a patron of plays and films certainly will do this, but the idea of types falls apart in a woman's particulars, especially if their number is small. Relationships are fated or are the result of projection these are possible explanations, not necessarily mutually exclusive, as fate is just an occasion.

So, retrospect, that belvedere, except mine looks in one direction, the other bald-faced and foreboding, and the view, however close in mind, suffers life's erosive nature, which has to be mentioned, although my mind is reliable, as far as I know, and retains a great deal of sensory effluvia when I write this word, I think of features that became so familiar, not to turn them into fetishes, but rather to wonder at them as elements of their beauty and their remarkable animation.

Not an autobiography, so I won't start at the beginning, yet affairs trace back sometimes to more than raw desire. As I write these words, I doubt them or have second thoughts. If I dissemble, it's often to justify myself after the fact.

Failing to recount leaves me with incidents and details, along with theories and cultural, anthropological, and sociological observations. It's probable that the latter will predominate, despite the way the former well up at times unbidden. "This is how it is with him" I hear at least one woman saying the one who compared me to a stock character from commedia. Ah, but which one?

Incidents and details the beds and their rooms are part of a continuum, along with other furnishings and surroundings, even including taxis and trains. Sleeping with one with whom one normally doesn't is odd. I always preferred long afternoons, and often we had little choice anyway, fitting things in deniably.

Life is made up of details that accrue from unlikely sources, and these can inadvertently spark desire, often with nowhere to go. Some of the tension of marriage stems from this. I note this because it has nothing to do with love affairs that unfold in and consume greater amounts of time. No, an inadvertent spark with nowhere to go burns on in consciousness the way the sheen of a lover's pubic hair survives the terrible, drawn-out ending of the relationship that brought it into view. Are they fetishes or are they icons in the side altars of memory, each with its array of small candles? If I light them all, will its hold loosen, or does memory keep its altars well stocked?

What freed me was aging past the need. It's the other end of an awareness of the oceanic pull of fecundity that plays havoc with us unless other factors make us immune, at least in theory. (All those longing, would-be fathers, by their own accounts, doting on their nieces!) In between, fecundity is the air we breathe, the risk we run, the why of every plunge.

If I were to venture a theory of these affairs based on my own experience, it would focus on their situational nature and their roots in a very human rebellion against life's finitude, which strikes us reasonably as a kind of violence unworthy of our position collectively of apparent dominance. Much else comes into it, but fundamentally, we're unhappy to encounter limits that strike us as arbitrary or outdated, so we ignore the omnipresent warning signs tradition waves and their echoes in cautionary tales.

Situational because an affair is shaped by an arc of arising and denouement, and while I don't have so many instances on which to generalize, each is as singular as those involved. This raises the subsidiary theory that in each instance, I too am singular, not the one who plunged in before. Of course, the woman with whom one plunges differs in significant ways from any predecessors and successors. It's also situational because it's a situation one encounters, familiar and not. I know this is a truism, life falling into a finite number of settings, but each situation is a collection of them particular to itself. Each is a field for actions we recollect later as the scenes enacted there, in a specific order retrospect gives us

This post-facto recreation has its reasons. Their journals reveal that the love affairs arranged by and for some of the family's women were talismanic in their afterlives. Although less organized affairs are often more painful, they resurface eventually as monuments to initiated desire. If the marriage they disrupted continues, they may be "forgotten," yet they live on in memory and sometimes also in progeny.

Praxis, inevitably, runs ahead of my theory, which omits and simplifies. Outruns is more accurate, given how much I've left out: attachment, for one; ego for another; pride, hubris, delusion; the waxing and waning of desire; our tendency to demand more of life when there's neither time nor space for it. We tire of what we're allotted, scraped from the everyday. We tire of the asymmetry of our situations, often. The awareness of pain inflicted outweighs the pain we sought to alleviate. It becomes clear, not for the first time, that what's ignited isn't easily kept at a simmer, but flares up almost by design, then flares out a process that differs wildly in each instance. The denouement is affected by the things left out of my theory. In some cases, a friendship can be salvaged, unless expectations were raised and crushed, or the breaking off of the affair was unhinging. Was it a facsimile of love? Later, we see that, no, the love itself was genuine, but it had nowhere to go.

My family arranged things, but not for its men. Not for the generations of women beyond a certain point, either. And by choice on their part, valuing their independence. The class structure that made marriages "below" impossible fell apart. And it's a matriarchy in many ways, internally tolerant yet externally conventional. This too has broken down, though, as things have loosened up. The landscape's very different.

Yet the underlying nature and dynamics of affairs likely haven't. Even the stakes are roughly the same, despite the advertised sophistication of current times. I speak here of any adulterous couple eking out its affair on the side. It can be memorable, of course I remember all of it but our couple may find its pleasures are outweighed by the improvisations the affair requires. A few upper-end hotels are the last bastion of these liaisons, but their bespoke falls lamentably short of what we provided. It's all "business," a transactional rather than a relational sense of life, despite the image they put out.

5.

"Like Aldo Rossi," Leo said, mentioning the architect's "scientific" text and contrasting it to those of Louis Kahn, her favored poet of forms. That I'm given to theorizing too is an ancient fault, much noted by the women in whom I confide, now including Lina, not that affairs are among our topics.

Affairs are the sonnets or maybe the arias of carnality, as against the dynastic epics most marriages prove to be. This is true even of marriages that seem mired in stasis an endless round of meals, small talk, and errands divvied up by gender and/or convention to pay the bills and have something left over "for the children." Within such marriages, if one dissects them, are unspoken dramas. When they cart someone away, the neighbors may discover an unsuspected passion if the survivor is stricken with grief or regret they find inexplicable.

Lina queries me about the past "What was it like?" she'll ask, mentioning a point in time and imagining I remember it. It's a useful prod to memory, I suppose. Others in the family could look it up in their voluminous journals, but mine are discursive. Often my poems better reflect whatever the day brought or the season, more likely, as they well up from the fields life randomly seeds, fecund and barren in turn.

I was vain enough to believe in virtuosity and its reception, failing to see the self-contained nature of my lover, her doubled X in contrast to my incomplete, in-need-of- XY. I was taken up from necessity and then tossed away. Hence her later assumption of my compliance or deference despite ongoing neglect this being seen by her as a charitable halfway house preferable to outright dismissal.

What science explains this? If we cite chemistry and pyrotechnics, they hinge on the unknowable, accidents, a Monte Carlo machine rigged by destiny. We know the whole arc from the beginning, if we recollect honestly. We know and yet we plunge, until finally we don't or we can't.

Retrospectively, my memory is buoyant, yet I feel the need to tote up everything that weighs against affairs. The loneliness and helplessness that comes with desertion and alienation, as one knows but the knowledge isn't useful, is a starting point, and often a prod for action or reaction.

My realization that separation was untenable and divorce not an option precipitated a breakup and an aftermath of recrimination. This knowledge wasn't useful, either, it turns out. I tried to arrange the next affair in light of it, but it didn't go as planned. Instead, and this may be positive as well as negative, my ego was ripped to shreds when she broke up with me. Even as I saw the reasonableness of this, I was plunged into despair. My actions bordered on obsessive, leaving me to wonder what kind of monster I'd become. I tried the next time to be forthright, but that affair proved to be the reversal of the previous one, despite my intention and brain-wracking efforts to square the circle which, I finally figured out, can't be squared. I also learned that, despite closeness, little or nothing of it carries over. Writing sifts the residue.

That sifting brings out the parts that argue for experience despite its perils. Still, I'm unwilling to suspend disbelief again. I suppose it's also a result of getting older, valuing friendship over knowing, acknowledging the real cost of knowing and its diminishing returns. Sated, I guess this is.

I've read memoirs that reflect on love's repeated arc and where it leads, the relief of having a close friend who mostly leaves us to our own devices. Getting older brings us back to ourselves, more content with the contents of our ordinary days. I see in retrospect the threads of substance I brought, along with my faults and foibles, even those that especially mortified me. Some mechanism in the universe settles these accounts. We learn that our sins were not so cardinal, unless of course they were. That some never forget is also clear.

7.

At my suggestion, the family bought the count's old house , renamed The Hotel Cosima in honor of my sister and her trilogy. A nostalgia for the era she depicts is alive again, one strand in an effort to "put distance between contemporary and modern," as Leo explained to me, summarizing a lecture she heard at her school. The passage of time has split these two words, apparently, the latter seen now as a movement that belongs to the past. Its death is constantly announced, but it persists as I do, my senses miraculously intact.

I came up from Piranesi and stayed briefly in Milan in the very room I occasionally slept in as her guest, not as frequent a guest as Giulia, on whom Cosima doted, but often enough to feel the glamor of her life there and hear in real time how it was ending, a disillusionment not unlike others, bittersweet, but it led to her trilogy and late fame or, from her perspective, a renewal of her cultural importance.

I took the train to Modena and, with Gianni's help, made my way to Franny and Guillermo's retreat in the foothills. We were joined by Lina, then fetched by Gianni, with a stopover at his and Leo's house closer in. My visit led to talks with Lina, who navigates her world by queries and hypotheses. "How is it," she asked, "that the people who've lived in many different places end up rooted mostly in one?" This made me think about distance. "You can live in the same town and be so far from another that you might as well be on the moon," I said. "Someone who was a friend, I mean, and then wasn't." She took this in. "Franny told me that she and Natalia were connected in a way that let them be apart without missing each other," she said. "It's like those plants that pull water from the air so you can carry them around," I answered. "You can be as rooted to a place as a tree, but a windstorm might knock you over or beetles might bore into your trunk and hollow you out. You have to make yourself at home on whatever terrace you happen to find yourself."

8.

Before I quit Piranesi for Argentina, I would have said my roots are here, More likely I'm both a plant drawing water from the air and a terrace-minder placing plants like that decoratively where the setting suits them. The plants and their tender roam the planet in search of suitable terraces, forming something with legs and arms, able to cajole, arrange, even seduce, and move on if the climate grows too sticky. I didn't say this to Lina, as the image of the rootless plant I drew is benign until its defects are discovered or pointed out. She will learn this. And yet distance can be entirely elastic, as it was for Natalia and Franny with their tendrils. With Laura, it's a bond we share that fate gave us, so our marriage continues. She's put the past out of mind, but I find it shows up regularly at three a.m.

9.

In memory, it began across a table, but in reality it goes back to the accident that first brought us together. We can never be sure what made an impression, which is why we chalk it up to destiny the gods sporting with us for fun, but granting us a taste of it. Still, a table has its place, just as a bed does. These are the stations we pass through no resurrection but a rich afterlife once our mangled fingers can hold a pen again.

In memory, the fault is always mine the shortcomings I brought to the occasions that were crucial, a kind of myopia. Maturation improved things. I gained stature, wised up, lost or abandoned certain habits, became more discerning. This was helpful with Laura, as marriage often fights the last war, pairing protagonists in an earlier drama who are no longer who they were, and yet remain uncannily familiar. Too bad then that we spend most of our adult lives dealing with this.

Affairs are one means we use, as unsatisfactory as all the others except absolute acceptance. Here's the place to which a long life brings you, as unconditional as parents are with young children, realizing the futility and captivated by their oddly familiar-and-not selves. We come back to this, I think, the result of surviving but also our familiarity finally with this here-and-now companion of so many years.

"My fault entirely" is an archaic sort of admission, a bow to the unreality we preserve out of politeness and fellow-feeling. It takes a certain kind of woman to accept it in this spirit of simply giving in, wanting no more argument. To reply that this can't be, that surely we share culpability, while likely true, misses the desire "entirely" conveys for absolution. In this sense, its rejection is apt, chalking up one more fault noted.

Equanimity is the last refuge of scoundrels, I learned on the job as an envoy and inveterate fixer, listening while civil servants hemmed and hawed, trying to divine what would clear away the obstacle and seal the desired pact, deal, or sale. You learn not to panic, as calmly is how the game is played. "Of scoundrels" because it's also true for the broad category "illicit" that takes up several rooms in my head or do I exaggerate? They seem like rooms, furnished as we encountered them. A sense of style guided our choices, and they reflect it; their ephemera have different associations.

Walking back through them, my regrets are minor or even nonexistent, as if it all happened to someone else. This is the oddness of retrospect you're there and you're not. Regrets seep in when the distance collapses, but they drain away by morning and, scoundrel that you are, you are equanimity itself at breakfast. Sleep comes in an eyeblink, but then you wake up and remember. In time, you learn to ignore the whirring waking brings that's initially so hard to shake. Equanimity is an extra layer, feather-light and barely visible, that holds at bay the recriminations one visits on oneself, as I've lately experienced, but no sure thing. Every day has its small adjustments as we wind down in the inexact way nature forces on us, feeling grateful we're still here, unwinding.

What was I thinking? A harbor bolt hole was a bit obvious, but those times were looser, despite orthodoxy. It was easier to drift out of sight for a while and organize transactions on the side. Contemporary life is losing this murkiness. I was thinking I could satisfy a hunger. Hunger and its venues take new forms even now, despite the refinement of my tastes.

But much of this is better captured in my poems. I miss Giulia, my one consistent reader. She maintained that I had an epic in my head that came forward in the theatricals I invented for the children. I never wrote down these stories, but they come to mind when I look at the small Greek heads I collected when I served as the gods' errand boy. Now I too am authentically ancient, a curious figure to my dwindling audience, now including Lina.

Her mother has come a long way from her university days in Buenos Aires, where I'd encounter her bearing the marks of whoever it was she was bedding, tactfully but insufficiently hidden. I have an eye for those things her grandmother had them too when we were young. She attributes her facility as a designer to clambering around her convent school's chapel, notebook in hand, working out how its effects were made, a process she repeated with whatever she encountered next. At university, she mined the library and archives, and built sets anything revealing what went on behind the scenes. She gets this from Carlo, our founding maker of forms

Leo's early love life sated her desire sufficiently to allow her to transition to a calmer, more orthodox existence, to which, I gather from her son's appearance, she made one exception. There's no painting nor any mention, so I'm speculating.

My epic's hotheads are cruel spoilsports, making war or otherwise interfering with life. Homage to Aristophanes, but also to eons of anecdotes told at their expense. Our sojourn in Andalusia in its golden age gave us an indelible sense of what a civilization could be, briefly freed from their impositions. Dispersed, we carry this in memory and recreate it a spirit of openness that informed Paolo's San Rafael just as much as it shaped our lives in Piranesi. Hotheads are an intermittent menace, like winter storms or droughts, but menacing with intent, actively hating our looks.

My theatricals make this baleful situation visible to a young patron like Lina not as tragedy, which she'll encounter later, but as the amusement of watching a schemer's schemes come to naught while ordinary lives sidestep his stupidity. I give the girls leading roles, along with their brothers and cousins. (I use hats to change their sex.) Adults figure, but offstage or briefly appearing like gods and goddesses. I don't make use of divine machinery the girls and boys figure it out on their own, managing to prevail, as is proper to commedia. There's also a chorus, needed to answer rhetorical questions as to the hothead or schemer's character.

I don't have much appetite for tragedy. Cracking jokes as death closes in, a practice arising with the first stirrings of the mortality that haunts us, comes as naturally as dodging it. I joke and dodge, and eventually I joke. Jokes come to mind the way poems do, and I can't help saying them aloud. Or so I tell myself, being old enough now to wear mortality on my skin. Even in dreams there's no reprieve, yet morning comes. Lina laughs on cue. Although on the cusp of losing interest, she still demands to know when my theater will reopen.

13.

Bourgeois through and through, I conclude, reviewing the annual summaries I receive as a party to our enterprises. Leo has extended what Carlo founded, while Paolo brought his diversification into wine to California. Whether it can all be kept in the family is a question. Some of it is off the books, but that's always been the case with the family. Summaries, then, are not quite the whole picture, but the proceeds help to pay for my dotage. I didn't expect to live so long.

Aristocracies and hugely wealthy families put parts of their families in risk of penury by narrowing inheritances down to a single heir. Bourgeois families like ours look instead to the enterprise itself and how to build it. We take a broad view of each one's contributions, as too much is undecided to push for specifics or impose them. Instead, we experiment. Life demands this openness to situations and intuitions.

Yet I'd be remiss not to note how our family is a kind of gyroscope that orients us and provides forward momentum. It led us to try to resolve problems other families ignore or deny, especially the problems women experience with desire. The men helped arrange things, but not much was arranged for us in this respect. I can only blame myself for failing to act on the implications of affairs, halting or avoiding them. These failures are eminently human, but that's no excuse.

14.

I am we are seated at a small round table separated from the sidewalk by a railing. There's coffee and a scone. Later, on a train platform, we embrace and I wonder what will happen or, more accurately, if I can perform. That night, I dream I'm on a farm wagon filled with hay, and there she is, naked, and I pull her up next to me. At lunch the next day I recount the dream and observe that she's trembling. It breaks the spell. I continue to have doubts, but not with her.

"We embrace." Desire arises or it doesn't, and this traces back to the aspect of being a man that's like a test, a highly reductive one between the sexes, measuring hunger as well as desire. Marriage tempers both with affection.

If solitude is my leitmotif, marriage makes more room for it, even encouraging it, while affairs founder on interruption and their expectation-raising similarity to courting. This is the fatal psychology that gives affairs their brevity unless it's faced squarely, but what exactly are we facing? It's only clear with considerable distance, even if we tried to face it with a few truisms we picked up that counted for nothing. Finding a room and a bed that's what transpires when we plunge in. (It should be "I," even if it seemed we plunged in together.)

A tendency in looking back is to overvalue what was lost. Leo is exemplary in this respect, constantly pushing toward the next thing while others exploit the last one on her behalf. As I write this, I think that it's the family's strategy applied at a different tempo. And she would argue for the constancy of her formal imagination, despite its variation in scale and use.

I look back and bemoan a variety of losses, even as they live on in my head, the subjects of my poems. They populate my epic despite its references to antiquity and to the family's sojourns in so many ports the anecdotes about them I took up as so many pregnant snippets, each the beginning of a tale. Epics begin and end, but our family's story unfolds in spite of efforts to snuff it out. Sidestepping an ending drives the plot, but our tendency to root hides this to some extent.

Dragging myself back to the present, I note how a balance of town and country persists, and a wariness of the capitals as places of residence. I use the word loosely, counting Milan as one certainly of culture in the heyday of our countess. I don't mind it, just as I didn't mind Buenos Aires, but it was a relief to return to Piranesi, just as it was a relief to cross the Plata by ferry to Montevideo a city, even a capital, but of a different order, proud and protective of the difference.

Listening to my theatricals with Lina, Gianni told me that I should write them out. He cited Calvino, a spinner of tales. Are they tales or are they an epic? Am I spinning parables or aiming for a grander narrative? If the latter, then the outline is hazy, like the bleak January sea off Piranesi's jutting coast, the ships emerging long after their horns are heard, winter's foggy chorus. If I were to write my epic, I'd follow one cast of characters, even if their names and ports changed. Is this just that I've lived long enough to see our descending traits? As each generation emerges, I'll recount the situations it faces.

Theatricals are the best medium, the Greek heads as stand-ins. My audience has seen it before, and yet there's something new to discover every time my epic's performed.

16.

A poet at his desk is a misnomer, really. I carry a notebook with me and write on trains, in hotels and cafés, etc., yet there's a desk, my desk, and a room that contains it, "a poet's room," Natalia called it, and this artifact and its setting seem to be part of the act of writing for me enough so that I came up with something comparable in Buenos Aires. If I used it for purposes beyond writing poems, a doubled or tripled sort of setting, that was conducive to bringing my preliminary lines a bit closer to the intent of their writing.

To write at such a desk is an act of self-belief unsupported by acclaim. Not even Giulia did more than express pleasure in my sheafs, as she called them. Soviet dissidents call this writing for the drawer. I write for the shelf Another holds diaries and jottings such as this.

To write at such a desk is to imagine others who did so: St. Jerome or St. Augustine in their respective rooms. Black-and-white photos of poets in their suits seem incongruous, yet how many poems have I written in a bourgeois guise? I'm suspicious of the idea of poets thinking of themselves as poets instead of thinking about the poem itself. Leo dreams of forms, but she also carries a notebook, has shelves of them.

Giulia's sketches were steps from source to depiction, but a poem is unsure at first even of its subject. It moves toward something it can't make out, arriving inexplicably. Then I set this aside so it can be a poem, if it has that possibility. Does the poem actually have that possibility? I'm never sure.

17.

I reached the point where I only desired a close friendship with a woman, unencumbered by a relationship. Destiny has figured with desire, signaled by recognition in three cases. In Rome, the third was sitting with an older acquaintance and I introduced myself. She became the close friend I wanted. It means we can discuss a range of topics without fear of giving offense. The only question is when to give advice. I try to wait until asked, but don't always manage. Recognizing my humanity, she protects our closeness with affection. I'm lucky that solitude doesn't tear at me Some can't bear to be alone. I have my work, and time isn't really distance for me a trait I share with most of the women in the family. In my case, I can bring to mind the totality of encounters. This makes absences less noticeable, which was a problem in the affairs I conducted. This may be why a precipitous ending to an affair is so jarring. Ruptures occur in marriages too, but there's a deep familiarity that heals them more often than not.

I make no claims now except here I still am, sheafs in hand or on the shelf, aware of her beauty, but its stirrings inspire only our conversations and correspondence, and my poems.

18.

I wanted to call the Milan hotel "The Courtesan," but I kept this idea to myself. Since it was the house Cosima's count bestowed, its real name is apt. I admire her for seeing the literary and historic value of her journals, "a unique record of an era" as they're always described. To me, they display her ability to see a deeper meaning in the events she witnessed, easily lost sight of in the glare of spectacle. She knew they took an army of artists, writers, performers, artisans, and workers to produce. The impresarios came and went, along with their circles. This and the ravages of time on the immortals of a given day provided all the drama Despite their repetitious egotism, her affection and respect were undiminished an innate sympathy for this world of artifice that she observed so carefully. She had no such sympathy for politicians. She and Natalia saw eye to eye on this, believing in the old school of patrons who ran Piranesi with a benign self-interest local enough not to lose touch with its citizens and denizens. This too broke down everything did around the time we left for Argentina. Breaking down politically has more propensity for tragedy than cultural breakdowns, except for those who experience it directly. As Cosima foresaw, the latter can predict the former, whether it's the horrors of trench warfare or mass annihilation. Inevitably a "post" follows, aiming to expunge and revive but in reality just starting the cycle over again.

19.

It was in Argentina that I found my footing. I think this was true for Paolo, also that placing ourselves in an entirely new milieu and having to rise to its occasion gave us the roles we knew how to play but had never been given the chance. I watched Paolo become a grandee, earning Matteo's full embrace, and helped keep our interests intertwined so the Piranesi holdings could be reclaimed after the war. Laura's interests were always separate from mine. Matteo and his family looked after hers, so they were never appropriated.

Family or families they blur together, a mix of indigenous stalwarts on two continents and our band of port-crawlers, talented at blending in, enterprising, privately creative with notable breakthroughs, like Leo's vast output, Cosima's trilogy, and Giulia's now-collected art. After I gave her a poem about spring, Lina said that Franny calls me the poet in the family and she, Lina, will gather up my poems and make me famous. Is late or posthumous fame my only hope? I told her that my daughter Caterina also likes my poems. "She writes novels and stories, so perhaps she'll help you."

The Buddhists counsel us to live in the present, while the Church points to the Afterlife. Writers see their own possible afterlives, a spur to keep going. A family like ours creates a chain of memory shared by its enterprises and creative works. My present blurs at the edges, is adrift in time, and yet it forms a meandering line that I can trace, especially now.

My real regrets trace back to my youth, especially to the period when I confronted my nature for the first time in an overwrought, volatile fashion. I outgrew this, but memories of excess and transgression haunt me: a close friend attacked when he dared to leave me; a young love cut short when I mishandled her dog; my hysteria, unable to stop laughing or crying. These are waking thoughts from an unrecoverable past events that introduced me to shortcomings I learned to temper to some extent but are still carried along. Regret is mostly between adults, so there's an element of hope to it, but the regrets of childhood never lose their potent sting.

I spent some days near Modena and in the Apennines at the invitation of Leo and her parents. It was good to get away, I realized to be elsewhere than Piranesi, where I find myself missing the family dead. Even Milan can be a little haunting, but it's the hotel that does it, not the city.

Leo showed me two magazine articles, Italian and English, showing their extended family at their country houses. "The English care only for farming, fishing, and hunting," Franny said. "And clothes," Leo added. "Ko styled us." Ko and her husband Ro are her indispensable collaborators. Ko frees her to design, while Ro is a designer–fabricator at home among Modena's abundance of those types. "Modena's car factories are where bespoke touches scale," Leo said. "We saw how it's done, then applied it."

Guillermo is now funded by the World Wildlife Fund, Franny said, thanks to an article in CountryLife . "Some royal, impressed by his remarks about hunting with nature, sent the British consul to our door. Ko quickly set up a foundation. Now Gianni's making a documentary." He nodded. "For the BBC. Guillermo has a lot of presence, a natural." His star, looking like the aging Picasso, smiled.

22.

Seated on her terrace, Leo and I discuss the past. Lina is with us, apparently reading, but I sense she's listening. "You always described yourself as a fixer," Leo led off. "To me, you've always been a philosopher, someone who looks at life objectively, questioning it, but you'd also rather be writing poems or chasing women." A flash of memories. "I remember our life in Buenos Aires," I said. "We were both a little notorious, burning through it together." She nodded. "I was my father's daughter, 'hunting with nature,' as he puts it."

Noticing Lina noticing us, she switched topics: "It's odd in these times to design things to endure." I replied, "You strip away anything that lessens an object's power, so there's an underlying purity to your work, whatever its scale." "Yes," she said, "my work is steeped in antiquity's rough, unelaborated forms. New materials arrive and I press them to tell me what they can do, but this is also from antiquity, really."

23.

With Franny on the porch of their house in the foothills. She's editing her mother's journals and letters, including ours. "My grandmother told me that Natalia needed an archivist, but as a lawyer, she kept everything. For me, it's a way to fill the gaps from our many years apart."

Did she retire to take up this work? "The UN is a dumping ground for old men too difficult to get rid of at home. There are some idealists, of course, some hardworking types, and all the right causes in abstract but endlessly delayed by those in charge, who mostly dine out, being too old for other things, and neglect their duties, if neglect isn't in fact the reason they're there. Guillermo had his horses he was really in his element in France, but he missed mountains and wildlife, so we found this place, closer to Leo and Gianni, where he can hunt and tramp around. That he knows so much about horses is almost an accident they'd just as soon eat them, like the French. He's never said this to his English clients."

24.

"No mention in their letters, but her journals are frank," Franny said, referring to Natalia regarding Nora, whose love for each other was clear to me early on. "Natalia thinks Giulia didn't know, imagining her to be a convent school girl. Their experiences at school must have very different!" I could have asked Franny if she was aware of Leo's university days, but I let it go. My sense is that at heart, they're all convent school girls who make their private peace with life as they see it.

"Anyway, what's the harm?" Franny asked. She and Nora were also close, a second mother in a way, more than an aunt. And Alma had explained a few things, including the fact that it might be entirely different for her, one man for a lifetime without any doubt, a rare and lucky thing when it happens.

Leo, she added, struck her as an amalgam of Giulia and Carlo with Guillermo's trick of seeing the form of things in the midst of distraction, that kind of focus or concentration. "Her work appears monumental, but when she explains it or we walk through it, I see that it's completely open-ended in how it will be used and who will use it. The products she designs also have this quality. Are they for children? Look, you can also do this with it, or you can renew it!"

"I've started sketching. When I stayed with Giulia, she'd hand me paper, pencils, crayons, and brushes. We'd go out together, me with a sketchbook she kept for me. I found it among Natalia's things and am adding to it. I told Leo this. 'I've had the same journal since Buenos Aires,' she said. She has shelves of notebooks, so she must mean a personal one."

25.

" Right after the war, Natalia made a reckoning, " Franny told me, "drawing on her notes: who died an untoward or unjust death; who was transported and who, of that cohort, didn't come back; and who collaborated or was treacherous. The bulk was written almost immediately, but she continued to note who escaped justice, including a few ex-Nazis who fled to Argentina through Piranesi. She also noted who they saved the families they hid on the farm, then spirited into the countryside or abroad. She notes later that very few who were active in the regime or party to its crimes saw their postwar lives and careers suffer. She quotes Gio, who predicted before the war that the worst of them would be singled out for reprisal, but the rest would soon be back at work. Resuming her law practice, she found herself amid colleagues who would have jailed her or worse had they been instructed to do so. There they were, when she became a judge herself, 'relieved not to have work for those devils.' I remember that Peron condemned the Nazi trials. I think Churchill had the same view just shoot the men at the top and start rebuilding. Natalia never praises herself for having done anything noteworthy. She saw it coming and thought it was her duty to do what she could. When she finally retired, the judges had a dinner for her. The eldest toasted her as the court's conscience and the one who'd plead for them at Heaven's gate, but out of compassion, as none of them were worthy. A silence followed, then another judge said, 'Hear, hear!' Natalia took some pride in this."

26.

"I should have stayed in Argentina to bear witness," Franny said. "I know my situation differs from Natalia's. She was always cautious, in reality, but managed despite this to be useful, even heroic. I was outspoken in my support of land reform, the rights of the indigenous, and other causes that Peron took up but his generals and their patrons didn't. Whenever I spoke up for the oppressed in Argentina from Paris, friends got death threats,. I was warned by the UN and the French government to be silent. No one really cares that much, and the Americans will back anyone, which I find strange given their war experience. It's like it didn't happen."

Compared to Natalia and Franny, my life seems insubstantial, spent evading my real work in order to do others' bidding and to exhaust desire in an elongated, unproductive fashion. Desire argues for itself, of course, when occasioned. Necessity is a better word the necessity to make art, realize form, defend others. My poems are a necessity, but just one among others.

27.

Franny motioned toward the hills. "This is an old, old place. It has the tempo of nature. Modena beats faster, but it still knows these hills. Milan wants to be a world city. They all do. In Paris, we were immersed in an old regime. Here, Guillermo wanders and hunts, as he likes to do. The English dub his ideas ecology, but we live here like Marie-Antoinette in her hamlet. I admire her, though, for wanting to get away from those endless gardens with their oppressive hedges!"

I mentioned Caterina. One pleasure of my current life is to see her more often. Our sons came with us to Montevideo, but she chose to stay behind. She met her husband Cesare there, introduced by Matteo's son Alfredo. Cesare is from an old noble family, one of our clients. He was often in Piranesi. To protect her properties there, Laura arranged with Matteo and Alfredo to give them to Cesare as a dowry. He returned them after we came back. They lived in Ferrara, so the properties were managed by Alfredo's family until we reclaimed them and the Piranesi farmstead after the war.

We've always corresponded, staying close despite all the gaps. As she found her voice, it became a literary exchange.

28.

Back at my writing desk in Piranesi, in a room with its own memories of desire, and not just mine, I intuited, returning to it long ago when Natalia borrowed it, noting the scents of lovemaking and their residue. Work fades from memory, but love leaves elaborate traces to be found again by association with one reminiscent thing or another. These traces are weightless, the way the poems they inhabit are nothing more than a necessity to write them out as they arise.

I do sometimes write down a line in the dark although it will be hard to make out later, but in general poems arrive. Agony isn't something I've experienced as a writer. Poems arrive when they do. It's why I don't think I'm really a poet.

The women arrived too, but I must have attracted them. It still seems inexplicable, these women and their traces, or maybe it's the force of their attraction that explains it. "West of gravity," I told one once, winning her approval. Love too is weightless, just like its traces, and yet such heaviness!

I never brought a woman here. In Buenos Aires, distant from Montevideo. I had rooms, nominally for the work I did there, that I used occasionally for other purposes, but hotels were better in the daytime, and in business to cater to it. Leo's hunting took place exclusively at night, I gathered, meeting up with her sometimes far after noon the next day.

29.

Despite the cold, I made my way to the harbor, stopping at a café to warm up a little. Last week, I turned 90 and the family gathered to mark the occasion. At my age, the speeches sound more like eulogies than encomiums, but eulogies are wasted on the dead. The family runs now even to great-grandchildren, so, I'm recovering. Caterina and Cesare came from Ferrara, and Franny and Leo, et al, from Modena.

Abroad, my birthday felt like summer, which I preferred. Piranesi is said to be temperate, but winter still nips at me. I don't like it. I could say the same about celebrations, but the celebrants made a big effort on my behalf, so I'm properly grateful. But it took its toll. Winter takes its toll.

My friend wrote to me, enclosing a small sketch she made of me from memory. I paperclipped it to some cardboard and propped it on a shelf behind my desk a sort of shrine of memorabilia. Leo has them, I noticed, these tiny museums.

Laura was in her element. She misses our sons and their children, but being able to visit back and forth with Caterina and her family is compensation. Much that once divided us has lost its relevance. We're diminished in form and yet more or less intact solvent, conversational, self-starting. I wander the harbor, but less so in the winter. I miss our dead, whose numbers are growing. Well, I'll see them soon enough.

30.

We meet episodically but are mostly correspondents, an underrated medium for friendship that I use extensively. Our friendship suggests to me that life comes down to listening, observing, and witnessing others' lives. You learn slowly that these are their own affairs. Advice can be unwelcome even when solicited. Taking an indirect or oblique approach is best, for which letters are well-suited.

When we meet, I'm aware of her beauty. I imagine this awareness isn't lost on her, but I'm a relief from predatory colleagues and the vicissitudes of her desire for marriage and a family. Leo avoided this by acting like a man (or a woman on her own terms), but her polytechnic is much less mired in tradition. My friend, in no sense a man, manages to find her way in a world like the Vatican, maybe I don't understand its workings, but the institutions men dominate are often warped or tainted by their fear of women's rivalry.

31.

In Rome early spring, pleasant. I came for a few days to see my friend, who kindly makes time for coffee, a lunch, and a dinner before I head back. She found a place for me on the Campo di Fiore, and I can see the famous statue of Bruno from my terrace. There's no elevator, so it's good that I walk in Piranesi now, not in the flatness of Buenos Aires. We toasted her long struggle to become a professor. She will teach at Berkeley in the autumn, as I'd suggested. I never made it to California, I said. Paolo, my only connection to the place, is dead. "You can visit me," she answered. I nod, but neither of us takes it seriously. "I'll write to you, as always."

The Pantheon is Leo's favorite building, especially when you approach its entrance. In her honor, we had coffee at a café across from its doors, then looked in. The play of light was remarkable, but I saw Leo's point that its real power is its simplicity. You see it in men sometimes, this kinetic stasis, containers of potential energy. I noted this to my friend. "No wonder the roof has a hole!" she said. From there, we walked over to the Villa Farnese, then down past a small church by Raphael, and finally across to the castle and Hadrian's tomb. I explore cities on foot, usually, although in truth what I do is find walks that please me. The terrains I remember accrue like this, even the human ones. My friend is a terrain of inference, never known yet as memorable as the others.

Funny to have these thoughts in the spring of my 9oth year. After dinner, my friend gave me a long embrace. It brought back a party, decades ago, ending with something similar that signaled desire, I realized later. That our farewell might be the last explains my friend's, I remind myself.

Part 3: Lina

1.

We went to Piranesi when Luca turned 90, a big event in which I met many of my cousins and their parents so many names and faces that I couldn't quite put together, but Luca took me walking in the harbor, sometimes with his daughter Caterina, telling funny stories as he always did. I loved my grandparents, but Luca was my favorite and he made me feel that I was his, although it was clear that he loved children.

This first post-pandemic year finds me in Berkeley. I owe my move to the university to Luca's professor friend. I was at a conference in Rome in the mid-1990s when she came up and reintroduced herself. (We'd met at Luca's funeral, she reminded me.) We began to correspond and never stopped. She's retired and mostly in Rome, but while she taught here, she urged me to apply for a post and then spoke up for me.

My field is critical theory, squeezed in among philosophy, literary and film criticism, anthropology, history, and other fields. I favor history, but critical theory pays the bills.

I could retire. I thought about it during the pandemic. I ask myself if the world really needs another middle-aged academic. It's remarkably expensive here. Should we leave? We own our house and have another near the coast. I love the climate, the bay we look out at. I have some family money, and Trent and I also have stakes in my mother's enterprises. Her work is popular again, she tells me as it should be.

I have a wife, an OB/GYN, works for Kaiser. Bisexuality runs in my family, but I fell for Bren plain and simple: two lovers who married, had kids, Ben and Jo an old story. We don't discuss our work except as work its conditions; the oddities of our colleagues, patients, students, staff; the contents of our everyday, mine recently disrupted, hers rolling on a little hazardously, we thought, until it was clear that family weddings are the main hazard, along with bars.

The writing I want to do lives at the edges, amid the rest: academic writing and teaching. Luca told me once that when a man retires, he has time for his own work, only he doesn't. I didn't really understand this until he died. I sometimes think that critical theory's only function is to prolong others' work that properly speaking should have ended with their deaths.

I like history, but I often find the academic version sclerotic or pedantic. Also, when a field pushes good people out of it, something's wrong. Like comparative lit before it, critical theory is a tent city of such exiles, some with bullhorns. I only shout from pleasure. This also runs in my family.

Medicine in general here is a corporate quagmire, but my wife's specialty is secure and her wonderful bedside manner gives her enormous positive word of mouth. Even at Kaiser this carries weight. Competing networks or their agents cold call her regularly to try to lure her in, but she says no. Kaiser is a fit, and her team is highly competent. Mothers and their babies benefit, which pleases Leo long devoted to Diana.

The university's art museum, especially its film archive , was where I hung out when I first arrived, but then I lost my taste for films. In the pandemic, when everything shut down, I found I had more time to write. My sabbatical overlapped part of it, so I began a history as well as my academic book. The history is to make sense of our family. It's impossible to ignore the enterprises, a running theme that plays off its sense of itself as bourgeois, but a particular sort, designed to fit in.

One blew up when Paolo's grandson Eduardo went into real estate and banking in Panama, laundering drug money. Poor Eduardo, found dead at a beach house, ambiguously enough that his wife was able to collect on his life insurance. Marco fended off his numerous creditors and also spirited his widow, children, and assets out of Panama.

Marco helped consolidate the agrarian holdings in Piranesi and San Rafael into a Swiss-domiciled holding company in the 1950s When Paolo moved to Santa Barbara, his holdings were absorbed. Leo added her enterprises and Gianni's film company to it, the Swiss being seen as a backstop against calamity, even an unforeseen one like the hapless Eduardo.

Walter Benjamin has been central to my work He saw in the detritus of 19th-century Paris an unfolding despite the cataclysms breaking out around it. The modern era culminated the Enlightenment's desire to overthrow tradition in favor of science, reason, and progress. WB was well aware of modernity's costs (and its tendency to slip into reaction) but appreciative of its possibilities.

I posit that antisemitism split the bourgeoisie, a binding agent in Europe that might have held the center. That splintering helped open the door to fascism. When the fascists marched on Rome, the family did the math in Piranesi. It's remarkable how quickly we responded. We have a nose for existential threats and a habit of staying clear of them. (This same nose led Marco, as capo, to ring fence our assets from the adventurous Eduardo.)

5.

I spoke Mapudungun as a kid, hearing my grandfather and Leo speaking it like a secret language. Franny and Guillermo also spoke to each other in Spanish, French, and Italian. At home, we spoke Italian, but I picked up American English by listening to Leo on the phone. I used to mimic her talking to her colleagues in Brooklyn. I'm a good mimic, like Luca. God, he was funny! He made me burst out laughing, which I think mattered more to him than anything, even being seen as a poet. (Caterina finally saw his poems into print.)

Trent took over Gianni's film company. Theirs are the only films I watch. I miss these elders and thank God Leo's alive. She's almost 93. Women architects are having a moment, so there will be a symposium in her honor on her birthday at the Milan Polytechnic, she told me. She's not enthusiastic about the event, "but it will draw attention to our backlist" the array of things she dreamt up and Ko sold on (and on). She and Ro are in Tokyo, still among the living With one foot in the Bauhaus, they blurred art, architecture, and design. My work is also blurry, unlike Bren's. Professions aren't to every woman's taste Cosima said that once to Natalia, I believe.

6.

Ours is a huge, wealthy- on- paper economy with ineffective leadership, progressives beholden to the highest bidders, a jackedup cost of living, problems evident but ignored. Tech has retreated to its suburban palaces following the exodus of its urban workers. Deteriorating conditions are noticeable to ordinary people, out and about after the pandemic lifted.

I argue with myself about this. It's based on perception, while the statistics point to a smaller exodus, less violent crime, rents and house prices coming down, transit ridership ticking up. Not long ago, perception was thought to be determinant. Was ours a brief paradise of local/global, upended by regional parity and paranoia, by Cold War-like rivalries grown complicated by a shifting, not-yetdecided order? Stripped of our former context, we look provincial. Recovering our provinciality might be a good thing, though, as the current oligarchs are culturally and environmentally clueless a scourge, really. It doesn't have to be like this. Decroissance , as the French call it, is a climbdown, leaving us with an Augean stable in need of composting. (And we know something about stables!)

Yet its beauty struck me from the moment I arrived.

7,

In 2005, at a conference I attended at the university on the future of the metropolitan landscape, I heard a professor of landscape architecture say in passing that only regions and neighborhoods mattered. I'd heard him lecture in the past he studied towns in the Outer Banks endangered by the neoliberal push to transform everything to make it fit for the wealthy, these small towns providing local color. What struck me about his work was his phrase "sacred places," by which he meant anything the townsfolk valued the dock where they learned to swim, the barber shop where things were debated and informally decided.

This aligns with my sense from childhood about the places we inhabit. Contemporary life is a struggle, at this detailed level, between what some hold sacred and others would wantonly profane. My mother shares this her interventions always begin with what's there and how anything new might fit with it or into it. She admires William Morris's refusal to clear away what accrued with time if it meant something to a place and its inhabitants. Modernity rarely had qualms about stripping the past away, but my hero Walter Benjamin also saw all it contained. Regions and neighborhoods are our most meaningful contexts the macrocosm of nature and the microcosm of local traditions. We need to learn to work across them "with nature," as Guillermo put it and rethink how we act within sometimes very long timeframes that are poorly understood or ignored. We need to grasp the limits of our knowledge and tune our interventions to them. I'm on the ridge, writing this, hearing the sea's distant pounding.

8.

Our country house is a half - mile or so from Drake's Bay , the last house of an organic architect, an unfinished wreck when we bought it. It looks out at a ridge that's part of the coastal park that dominates the peninsula. The climate is winter wet or summer bone dry. The house rises from the remains of one that burned to the ground in a wildfire in 1995. Another wildfire two summers ago came within a mile.

The nearby towns are a mix of outsiders like us, for whom this is country to our city, and locals, some genuinely so. The weekly paper describes a history of dairy farms and cattle ranches, a few still active but fighting with their neighbors. The backdrop is government in different forms. There's an undercurrent of left-coast anarchism. Cows on the road!

I feel at home here, as it reminds me of my grandparents' house in the Apennines. Such places managed to resist the onslaught of whatever the cities had in mind for them. It's not easy if it's not mass tourism, it's the conversion of farms to suburbs, villages with so many second homes that no one's left to maintain actual daily life no bakery or café. When I read my family's journals, they note the artificiality of their estate, which existed partly to showcase their bespoke horses and bulls. Yet the artist Giulia lived mostly there, conscious of its seasons and how country folk viewed their lives. My daughter surfs off Bolinas, a source of anxiety for me as an inlander. She wisely expresses her awe of the ocean, her terror. Living closely with nature does this to you. We deal with terror by taking its measure, or maybe it's our own measure we're taking our skill, our capacity for fear.

9.

Capital ism attached itself to imperialism as its bankers and mercantile empire-builders, but it's trading that underpins the bourgeoisie an activity built on reciprocity, despite the distortions trade caused as it scaled up industrialization and resource exploitation. My mother has strong feelings about scale. Success to her is any building or object that people feel is worthy of continual acts of renewal and repurposing.

Scale sets the terms of how to manage it. The park our country house overlooks was probably better run by the farmers and ranchers who owned it originally. It's more picturesque as woods, but their pastures were firebreaks, and farm and ranch labor kept an eye on things. This anyway is my supposition. I wasn't here in these before times.

In the spirit of Luca, I argue for bourgeois modesty in the face of nature and of any human forces to be worked with or around. Such modesty includes a sense of limits, of a scale that's appropriate to a given situation, that fits. We admit our own limits, as humans, and consider our contingencies. "The door is always there," Confucius said. Today, this could be a miscalculation. On to Mars? I'm not sure Mars is an exit.

My dissatisfactions are less with tribalism than the efforts of each tribe to bend the rest of us to its view. It also irks me that these disparate views are lumped together and amplified as pledges of allegiance to momentary causes. This reflects the loss of a history I heard first hand and a tradition I'm old enough to have experienced directly. I make a point of teaching, not sloughing it off. I look for the good teachers among my graduate students, knowing the difference they can make to beginners who need to find their bearings in a huge university. A field like mine is seen as superfluous. They say the same of ethnic majors, but we need them to pry the canon open. My field's pertinence is like having test strips for fentanyl a prophylactic knowledge arising from wariness.

Wariness and openness, like Jo and the ocean. I suppose really that I'm a critic, a branch of journalism, but with feelers extending far and wide within culture, antennae to pick up signals and resonances from a welter of sources. Less a critic, more an observer maybe, but is this stance possible now? I'm called on to take sides, accept wholesale the nostrums of the day, fall in despite knowing their shortcomings. Arguments take form as threads. Who's blocked or vilified, and who isn't? If discussion is ruled out, then I'll sit on my shaded terrace and write, distant from all of it, old enough that my observations accrue and beg for summation theories rooted in this life I've led provisionally, finding my bearings as the planet lurches forward. I marvel at how the family manages to serve its own and others' desires, an art of doubling it has somehow sustained a bourgeois art, the family would add.

11.

"Experiences are lived similarities," WB said (as quoted by Frederic Jameson in a book on him I'm reading). It makes me think of listening to my elders describe their lives in exile or under fascism in the human terms of what it meant for them, their friends, and vulnerable others. A theme was their wariness of whatever fell in the realm of threat. (Several of Caterina's short stories describe this in Ferrara.)

When I point to "lived similarities," I'm often met with blank stares or denials that they're related. At the same time, my students make connections that distort the past and the present, omitting contrary facts and complexities. If there's a reason to educate yourselves, I tell them, it's to confront a world that's endlessly complex and yet steeped in patterns themes that recur in new guises, either promising or perilous. It's in this sense that critical theory is useful, pushing students to go further, but it gets this from its antecedents, in reality.

In the cloud are digitized family journals , back to Giulia . Luca is the exception to the rule that only the women kept them, but Luca is the exception in other ways. I share his tendency to theorize, and his sense of being unsure how his life adds up and who he really is within it. I'm Leo's daughter in certain ways, but then our women are stalwart once they put their wild youths behind them. When I arrived here, I had my own history. Luca's conflicted nature dogged him. These conflicts are unending, aren't they? One saving grace of this region is its tolerance, but it's always precarious. The day after Trump won, I was on the train headed to the airport. A white man launched into a tirade that he would never have done a day before. The pandemic was a relief from this. I find myself wanting it to continue, to leave everything behind and only work on our family's history. It feels like my reason for being, as opposed to what I prepared to do and am still doing. It interests me, yes, but less and less. Only WB interests me, the way he interests FJ, giving an unexpected lightness to a prose style that's usually heavy going WB is too provocative to be taken in that vein. He struggled with distraction, yet he produced and produced until he ran out of time and space less a suicide than a man self-euthanizing.

13.

The intimate history of the family comes down to a sign. It's Natalia who raises it, referencing her chart and how it was explained by her lover Nora and her mother-in-law, Alma, both Etruscans according to themselves. The sign denotes selfsufficiency this is my term for it enabling a woman to get past desire or an incompleteness that prompts her to seek her complement in another. My gloss on this is inexact and selfsufficiency isn't quite right. The women who had it, including my mother, describe burning through desire in order to feel sufficiently sated to get on with their lives. In every case, there was a remnant, an ember they brought to a marriage. Natalia is an odd case, desired across her life by Nora. That she always initiated their tectonic interludes, by Natalia's account, may be what Luca puts his finger on, a self-delusion about who does what and also that it doesn't matter, that it causes itself. As far as I can tell, this continued, although at longer intervals.

Unlike his sister Marta, Luca failed to live on blamelessly, acquiring other habits. His incompleteness was chronic until late in life he met his professor friend. At that point, he also looked critically at his own past, wondering at his persistence in the face of reality's implacable inelasticity. Life has natural limits that the young breach from exuberance and ignorance, but discover soon enough. Matteo, a patron, seems to be the only man who actually managed to have a parallel life that converged in the person of Paolo granted, at a safe distance from Piranesi, a place among the gentry. An example of his largesse, Giulia might say, but Franny and Leo saw him as the deusexmachinaPaolo summoned to San Rafael to wow the locals.

14.

Leo echoed Giulia in the liaison that gave her Trent. I don't think she sees it like this, however. It was the huntress in her, I theorize. She was well taught by Guillermo. Trent resembles his father. I'm the Natalia of this sequence, but that father never knew us, since Leo didn't feel it was important. This exemplifies the self-sufficiency I had in mind, which Leo has in spades: her momentum or trajectory. I'm often unmoored in the university, in it but wanting out, although I'm valued and even enjoy it. If only I could shrink it down to convent school size, be Vivaldi to the innocents who form each semester's ensemble. I would lead them and then go home and compose.

The pandemic gradually stripped away the extraneous, as I realized so much was, leaving me with certain ideas related to my field, loosely speaking, and these journals. I divided my time, such time as was mine, between them, but then I began to relook at time and form a new relationship with it. Bren came along with this reformation, because I saw that she's a continuous presence, even when absent. This is like Natalia and Franny, according to Alma. I extended this to my work, asking if it wasn't actually one undivided thing that admits no hierarchy. If time seemed to gnaw at me likely a disease of academics the pandemic may have provided a cure.

15.

Leo said to me, regarding children, that once you have two, you might as well have eight. It's true that two is a big jump from one, but more than two is now uncommon in the family. The journals record proximate aunts, uncles, parents, siblings, and cousins. Luca's 90th birthday brought home to me what Piranesi meant to the family, why Luca and Cosima went back, and why Natalia and Giulia never left. Their journals make me feel my life is atomized in comparison. The pandemic led me to test the deeper waters of disconnection. Bren is more naturally social. She grew up here, and has family and childhood friends nearby. Before the pandemic, we were more social. I do the cooking. Bren does the cleaning up, being used to mess.

The real memoir of Luca is to be found is his poems. He read Horace and became something of a Zen Buddhist in his efforts to get past the "ravines" where he found himself. But passing through them was necessary, he wrote later. The pleasures of the affairs are also noted. Poems didn't force him to explain. They touch on things he couldn't elaborate but wanted to set down, and you grasp enough without needing to know more. His poems are worth reading. They develop over time, shifting forms. He wrote constantly.

I admire his ability to live with his unresolved, problematic desire. Carlo, who Leo is always said to resemble, is another bisexual, sort of a predator, we'd say now, fucking the help, but Giulia doesn't see this as a defect. What strikes her, and Natalia, also, is his steadfast fulfillment of his family roles and, later, his decision to abandon sculpture and his studio, joining Giulia and painting. Natalia and Nora, epic duo, are entwined practically from the start, but Nora is entirely our contemporary in wanting to rub Piranesi in the face with her real and complicated nature, bringing with her all others society excludes or diminishes, even now. Especially now.

I've never moved into my work entirely, as Giulia did. Natalia puts her finger on it when she describes her own life's unchanging settings. To her, it's completely ordinary, except that she's a lawyer, except that she finds a divan and allows her childhood friend to fuck her brains out, but never the same way twice. A work of art, those two, but like Luca, Nora longed for visibility. It's Cosima who got it, turning her Milan journals into a trilogy. Her success gave Luca hope for his poems, but her saga was easier to sell.

17.

When I arrived at Berkeley, I was the hot new thing, a lure to colleagues and students both. I was also on the run the way I think Leo was when she went to New York to put an ocean or a continent between us and the lacunae of our past lives. Both our journals break off at this juncture, which is so odd. Once here, I immersed myself in it and in my field. I wrote, taught, spoke, avoided predators. I found Bren, who put her own work aside to have our children.

We burn hot at the start, we Piranesi women, yet there's desire still, sufficient unto the night. Gasps, as Nora put it. What exactly do I want? This is leisure's question, I think. The enforced leisure of the pandemic made it more urgent. It's not a midlife crisis in the sense of a desire for someone new, but a desire for a life bigger than the one I have now. Or is it smaller? Different from my current one, anyhow.

18.

Luca mentions our family tree's accuracy. I have one with Leo's annotations. Trent's father is penciled in with a question mark. I asked Leo about this and she said she was never sure, despite the resemblance. She and Gianni were an item when the form-giver passed through. Trent won't do a DNA test, but Ben and Jo are his children, half-siblings of his daughters, as Leo notes. Her thin penciled lines remind me of my chart. They could also do the test, but none has.

Inverness has several foundations centered in the houses and studios of dead artists. Jo interned with two of them in successive summers, and involved herself in another's fancy magazine. There's a whole network of these quasi-cultural afterlives of iconic types. But as soon as the pandemic lifted, she went to Modena to see the family. Trent's Genia is from the ducal family that ruled the region from Modena east We summered at the farmstead where she has a house, much like Giulia's near Piranesi. Now Bren is there. I should join them, but I'm too busy with this history.

19.

A director who knows Trent is visiting here. His wife is a cinematographer and they have a three-year-old, all staying at the Gordon Onslow Ford compound near the J.B. Blunck house two landmarks of Jo's terrain. I drove over and we had lunch. He showed me Ford's house and studio. "No photos on social media," he said a rule the foundation imposes, fearing thieves. Ford had a remarkable collection that he sold piecemeal, and faded photocopies mark where they hung. The house "is like Piano's airport terminal in Osaka," Leo commented when I sent my photos: "When the Japanese complained about the cost, he just lopped some off like a butcher selling them salami."

Compared to Ford's house, ours is an organic cathedral left unfinished like Gaudi's. I wake up in amazement, looking up at it. My mother preferred to revamp old houses rather than build new ones. She doesn't design houses, although she still helps other architects and designers work out unusual forms, still takes a huge interest in new materials. Ro is gone, but her circle at the polytechnic has successors who marry form and making. The pandemic kept her out of Milan, but there's Zoom and her house in Modena has become a pilgrimage site for her young followers.

I'm reading the journals Natalia wrote in the worst years of fascism how everyday life there was disrupted and how she and others coped. When the Nazis quit Piranesi, no one was sure at first if they were really gone, but then they paraded the Virgin and she attended a Thanksgiving mass.

20.

" In Buenos Aires , a classmate, an actress, fell in love with a filmmaker. 'Mike & Mads,' we called them, because she was so high strung. Mike ended up in Milan and it was because of him that I met Gianni. In Buenos Aires, I made sets for theater productions and in the back lot of a film studio where Mike apprenticed. He also made his own close-to-silent films with a borrowed Bolex, with voiceovers he added later. Mads was ideal for this, being so visually histrionic. She had an apartment paid for by her wealthy provincial parents. One Monday, after Mike left for work, she took the gun they gave her 'for protection,' and shot herself in the head. No note. Mike only learned of it when a friend told him it was in the afternoon paper. Her family descended, cleared out her apartment, and took her body back to Mendoza. She led a double life, but Mike told me later that she suffered from a double bind. In Milan, he made a film about her. 'It was hard,' he said. 'The ending was so ambiguous.' Her suicide made me appreciate our family more. It was so disorienting, and I'm almost never disoriented. Luca understood and helped me get away. In New York, I had to learn how to navigate all over again. One reason I quit Milan was to see the night sky again That's the part of city life I most dislike."

Leo's account made me think about that fraught age, 20, a cusp between adolescence and something closer to maturity. The university has always been a minefield on this score; now bouts of madness are considered the mad one's private affair until she turns up bleeding, comatose, or dead. I take distress seriously. Nothing we do here is worth killing yourself over.

21.

Modena functions for Leo like Piranesi did for Giulia, who split her time between the country and the town, sometimes going to Milan (where my mother goes more frequently). If Leo thinks in form, Giulia thought in images, "seeing what was important to her," as Natalia writes somewhere. It isn't that their visual way of thinking excludes human feeling. Its roots are empathetic. Leo is compared to Carlo, owing to their preoccupation with form, but form for her means supporting life far beyond any current ideas of it. In her journals, Giulia speculates that her work will survive but the artist and her human subjects may lapse into anonymity.

Trent and Genia split their time between Modena, the farmstead, and Milan. She's writes on film, which is how they met. She's also writing a family history, focused on its revival in the mid-19th century after losing its hereditary grip on the region. Our parallel projects have led to correspondence and mutual encouragement. And I owe Ben and Jo to her initiative, a very up-to-the-minute sort of family tie.

Their journals describe their talismans: Giulia's portrait of Matteo; Natalia's divans; Luca's Greek heads; Franny's Mapuche married, advocated, embodied; Cosima's sliver view of the harbor and her spare apartment; Leo's Diana. What's mine? Perhaps Jo can sort it out. Our journals are handwritten and always with us, stuffed in a pocket with a pen. Giulia knew her portrait's power. I have a copy of the photo of Franny and Guillermo in Deauville, Guillermo "dressed English." Is it mine?

I never thought of this kind of project until I embarked on it. Retrospect turns everything inside out, the journal entries rising usefully to the surface to explain what otherwise isn't.

I'm seated on my favorite terrace at the ridge house, off to the side under an oak of modest size, flagstones laid out along a path to what was supposed to be a pottery shed, with a metal mast similar to but smaller than the two in the house. Below, toward the lower road, I hear quail on the march.

Terraces for me are like trains are for Leo, conducive to emptying my mind onto paper. I don't write my journal for posterity, and yet there's an imagined reader I address. If Cosima rewrote her journals as novels, it wasn't to distort the events she witnessed but reorder or reconstruct them, to have that freedom which I also grant myself, like Herodotus.

23.

Giulietta, my niece, is engaged. Genia and Trent tell me separately that it's a good match, "a real couple," as he put it. I start to make plans, which brings home to me how this will repeat as her sister Paola and then Ben and Jo will marry. I'm struck how inevitable this seems, the way life reverts to a norm, how we, believing ourselves to be in the vanguard, are demonstrably conventional, yet another manifestation of our family's trope, married couples with children, however they were engineered. Not above giving destiny a gentle push.

Texts fly back and forth: Jo a bridesmaid, Ben asked to support the groom; the creche's chapel the venue; dinners in town and at Genia's farmstead. It sparks thoughts and conversations, even speculations, among us.

I may stay at the Milan hotel, still in the family. Luca and I used to have tea there and I thought it was very grand. His daughter Caterina would sometimes join us. She and my grandmother were the same age. I loved going to Milan with him or Leo, a contrast to Modena and the country. Luca was a wonderful host. I think he also loved the idea of hotels.

24.

Early Luca was a fabulist , the whole family sensualists. And they seem always to be in conversation. Later, Luca is regretful, burdened in some ways by retrospect. I asked my mother about him. "In Buenos Aires, we were especially close and I felt that he alone understood me. He thought poetically the same way I think in forms. His reference was Homer that tradition and I understand this. Antiquity provides the purest forms, the ones that transcend order. You see it in a building like the Redentore or the Pantheon. Poems are far less visible, yet a few outlive everything. The poet is never sure, though."

What about our sensual family? "Luca envied the women. His love life was problematic." I thought of Nora. Luca lacked a comparable arrangement. His close friend was the nearest he got. I seem to fall into Franny's category, but I have a disorienting backstory like Leo's from Buenos Aires.

Luca snaps himself out of it, another of our family's talents.

Leo told me that her father admired Europeans' energy but was bolloxed by their inanities. "His interactions with them were subtly and ironically parodic, like Buster Keaton. He got on with Paolo because Paolo thought of him as part of the land itself. His marriage to Franny fit into Paolo's grand plan, the other half of which was his own marriage into the local gentry. My parents were unusually devoted to each other, although so different. Franny was Natalia's fearless daughter, with her sense of justice needing to be done and her never doing enough."

An urge for prognostication ran through the women, and my mother and I both got a double dose Mapuche and then Etruscan. Leo recently sent me her notes of the readings that Trent and I received as children. Jung argues such things are synchronous, but I relate it to Benjamin's now-time and Whitehead's idea that our actions unfold from everything that preceded them. The notes read, "Trent like his father; Lina sees into things; self-sufficient, so prone to stasis and self-isolation; keeps her family's stories. Trent too, but a storyteller," and other things of this nature.

My chart is clear that my desire for another is undivided, but much is left to be lived out among the pulls of interest, talent, opportunity, and the needs of others. When I went through it with the chart's maker in Piranesi, she paused, then said, "Your family knows you better than yourself about certain things. They'll sometimes rescue you from your blindness."

26.

Jo texts. "There's more!!!" My grandparents' house is more or less as they left it. Leo stays there whenever she wants "difference." Asked by her to look at its contents and make an initial inventory, Jo found diaries, journals, and letters "way too much to scan. You must come!"

I've been pondering my selective blindness. Bren's work is like mine in that we both deal with shifting cohorts, although the pace and nature of our interactions differ. Floating above this is our higher-level work Ph.D. students and residents, the papers we write and give, books or book chapters. All this gives our days their inertial necessity. The thing about inertia though is that you need a break from it to see it accurately.

I'm reading a new book by Yves-Alain Bois that collects his work from the vantage point of age. His excitement about Barthes, Derrida, and others is undiminished. He was very lucky in his circle of friends and collaborators, and also in his era, a half-generation ahead of mine, which feels stalled, or I feel stalled, in comparison, but his example revives my hope.

Only certain writers and thinkers, especially WB, interest me their efforts to synthesize their breadth of learning, observation, and experience. My work on him is largely done and I want to set out new direction, but what? I focus on my family's history because the sources at are hand, but is this really just a delaying tactic while I figure out my next move?

27.

Friends induce d me to hear the Wildcat Viols, an early music quartet, in St. Mary Magdalene's parish hall. By rights, I should attend the Anglican All Souls closer to our house, but I come from a long line of convent school girls. "Who am I to judge?" is a question lost on San Francisco's reactionary bishop, but the Madeleine, as we call it, is aligned with Francis. Like the Wildcat Viols, "no one turned away."

They play Purcell among other composers of works for four viols bass, tenor, and treble, the program said. When she took off her glasses, the Italian violist proved beautiful Our region has early music on the brain the performers are dedicated to it, playing new copies of old instruments and forming floating groups like this. It felt alive to me despite the music being composed in the 1600s.

Concerts always prompt thoughts. I realized that I've met my academic ambitions and can't prod myself to go farther. Jo's text led me to text Bren later that evening her morning in Modena. For a couple sharing two houses and a life together, Bren and I rarely discuss our situations' suitability as contexts for our work, especially the work we envision, even if it's hazy and insufficiently examined. Distance has spurred her reconsideration. Has her absence done so for me? We spoke for two hours, which I take as a yes.

28.

Frederic Jameson cites WB's di fferent takes on history, and his self-positioning as a bourgeois intellectual, walled off as such from the proletariat and, by inference, the precariat. FJ distinguishes the former as most in need of hope and longing for a future, whereas the latter are still angry about the past. It felt as I read it to be more about FJ's present or ours, but his comments made me think about our family's history. Its sense of itself creates a kind of conversation through time, a meta-narrative. I must be a literary historian, given my attraction to exactly this possibility of ferreting out thematic backstories arising from this seeming back and forth, and its bildungsromannature, whether discontinuous or evolutionary. They even pull Guillermo into it, interpreted as Nature's Matteo. Leo seems more or less self-invented, yet absolutely in a lineage that includes art, form, making, and the occasional bedded grandee all these women who made their own arrangements or induced others to do so for them.

Reading FJ's book reminds me how WB first piqued my interest and still does in a way that most others don't. After rereading a passage of his theses on history, I felt sure he'd endorse my striking out on a new path armed with what I've learned from him. "He wrote it for me," I think brazenly, but in reality he went where his mind took him, paying a big price for his independence. Glückis luck as well as happiness, FJ notes, a very German pairing. Was WB happy? His luck was terrible. We're lucky to have read him.

29.

In Modena and vicinity for Giulietta and Vanni's wedding, a splendid affair as befits this daughter of her well-connected parents and her remarkably famous grandmother. Genia's family and their friends are here in force, and there are others like us who came from afar. Jo is radiant. Ben and Bren are in conversation with the medical world my mother touches we get a lot of mileage from that clinic.

It strikes me again how rooted in orthodoxy our families are. Orthodoxy knows how to display the bride so other young ones will follow her into matrimony. She goes beautifully along, in love with the idea of it. Orthodoxy wasn't quite ready for us, but our union fell in with its view of family continuation, even if only one of us did the breeding.

Fecundity is a thematic backstory with contrapuntal riffing. The women kept men in the picture, clearly loved them, but they weren't patriarchs. If some of the women loved women, was this partly because it uncoupled desire from pregnancy?

Some, long-lived, wrote the looks back lucid old age affords. Leo still looks ahead, taking the train into Milan again to visit the polytechnic, and engage the students and their teachers as they work on something together, her curiosity and her talent unabated. She's amused by her current fame. "It's odd to the see the old photos again. I really did look the part."

She urges us to stay on. This is easier for me, harder for Bren, but calls are made. Meanwhile we take walks and talk.

Naturally, I dove into Jo's trove. I also had a series of conversations with Leo, whose memories of San Rafael, the Andes, and Buenos Aires are so detailed that I recorded them on my phone as well as taking notes. She thought to write something, but this is easier. She also expressed doubt about our growing up "with such parents." No, I protested, it was so interesting! Also, we had two sets of parents, really, in that household we shared with Ko and Ro, and their children.

"I remind myself of Maria," Leo said. "My parents noted the similarity, although she would have been shocked by my goings-on. I learned from her that everything in life is just a framework for change, even the Church, which she saw as a big basket filled with the beliefs people brought, mixing their shrines and idols with the Virgin and her saints, like Luca's Greek heads or the Etruscan artifacts Alma handed down. It stays with me, Maria's basket its forms and contents are in constant flux but the idea of it has never lost its potency."

I asked about Franny. "She and Natalia shared a sense of justice, but Natalia had to overcome her wariness, which was innate Only later, as a judge who'd survived the years of fascism, did she shed her anxiety. Even then, she was anxious for Franny. My parents only fled Argentina because their lives were threatened. My mother always felt she should have stayed. My father became European 'one of you,' he'd say to my mother."

31.

Luca said that it all began with "What if ?" The women posed this question, their men having the wit to take it seriously. Our family is creative, collectively and individually, in accommodating desires of different sorts. Its bourgeois nature suits this, orthodoxy providing an all-purpose scrim.

Being in Modena gave us a chance to talk and arrive at an arrangement. Everyone can be accommodated, even Giulietta and Paola, which speaks to the remarkable flexibility of things given the will and the resources.

Bren and I agree to proceed in stages. She's talking with the clinic, now a women's and children's hospital, about leading an OB/GYN cohort there. I want to write our family's history. The newly found trove is a reason to do it here, but I also want to be with Leo. She's asked Jo and Giulietta to co-direct her foundation, funded by the royalties from her products and Gianni's films. They're both enjoying a revival, so the revenue is considerable. Her archive is at the polytechnic, but this venture is her personal last act.

Ben won a residency at UCSF and Paola plans to study architecture at Cal, so they'll share our Berkeley house. No bridges burned "always an exit," as Luca would say. Yet here I am, finally, back where I started in Modena.

MODENA

“Every moment is a moment of judgement concerning certain moments that preceded it.” Walter Benjamin

Part one: Franny

1.

I suppose this is a memoir, really, what I want to write. Leo resists the conceit that a century can be so evenly divided. Still, here we are, Leo 20, me 40. I'm in Buenos Aires to discuss education and labor policies affecting the indigenous of Argentina, a subject that's slowly getting a hearing. But let me go back in time.

I was 16 when I arrived in Argentina after a boat journey during which I tried to learn Spanish and imagine life in San Rafael, the boomtown my uncle Paolo chose to extend the enterprises of our family and its patron Matteo. Paolo was there already and had a plan: to marry into the local gentry, diversify into wine, and see what else was possible. He purchased a farmstead in cultivation, run by a Mapuche widow, Maria, "who came with the property," but soon gained Paolo's respect. Her son Guillermo knew horses. "They're hunters who eat horses as well as ride them, but his expertise is remarkable," Paolo told me. He believed that breeding race and sports horses could be taken up in San Rafael, and that wine and horses together could draw wealthy polo players and owners.

Those with money in San Rafael sent their children to boarding schools in the capital, but Paolo turned me over to the nuns at the convent school. Maria taught me Mapudungun. Paolo grasped what his local peers ignored, that the Mapuche saw their vast territory, which spilled across the Andes to the Pacific, as hunting grounds. Maria's husband led the resistance to the Europeans and died before the peace with them she helped forge was established. To the surprise and bewilderment of the other landowners in San Rafael, Paolo gave Maria and Guillermo an equal stake in our venture. Inevitably, Guillermo and I fell in love.

Marrying out was frowned on by the local gentry, but Paolo felt ours was not only an evident love match, but an aristocratic merger granting himself that promotion, not quite earned yet, in reality. So, he organized a campaign, inviting Matteo to visit San Rafael, endorse the enterprise's arrangements, and bless our marriage. Don Matteo, as he came to be known locally, was in fact the aristocrat transplanted Italians imagined. He even brought a priest along to marry us who spoke Spanish and translated for the non-Italian gentry. And not just a priest, but a monsignor glad to have an extended vacation at Matteo's expense. The upshot was that Maria and Guillermo became "family" in the eyes of the locals, exceptions to their usual indifference or disdain. In time, their advice on agrarian and equine matters was sought out.

Matteo was glad to invest in San Rafael, as Piranesi was feeling the effects of the market crash. Paolo and Luca were adept at tapping the urban wine markets. Luca fed stories to the press about the great tradition of racing and sporting horses in Piranesi, now brought to Argentina and invigorated by Mapuche talent in the person of Guillermo. Our polo ponies and his expertise soon had a following.

Later, I enrolled Leo in a Catholic girls’ school in Buenos Aires and enrolled myself in the university. The indigenous of Argentina were at a disadvantage compared to the Europeans, so I focused on what I'd need to argue their case effectively. I soon found myself making social and economic arguments for a new approach. This led me to a rising politician, Juan Peron, now in power.

3.

Leo was three when Natalia and Giulia first visited San Rafael. That was 1933. When she was eight, they visited again with Alma and Nora. Those were fraught years, viewed in retrospect. Luca's sisters quit Piranesi for Montevideo in 1938, Cosima alone and Marta with her family. As Cosima spent the season in Buenos Aires, she and Luca bought two flats there, one of which he uses when family business brings him across the Plata.

Cosima and Marta want to move back to Piranesi, I heard from Luca. Laura and their sons own and rent apartment buildings in Montevideo, so they're not ready to join them. Property has always been Laura's business. Matteo and his son Alfredo ran the Piranesi end of things in their absence, avoiding seizure. Who owns what has all been straightened out, I heard from Natalia.

Matteo, Giulia, and Carlo are still in reasonably good health. As Luca foresaw, they were left alone. Matteo's ties to Argentina and his position as its consul, which was my mother's idea, also helped. They shut the consulate down once the rat line made an appearance. It's odd how Argentina is now a haven for those murderers, or so Luca tells me they haven't shown up in San Rafael, as far as I know Argentina took in a lot of fleeing Jews when no one else would, so Peron may think it's only fair. The stuff of nightmares, though, such men. I worry about their influence on the military. Peron thinks he can control everything, but can he? Luca says the Americans quickly snapped up the German scientists, worried that the Russians would get them first. My mother writes that there's no appetite at home for pursuing the fascists, either. "As your father predicted, they shot the worst ones and then life went on."

If this is a memoir, then what kind, exactly? I feel that parts of it should be separated out and that my focus here should be personal and familial. My mother told me that her journal touches on her work at court, but only because it was one setting of her life and she sometimes found herself writing about it. I mention Peron, but this is like mentioning Mussolini if one lived in Rome while he was in power and one's dealings overlapped the man occasionally. I don't really know Peron, but I've encountered him. And this is his moment, I think, and some of the causes that interest me may benefit from his support, but it's hard to know.

Luca and I sometimes talk politics or perhaps socio-politics or socio-economics. It's hard to separate these categories, even in a provincial town like San Rafael that's still run by the gentry despite the appearance of Peron's followers the way Mussolini's turned up in Piranesi. I share Luca's wariness of the type. I'm leaning toward what the economists call welfare capitalism, which aims to put a floor under the working poor. Peron is also for this, but the capitalist part means that enterprise continues. Our family is all-in for enterprise, but recognizes our civic obligations. My mother feels that it's the real guarantor of enterprise if they're in balance. (My mother writes to both of us about these issues, much debated now at home, and we refer to her letters in our conversations, then report back, an interesting process that helps sharpen our thoughts.)

Leo is another topic, this wild girl of mine. Luca is confident she knows what she's doing, is very much of her time and place. She still spends the off-season hunting in the Andes with her father, but she's also close to Maria they all chatter away in Mapudungun. Paolo and I speak our Piranesi Italian, as I do with Luca. The local Spanish and our Italian are not so different, apparently, as Guillermo and Maria can follow us when we talk, but this may reflect the amount of time we've all been away from its source.

Luca thinks Leo should study architecture and design. He says she has an aptitude for it and would find better instructors elsewhere. This explains her Portuguese and English classes!

5.

I come from a long line of women who did what they wanted. That's my sense of our family, which Luca serves as historian, theorist, apologist, and psychologist. (He and my brother share the title of chief fixer, although my mother does her share.) I think that Paolo brought me to Argentina to continue that line. I don't think he foresaw how it would happen, but when it happened, he took it in the best spirit as another expression of the above-noted truism.

Leo then is the continuation of this line and I have nothing but praise for her pursuit of it after her own fashion. Like those before me, I took the precaution of enrolling her in convent school, our favored cover of orthodoxy, as Luca calls it. This despite knowing she might encounter prejudice, being of mixed race. Provincials, I told her, without the saving grace of rootedness. She understood.

Our line only really rules out adultery in its amateur sense. Luca, while knowing better, is the counterpoint. He doesn't talk about it especially, but I can read his moods and his poems are a travelogue of the terrain he's covered its pleasures and terrors. My desire is undivided, as Alma would say I would have fled into the Andes to be with Guillermo, as Paolo understood. He did his part admirably.

"In its amateur sense" is to except the arrangements that gave Giulia Paolo without scandal or heartache, then gave her Carlo, along with Natalia, Marco, me, Leo our lineage. Luca and his sisters are odder cases, like Natalia and Nora's uncanny closeness.

I do worry about Leo, of course. Buenos Aires isn't Piranesi or San Rafael, but then she's hunted with her father, holds her own among his brothers and their sons, the way we did summers at the farm. She also shares Guillermo's fascination with our enterprises. They're both attentive students of those arts, more so than me.

Both my grandmothers figured when I was growing up. They're so different. Giulia knew Alma before Natalia married Gio, because she sold medicinal and cosmetic herbs, oils, and ointments from her tiny shop on the market square and, less often, from a stand there dried bunches of herbs, I remember. I spent time with her and she taught me a lot about the plants of the region and their uses. It was one way I bonded with Maria, extending my knowledge to this new terrain. Together, we taught ourselves the rudiments of viniculture.

Giulia consulted with Alma, as did my mother. They shared a distrust of doctors when it came to women and children. Gio had his mother, so I don't think he ever saw a doctor. Paolo saw them. Matteo knew Alma, a stalwart among the Etruscans, but he had a doctor. Every woman in Piranesi saw Alma for something, I think.

Matteo introduced my parents to each other. His doing so made it a fait accompli, because he was prominent among our patrons and a supporter of my grandfather Carlo, organizing local commissions and helping him find them in other cities. My sense is that every woman in our family reminded Matteo of Giulia, and those memories were sweet to him. So, he was a doting presence in my childhood and a hugely helpful one when I married Guillermo. He provided Paolo with a lifelong template for how to be a patron, and coming to San Rafael enabled him to fulfill this ambition and repay Matteo for his faith and considerable investment in him.

"Men of action" is how Giulia summed up these men, excepting Luca, "the literate one" or "the poet," yet also "the envoy," adept at certain complicated situations, able to cut through the fog and do whatever a situation required to advance the family's interests. On a personal level, he suffers from women or rather women make him suffer, or they all suffer in some way. I'm never really sure.

Giulia and I share an indirectness that is foreign to my mother. I had the sense that they both avoided certain subjects or that Giulia avoided them, feeling that Natalia had her own life to live, the same approach I take with Leo. It would take Guillermo or Luca saying something to make me intervene, and neither of them ever has.

7.

It would be modern of me to blame Natalia for neglecting me, but untrue. As Alma pointed out when she first took me through my chart, my mother and I are inextricably connected. This served us both when the war really separated us. Afterward, we noted how we knew the other was okay, would be okay. Independence then was by design, partly because Natalia had her work, but also because it suited me and had no bearing on the love I felt for her.

Gio is our great Etruscan rock, the origin of the confidence that Marco and I have in situations that would unnerve many. Paolo and I both recognized it in Maria and Guillermo the anchoring effect of eons in a territory possessed by being in it, not by having it. Here, my brother said, let me give you back a part of what's yours. He said these words then laughed, even as he assured them he was serious, that they would have title to it, just as he did, would be landowners just like those interlopers.

Marco brought the company he took over from Carlo through the war, promptly shifting it to meet the allies' needs, and again as the postwar era took hold, always broadening its lines and sniffing out new markets. He took a lot of risks in the war, secretly supplying the partisans, hiding Jews, and holding the businesses of some who fled or were transported. Not all of the latter made it back, but he squared things with their families a fair dealer, as we strive to be. This aspect of a successful enterprise gets overlooked. There are many shortcuts to tempt entrepreneurs, but if fair dealing is omitted, it eventually proves fatal.

I'm sure some would argue. There are a lot of bastards running successful businesses, but karma may be a genetic trait, like a weak heart or a tendency to get cancer or some form of madness. With a family, as with horses and vineyards, generational proof is what's demanded. That idea always feels endangered. Will it be more so?

I don't think it's accidental that our family's women have a stake in its unfolding that comes close to making it a matriarchy, even as our men of action apparently run things. Luca understands this dichotomy and the role the women play, not unlike his own.

I was struck from the first by the southern sky and seasonal shift, and I passed my amazement on to Leo, talking about the differences and explaining the night skies of the two hemispheres, the stories of the constellations told to me as a child, the goddesses I admired. On Luca's episodic visits to San Rafael, he elaborated on the pantheon for Leo's benefit, particularly Artemis or Diana, her favorite. He brought her books on Greek and Roman temples and the sculptures and friezes that depicted her. Luca brought her to life, this goddess of the hunt. Leo was enthralled.

Guillermo is immersed in the night sky. He taught Leo to orient herself by it, and judge direction and movement, necessities when fleeing prey take one into unfamiliar territory. They read the sun similarly, adjusting to the planet's shifts. In this hemisphere, at least, they're never lost. I'm not as lost as I was initially, although I came by ship and saw one hemisphere slip gradually into another. I wish sometimes that the calendar here corresponded to the seasons.

There's a part of me that would like to go back, not necessarily to Piranesi, but definitely to Europe. I like Buenos Aires and could imagine living in a city like Paris or Milan. Yet I also like San Rafael. I've lived in Argentina for more than half my life, so, is this home? If it means keeping quiet about issues I care about, then no. Guillermo is quite at home now in Buenos Aires or Montevideo, mixing with the owners who pay royally for our horses and his consultation.

I speculate, but then so does Luca. Over coffee, he frets about the regimes of our respective, adoptive countries. He has a finely tuned ear for the politically untoward. He sees Peron as populist froth that obscures the military's love of oligarchy and its own place within it, "a problem too in Uruguay and Chile." The Red Scare in the USA will find echoes here, he predicts, "to our detriment." As always with Luca, his first thought is for the family and its enterprises. One more reason, he says, to get Leo on the road "before she torches the city." He didn't elaborate, but I can guess, thinking of Natalia's "scrapes."

9.

The persistence of convent schooling has me wondering. We do it reflexively, and it's not purely a gesture to assimilation or an effort to fit in we seem genuinely to be convent school girls, benefiting from mixing with the nuns and being steeped in their self-evident belief, the sincerity of it, long enough for it be salutary. This despite having our own way on matters like desire that are personal and nonnegotiable, and questioning the authority of the Church fathers.

At the university, I boned up on the Enlightenment and its effects on philosophy. I discuss it sometimes with Luca, whose knowledge of it comes from literature. We note how metaphysics was jettisoned and religion stifled in the name of progress, only to reappear in Russia and Germany in secular, totalitarian form. (The Italian fascists were more cautious in this respect.)

Religion is less about beliefs and more about our awe that we're here at all and a healthy sense of the value of any community that shares this. It's what made the Mapuche understandable to me this awe, how we situate ourselves in life, what keeps us whole not atomized. Convent school is one antidote and hunting from here to the Andes is another. They’re antidotes to life with its patterned randomness, its apparent ending, so final that we invent endless reasons why it's not, ladders over the walls time erects, the dead ends. To their credit, the Mapuche dwell on this much less than we do. To hunt is I suppose to be the randomness of something else, caught up in their randomness, the randomness of life itself reduced to a particular terrain at a particular stretch of time. What hunters learn is how to live in it. The rest of us improvise, mostly, but we learned how to do that at convent school or at least I did.

Improvise is imprecise. We learned to suppress our fears with formulae and bravado, to deflect, demand, bend things to our will, and yet maintain a surface of orthodoxy, a belief we shared with the nuns in the efficacy of prayer and with our peers in the efficacy of our personal deities, preservers of our daily lives beyond the promised bread, hearers of the bargains we offered, awe that it worked out, brought us here. I thank those blessed sisters, every single one.

Over coffee, Luca and I discuss our theories of type. He argues that we move between the poles of pure types. In between these two poles are types of lesser or greater ambiguity. They desire pure types to push their self-identity in one direction or the other.

I counter by saying that types are better understood in light of everyday experience. Childhood is ambiguous by nature, and our memories of it may cause us to reject a given type later or play with it. Luca concedes the importance of context, but adds that we have to distinguish between life in the world and life in the mind, and within the world all of its myriad settings, some of which enable us, if only briefly, to bring outer and inner together. We both remark that this is like the games children make up that hinge on imaginary places and situations that lift the usual givens so they can experience a semblance of the other an actual other or another in the mind or both, depending on who's playing. On their own, children conduct other experiments, not always to their parents' liking.

Am I a pure type? I think Guillermo is one. We briefly catalogue the family's pairings, which produces a fair amount of ambiguity, known or inferred. Giulia, we decide, is pure, at least in reference to Matteo, and perhaps a necessary pure for the ambiguous Carlo, Luca suggests. Gio and Paolo seem pure, like Matteo, but then there's Nora. Luca compares her to Carlo. I wouldn't know, I say facetiously, which makes him laugh.

Then he makes what I take to be his main point: type is shaped by desire, but this evolves, as it did with Giulia and Carlo because she had meanwhile shifted her desire to her work, with just enough left over for Carlo in his role as husband and father, a desired role for him as he burned through his apprentices and models. There's no hypocrisy in this, Luca feels, because humans will do what they need to do to make their lives work, and their lives evolve with time.

The world, though, is in general badly organized for this reality. Ambiguity can be a lot of work, especially if it means playing a part. Many of the ambiguous are happiest on their own, although some end up happily with others who share their particular ambiguity. Cities are havens in this respect unless (until?) they prove otherwise.

In conversation, Luca has provided a history of our family as he understands it. It's one benefit of living "an ocean and a sea distant" from Piranesi. It means that he's less forthcoming about his sisters and especially about Laura except as she sometimes figures in his expressions of regret for his "stupid affairs," as he describes them, the origins of which that is, the schism that arose in their marriage he blames on himself. As the decades pass between its origins and now, Luca's stock has risen in Laura's estimation, I gather, in part simply because the marriage continued, everyone connected with it more or less intact despite the turmoil that arises in such situations. Through Luca, I've come to understand some of the myster ies of my immediate family, particularly my mother and grandmother. His working theory, or one of them, is that desire is a problem in life that each person solves in her own way. Convention or orthodoxy is one readymade solution, but then life is usually drawn out, with ample room for the problem to arise again in new forms. Giulia exemplifies the ability of some women to burn through an excess of desire then live on the residue while turning their attention to their work. Others find long-term relationships that sustain desire without it overcoming them. Natalia is an example; I may be one, but in the context of a marriage without an appended lover. Men, Luca says, are all over the map. A few, like Matteo, know their own minds and arrange their lives accordingly. Most fail to do this, and many really don't know their own minds at all, either lurching from one thing to another, reactively or opportunistically, or responding to signs the gods set before them, likely for their own amusement.

I count myself lucky to fall into an apparently small category. Leo strikes me as a variant on Giulia, who Luca claims "lacks fear" and is single-minded about getting what she wants from life. Not an artist, Leo has something of that temperament. I say to Luca that she's like a man and he demurs, saying that as a follower of Artemis, she makes her way in the world of men with no fear at all.

The Mapuche hold the Andes sacred, marking their territory by the farthest distance from which they can still see them. They never built pyramids out of a sense of deference toward these mountains. The Mapuche's idea of their territory is based partly on the way they read into it then link it to reference points like the Andes as well as to the cosmos and microcosmoses. Everything is a signpost for them, and some of the signposts are rewritten as they pass by them.

Maria told me at different points that Leo will benefit from the Mapuche's traditions as well as from my Etruscan ones. Guillermo has also made this point. The Mapuche move adeptly in the world the Europeans have imposed on their territory, but they're also rooted in a deep past in which the Andes figure not only as a point of reference, but as a retreat.

Leo and I sometimes discuss how she sees this. It's one of the topics that she and Luca touch on. Luca thinks the world's divided between the rooted and those who set down roots, although it's an illusion, traced back everyone's people came from somewhere else. Some will perish if dislodged, while others can find themselves in a better place than the one they left, reestablishing themselves and continuing in a direction they carry with them like a compass.

My sense is that Leo has benefited the most from this innate habit of reading into places, and also from Guillermo's decision to teach her to hunt, to be totally at ease in the milieux of that life. Hunting is most of all a matter of patience, a foreknowledge of the game, and the self-assurance of the huntress, alert but unafraid.

For whatever reason, a Russian has befriended my husband. We're back in Paris after retreating to the country during the strikes, but Guillermo goes down to Deauville on horse business and his new friend sometimes accompanies him. I know him a little, a bureaucrat in genteel exile here after some misadventure, but until now we only nodded collegially. Their friendship leads us to talk. (I just found this journal, so am restarting it.)

Leo sent me a book in English of poems by Yevtushenko, the Russian poet. I brought it with me to the office and he noticed it, but made no comment. The Russians can be garrulous, but in the office, they scrupulously avoid controversy, fearing that we're all being overheard not just the phones, but the walls and lamps. Is it true? If so, a waste of time, as so little gets done. But later, we were in Deauville and the Russian phoned, so we invited him to lunch. Relaxed around Guillermo, master of horses, he let down his guard. One of his topics was my book and its main poem, "Bratsk Station." It was his project, the biggest ever, meant to industrialize Siberia, and it failed, despite heroic effort. All possibility of advancement vanished, but he managed to secure this post in Paris. He lost his faith comprehensively that was the word he used. (We spoke French. "It's lucky I'm fluent in it.") As the poem conveys, these monumental projects were genuinely "of the people," galvanizing the popular imagination with a future to which Sputnik and other Soviet triumphs pointed. For him, for his generation, their failure was existential also his chosen word. "So, here I am in Paris, involved with development in ex-colonial contexts, and I have no faith at all that the projects we fund can do anything."

By an entirely different route, I arrived at the same conclusion. I'm close to retirement in French terms, and it's appealing, but I should plunge back into the work I did that raised the generals' ire, witnessing the injustices visited on the indigenous, on women, labor activists, leftwing politicians, community organizers, but such work would be a death sentence, even with a diplomatic passport. It was only Luca's adept bribery and the French ambassador's intervention that got us to Paris in the first place, despite the UN's offer. Natalia was braver, I think, but no, she kept her head down and took notes.

14.

We went to Piranesi for Carolina's christening. It was good to spend time with my parents, Luca and Laura, and others. So many cousins! Piranesi is more or less intact, although my mother spoke disparagingly of the new courthouse, preferring the old one now being considered as a museum. We took a look and Leo told Natalia she thought it would make a good one. Leo and I also saw Nora, who brought up her prewar visits to Argentina with Natalia and Giulia. Leo told her that she wants Trent and Lina to visit their Mapuche cousins and get a reading. Later, she and Guillermo reminisced about their hunting days. It reminded me how close those two are, chattering away in their much-inflected Mapudungun. Back in Paris, Guillermo told me that he wants to live closer to Leo. We've made several visits to Modena. He's tiring of the horse trade, he said, and tired of catering to the wealthy.

If we do this, we'll sell the apartment in Paris and the house in Deauville. I like them both, but my life with diplomats, high officials, and cadres of experts and specialists is wearing. It's lucky, of course, that I have a secure position, which insulates us from reprisals. Everything in San Rafael is tenuous, but Luca assures us we’ll be back in business there once this all blows over. Ensconced now in Santa Barbara, Paolo writes to me wondering if he'll live long enough to go back I hope he will! As Matteo's son, he may not be as long-lived the Piranesi seem to be.

Natalia and I went out to her parents' old country house. The farmstead is still in the family, thanks to Alfredo, and the house is now a venue used for grand occasions. It's also a museum of their work, open to visitors and scholars. Giulia is gaining art-historical interest as a transitional figure whose work is figurative, cubist, and abstract-expressionist in turns. Carlo also has a following for his late work as a painter and for the small works, often in fired clay, that "experiment brilliantly with form," in Leo's estimation.

15.

One pleasure of our visit to Piranesi was seeing Marco. We favor our respective parents. Alma said that Natalia and I are bound together, which I think is true. Gio is closer to my brother. Both are level-headed and pragmatic, but Marco is also Carlo's grandson, confident and extroverted. My mother and Alma both maintained that Gio was the source of my confidence, but Luca credits Giulia.

Self-confidence is one of life's dividing lines. It's a line that people manage to cross despite crippling shyness or nervousness when they were younger. Crippling is the apt word, in my view, as children are fearless until someone puts the fear of God into them. If I have any justification for quitting Argentina, it's that I didn't want to die at the hands of yet another band of fascists, having managed to give an earlier one the slip. Luca would say that I got this from the Piranesi

When our Russian bemoaned his lack of faith, the doubts about his work that arose because of it about his work, I immediately felt that I have them too. Not even Natalia's scrupulously accurate list resulted in the postwar prosecution of most of the miscreants who made it. But the list does have all the weight of history behind it. It led me to say to our Russian that Yevtushenko's poem is enough, that its wonderful protagonist conveys in full the arc of progress, like those trains that famously ran on time, eventually to the camps. Levi as a witness to me outweighs the trials, still ongoing, the villains too old now for their parts, increasingly, yet pursued doggedly. Natalia calls this the machinery, with its relentless momentum.

No doubt this is just self-justification, assuaging my guilt. But then Natalia quotes Gio, who thinks most people just carry on and wait it out, idiots being part of every landscape.

Guillermo and Gio compared the Mapuche and the Etruscans. It was Maria who made the connection when I described my lineage: two peoples with deep histories and the ability to go to ground, if necessary, to evade the tyrannies of others. Guillermo said that this isn't unique to the Mapuche, but is shared by any indigenous people lorded over by outsiders: "When Jesus said that the meek will inherit the earth, He spoke for the indigenous, because the outsiders either go to ground themselves, marrying in order to assimilate locally, or they come and go, often destructively. But the earth that the meek inherit is sturdier than these demons. It has survived its own terrible upheavals and whatever has hurled in from outer space asteroids laying waste to a continent or killing off the dinosaurs, seas that freeze entirely or dry up, leaving deserts. It always heals, a living world we're all part of. We lived in it, hunting game and foraging, in a territory we grew up with and could navigate. It's shrunk and been fenced off even I've done this, a bourgeois too after marrying into your family, but the meek will take those fences down. No one can know how it will happen, but they'll prevail. If some grow impatient and take up arms, it's usually because the world they hear about, utopias of communism or capitalism, it hardly matters, inflames their imaginations,. They end up killing each other or dying at the hands of momentary tyrants. It's tragic and pointless."

Gio expressed some sympathy for partisans, having done his part funneling munitions from Piranesi into the hills. "Yes," Guillermo said, "I don't mean to question their bravery, just to point back to Jesus, the only real radical who ever emerged over here. He said it plainly: the earth is your inheritance. It's more than enough. When I met Paolo, I was amazed by his 'business acumen,' as they call it, but eventually realized that he understood nature itself husbandry is the word, but it's more like gardening than farming, because the relationship is so close, so caring. He brought this to the market, and had a genius for knowing where it was. Bespoke is Luca's word it. If Jesus knew that word, he would have used it. Paradise is bespoke because those who tend it care for it like lovers. Desire runs through the earth, and Jesus explains its first principle: as yourself."

Being with Leo and her children brings her past to mind. We are, each of us, a kind of distillation of others, inheriting parts of them and being influenced by them families, classmates, and the world itself chime in, but Leo is in some ways sui generis, raised as a man, as Maria and Guillermo felt she would need to be.

Later, encountering her in Buenos Aires, I recognized the marks my mother used to come back with, "scrapes" acquired in the country, noted without elaboration, the particular marks women leave, or this anyway was my assumption, my inference. I never asked, because it wasn't my place to ask, but I did have a very tangential conversation once with Luca, who assured me in his elliptical way that Leo could handle herself. What threw her off was that girl, the student from Mendoza who shot herself. I don't think it occurred to Leo that this was humanly possible, so she was shocked. It snapped her awake, was my impression at the time. Luca was her confidant or maybe her analyst, and he grasped her need for a change of scene.

I remember her interest in the church attached to her first convent school and her quite accurate drawings of how it worked. The church's homegrown exuberance was underpinned "not very elegantly in places, but effectively," she told me. She recounted this to Luca, who remembered it. He's very attentive, and he'd read about the modern architects in Brazil and Mexico. It all seemed to converge on New York, so he pointed her there.

I would and wouldn't have predicted it. I mean, it was there, the part that's observant and adept, but then also the part that was feral, that took real pleasure in the hunt, in the objects of the hunt. Guillermo was like this too, and they'd disappear for a week, hunting together. Maria saw nothing wrong with it just their nature, she said. It's hard to square this now with her older self, as if her passion for it burned away. That would be Luca's explanation, but Leo’s beloved Huntress may also figure.

Paris is awash in new philosophers. My mother follows them. I was surprised when she referred to Foucault, but he figures now in law journals she still reads. She's always had a love–hate relationship to the law courts. She sees their necessity, but bemoans their potential for abuse and the way the prevailing political climate warps them. The era of fascism wasn't an anomaly, she says, but an accentuation that showed the underlying tendency. Justice, then, is a shifting line; it’s society's supposed representatives who tug it, aided by judicial sympathizers of one ideology or another. In every generation, only a few judges cleave to the probity justice actually requires to be fair.

"Madness is a unique problem," she adds. "It's wrapped up with social justice in every respect, and part of the dilemma is our need to protect the community from harm, protect the mad from self-harm, try to treat those who can be treated, and decide what to do with the ones who can't. It's fashionable now to dismiss the idea of madness, arguing that it's a social construct. When we encounter madness, we quickly question this, but politicians have been quick to grab on to it and close the asylums and sheltered workshops, a tax drain, as their backers call it. We'll see soon enough if this is a false economy."

The courts are imperfect, sometimes terribly so, but they keep alive the idea of restoring what's lost when rule of law is set aside in favor of the whims of authority or oligarchy, their interests. She believes in the courts the way she believes in the Church. Both can be insidiously corrupted from within, countenancing evil in a series of small steps "corruption accumulates until the stink of it finally reaches public notice. It does immense human damage, civic damage, but finally collapses under its own baleful weight. Then the cycle restarts: shame and regret, recrimination and reform, and yet corruption returns because people forget, let down their guard. And there's money to be made politicians are TV stars now, pandering to the ignorant on a mass basis worse than in the 1930s." She shakes her head. "I still speak out about these issues. What else can I do?"

19.

I’m seated at a café's outside table. A man I don't know pauses I recount this later to my mother. In Buenos Aires Spanish, he tells me that if at any future point I comment publicly and negatively on events in Argentina, the response will be, in each instance, a random death, "a man, a woman, a child, a nun sacrificed to your freedom to speak out." He gave me a quick little smile and walked off.

At my mother's suggestion, Gianni filmed us in conversation about her experiences of Italian fascism. I spoke of Argentina as a haven from it, and Natalia noted how she and Matteo helped so many flee from Piranesi, thanks to the visas they provided. I praised Peron for his tolerance, noting how many Jewish refugees Argentina took in. I described coming to know the country as a paradise. Then Natalia described in sometimes harrowing detail the worst years of fascism under Mussolini and then the Nazis. She held up her list to the camera, telling how she recorded every act of treachery, "because eventually these evils end and an accounting is made, as in Heaven."

The film was shown in Italy and, subtitled, in France. I haven't seen that man again, so I have no idea if no one was murdered or if they did in a dozen or if that threat was even real to begin with, but at least one observer, writing in Paris, called it a political allegory.

"Your mother really looked the part," Luca wrote me. "Holding up her list, she was like a hanging judge from commedia . And you, Franny, coming on about Peron and Argentina like a good-will ambassador from the 1950s you were marvelous! Giulia always said the best way to get into their heads is by indirection."

One day in Deauville, a sportswriter asked Guillermo what he thought of events in Argentina. "I'm French, and I only ever follow the racing news. My mother lives in California. I think her main interest is varietals. Horses, vineyards are they political? They may be, I'm not really sure. What do you think?" Smiling as he said it.

There was an element of truth to my nostalgia for Argentina. It was so promising back then and I miss it at times, like Piranesi in my childhood, summering with my cousins.

I catalogue our contradictions or is it our wisdom? What comes to mind first is our Catholicism, an elected assimilation that we've maintained scrupulously since arriving in Piranesi. Guillermo and his mother fit into it, and Lina is destined for convent school, like the rest of us. This persists despite the wildness, arguably, of our desires, or their unorthodoxy. We decide, then we arrange, each in her own way, what to do with our desires. I married mine and raised our daughter. My mother built her life partly around Nora and vice versa, to cite Leo's theory of hunters and their prey.

It's odd then that some of us were at risk when they came after the Jews. Who was more Catholic than us? Where was the backsliding? But their idea was racial taint. Isn't this the source of our beauty? I look at Leo and think so. Lina has it too, a kind of lustrousness.

Bourgeois, this is our other trait: advocates for free markets and personal freedom within the boundaries of common sense. Arrange what can be arranged, grow our enterprises with immense care, live in modest affluence on the proceeds: this is how it is with us, despite my marrying a landless aristocrat given to hunting and horses. Even he fell in, despite an ironic distance that is in fact our trait too, never quite believing our good luck, always touching wood, warding off hubris, acknowledging the entirety of our shortcomings, but in a Catholic, not a Calvinist manner, absolved, free to arrange anew.

I remember being struck by Cosima's energy, so like Giulia's, a willingness to persist with what interested her and apply her skill to it, infusing the clarity of her observations with wit and panache and self-deprecation and sympathy, irony, horror. She smelled fascism like you might smell mold in an airy, light-filled room and wonder what was amiss that it could be here, for here it was, insidiously, a risk to every person she held dear. She sensed it early on, like Luca.

And an arranger who preferred society to being ravaged, just as her sister opted for motherhood and a quiet afterlife. Chosen with experience, as our liberalism endorses. When they came for Cosima, she was in Montevideo. Her trilogy was too much in circulation for them to do much about it; her notebooks were well hidden.

In Piranesi with Natalia discussing the nature of our work. In one conversation, she observed that Luca combined in one person the attributes of P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie and Jeeves, hapless and then shimmering in to rescue himself. She wondered if Wodehouse meant in some sense for them to be taken as aspects of a single character. We decided no, but later I told Luca about her theory, which made him laugh. "That's me."

I came to see Natalia because she asked me to help sort out her journals and decide if hers was a life worth reading. She seems doubtful, a self-doubt of longstanding, I gather, but on paper, hers is definitely a life full of incident, even if the stage set, as she calls it, is set entirely in Piranesi and vicinity, other than her visits to Argentina and periodic trips to other Italian cities, especially later when the fame of her reckoning list led to speaking engagements. Israel, too, for her and Matteo's work spiriting Jews out of the country.

But back to her question. Natalia contrasted herself with Giulia and Cosima, who she sees as utterly devoted to their own work, not always consciously. She remembered that I was the first to see the resemblance, which Cosima also saw once she was clear that she was a writer and had always been. Yet they were both women who sketched, as Luca also did, each in her or his own medium, declining to label themselves and in some sense content just to be themselves, although Luca much less so, being in internal conflict the way Natalia felt she is, too, always asking who she is, really, and what her work amounts to, if anything. Luca has this worse, she felt, because poetry is parsimonious with its laurels, and even then, no one really knows what will last and what won't.

I mentioned the last part to Luca, who said that the question has to be ruled out or no one would write poetry at all. "Poetry is useful for saying certain things that can't easily be said in prose. It also lets you set down images that strike you as worth setting down."

In some way, this reminds me of Natalia's assessment of her life as a lawyer and a judge, that it had an inner necessity but arose from outer life, its situations and expectations, "outer necessity, maybe."

A woman I know gave me an article by an English Marxist that she translated for an Italian journal five years ago. In it, he discusses the unique alliance of English city capitalists and large landowners in the country who farmed for profit. The bourgeoisie in France and Italy were mostly urban, leaving them in a worse situation than their English counterparts. But some of the Italian dukes and princes with hereditary emerged as bourgeois landowners. Caterina married into one such family, whose holdings stretched from Ferrara to Modena. (In a book Leo sent me, bought in New York, a woman named Jane Jacobs argues that the countryside is inevitably part of the economy of the cities that buy from it. That seems true.)

We are finally in the house Leo found for us and renovated, uphill from hers, at the border between “country” in the sense of foothills that are still more or less agrarian we have a kitchen garden and the wilderness that defines the mountains proper. Wildlife filters through, of course, and we daren’t keep chickens as Leo does.

Guillermo goes to England sometimes to see his clients. He notes their preoccupation with the countryside (thoroughbreds, shooting parties, fishing on private rivers, landed estates), and with peerage. "There are old leftists in the House of Lords," he says. He gave a talk in London on hunting, omitting the detail that horses are the Mapuche's prey, and now he's seen as an environmentalist, since the English are always eager to justify their pastimes.

Guillermo is wary of the French left. He thinks that the English, some of them, share this. Through an accident of history, England wobbled through several revolutionary periods. He thinks that an early episode of theocratic dictatorship immunized it.

I think sometimes about Peron, who I saw as a champion of my causes, but actually paved the way for the military, murderously asserting its "rights" in the name of a made-up "order" that rests securely on corruption. Yet in Peron himself there were impulses to break free of the past and put Argentina on a new basis, infused by peoples like the Mapuche. This was what attracted me. He reminded me of Matteo, I confess, a reflection of my own tendency to idealize our deusexmachina . It was naive of me to imagine Peron transcending his contradictions and staying clear of the generals with their own ambitions and their industrialist backers. And the bother of democracy, which they're only too glad to dispense with: Peron paved the way to this, but it may also be the nature of these self-made countries.

Guillermo tells his English audience that they're a model. He uses hunting to exemplify "living with nature, not against it" his slogan. It’s made him popular in the small circle he attracted through the horses. He's serious about it, but finds it funny that this tribesman in his bespoke suit, with his implausible history, is there telling the English, a few of them, what they want to hear. Are they serious? England is in a worse mess than France, with terrible poverty in the midst of huge wealth, and whole areas that are cut off from economic life. People are also part of nature. If the English don't realize this, is it because there's no peasantry? Its absence has left them with a huge amount of nostalgia, but what use is that, really?

24.

This traces back to my grandmother Giulia, and also to Maria, two very different takes on peasantry. Giulia loved the farmstead. She saw it as artificial, a showroom, yet it was proof of the family's rootedness. Maria saw herself as a midwife, bringing germs of ideas to fruition. This cycle, what she and Guillermo call husbandry, also made the Piranesi farmstead compelling to Giulia. They were immediately close when they met, both in their element, like Guillermo with horses, an intuition that comes from deep understanding. (Like Alma, come to think of it.) Everything with Giulia came back to her self-knowledge: not an artist, but one who sketched and painted the cosmos from an inner necessity to set it down. Not a courtesan, but a woman who desired a particular lover on her own terms.

The peasantry, which Giulia called countryfolk, is a leitmotif of our bourgeois family. I suspect that what saves the English is their attachment to the land, which is why Guillermo resonates for them. But this is also a sentimental attachment to a vanished peasantry. In Giulia's time, it hadn't vanished. Just as traders knew the sea and ports of call intimately, farmers knew their fields and hands They shared the same ingrained fears and propitiations. All they knew was insufficient if luck turned against them. Guillermo's sense of fate is similar, but colored by hunting, whose central mysteries are the bond of hunters and prey, the element of chance, how both accept whatever happens, their own injury or death included.

I went to Montréal to speak at a conference on the indigenous. It was my last hurrah as someone who thinks about them from a nominally international perspective. This, I ended up saying, is a problem, because to be indigenous is to be local, and the term, like "aboriginal" before it, lumps together a vast array of peoples who place themselves in specific territories. Even if they spill across borders, they are at most regional and often much smaller, tied of course to others, but separate the way dialects differ from one town to the next, or did. It's all breaking down, but there's a countervailing effort to stop and reverse this, as I argued.

Afterward, I was approached by a woman I remembered from university days in Buenos Aires, not a friend but an acquaintance. We started tentatively, which I saw was from our respective fears, so I recounted the man who spoke to me of retribution at my café table in Paris, which broke the ice. I also mentioned my mother, because her example during the years of fascism seemed germane. Tell everyone to make notes, I said. Hide them carefully. It will end, and the perpetrators will do what they can to evade a reckoning. These notes are the charge sheets of history. Even if a reckoning is forestalled, it will happen eventually, but only if there's documentation, and time gives notes like this remarkable veracity, not least because of their sheer quantity, the way they corroborate each other in naming names and pointing to crimes. My mother, I added, has always doubted that she did enough, but what she did proved to be enough: her list is famous in Piranesi, owing to its thoroughness, and its appearance brought out dozens more, a host of notetakers, each privately recording the terrors of their everyday.

"Tell them this," I said. "The stupidity of these murderous cretins will do the rest." After I went back, I made a trip to Piranesi expressly to recount all of this to Natalia, my self-doubting and yet persevering mother. "Natalia's list" is how I'd termed it to my acquaintance. I hope that name has some life to it. She seemed pleased and of course characteristically doubtful. I have the same doubts, yet the nuns who taught us never extolled martyrdom. Their Jesus lived in an everyday like theirs and ours. He didn't long to be crucified, it was just how it was. Take notes, he told his apostles.

26.

In Piranesi, I confer with Natalia about her journals. We discuss an organization in Paris that's aiding refugees from Chile. She spoke with the director, she said. I didn't know him, which I found embarrassing, although my mother didn't appear to expect that I would. I only follow events in Chile on the news, it's similar to Argentina: the Americans are implicated through the CIA and the Chicago economists. It means Guillermo and Leo can't fly into Santiago anymore to see their cousins. It's all off limits.

"It's far away, so no one pays much attention," Natalia said. She's growing frail, but her memory is intact. She regrets that she couldn't attend Paolo's funeral. I think Guillermo took his death the hardest. We went together to Santa Barbara. Paolo left San Rafael hoping to return “when they’re gone.” Alas, he didn’t live to see it.

My father remains a man of action, as Natalia typifies him in her journal, along with Matteo and Paolo. Luca meanwhile seems to have a girlfriend in Rome which perks him up like they did in Buenos Aires. "Just a friend," he says. "Not an affair, just talk."

Part of me wants to put my causes aside and focus on the family. They engage Natalia reflexively. Despite all my years of advocacy, they overwhelm me or maybe I'm just worn out they've worn me out, these devils and their endless minions.

27.

Luca says that Modena reminds him a bit of San Rafael. I'm glad to have his company. Leo also. Leo told me that Luca saved her life in Buenos Aires, filling in a few missing pieces in her upbringing. I can see that. Natalia would have been a better mother for Leo, but these things skip generations. Luca understood my daughter's inbetweenness. He also grasped her talent.

Luca describes his theory of sexuality as evidenced by our women. He sees me as the great exception and wonders if Paolo grasped this. He and Guillermo both admired Paolo tremendously, "a pure type," Luca calls him, who foresaw the freedom he'd win for himself in San Rafael, even if the generals undid it later. Guillermo is another. Leo is a return to form, the complexity of the women and their remarkable self-knowing. Leo sat and listened to all of this.

"Mads somehow fits into this picture," she said. "I often think about her. I found her death inexplicable. Mike's film pins it on her provincial upbringing. He thought she couldn't make the break from it that her future required, but I think the reasons go deeper." Luca nodded. "It cast a pall on your life in that period. You assumed that humanity fell into patterns the way prey does for a huntress, wily but ultimately predictable. Humanity can always surprise us."

"Her death shook me up," Leo said. "You told me to go to some other place entirely, pursue what the gods put me here to do." Luca nodded. "It was obvious you were meant to be an architect. It's said to be a man's profession, but you knew the basics on that score."

28.

In Rome, visiting Luca's professor friend. She came to his funeral and I caught up with her and introduced myself: "Professor?" She's recognizably Luca's type. She'd planned to head back, not inflict herself on the family, but I convinced her she was on safe ground and that I was glad finally to meet her. We broke through the reserve of two people who knew each other only indirectly. She's 38, unmarried or, as she said, "married to my work." Leo was a source of wonder to her, she added how she managed to find a place quickly, unlike herself "in these medieval institutions." She shook her head as if to dispel the thought. "Luca told me I should go to California. He ruled out New York City based on Leo's depiction of it as 'a city of lions.' I think he saw California as more open to experiment, less caught up in tradition. I argued the point, as the American east coast can be iconoclastic, but some of the iconoclasts drift west, I understand. History argues for Rome, but it breeds corruption! Yet it's also beautiful. It's hard to imagine living somewhere else, but Luca felt I should free myself from it, live the life I actually want, then come back if it still attracts me. It's foolish, he said, to be sentimental about a city if it works against you." I nodded. It’s why we left Paris, San Rafael, and Piranesi. We realized later that it freed us. Guillermo is the least sentimental of men, carrying his territory along with him. My sense of freedom came with a sense of guilt that Natalia's selflessness exacerbates. I haven't done enough. On the contrary, I'm on life's sidelines.

In Piranesi for my mother's funeral. Nora and Laura are the last of this generation of which Paolo was the oldest Nora in black, frail, and Laura a bit more colorful, with the energy of a businesswoman still engaged in her business, which amazingly includes everything she owned in Montevideo, run by her sons, along with the Piranesi part she reclaimed. Caterina came from Ferrara. Now that I'm in Modena, I see more of her. "Your mother was the rabbit who took up arms against the weasels," she told me. I liked that image.

A new decade, I reflected on the train. Leo turns 50, I turn 70. I miss Luca's political commentary, but Guillermo has stepped in. He thinks the world is in a big shift, quite different than it appeared to be when the war ended. "Not that we really noticed in Argentina." This is why the whole region slipped into dictatorship, he thinks. "It's like they have to experience it again and again to remember it."

My bond with my mother is unaffected by her death. We saw each other much more when I started this project in earnest, and I think I cleared up most of my questions, at least about her life in the world. Her personal world is there too, more straightforward than other matters on which she often wrote in haste or guardedly. Nora is remarkably present for one who often noted she was hidden. Of course, she was hidden still is, really, despite a loosening of things. Natalia was pragmatic about desire, helped in this by Alma, never shy about stating things plainly. She might also have seen how this made the marriages possible that both women valued. Luca would have put this more elegantly than I'm doing here, but I think he'd agree with my assertion of pragmatism. His sense of our family was predicated on it, "our genius." Guillermo has similar admiration for our bourgeois habits, how we turn all that we touch to profit, but he admits that this is a partial picture, that there's a streak of piety, and also of affection and her sisters, tolerance and compassion.

Piranesi is emptying out, from my perspective. Marco told me he felt the same. He came here mainly to see our parents. When I went to Rome, I stayed at his apartment, but Milan is his home, like the business. Piranesi is where that began, so he keeps the tie. I wonder if it will continue? We didn't discuss it. He may not know.

30.

Our Russian unexpectedly phoned from Milan, then visited. He was there for a conference. he said. He told us a story about a Polish economist, visiting the US, who had dinner with an American professor and his unrepentantly Stalinist mother. This was during the Prague Spring, a fraught year for a young Euro-Communist, but he bravely laid out his theories, hoping that news of them wouldn't filter back from the US hinterlands. The mother listened with mounting irritation. Finally, she slammed her fist on the table. "I stormed the Winter Palace!" she said, to which he had no reply.

"A long time since 1917," he added. "Indeed, 63 years," Guillermo replied. "I was seven," I added. He looked bemused. "I give it a few more decades. It will give way in stages, the edges first. When it does, fortunes will be made, but later those fortunes will be lost as the apparatus finds its footing and revives itself, just as it did after 1917. Nothing will change despite everything seeming to change. As Malaparte wrote, a new aristocracy replaces the one they shot, and the apparatus is soon back in business."

He smiled, almost to himself. "I've made provisions for this. No pension if it falls apart, but my years abroad have taught me the discreet art of squirreling it away. I have a second passport. The main issue is timing and of course placement: when and where? These are the perennial questions, There's a side wager whether the apparatus will take notice or lose track and will I live long enough to be noticed later? It's a version of the Trotsky problem. Not even Mexico is far enough away in these cases. Am I one?" He looked at us. "I spend my days like this. The conference isn't so interesting, but my mind is elsewhere anyway and it's usually racing. It's only here with you, among friends, that I'm able to allow it to pause."

Desire drives the women in our family in some sense, along with a feeling for timing in our relations with each other and with the wider world, the world as given and the bourgeois effort to work with it and within it, to make it work for us. We share the latter quality with our men, most of whom are less caught up in desire. There's a dialectic to my descent from Giulia through Natalia not just inoculating me against fear, but enabling me to see at firsthand how they dealt with desire in their respective ways, how they constructed lives that either moved on from it or built it in. The painting of Matteo and the fact of Paolo were as evident to me as the marks Nora left. She was an arrangement that outlived both their marriages. It left me determined to marry only for love, but Alma chalked it up to my nature. How does Paolo fit into this? Guillermo thinks that he intuited in short order the importance of the Mapuche as he and Maria personified them, and our mutual attraction. "Paolo is Fortuna's child," Alma told me when she visited, "like Leo." She saw Maria and Guillermo as proof of Paolo's luck, and my own.

This strange epoch. I wonder if I'll see the millennium? On paper, I've dodged every disaster. What I have to show for it is less obvious. Certainly, I've never lingered when life pressed at me. Compared to Natalia, this looks like cowardice, but she denied it, relieved and relieved again that I was out of harm's way. My accomplishments reflect their moments, just as Natalia's story in my hands reflects her presence these last few years and these journals, which raise a sense of obligation in me that never arose in Paris, that capital city of willful inaction, the barricades notwithstanding. All I managed to do was to point to Natalia's example.

It may be that the experience of desire “from necessity” led these two women to accomplish more than I have, that each made a pact with life that was the other side of their arrangements with it. I don't know. I may be more like my father in this respect. My brother is more naturally ambitious. Leo is in these women's great tradition.

Part two: Jo

1.

"What does she mean by 'his type'? What was Luca's type?" I asked Leo. "He liked women whose minds played across their beings," she answered. "That sounds ambiguous, doesn't it? But I can see them, and he helped them see themselves. His attraction to them was as an animator. Laura was still attractive when I first encountered her in Montevideo, but she’d been a stunner. Everyone was surprised she married Luca, the one man who couldn't animate her in this sense, despite their children. Yet they had a remarkable bond. She found Luca funny, which he was. Their schism was a disaster for him, but necessary for her, I gather, and he was the one man who saw this clearly. He said that the women just appeared, and he had a premonition of this, much as he and Laura seemed to recognize each other at the start. He felt that life had these counternarratives and he was helpless to resist them, but only the last one, his friendship with that professor who later helped your mother, proved lasting. Yet Franny was right that she was his type, but he found other ways to animate her. By then, he was fine with that. He felt affairs were impossible and envied the arrangements the women made, especially Giulia. She was his ideal, more so than his sisters. That tradition ended with them; we made our own arrangements, like him, but he thought we were better at it than he was, although it's clear that his poems owe everything to it."

She picked up one of Luca's little Greek heads. "He was good at seeing every side of things but crazed at times by heartache. Most of the men in the family, even the bisexual ones like Carlo, are more or less who they are, although Carlo made one big shift, a kind of retirement, I think. Luca was much harder to pin down. He was a consummate fixer, able to deal with situations that taxed others because they were drawn out, complicated. Life is like that, he'd say. It's a different skill from Ko or Marco, as indispensable as they were to me at other points. It's not a clear line, though. Marco told me he pulled me into his enterprise on Luca's advice, but we had a rapport like mine with Ko and Ro. Like Maria with Paolo. You come from a long line of such types. How I got Carlo's strand I'm not sure. Enough from the women, too, to live like a man."

How well did you know Cosima? I asked, reading her letters. "She left me a legacy," Leo said. "I met her when I studied in Buenos Aires. She helped me find work building stage sets she knew everyone in opera and theater in the city. That was her one interest in life, their world. The translation of her Milan trilogy was popular people identified with the period her books celebrate, but she was genuinely, deeply interested in performance and the culture it engendered. She was especially close to Luca, who organized the translations in Spanish and then in Portuguese, with editions by other publishers. I still get royalties from the television rights. And she loved my mother for taking her seriously as a writer and Natalia for turning her notebooks into publishable texts. Natalia was a wonderful editor, which she attributed to being a lawyer. She had an eye for the story and brought it out from under the welter of details Cosima habitually noticed, without losing their power."

Cosima's letters are to Franny. Her Montevideo journals are at her house–museum in Piranesi, but the letters are in the same vein, recounting episodes, especially with people she knew and observed. The focus is partly on Buenos Aires, where she had an apartment for the season. Her sister Marta sometimes joined her, as did Leo and Franny when they were in Buenos Aires, according to Leo. In those periods, her letters are written like a critic surveying a scene that her readers have also experienced, remarking on its highlights. She also wrote in this vein for one of the Montevideo papers, articles that Luca collected and published later.

"One thing that surprised me when I lived in Buenos Aires was how familiar she was with the film scene there. Of course, there was a lot of overlap, but she knew Mike and Mads. She asked me about Mads' death and even mentioned details about her family, 'gossip, probably,' that I hadn't heard. She and Luca were good at ferreting out the backstory of a given situation. They always had a theory."

Cosima and Marta were both striking as young women, their photos reveal. Leo still has her family album from San Rafael. Their splendor may have rubbed off on Luca, made his marriage to Laura explicable. This was Leo's feeling when we looked at the album.

3.

I share my work with Giulietta, my cousin and half-sister owing to the peculiarities of my parentage. Trent, my uncle who is also my biological father, is his father Gianni's filmmaking successor. Lina is focused on the family history, with particular reference to Natalia and Franny. Genia, Giulietta and Paolo's mother, is working on her own family's history, so they're actively comparing notes. Summers we spent on Modena always included staying at the farmstead where they have a country house. It belongs to Genia's family, who were once aristocracy in these parts.

Leo wonders what her foundation might do when she's no longer here to influence it. I wonder about my place in the world. Lina may be wondering the same thing, but I'm not sure. Of my parents, Lina is moody and self-critical, while Bren is buoyant and outgoing. Leo admires her devotion to mothers and babies. It is, as she puts it, a fucking miracle that Lina and Bren are a couple. I infer it's because Bren gets Lina and is okay with her neuroses, as Leo views them. Gianni was "such a reliable man," she told me, and Bren is Lina's Gianni. "We treated Lina as one of us, growing up, so her childhood was unusual in some ways." Well, mine too.

Leo learned from her father to see the world as a shared territory marked by paradox. He was "the only realist," she says, but it was a pragmatic, ironic realism, amused by his luck, bemused by his fate.

4.

"He was in no sense a primitive," Leo said of her father. "The Mapuche were into horses, cattle, and farming; hunting was a pastime, not what they did, but their idea of land still reflected it. It was my grandmother, Maria, who brokered the deal between her people and the newcomers. Guillermo's father died resisting them. An implied threat of violence is one tactic in negotiation, but my grandmother distrusted it, since it left her widow. She raised their son in this new culture, baptized Catholic and bilingual like her. Guillermo was culturally ambidextrous; Paolo and Franny saw him as a different sort of outsider, an aristocrat they instructed in their bourgeois arts. When my father explained how he saw 'territory,' Luca said it was like his idea that we carry what we’ve accrued with us from place to place."

A pause while she glanced behind us at the Apennines. "Hunting with him took every form, sometimes on horseback, other times on foot, with others or paired or alone. He was really patient yet always prompting me to test myself against whatever arose. I was on a horse as soon as I could hang on. I knew the night sky and the sun's arc as they shifted, how the weather changed, especially in the Andes, when to shelter and when to tough it out, how to keep my head. He showed me how the patterns of life persist in different guises, often harder to grasp until things unfold and you finally see the situation for what it is. You have to be alert if you aren't sure, especially to whatever seems familiar but might not be."

5.

"Franny struggles to reconcile Peron with what followed," Lina told me. "Chile under Pinochet doubly cuts Guillermo off from his family, yet Franny is relieved to be securely back in Europe. She also notes Guillermo's immersion in that part of French life that reminds him of his own in Argentina as horse whisperer, as we say now, a reputation he trades on that leads to his third act as an ecologist in the World Wildlife Fund tradition. She finds the UN incapable of meaningful action. They outlast Argentina's dictatorship, and she lives to see Pinochet seen off, but Europe breaks the hold of their past. All she feels she accomplished was to encourage people to document the horrors they witnessed, like Natalia's list."

I get these running accounts of her forays into the journals. I also hear, less often, the questions she's posing to herself. I learned from her to do this myself, not that my answers satisfy me. Convent schools give us verities we come to doubt and yet return to. Leo is also their product. They encouraged her to clamber to plumb the mysteries of form, and perhaps taught her how to be a woman when she chose or needed to be, this huntress Franny brought them.

6.

"Why was it a fucking miracle that Lina met Bren?" I asked again. Leo laughed, then turned serious. "The charts and readings lay out your nature, but you still have to figure out who's real among the facsimiles and poseurs. At the beginning, this matters less, but as your sense of what you're after sharpens, it can be a problem, because the truth is that only direct experience can tell you, at certain points, who another person really is. When you learn, it can be unhinging. This is true I think of anyone who figures, not just a prospective partner. There's an aspect of betrayal to it, even if it's inadvertent on the other's part not directed at you, I mean."

We were at her parents' house, but Lina and Bren were out. "A kind of fluidity runs in our family, with exceptions. Franny was one. Giulia would have happily spent her lifetime with Matteo if he'd been available, but she illustrates what was also true for me, a need for a suitable father. Gianni was that man for me. He understood me like Bren understands Lina. Fit and reliability enable you to take your joined-together life in stride, bumps and all. Or else there's an indelible bond, like Luca's with Laura, pulled by their diverging desires, yet allowing time to sort it out."

She glanced at a photo of her parents from their days in France. "I think luck runs in our family," she said. "We have our moments of doubt, but then we recover or are helped to recover. Luca helped me, and his professor friend helped Lina. She knew the world Lina struggled with, its particular human perils, predatory mentors and unreliable if not actively sociopathic colleagues. Luca's friend pried her out of Milan and off to Berkeley. The fucking miracle was her meeting her complement, reliability herself. Bren was my goddess's gift to us, wanting babies. One of life's conundrums is to find this other amid raw desire, intuition, reason, fate, destiny, our collisions with others' galaxies. Fecundity is there too. It's quite spectacular."

7.

Trent has always been in our lives. My parents named him as our father early on, and every time we visited, it was a little clearer how we both took after him. Genia is a writer and film critic she wrote about the two filmmakers, Gianni and Trent, and Leo pulled her into their orbit, "her orbit, really." It was Genia's idea for Trent to be our father, once it was clear that Bren would do the birthing. I learned the details from her. When I came for Giulietta's wedding, I stayed with them and Genia and I took the opportunity to talk.

Why Trent as donor, I asked? "Lina is so attached to her family that I felt she'd suffer if there was no actual connection. Bren was amenable. They were visiting and wanted kids, so I suggested it."

Why does Trent resist a DNA test? (I'd discussed getting one with Giulietta.) "Leo always says she wasn't sure. I've looked at photos of Louis Kahn and there's a resemblance, but he also looks like Leo's father. So, I think it's out of deference to her. There's also the film Nathaniel Kahn made. He and Trent have met Trent loves the film but he came away with the sense that there were already many claims on Kahn as a father, and one more would be an intrusion. Leo felt this, too. And Trent loved Gianni, of course; they shared a lot of instincts about filmmaking, among other things, two natural collaborators. Leo's relationship with her father was similar, 'an affinity, not an influence' is how she puts it. I think she saw Kahn similarly. Even if Trent isn't his son, Leo absorbed something from him and then made it her own. She took him to bed on a whim he was the one modern architect she respected completely."

8.

I went with Trent and Genia to their country house. The Piranesi have two connections to her family, Genia told me. "Ercole, the one who made us bourgeois and agrarian, bought bulls from the Piranesi. After we lost our estates, Ercole approached his former tenants and they bought them back together, making each farmstead part of a cooperative that the family managed on their joint behalf. Your family invested in that. The other connection is your grandmother's cousin Caterina, who married Cesare. Do you remember Federico from your summers here?" I did. Five years older than me, so closer to Giulietta when we were younger. "He's taken over his father's role as the go-between, serving customers among the top restaurants and the best food halls across the region. His father is the grandson of Caterina and Cesare. Cesare spent time in Piranesi and got to know two grandees connected with your family, a father and a son. They arranged the marriage. One curious thing is that Caterina's surname is the same as her mother's. I asked Leo, who she said that maybe, finally having a girl, it seemed fair."

I think back to Genia's comment about Leo pulling her into her orbit. We're a family of arrangers, ready to make something happen if it looks promising. Is it a model for the foundation? Whoever runs it needs a sixth sense. Why on earth then did Leo choose us?

"A small world," Trent said in the car as we drove here, apropos of something. It sometimes feels a bit incestuous, "like having a sibling for a father," as Bren once put it, but Trent in person dispels this.

9.

"I was immediately attracted to him. I think that's what she saw." This from Genia, elaborating on her "in Leo's orbit." Spending time with him, I find that Trent is at his best in the context of a task or a project warm, forthcoming and conversational. Not that he isn't a good father his daughters adore him, clearly but it's harder to raise things with him if they're approached directly. They come out as passing remarks, as if they just occurred to him.

There are parallels between our families, Genia said, if you take Ercole as a hinge, shifting a 10-century-old ducal family into his idea of the landed bourgeoisie. The Piranesi did this by a different route. Federico appeared at the party this evening. Paola texted me from Berkeley that he might come. She and Giulietta call him Freddy, but I remembered him as Federico a serious person, even then.

10.

"While we were seizing Ferrara, you ran the Spanish caliphate ," Genia said. "In Kyoto, women were inventing the novel, bedding whoever caught their fancy, and watching as the men jockeyed for power by marrying off their sisters." Don't overlook the Etruscans and the Mapuche, I added. She nodded. "When we look back, our different strands come forward. Lina tells me that being here has put her academic life in perspective. She misses parts of it, especially her students, but she thinks her field is the wrong one for her at this point. I'm not an academic. My articles and books reflect some fairly deep interests, but I tire of them. Yet as time passes, I'm starting to see how they relate to each other. Lina says she's writing her family's history to clear her head. I think mine has a similar impulse. You have to approach things obliquely sometimes, write a narrative that has nothing to do with them so your thoughts can marinate a little."

She added more hot milk to her bowl. "Lina has a characteristic of your family, which is to move quickly if the situation demands it. There's something visceral about its history. We made dynastic marriages, but the Piranesi women maneuvered by intuition. They burnt their fingers sometimes, I gather, honing the art of this."

She laughed when I noted that some of them married aristocrats "The famous Cosima, who had no children, and fled for Uruguay. And Caterina, who did and didn't. When I suggested that Trent be your father, I wanted somehow for you to get a bit of me, to be part of my family in the same way I'm part of yours. It's mad, I know, and ironically, it's possible now to have three parents, thanks to genetic engineering." I took this in. Whose orbit am I in, exactly?

11.

"Leo's approach to design always implies an unknowable future somehow to be contained, given identity, an organizing principle that will be self-evident to those who follow." Genia sums up after I shared my fears about the foundation. She feels it should be set up like the rest of Leo's work, as open-endedly as possible.

I asked her about Lina. "’Sprang like Athena from God knows where,' Leo told me. She and Gianni were affectionate parents, but neither of them knew what to do with her. She's brilliant, yes, but at what? Franny helped Lina with that, as did Luca's professor friend, but 'at what?' is an episodic question for her." I can relate.

Did she know Caterina? (I'm reading her letters to Luca.) "The generation of my grandparents. Cesare and his son Francesco organized harvest dinners at the family's farmsteads. She died when I was in 23. She lived in Ferrara, where her novels are set, but her memoir describes the Piranesi of her childhood and a visit she made to Uriguay before the war to see her exiled family. She saw Cosima in Montevideo and again later, but Giorgio Bassani was her champion." Lina is reading Bassani's NovelofFerrara .

12.

"They're really different, Genia told me. "Trent is a filmmaker like his father, unwavering in that ambition. Lina is more ambivalent." After dinner, she put her book down and turned to me. "Leo is like Saturn, its rings drawing the eye. Lina is like Venus, a cloudy planet, but she's also like Jupiter with all its moons. Perhaps she wonders how to put her two planets in dialogue?"

At night, to the sounds of a summer farmstead, this conversation replays in my head. Who is this Jo? Is this even the right question?

Leo always considers the outer world, wondering what to do with it. Genia is another model, not an academic but a journalist and critic respected in the cultural circles she inhabits. I assumed, growing up, that Lina had a community like Bren did, but talking with her now, it's clear that students were her main concern. They move through, although a few become friends. Her "community" is the atomized one of specialists, and she's steadily lost interest in it.

She told me that she and Bren want to rescale their lives. That's an interesting thought. Leo and I also talk a lot about scale, which she sees as the great conundrum, "the edge conditions past which we find mass society with its anonymity and shallowness. And yet everyone has individuality and depth, in reality. How to serve it?”

13.

"Hello! Here I am, living your foggy life." Paola texts with a photo from the window of my room. It's morning there, early evening here. "I heard you met Freddy," she added. He must have told her, confirming my impression that I made one. I try not to put too much store in this. Not unhappy, though, to see it confirmed. "I did," I text back. "Off to studio," she replies.

Genia says that Bren and Lina will join us tomorrow. Leo may come, too, but it's not decided. Brent will fetch them. He's been going back and forth, so his old Land Rover is here and he's teaching me how to drive it. (It would be ideal for Inverness.)

Paola's photo leads to a wave of nostalgia. The pandemic meant I was home three semesters out of eight, cutting into the distance I'd sought. Did I really want it? I was the one who demanded Lina come, but it was really Bren's idea, luring her. Like Franny and Guillermo, they're very much a pair. I said as much to Genia, but she countered that once back together, they quickly staked out their separate domains. She's pretty observant.

Giulietta texts me, asking when I'll be back in Modena. I've been so caught up in this place, my conversations and self-questioning, that I've let things drift a bit. She says that Trent stopped by and they talked about the film part of the foundation. She wants to update me. Maybe they should come up? She'll talk with her mom.

Putting my phone down, I remind myself that I'm codirecting this thing, that Leo chose us to help give it shape. She's not immortal. It would be easy to fritter the time away and disappoint her. Trent told me that she always hands off to others, so the trick is to understand her intent. His part of it is clearer. If Paola wasn't away, I wonder if Leo would have picked her instead, an architect like herself? But in our conversations, she emphasizes the social or human aspect that drove her work, despite her reputation as a form maker. "Yes, forms, but what people can do with them is my main interest."

Federico seems to appreciate that I call him Federico, as always.

14.

I'm awake and it's three a.m. My head's full of anecdotes family histories mixed with the incidental stories I heard about work, love, marriage, walking home or taking the train or going to a concert. Incidental is to say that they range from hope to hopelessness and often back again the friend who went away for a week and came back to an empty house, the boyfriend or husband proving to be sociopathic, the realization that he’s a dud, or that the marriage she hoped to break up wasn't breaking. In the golden age of the Piranesi, someone watched out for us, but it was a cultivating sort of watched that attended to our desire. It suited them, their journals say, and they managed to get past it and on with their real work. This Federico, here by chance or having a look? Because a look was what he was having, however much this pleased me. I could text Paola to ask if she set it up, but no to the texting, that is, not the thought that she set it up. If she did, it epitomizes the Piranesi motive: reading the mind of the other, intuiting her hunger.

Leo, where does she fit in this? Her choice of me and Giulietta has a basis in our interests and abilities, but is there something else? And where is my arranger? How did a tradition so obviously useful die out? Also, there's the small matter of my actual hunger, actual desire, against the background of my paradoxically conventional upbringing, in which not a word was ever said about it, yet I was dropped into a convent school in a city with a homophobic prelate. Don't mention the parents! Yet just enough Mapuche to be vaguely indigenous, unsure what box to check on those forms, because I'm as bourgeois as they come, in reality, despite my aristocratic halfsisters with whom I share a Piranesi father. Jesus! I say this aloud, invoking our patron, our guardian against hubris, our unconditional wingman, spade in hand. He sees me through my little hours, my few minutes, of doubt and despair, reminding me that I'm Etruscan somehow and Mapuche, more specifically, at home in the world despite my attachment to Inverness and the sea.

15.

An update from Paola: "He's smitten. I have it in text." I take this in. Lina's making dinner, in her element. Bren is talking with Leo about the clinic. Genia and Trent are talking with Federico, as I persist in calling him, who's here again. Giulietta grabs me. "I'm pregnant!" she says. "Only Vanni knows." He's helping Lina a man who loves to cook, which is lucky for her. I take this in. My life is unfolding in tiny cataclysms.

Earlier in the day, talking with Bren, I told her how I invoke Jesus sometimes and identify him with our family. "I was raised Anglican. I love the old service, but the Madeleine's priests are believers; that wasn't always true of the Anglicans. You Piranesi are attuned to Jesus as a reminder to rein it in, but He also protects you against randomness. I agree. Medicine frames life scientifically, but our stories all end with our extinction. I tell my patients, 'You might die. Your baby could die or be incapacitated.' I pick my moment to say this. I could quote the odds, but I don't. We're all gamblers in some sense and Jesus is there with us at the table. I'm there too, of course, because God helps those who help themselves."

At last night's raucous dinner, Giulietta revealed her pregnancy as Vanni beamed. Bren gave me a look that I think referred to our conversation. This morning, Federico and I talked. He opened with variations on "Who has this Jo become?" This appealed to me, and I returned the favor, wanting to know how he sees himself now.

"A négociant is what the French call it, in constant conversation with the market and the producers, in my case the wholesalers and chefs across the region, and the cooperatives on our farmsteads. It a bit like being a gardener, advising them, but my talents are market savvy and sensory assessment. What they produce is pricey, so does it live up to the expectations that come with that? I can also describe those qualities convincingly to the buyers. I have a feeling for both sides of it, acquired by accompanying my father, growing up."

I'd made him a cortado and he took a sip of it. "My father sent me to business school to test my interest in the role. What I got from it was a clearer idea of the border of mass and bespoke. It's not hard and fast, but you see where credibility is stretched. Mass sometimes wants to be taken for bespoke, and bespoke always looks enviously at scale, wondering how far it can go without looking foolish."

Another sip. "We carved out this niche when there were landed estates and someone had to handle the trade. It wasn't a road to glory except when the accounts were read out, when banquets were held, and whenever the family needed to display its largesse."

One last sip. "It seems prosaic, no? I find it interesting, though, a dialogue that's been going on for eons, interrupted by the stupidities of power but finding ways through and around. There's always a desire for it, like other things that mix pleasure with necessity."

17.

"But he is a gardener," Lina said as I recounted our conversation. She cited a Taoist parable: a Confucian mandarin points out to a farmer the folly of his slow approach to watering his plants, since machines exist to water thousands of them in short order. "Then I'd be a machine," the farmer answers. I have to repeat this to Federico, I think. Then Leo spoke up: "He's tied to the land." Giulietta added, "He lives in two worlds, He couldn't do his job if he didn't know them both intimately. And he trades on our family just like you do, mom." Genia laughed. "I write under my family name, so it must be true. I'm not sure 'trades' is right, but yes, we do."

I like this image of Federico, bridging between the farmsteads and the metropolis. He left earlier, but will return. I note suddenly that no one, not even Giulietta, has called him Freddy after I called him Federico. He's acquired some gravity. Not too much, though, hopefully. I like a little buoyancy, especially in bed.

18.

"I dreamt of your father last night," I told Leo. "I dream of him too," she said. In my dream, he was wearing the tailored suit he wore in the photo with Franny at Deauville. Trailing after him, sometimes forming a background and other times a cloud, was what I realized on waking was the territory he brought along. We sat on the terrace of their house in the rattan armchairs that are still there, and the cloud evaporated. He pointed at the view. "I like to pause here and then go back into the hills to talk with the wolves, the boars, and the deer. Some are hesitant to put roots down here, but I understood why to do so when I laid eyes on this," meaning the view, to which he pointed again. "It was the end of my journey, there was no point turning back. I planted trees here to shade my descendants. A few of them may come as far as I did in order to feel properly at home."

Then I woke up. In the half-light, I felt he was still present, although we were distant from that terrace. Brings it with him, I thought. It might be the view out to the bay or the next ridge. Would I miss them? Yes, I would, but Federico could make it worthwhile, even inevitable, I thought. 'Recent graduate lapses into fantasy,' I said aloud, but it was true, the thought was there and it seemed likely Guillermo knew it.

.

My siblings are on my mind. We're a cohort, but what, exactly? I asked Leo, since we're all her grandchildren, and she pointed to the unusual way we're tied together, a symbol she thought of how life has evolved to address the demands that télos makes on it. She reminded me that she's an only child, unusual in both families. This may account, she said, for her close relationship with her father growing up and her independent nature.

I think of Ben, my amiable brother, very much Bren's son, drawn by medicine at a young age and just going with it, the way Trent was drawn by film and seems very much Gianni's son, although maybe not. Such ambiguity floats through the family. Perhaps what floats through is a tolerance for it in its various forms, inner- and outer-directed. Leo ventured a theory "in Luca's memory" that the Piranesi unconsciously seek safety without really knowing what it means, even as they doubt it's possible. It can take such forms, she added, as assuming another identity, if this is possible, or wearing its clothing, if it isn't; and appropriating the bloodlines of any and all available primordial cultures."

Paola texts: "OMG, I'm dreaming in forms like grandma!" LOL, I reply, but it's also possible that her father's lineage skipped a generation. Our father's, I should say. My parents don't fit the tropes, but I give Lina the edge as the dad. Bren was put on the planet to be her helpmate, her among many others. Lina is a bit selfabsorbed, there's no way around that, while Bren is out to save her small part of the world, including us, thank goodness. I feel closer to her because when she's with me, she's there. That this is bedside manner doesn't make it untrue. To Genia's point, it's who she is.

20.

I've been staying at Federico's primitive hut. We're an item. The path to this included a road trip to see the cities where he plies the cooperatives' goods. Each city has its own network of suppliers, and there's a farmstead or several to cater to its needs. Federico has an encyclopedic grasp of these long-established relationships, "sunk knowledge," he calls it, that would be lost if he left the business, for it is a business, and not a particularly easy one, despite its longevity. His hut is a stone cottage on a farmstead in the vicinity of Ferrara, the family seat and the eastern end of its territory. They have properties across the region and he has the use of various apartments wherever he does the family's business. Our knowledge of each other thus far has been gained in such places, a timely break from the collective Piranesi. He's in Ferrara now and I'm here in the country writing this.

Federico is the same wherever he is, in my observation, and aware that the ideals he values come with contradictions. He speaks admirably about Leo's efforts to give scale to the bespoke. “A lot is broken in agriculture,” he says. “The EU isn't helping. It should be possible to find a middle ground, but much weighs against it. Yet it's crucial to resilience. Whenever you look into mass in an agrarian sense, it doesn't add up. It's either logistics or chemistry, and the cost is too high, environmentally. It's also bad for people.”

Regions are the largest possible area when it comes to scaling "sound agrarian practices," as he puts it. I mention home, as I still think about it, despite the intervention of college and Modena, and then blurt out that we should go there together, then wonder if he'll find this be off-putting. He picks up on this. "I'm not irreplaceable here," he says. "My work is an extension of my childhood, and I feel uneasy about abandoning it, but your region is another agrarian one like this that could be scaled in the manner I envision. Looking ahead, I could imagine our making a business of such a process, once we prove it. I'm not sure I want to be a negociant my entire life. It may be why my father insisted I get this schooling!"

I love this reply. I met his parents in Ferrara. It went well.

21.

While Federico acknowledges his family is bourgeois by choice, he's focused on limits and the tendency to ignore them that capitalism's cyclical self-destruction reflects. Bourgeois democracy is better equipped to deal with this, he thinks, being freer of ideology. China is grappling now with this tendency. He believes it will go badly. "Entrepreneurial better describes you than bourgeois," he says. Pushed by circumstances to diversify from locally bespoke to larger markets, we reached an apogee with Leo. Her tendency to let others run with her innovations after piloting them, using licensing and regional partnerships, has agrarian possibilities, he believes. It's hard to ignore the longevity of his family's relationships with its farmsteads, so it might be better to find roughly comparable entities to cooperate with on a wider basis. "Leo's model," I say. He nods.

I agree that "entrepreneurial" better describes the Piranesi, who "could make money from anything," as Leo said, quoting her father. He, anyway, was proudly bourgeois as a kind of embellishment of his native aristocracy. Not unlike Federico's ancestor Ercole, who made lemonade so successfully with the lemons handed his family.

In a passage in her journal that I just read, Natalia writes,

This dreadful period we've lived through and are now coming to understand in specific terms is captured for me by the camps as the mechanical aspect of state murder ratcheted up in efficiency to the factories of "scientific management," and the murder of some 600 civilians men, women, and children in Oradure-sur-Glane, burned alive in the barns and a church to which they were herded, an act of depravity and blasphemy by "hardened Nazis," as they're called now in postwar accounts. Fascism oscillates between these poles. That we had smaller versions of its oscillation doesn't let us off the hook for the crimes our fascists committed, yet it takes my breath away, the industrial scale and the wanton folly.

Now we watch as certain people try to exonerate themselves. That they do so is understandable, but I lament the tendency to permit it on the grounds of expediency or a sense of "where will it stop" if a reckoning is made seriously. Italy is worse than Germany in this respect, but even in Germany, the prevailing bias is to let it go, imagine that the worst offenders were dealt with in the trials or will be hunted down, leaving others to be rehabilitated or, if not, to write their self-serving memoirs in a bid for sympathy.

It's an illusion to think fascism has been stamped out. It has a hundred disguises, but its central theme will continue. As the horrors of the last two decades are forgotten, they too will recur.

I had to google this village. Jesus. Lina compared the war in Syria to the Spanish civil war, saying it was a warmup for something worse. Is the Ukraine that something? It seems equally wanton.

Franny often commented on politics. Looking back at Peron from Paris, she saw how populism led to fascism in its military form, a feature not just of Latin America, she noted. Her Russian friend predicted his country's immediate future, but also Putin's petrofascism. Who designs their uniforms? Giulietta asked, putting down her phone. "Now that's a Milanese question!" Leo said. "They do look like duck hunters."

I'm back in Modena. In Ferrara, Federico proposed marriage.

23.

We laid our cards on the table. He went first. "It's hard to leave." I nod. "And impossible to give you up," he added. Is this a marriage proposal? I asked him. He looked at me. "It is. If it means living in California, then I'll do it." I answered, "I've given it a lot of thought. When the pandemic lifted, I came here immediately, I notice. I want to make a life here, not somewhere else, and I want to make it with you, Federico, so yes, I accept. Absolutely."

Paola wrote me that she misses her boyfriend and Modena. She finds her architecture studies both disconnected from and overly connected to reality as she understands it, but this, she adds, may reflect this odd region, which is recovering from Tech and the pandemic. Everyone seems in shock. She'd like to come home.

I feel a bit like Franny must have felt in San Rafael, so distant from Piranesi, deciding to cast her fate with Guillermo. Federico is not so landless, but I identify with her youth and appreciate her confidence. Nearly a century ago, that decision, and now three generations of her descendants are gathered here.

My parents were "supportive but wary" in Left Coast fashion, worrying that a summer fling was being cemented prematurely. But Federico called on them, asking for their blessing, which they gave, his sincerity being manifest. He's central casting. These negociants don't lack for charm.

They say that Franny knew at once she would marry Guillermo. Can it be true? I think she looked back and saw a trail. Leo told me to come, I reflect. Little with her is accidental, I've come to realize.

Trent and Genia are on board. "You'll even have a title," she said.

24.

"Who is this Jo?" I take inventory of my foremothers. Lina is the only scholar, although Leo says her mother was a serious student. My experiences to date with higher education remind me of Leo's account, gravitating toward what appealed and evading the rest. I lacked the singlemindedness of Ben's long march toward medicine. Could I support myself? It seems doubtful, although stories abound of equally feckless ones finding footholds in strategy and such. Even the scholars are competing for those jobs now, as academic posts are fewer and pay worse now, Lina says. She backed the grad student strike and disdains the bloated, overpaid cadre of administrators. Things certainly ground to halt when they struck.

Am I sidestepping this dilemma? Doubly sidestepping it, as the family took me on and now Federico's taking me on. I don't dream of forms, like Paola and Leo. I have a good mind, if I say so myself, but my efforts on behalf of Leo's foundation are questionable and I keep waiting for her to express exasperation, but she doesn't. I'm no Ko, however. She'd have it up and running. What am I resisting?

Why is Federico's project so appealing?

Tangibility, for one the same resonant sense of "land" that I felt in Inverness. Purpose, too seeing how much it matters to Federico and sharing his conviction. But both are present too in Leo's work and Gianni's. Leo told me that while she gave her archive to the polytechnic, she doesn't trust it to handle a bequest wisely. It's like Lina's reservations about the university. Could there be a school? Genia and Lina could run it. They're at a similar point, wanting to shift things so they do more of what they genuinely want to do, in a setting that's small enough to almost run itself. Is it a school? That's probably the wrong word, although certainly Lina loves to teach. An institute, a seminar, a lab, a studio something that combines study with making, that invites conversations and builds on them. What Federico has in mind needs this sort of apparatus. Finding a place for it here is one piece of this thing I'd like to construct. It's a Leo sort of thought, this, my own version of dreaming in forms.

25.

"Maybe just call it a foundation," Genia said. She's here talking with Lina and, finding her on a terrace, I told her my idea. "Foundation doesn't suggest expectations or point to fields or professions. It's open to all sorts of things that aren't typically found together but in the right hands might cohere. That sounds right for the Piranesi."

Can it survive without Leo animating it? "She told me once that she's a big fan of lateral thinking because its creator, de Bono, saw that the path to a good idea goes through a lot of obvious or stupid ones, so, let things emerge through dialogue. I imagine she wants it to have a form that's open-ended about exactly what it does."

The famous ambiguity of the Piranesi, recast as a virtue. But likely it always was a virtue, "flexibility" in light of events, and principles like honest dealing, personal pacts with the gods, no to hubris but yes to ambition and desire, a scrim and exit strategy handy, ironic distancing, a layer of calm. This sums us up, I think, and now I'm marrying into Genia's family like she married into ours, another dip into another gene pool, more rooting, possible added safety.

Modena Foundation sounds plausible, although Ferrara, scene of our ongoing debauchery, is growing on me. Eros attaches to such places, as one of Cavafy's nights-in-Alexandria poems makes clear.

Have you ever seen wolves in the mountains? "Yes," Leo said, "and that's an odd story. My father often hiked up to one or another of the huts we made together. He would leave early and return before dark, but one evening, he failed to return. My mother telephoned, and I drove up to their house and, without giving it much thought, set out with a headlamp and the one clue he left behind: a note on the table that said "No. 2." The huts were numbered, and I guessed that this was his destination. The note itself was unusual. He came and went, completely at home in the mountains."

She shifted in her chair. "I knew the path quite well because we'd traversed them a lot while the huts were being built and I went with him sometimes. There was a moon, so I didn't need the headlamp. The second hut marks an edge, my father told me, beyond which the real nature of the mountains started. Like all edges, it was porous. I also remembered him telling me that wolves are like cougars and jaguars in that it’s possible to befriend them. The second hut lay at the upper end of a meadow. I saw that a man, likely my father, was seated, propped against the wall, his arm draped over a big dog, on first glance. Alerted by my footfalls, it rose, larger than I thought, and gave a low growl. I stopped, and opened my jacket to let the wind carry my scent. It sniffed the air, raised its head, and howled, and this was picked up by other wolves apparently in the vicinity. I'd come closer, but it turned to my father and licked his face. Then it retreated uphill into its own territory. My father was dead, I saw, but peacefully so. There was an emergency phone in the hut, one of those old wind-up ones connected to foresters lower down. I told them my father had died while hiking, probably a heart attack, and we were at the second hut. Bring a stretcher. They sent a helicopter. Times had changed and medics were called in as a bureaucratic precaution, even if it was medically useless."

Another shift in her chair. "I sometimes wonder if I dreamt it. I never told my mother about the wolves, as it would have frightened her. My father wouldn't have mentioned them, either, She put up with our adventures when I was young, but she avoided the Andes. A city girl at heart, her interest in nature ended at their fence line."

27.

At dinner, Lina mentioned Bassani's NovelofFerrara She said it reminded her of Natalia's journals, tracing how fascism made its way to Piranesi. Federico said he'd read him. The repercussions of the Jews' removal from Ferrara are still felt there, he added. The city's bourgeoisie deserted them, despite their long presence, only abandoning the fascists when its own interests were threatened. Lina described her book's thesis that hostility to the Jews split the bourgeoisie after WW I. This led to a discussion of modernism.

Leo cited Ivan Illich's critique of the Enlightenment for defining and applying universals, and its overconfidence in science and technology. She noted that modernism had two traditions: the locally aware, humanist one of the arts-and-crafts movement; and the hubristic and exploitative one of industrialization. Traces of both still unfold concurrently, often by the same architects, oblivious to the contradictions in their work. Yet some can look critically at it and preserve the local without losing sight of the question of scale.

This applies to agriculture too, Federico said. The terrible effects of imposing universals onto locals are only too clear, yet the sheer demand for food makes it harder to resist its continuing imposition.

Healthcare too, Bren added. "It's a constant battle to keep track of the individual patients as human beings rather than bodies with conditions, to know them in a more personal sense, so you can talk them through the arc of pregnancy and birth meaningfully." (I noted to myself that this remark had more resonance with me suddenly.)

Leo felt that this dilemma is built into life, how the local vies with larger forces even to be heard, let alone preserve its prerogatives. If the Piranesi have any claim to evolutionary success, it's how they've managed to find fertile middle ground between the cosmos in its many forms and the local that's its immediate base and opportunity. "We also benefited from the older cultures we married into." Lina said that this was characteristic of the Sephardim, assimilating by intermarriage and constantly extending its idea of family. It worked for some but not for others, but our inherent wariness led us to have a Plan B. Every port hop probably reflected one.

At dinner, Lina raises her objections to Slow Food. Citing Laurent Berland, she argues that junk food has its place. Federico listens calmly. Leo notes the precarious situations that many live in, while supporting his desire to give scale to sounder agriculture.

"Tobacco is an example of how junk food might evolve, left to market forces," he says. "Stung by its association with ill health, the industry is trying to vape or warm its way to a post-smoke product line that holds on to the smoker image and of course the nicotine. But junk food was there earlier, adding vitamins and non-cancerous dyes, touting each and every innovation as healthier. I don't think an arc like this gets us anywhere. It would be better if we touched the mass market more frequently, the way the wine industry manages to do, steadily improving things at both ends in order to educate taste and create a demand for sounder practices in the vineyards. I know, apropos of Leo's comment, that this doesn't solve the precariat's issue of falling below what such producers can economically deliver. This is like housing. You have to subsidize supply or demand. Right now, there's no appetite for subsidies beyond the subsistence level."

Lina objects that for some people, nutrition may not matter. "Yes, and convenience is also a factor. Inadequate housing and lack of time work against cooking your own meals, but this is also a lifestyle choice," he replies. "Yet there are ways around this, like cohousing and communal gardens. In wartime, there's more interest in these solutions, then the market reasserts itself. But they exist. They work. It comes back to education, demonstrating again what's possible."

Leo notes how she used this strategy to show people how to live in new ways, using products that better met their needs. She feels that the case for farm to table, conveyed in human terms, hasn’t been made effectively, but “your coops have a head start on that."

"What brought me back to this," Federico says, "is the example of my father and our branch of our family, tied to the land and proud of what comes from it. I think this is true of many family enterprises, a sense of purpose that's genuine, seeing profit as the means to reinvest, weather reversals, hand them on to the next."

Leo beams at him approvingly. I sense that Lina is torn between her not inconsiderable family feelings and her theoretical apparatus.

The next morning, Lina sought us out. "Why am I resisting the points you're making?" she asked rhetorically. "It goes back to Berkeley, the way Slow Food manifests there and junk foods are condemned. In principle, I agree, but the assumption is always that nothing can be questioned. I have questions, and I've raised some, as if I were back there, my skepticism prompted, but what you're proposing is actually an enterprise like others our family took on."

We were out on the terrace, and she paused to take in the view. "I support what you propose. Let me be clear about that. It takes time for my head to clear, to remember that an idea can have value, even if some of its advocates try to make a religion of it. I don't hear you proselytizing. If Leo was with you totally last night, it's because it's exactly what she did across her career. People think of her as a formgiver, but scaling what doesn't seem very scalable is her specialty."

I set my notebook down and spoke. "Something else runs through all of this. A calling is the word I'm after, leading to art, poetry, lovemaking, memoirs of Milan, and creches and clinics that support women and children. If some of it seems frivolous, it’s the yeast from which life rises." I mostly take the notes but find my voice on occasion. "It's our religion, our orthodoxy," I added. "Also, not to change the subject, I intend to marry Federico this Labor Day weekend." The yeast waits for no man, I thought but didn't say.

30.

Thanks to Genia's interventions, we found ourselves in a tavern as old as the church where we wed not long before. I had proposed a civil ceremony, but his parents might be put off, Genia said, and things were unorthodox enough. The tavern is along what seems almost like a country road, but is part of Ferrara proper, left as a remnant of a grand plan for the city by one Federico's ancestors. The food is medieval, he told me, a culinary history kept alive by the owner. It made for a memorable meal within this long, dark space, out of the midafternoon’s late summer heat.

Genia rose and made a short speech directed at her cousins, his parents, noting that Ben and I were "practically siblings" of their Giulietta and Paola, and that Federico first met his bride at the farmstead tended so well by Giorgio, his father, in his role as its négociant. Across this summer, she added, she had come to know us both, this couple, Jo and Federico, who found each other again and will make common cause in the service of our agrarian family, like Jo's ancestors did for our Ercole, many years ago.

Then Giorgio rose and replied in kind. Taking the hands of Elisabeth, his wife, and Lucrezia, his daughter, now my sister-inlaw, he welcomed us to their family, our family; welcomed Ben and Paola, who had flown in from Berkeley for the occasion; welcomed my parents and Leo, noting "their many good works" in Modena; and then said finally how happy they all were on this marvelous day.

The rest is a blur, but we ended up at the Ferrara house and then made our way to the primitive hut, the scene of our past revels.

31.

"Are you okay?" he asked after I threw up one morning. I could see him running through what I ate, sources of contagion, but there were none, I assured him. "I'm pretty sure I'm pregnant." He turned pale and then flushed, a sequence that pleased me immensely.

In TheWhiteGoddess , Robert Graves mentions in passing that Roman babies born in May were mostly the result of Saturnalia, a kind of mid-summer lid-lifting also popular in the sun-starved north, and so it was that we, two besotted celebrants, are blessed with this possibility, quite fitting for an agrarian-minded couple. The yeast and I must have a secret code, because I knew and didn't care.

This was confirmed, given the family's OB/GYN close at hand. The news was relayed hither and yon. Genia was ecstatic. "I never understood why everyone delays. Get on with it is my view."

I was worried that Leo would feel Giulietta and I were letting her down, overlapping our pregnancies like this, but she shared Genia's enthusiasm. We were alone when I told her and, quite remarkably, she said that she felt all along that I was intended to be here and that Federico was part of that intention. "Perhaps too you were the lure we needed to draw Lina here, to free her from that life so she could join Bren and make another. No coincidence that you found those boxes, and maybe that Franny left them there for you to find."

Part three: Lina

1.

When Giulietta and Vanni married, I found myself speculating. It seemed premature Jo is young, I told myself. More likely that Ben will marry first. Still, I pictured Trent giving Jo away. I thought at the time that Genia would likely resist this, even if it his being her father was her idea. And then Jo married into her family! Yet she wanted the opposite of Giulietta's extravaganza, which was what Genia hastily arranged the minimum that decorum allowed, which meant that church, priest, and celebratory feast were modest. But Jo is like this, her beauty so incidental to her that it's a shock on those occasions when it's brought out. Leo gave her one of Franny's Parisian dresses to wear. It fit her without alteration and she looked stunning. I have no idea if Federico's father wrote down his remarks beforehand, but the emotion he conveyed said he was won over.

I felt like a fifth wheel in some sense, despite also feeling love and pride for this creature we raised together, a surfer girl and coastal hippie whose agrarian streak we failed to notice. This was biology talking, though, and I shook it off. Fortuna, I reminded myself it's not a good idea to resist what she proffers. And now she's topped it!

Bren was and is ecstatic. Her baby. I get it. And I see her in Jo, a beauty also worn lightly, but yep, I fell for it. Federico's a human after my own heart. Ben and Paola meanwhile have gone back. Do I miss it? One terrace is as good as another, but where's my convent school and the fall semester's innocents? And what besides a history am I composing? These questions lack answers.

On a whim, I visit Piranesi after a long absence. I stay at a small hotel not far from Cosima's house, where I stop in later to introduce myself. First, though, I walk the harbor, locating Luca's old bolt hole, now my grandmother's monument. It's closed, but there's a number to call to make an appointment to see it. I call, telling the woman who answers that Natalia was my great-grandmother. Wait there, she says, and in seven or eight minutes, she appears and lets me in. Luca's writer's desk is still there, along with the divan. The woman steps outside to smoke and I sit briefly at his desk. I can't resist and also sit, carefully, on the divan. It appears up to its task. This homage is repeated later in Giulia's studio.

I sat at Luca's desk in the interest of sympathetic magic. Is it Franny who mentions it or Leo? More than hunting, I surmise, in her Mapuche tutorials, a counterpoint to the nuns and university, but then perhaps coming up again at Cooper Union, the osmosis that characterizes her way of working, although that might be us, the Piranesi us. But anyway, I need it and this desk may have it.

Then I visit Giulia and Carlo's country house. The harbor curator kindly phones her colleague, so I'm shown in without a reservation. We talk and she explains how the house and its art are kept as they were, but now there's an annex that's partly for storage and partly to show a changing array of work, there being so much of it. She takes me to see it and while there, I notice a painting that reminds me of the famous head of Matteo the same size and painted in a similar style, of a woman who looks uncannily like Matteo. "Who is this?" I ask. "On the back, Giulia wrote 'Caterina," she replies.

3.

On the train back to Modena, notebook open, taking stock. The twin to Matteo stays with me. (The curator let me take a photo.)

I chalk Jo's marriage to Franny, who wasted no time once she saw her future in Guillermo. I had to pass through thickets of timewasting men, each initially plausible as well as desirable, then falling short in their different and sometimes disastrous ways, causes of unhappiness that led me finally to quit Milan thanks to something like divine intervention on the part of Luca's friend, my patroness.

Genia is also at the back of this somehow. We're closer now than ever, thanks to our parallel projects and now this added tie. I'm also grateful to her for stepping in, gauging how best to spring us on her cousins, mindful that Jo needed to arrive unencumbered and be free to explain herself on her own terms and in her own sweet time. Bren has these issues too with her Central Valley family, not necessarily on the same page with us politically or culturally, but time and kids layer particularity on these reflexive biases. One reason, though, why Jo kept the wedding tiny, but its announcements widely shared.

Bren is thriving at the clinic. She strove to create a kind of haven within Kaiser for her moms and babies, but this is the real thing. I don't yet see a comparable situation, but I'm also immersed in this history and how to convey it meaningfully. As Natalia asked herself, is it a story anyone would want to read? This is my problem, though, not the family's. The raw material is compelling.

My convent school idea keeps coming back to me, some way to reduce the scale of my scholarly and pedagogical life so that what appeals to me is still there, but with time for real conversations with colleagues and students, and room to write in a broader sense. I was struck by Luca's observation that his real work finally came forward after he stopped the rest, valuable to others, doubtless, but an evasion. Does such a school exist or will I need to invent it?

The passing scenery is a blur of fields and occasional villages. The only immediate passenger is a composer, apparently, his score laid out on a table like mine, a pencil in hand, intently focused. I thought of a passage in Natalia's journal where Nora speaks up for visibility. It's what we all want, to be visible as we are, others seeing us as we see ourselves, inclining towards us, taking pleasure in the sight.

Tolerance isn't what Nora wants. Her bravado is intolerant of it. Like her fingers under Natalia's nose, she wants acknowledgement. Across time, the desire for it is likely undiminished, while receptivity waxes and wanes, or has its places islands, ghettos, and safehouses at times. Piranesi is looser than elsewhere, the journals say, content to overlook what stays private. Nora wants to be a man in some sense, that tightrope walk between pure types that Luca describes. On divans or borrowed beds with Natalia, this was possible.

The composer makes some erasures. I keep thinking he'll start to hum, but apparently it's all in his head. Some have this ability, while others voice their thoughts aloud or are caught up in conversations, a word or two slipping out. Bren and Ben are like this; Jo and I are not. Am I, as Giulia might put it, thoroughly conventional?

I realized when Jo wore Franny's dress that she's my model of a woman of a certain age. I wonder if she wanted to be a professor? It's clear she disliked the UN, but she’d have found academia just as trying. She dressed the part, and that part was her authority. Leo had her own version, mannish, but letting it play against her figure. It was of a piece with her exoticism. She's an actress, "a natural," as Gianni said of her father. Even now, she plays the part of a design doyenne flawlessly. Whatever serves the plot and keeps her latest projects in motion.

I always felt out of place in Berkeley, only getting away with it by remaining Italian, that persona and those tailored clothes. Well, I am Italian, of course, and I've shed that look once back in Modena, or loosened up, influenced by Genia, queen of the tailored bucolic when not called to Milan. I've mostly dodged the big city, tending my terrace. I never wanted to be a man. I don't think Bren wanted me to be one, but it's not something we've discussed. She doesn't pose questions like this to herself, at least not so I could hear them.

5.

Iris Murdoch strove to keep out of her diaries any cause of future embarrassment, and to examine her past thoughts "constantly." The first impulse is like the warning to wear clean knickers in case you're hit by a truck. The second is worthier, but maybe an obsession. Our family journals throw caution to the winds, except for Natalia's hiding hers in wartime, but looking back episodically and critically is a trait. Not constantly, which strikes me as an impediment to action, although from what I know of Murdoch's life, I bet her revisits were also episodic. Was there a secret diary, or did all of that seep into her novels? Bois quotes Freud on dreams being overdetermined, and diaries can be like that. He also says that critical theory keeps history from being mere facts. What about White's "it's all narrative"? A bad novel is littered with its moment, as Tomasi de Lampedusa noted, so Bois is right narratives per se are no guarantee.

Nora is very much in the picture in Natalia's diary, but it only has the salient details. Giulia links "memorable lovers" to obsessions, hence the need for an ending or a cure to be free of it. Natalia and Nora are the obvious exceptions. Passing over the sailors, it's clear Luca preferred women to men as lovers, but never found his Nora. He's the family's theorist and a critical one, cleareyed about his faults, discounting his talents and what they meant. I know the territory, shared by my grandmother and her mother, but not by Giulia or Leo. And Jo?

I should ask Jo to set down her take on the journals. She's read enough to have an opinion, and it would shed light on where she places herself in this constellation of ours with moving planets, yet another now evidently fecund, unlike her ambiguous parent.

On the terrace, shaded by a wall. The heat is stupefying. That it is so elsewhere, a very generalized condition, is attributed to climate change. Stupor is a kind of statis but also a kind of inability to react. Our reactions to politics can be like this. A century ago, our ear was to the ground, a list of options in hand, the port close by. We knew by long experience when to head out. I wonder if we haven't lost this instinct for self-preservation? It makes me long for a cigarette, not a very frequent desire. I smoked when I was 12 and gave it up nine years later with my first bad sore throat. I only enjoyed really strong cigarettes, unfiltered, and not in quantity. I had no difficulty stopping. My main vices are self-centeredness and my inability in the distant past to admit it wouldn't work and/or the man wasn't worth it owing to the usual causes, experienced one by one. Bren is far more than a process of elimination, yet also that.

The ground laid by others freed us to be a traditional couple with a few quirks of expediency and family or families added in. As I get to know Genia better, I see how immersed she is in her family, how Jo's marriage to Federico falls into her narrative arc of which I'm also part, a narrative that's fundamentally generous but an instance of what Giulia calls largesse. This fits with the Piranesi narrative.

I should be alarmed, I think, putting down TheEconomist . Why am I not? It may be Berkeley that puts me in a state of reflexive skepticism, aware of the dangers but discounting them. "First time as tragedy, second time as farce," but what if it's the reverse?

Ben phones, mostly to talk with Bren. Bren is mom unless they're hungry. They're discussing some aspect of his residency, based on her replies. Paola and I now have similar conversations, as I'm the closest thing she has to an informant about the university. She finds it baffling in ways that I recognize, because they are baffling what academics bring along and inflict on their students, like Larkin on your parents: not always intentionally. It's better than it was, we tell ourselves, but Paola tells me no, an exasperated no.

7.

My Piranesi query drew an email from Montevideo.

Like many others, I'm interested in genealogy. I'm descended through one of his sons from Luca Piranesi, so you and I are distantly related. My research put me in touch with another cousin descended from Luca's daughter Caterina. She is a bit mysterious to both of us, a novelist who was baptized with the surname of her mother. As you know, she stayed behind when her family left Piranesi, ending up in Ferrara, where my cousin lives. We decided to do DNA tests, and hers revealed that Caterina had the same mother but a different father than her brothers. I attach copies of our tests, which may be helpful to your history.

The cousin's DNA test indicates that Matteo's oldest son Alfredo was likely Caterina's father. He and Paolo are close in age, and part of the same cohort as Luca and Natalia. How did this play out, I wondered? The journals note upheaval in Luca marriage, but the cause of it is never named. I decide to take this up with Leo.

8.

Leo thought Laura might have talked to Alma when she first knew she was pregnant. Finding the card, I phoned the curator who let me into Luca's bolt hole, asking if any of the archives include Alma's. "Yes, but talk with Claudia," she said. "She's going through them for a book she's writing on traditional medicine." I called her.

"Alma kept logs along with recipe books. She didn't keep many letters, but her notebooks that's the format are preserved. I'm going through the recipes, but I can check the logs. She was very methodical, although it's in a shorthand I more or less understand." I gave her a likely range. "Give me a few days." I was doubtful that she'd find anything, but then an email arrived: "There's a note,

L+L ≠ B = L+A

followed by tiny drawings of a baby and an angel. The baby has a bow in her hair and is circled. I can send a photo, if you need one."

Married, at odds with her husband, pregnant by his friend, she might have asked if she could abort this accident. Alma, who likely sensed it was a girl. said so to this mother of boys. She also knew Luca, the one man in Piranesi who would let it go, and love and raise Caterina as his own. This is a guess. Anyway, they stayed married and Caterina was born. "They carried on as before," Giulia comments somewhere. Story of our lives. But Giulia's remark that future onlookers would ask, "Who was that woman?" after seeing her portrait of Matteo, also came back to me. It was Caterina, to whom Laura gave her surname, an Etruscan like herself.

Did Alfredo know? His continual support of Caterina, and the help he gave Laura to protect her properties in Piranesi, argue for it. But I don't think Matteo and Paolo knew. Luca only seems to have known there were problems with his marriage, not that Caterina wasn't his. Her letters to him only and ever address him as Papa.

9.

I'm reading Wittgenstein, one year at a time. He makes me think of books I want to write, have considered writing, should have written. This despite my project, which I pursue in a doglike manner: singlemindedly and with affection, the journals floating past me at night like voices in the street.

Wittgenstein turns sometimes to the Jews this is 1931, before the mess but not before its prelude. The Piranesi are Jews to the extent that it marks their vulnerability, to speak to my mother's point. How to assimilate so thoroughly that it ceases to be a source of fear is one of the family's questions. How to deal with desire is the other. If transcendence underlies them both, it's in the sense of getting past a necessary condition to get on with life's other necessities. Only Luca's father says it, sottovoce: "We are Sephardic." His mother says we're Phoenician, while Giulia says we're Spanish. Luca's father points to larger categories: Mediterranean, cosmopolitan. Luca identifies with the Greeks, takes Homer as his model. That we're Jewish is like being Cretan or Maltese, part of a story, but the story includes fleeing, port-hopping. There's also a sense of "that useful family" whose past efforts to assimilate didn't work. A long line of convent school girls, aware that self-protection is a deal one strikes with the deities at hand, in which one is or isn't confident.

Can it really be true that Jo is the culmination of this long arc? I see her through the lens of desire, that Etruscan sign, whole or split. Like Franny, she knows her man when she sees him, and yet Leo's account feels right too. But then Paolo becomes a grandee and has to abandon San Rafael. Who knows what enmity he attracted?

Leo discusses the family with the authority of a witness. Natalia reminds me that any such account is layered. Wittgenstein is my new crush, speaking to me across the decades like WB before him.

"Gender change is like religious conversion," I wrote last night. Late this afternoon, I elaborated the thought. If I say "I am a man," despite the biological refutation of this, or if I go further and alter myself so my body conforms increasingly to my self-assertion, then the rejection of this, from the outset, is like the rejection of those Jews who became Christian, a doubt that their conversion is real, is sincere, can be relied upon because their nature is supposedly otherwise. Nora pictures this in her famous address to Natalia, linking it to the condition of her people, colonized, forced to be in the background the way matriarchy lives in the background, an order thrown over, a rule by women who, Graves among others says, killed their consorts after a year, the agrarian year.

I link these things as she did. Although they're nominally separate, Nora has a point, treating them as one case, the judgement of some "other" who limits my self-assertion, won't let me alone to be myself, an inherently changing condition. I want to tell these changelings to live for a time as they see themselves, get acquainted with it. but this requires something more than Piranesi's tolerance, which only goes so far, remains tolerantly orthodox, but orthodox nonetheless.

But who are these ever-affronted ones for whom a self-asserted "I am a man" gives rise to umbrage, is a catastrophe, a social problem to be solved by suppression? When Luca saw Bruno's statue in Rome, did he wonder that the Church’s earthly shepherd burned him alive? Jesus would have said this defeats the whole idea, that you expel the demon and preserve the man. Bruno's apostasy was a threat to the Church, and it wrapped its response in orthodoxy. A similar displacement is happening now, rightwing authoritarians quoting scripture as demons are said to do. What is a man to them? Cannon fodder, dupes and marks. And a woman is a cow to breed others of this stripe and submit to this self-proclaimed new order.

Resist, I tell my changelings, but don't martyr yourselves! If I say this, am I not false to Nora and their desire to be seen? Perhaps. They'll come for us too, of course, working their way down their list.

We went into Milan, to the polytechnic's "Leo symposium." Her, me and Bren, Jo, and Giulietta. Genia and Trent joined us. At Leo's suggestion, we slipped into the second half of the afternoon session, avoiding "the apparatus," versions of which she'd seen. A festschrift is planned. Her talk was fairly brief, politely alluding to others' work and even quoting from it to make an introduction, then adding that her roots were never in theory but always in observation, which is a kind of history and in its own way perhaps a theory in the original sense of explaining something to yourself and then trying it out.

She thanked a nun from her convent school in San Rafael who encouraged her to clamber around the vernacular baroque church and others like it, notebook in hand, working out how they did it and also why they did it, how light is intrinsic to form, how there's a sleight of hand to it making use of distance so that not everything has to be so carefully done, "like film sets," she said, recounting that work. With amazing brevity, she traced her arc, thanking those who helped her and also the specific work that meant something to her. She described Ko and Ro as invaluable collaborators, but said that ordinary people "babies to very old women, mostly" deserve the credit for generating almost all of their ideas. She thanked Maria for her basket, the idea of malleable, porous, open-ended forms that serve as artifacts in Aldo Rossi's sense, "overdetermined as dreams are, as Freud says. His observations are always acute, Freud, and if his theories are wrong, they're still interesting." From Bois via me.

"I still dream in forms," she concluded. "I still carry a notebook and consider what to do with what I dreamt, whether it has some place in the outer world. I still have conversations at the creche and at the clinic, to hear how it is now. Ko is off in Japan, so I find others to ask questions while I sketch and make notes. It's not so easy now, but once a year, I stay at the hut in the Apennines I designed with my father number two, where he died quite peacefully. We had informants when we worked on it, but we also drew on vernacular forms, a record of others' theories and intentions in that place."

Giulietta is visibly pregnant; that Jo is pregnant is only noticeable to Bren and me. Federico and Vanni arrived and we all went out for dinner after Leo said her goodbyes to the conference organizers. Her talk was filmed Jo sent me the link, already on YouTube.

12.

Did Caterina know that Alfredo was her father? I raised this with Genia, recounting everything I'd learned. She took it in. "Let me look into it." After a few days, she texted. "I have an answer."

Very typically, Genia rang up Federico's father, summarized what I'd told her, and asked his opinion. Consulting the archives of his branch of the family, he found a carbon of a letter Cesare wrote to Alfredo, thanking him for dealing with the authorities on Caterina's behalf. The letter followed the enactment of laws against Jews.

I called my curator friend in Piranesi to ask if any of Alfredo's correspondence survives. Yes. I gave her the timeframe and asked her if she'd look for any interactions with the authorities about Caterina. A week later, she told me she'd found an official receipt for an affidavit Alfredo submitted, attached to a handwritten note: "Re: Caterina, to secure her future. Wrote to Cesare, affirming this 'as we discussed.'" Being the curator that she is, she also tracked the affidavit down. In it, with his lawyer as a witness, Alfredo swears that he's Caterina's natural father. Nothing private ever remains so, as I imagine Alfredo knew, so it was honorable of him to take this step on Caterina's behalf. In character with the man, I gather.

Jo, getting wind of this story from Genia, tells me about a note.

"Among Franny's stash of letters, there's a handwritten one from Caterina after Luca's funeral. It's brief, but it might be helpful." I found it. She says she was glad to see Franny again in Piranesi, and also to "have the chance to talk with your mother, still very sharp!" Then she adds, "I understand your feelings of frustration about the events in Argentina. I also feel I didn't do enough when it mattered, and that I was shielded from terrible things that others were not."

I asked my curator friend if she could look through Natalia's personal papers to see if there were any letters to or from Caterina in the period following Luca's funeral. A few days later, she texted: "Check your email." And there it was, a letter to Natalia from Caterina, handwritten and sent from Ferrara.

I was very glad to see you again after a long while. Returning to Ferrara, I reflected that you're the one person with whom I could have had this conversation! Yes, I remember the portrait Giulia made of me. It was the first time I realized my resemblance to the family of Matteo and Alfredo, who were always so kind to me.

When the fascists passed their laws, Cesare was in Piranesi. He and Alfredo talked and "made an arrangement." He didn't go into details, but I was never bothered by the authorities, as I feared I might be, despite having my mother's name. When I asked Cesare about it later, he said Alfredo had claimed in a sworn document that he was my father. Was it necessary? I asked. "Alfredo thought so. He was the one who suggested it." Earlier, before we were married, he told Cesare, "in case it comes up," that I was "family." It didn't. Cesare's family had shed its ducal habits, although I have a title. I knew Alfredo was our go-between, but not the rest. I’ve always thought of him as a benevolent uncle.

I could ask my mother about all of this, but I doubt she'd want to discuss it. "Long ago," she'd say, giving me a vague look and then changing the subject. Giulia's painting and his solicitude argue for Alfredo, but Luca was Papa starting in childhood. I am in their debt, these two kind men, who loved me unconditionally.

Rabbits in foxes' clothing, or is it the reverse? Giulia, who strikes me sometimes as the wisest of the Piranesi, captures the family's two-directional approach its inner and outer worlds. It would like to disappear into the more secure milieu of its patrons and bear their children while viewing this as a possible side-effect of desire for certain of their men not just possible, but desirable. Yet it recognizes through direct experience that the security of its patrons is illusory and their institutions imperfect. Conversos, as the Spanish called them, taking the teachings of Jesus seriously and yet conscious always of the tentative nature of their status. That too bought us no security, yet it gave us a viewpoint. We're all convent school girls, but we're convent school girls who reinterpret the outer world, resist it, witness it, give it a new form.

These are the women; with exceptions, the men just "arrived." (Not for me, but then Bren showed up.) How rabbity and/or foxy are we still? Leo lives up to her name and Giulia exempts herself from such analogies. Am I a hedgehog who looked in the mirror one day and realized, like Orlando, that she was a fox, and then had to live with this and find a milieu suitable for foxes?

(Thoughts of Orlando remind me how that film was a favorite of ours when we met, rented and watched a little obsessively. It took me a while to settle in, whereas Bren just went where her heart took her. Not that I was unsure of her. I was more like Tilda Swinton's Orlando, having a look at what he's become.)

Jo has a good deal of Bren, I realize. I always think Ben got it all, but it isn't true. There's an outdoors/agrarian thing that's not mine. I like to look at the countryside, but I rarely hike in it. And I never cared at all for gardening. Leo and Gianni let me be, luckily, and we pretty much did the same with Ben and Jo, so it's nature.

Fate and télos, terraces and bolt holes, a dream: this mélange is mixed in with my morning cortado. I dreamt I was in the pitch-dark offices of several academics, but the sun poured in through side windows obscured by their office doors. I'd made a précis of a paper or article written by a third party, and the academic, a man, was on the phone discussing it with him within earshot. "She transposed your chart into characters, but then, having named them, didn't give them any characteristics" is an example. He went back to his desk, then gestured that I should join him, but the contrast of light and dark made it hard to interpret this. We went into his office or a conference room. You'll need to take notes, he said. I picked up a yellow pad on the desk, and it was full of someone else's notes, so I went to look for my Moleskine. The larger space was now lit up and I encountered a colleague I hadn't seen for a long time. I couldn't find my little notebook or a pen, and decided simply to walk out. Then I woke up. "My experience of academia?" I wondered. Just now, I thought about WB, trying to navigate unfolding situations that always broke against him, yet doing so led him closer, I think, to his actual work. But this is retrospect considering the matter. In other circumstances, he would have won his professorship or become a celebrated critic in a more liberal Germany or made it to America or finally finished his monumental project this series of possibilities that were not to be, fate running in opposition to his télos, giving him situations to which he heroically rose, an epic improviser, always looking for suitable places to live and work, and the money to do so, doled out in inadequate increments handed over slowly, ungenerously. The life, when I read it, made me cry out, wanting to fly back in time and intervene. Arendt envies his posthumous reputation, but even if he had an inkling of it, he couldn’t monetize it. Posthumous is not a useful reputation!

Compared to him, my life has been almost without incident, my productivity sufficient to secure a middling reputation that leaves me, in the midst of middle age, with a slew of questions. Even my dreams express my coming up short in my own mind, and yet the image I had of Vivaldi and his convent school girls persists. What would I compose? Where do coteries of putative virgins gather? Should I, like St. Francis before me, just declaim to the birds?

16.

"Atopia" Barthes contrasts it with utopia. Not "placeless," but more to do with the way places, from terraces to mountain ranges, have a certain interchangeability or form a catalogue of possibilities or experiences, remembered or anticipated. Is this WB's now–time in a spatial guise, or do we bring this to the places that resonate for us? Is that resonance there as a lure, a background that momentarily comes forward to remind us of its correlates? Is it a genetic trait, making our exits less jarring, and our entrances too, giving us the confidence that we'll find new correlates new terraces or country houses? Barthes' workspace takes the same form in three places. Is a notebook like this? (How small can a correlate be?)

Leo would likely disagree. Can I summarize her argument? It begins with form as a container, but one that's visible, malleable, detached from function sufficiently that imagination can project onto it and every person brings her own ideas of its possible uses. Her objects are similar, never precisely what they seem. Stein's repetition becomes the joke she must have intended, a series out to infinity, if you care to keep it going, such distance as nature affords us, but influence or model also figures, the memories of experience that creativity replays.

Barthes, RB as he calls himself, is wary of the novel's télos. It made me return to WB, whose biography is steeped in it, a kind of downward spiral like Werner Herzog's Aguirre , "a film like a crashing plane" as a friend described it, adding how the monologue of the megalomaniacal conquistador at the end shows how German by its very nature gives depravity a veneer of sense. RB cautions me against viewing WB, or the family, or a people, in this manner. Yet it seems true: we wander between fate and télos, pushed and pulled. If I apply it to myself, though, I'm forced to agree with RB. Up to a point, I'm also forced to add, the Etruscan in me talking. Jo is my current patroness of this impulse to go along, like Guillermo.

17.

I'm in Ferrara, going through Caterina's archive. Jo and Giulietta are pushing to make headway with the foundation before their babies arrive so she and Federico are in Modena and I'm staying at their place. Caterina's papers mostly relate to her work as a writer, but the correspondence between her and Luca is what drew me. It confirmed what I knew as a child how Luca conveys his interest and affection by constantly returning to shared themes. Their letters reflect on their encounters, heightened by their abilities as writers to elaborate. They illustrate how letters continue conversations, and vice versa, admitting no clear boundary between them. As Caterina's writing gains force and finds a publisher, he becomes a close and appreciative reader. They also discuss what they're reading and both mention conversations with other writers and editors. Occasionally he inserts a short poem. There are letters from her to his poems' publisher. Only after his death, she tells him, did she understand the extent of his poetic work. He named her his literary executor, a task she took seriously, going to Piranesi to look and then borrowing his notebooks so they could be properly edited. Giulia was apparently his only consistent reader. That he managed to keep everything, moving it from Piranesi to Montevideo and back, speaks to what it meant to him. She waited until Laura died before publishing a selection. It's gone out of print, and I feel I should honor my childhood promise to him and revive it. Leo has Franny's copy. Giulia's take on Luca's poems is accurate, but what he shared with Caterina in the letters stayed clear of such matters.

There are letters from Alfredo. It seems significant that he never fails to note her birthday. But, like Luca, Alfredo may never have learned from Laura if he was or wasn't Caterina’s father. Perhaps only Alma knew? Yet there's Giulia's "Who was she?" Surely Laura said something to Alfredo, given all he did for Caterina. Surely her resemblance to Matteo and his son gave the game away to Luca. Or not. The evidence remains inconclusive, so I’ll have to keep digging.

Caterina's archive includes her personal library. I ask to see it. It's mostly first editions of her books, with her annotations, but there on the shelf is her copy of Luca's SelectedPoems . Taking it out, I find, inserted at the very back, what proves to be a folded note-to-self.

In Milan, during our last conversation, as it proved, Luca told me that Alfredo invited him for lunch in Piranesi. After reviewing his dealings with me and my mother introducing me to Cesare, the "dowry" he facilitated for Laura to protect her properties, and the affidavit he swore later to protect me he said that he was actually unaware of any connection to me until Alma approached him. She did so, he said, after Giulia, who guessed it based on appearance, came to see her and Alma told her that it was likely, but also that neither he nor Luca had drawn this conclusion. The Piranesi were anxious about the fascists, presciently so, and Alma told Alfredo it was Giulia's desire that he help me, whatever their actual tie was. Then Alma added that she had no doubt that I was his daughter. Hearing this, Alfredo vowed to her that he would protect me.

Following this conversation, I asked Cesare about it. He told me he'd been reluctant to get into details, since it was clear that Alfredo didn't want to supplant Luca, his childhood friend.

Alfredo's account squared with his memory, Cesare said. "Your safety was his concern. Claiming you as his daughter meant you weren't a Piranesi. He said he hoped it would never come to that, but the situation of such families was perennially insecure." This was at the outset, when they were discussing the dowry. Later, when they thought I might be in danger, he and Cesare spoke and the affidavit followed. Whether it was true or not was never discussed or confirmed. All I knew was that my fate was severed from my family, still a cause for guilt for me given that so many perished who lacked this accidental exemption. Bassini told me later that I wasn't responsible for this chain of events. It was kind of him to give me this absolution, not that I've ever accepted it.

Well, I thought, here's my answer. Funny no one else found it.

19.

Reading Peter Wollen on Warhol, I asked Leo about him. "I knew of him, of course, but he was an artist. There was some overlap, but it the French philosophers had more impact on the architects."

I asked her if “late modernist,” her self-description, looks back at Greenberg, for example. "No, the same term means different things. When I use it, I mean modernism's revival after postmodernism. Architects we thought were hinges, like Isozaki, Rossi, or Stirling, seem less so now than their predecessors Kahn and Scarpa. Warhol was at home with repetition. He was originally a commercial artist and his work anticipates mass customization. The best architects try not to repeat themselves, but it’s almost impossible if they become successful. Seeing this, I limited my architectural work to buildings that struck me as prototypical. Others could emulate them, but they also generated many, many product ideas that we could scale.” She picked up a book on Corbusier's Ronchamp. "Form’s scale suits its context and contents. This was innate, a reflection of our humanity, but we’ve lost sight of it, particularly since the war."When we use the word “bourgeois,” we mean the in-between of power and the street, aiming to be useful to both and still be able to cater to our own desires. It comes from trade and enterprise. Their necessities are not unlike desire's." She gestured at the photo of her parents in Deauville. "My father said it was our genius, openness and wariness that prompts reinvention. This is what we mean by bourgeois."

Disorientation, singular for Leo, is how it often is with me. Time inserts distance, nominally, yet things come forward on their own, bidden by associations yet unbidden or forbidden if it were up to us.

I can conjure him up, the charlatan who strung me along with his facsimile of a relationship, positioned deliberately between love and friendship, taking love's liberties, including the freedom to be cruel. I'm never obsessed, much as Leo is never disoriented, but with him, I made an exception. It was Luca's professor friend who labelled my ailment and its cause, then recounted to me how a cabal of academic men wreaked havoc in her own life.

“Leave Italy!” she said, echoing Luca’s advice. She felt that the strictures the grand universities imposed on women were to be avoided. "It cost me a marriage and children, and for what?"

Now I'm back, close to three decades later, as disoriented as ever. Adrift is more accurate, and I remind myself that it's not necessarily a bad state of mind, a sign of openness that's also a sign of closure. It forces me to ask myself a broad question about talent and desire. Or are they separate questions? No, it's one question, or needs to be.

But so many subsidiary questions, like here or there. It was easy enough to arrange this hiatus, but how compelling is it to stay on? It's Bren's question too, yet I think she's happier with the clinic's scale, its dedication to women and children that reflects her own. If I dream of Vivaldi's convent school, it hasn't surfaced yet, although reading about Barthes' love of the seminar gave me some ideas.

I thought Bren would miss her family more, but our being here is drawing them. My family's presence is orienting; Jo's perpetuating it here is orienting, even desired, but how does my work fit with it? Is this even the right question? I'm so used to a certain apparatus, a seasonal rhythm, despite the pandemic's disruptions. Barthes notes that a seminar ideally is just a table and a few chairs.

Giulia's question, "Do we seek exemption?" sticks with me. It's true, but it's also a bourgeois trait, she writes. The family's idea of it arises from trade and also from its insights about the dance traders do with their xenophobic patrons, not omitting the street to which it makes holiday offerings, at least to the housewives, at cut price. Nor is it much use when things turn leaden, like art too. But art is what Giulia desires to make, once making love is less consuming. And to be bourgeois is useful in that sense, like Natalia's neutral gown.

Raymond Williams' criticism of C.P. Snow's novels could be levelled at us in that we describe an unproblematic world whose edge conditions are like the pandemic I viewed from my terrace. Natalia and Franny are aware of them as danger and injustice, but it's Giulia who notes how a new story supplanted an older one that fused civic conscience with Christian charity. The Etruscans figure too, resiliently indigenous and outside the grasp of this new order.

Guillermo, my Mapuche forebear, is a version of this, but he's also, like us, an assimilator, marveling at our family's ability to survive on its own terms, take a blow to the balls and stagger on. Leo wraps all this into her celestial gown, her comet-like energies devoted (there's no other word for it) especially to women and children. Like Giulia, her self-confidence is unwavering, despite terrorists at the margins.

Aristocracy floats through us: Federico, like Cesare before him, is a safe harbor, viewed from the backs of mind of the Piranesi. Or is it the other way around, one more instance of the lure? Also floating through are the complications of our natural fathers, known or not. There are accidents, less-than-accidents, and outright contrivance. There is, relatedly, the mix Etruscan, Mapuche, Latvian the purest of pure mongrels, an aristocracy of an often-exiled sort.

Jo comes by. Out of the blue, she asks about her conception. You'll have to ask Bren, I say. I wasn't there. You don't know? she asks incredulously, and I parry with a reference to our agrarian, horseand-bull-breeding families, including Genia's. She rolls her eyes, considering this a dodge, but then asks me about Caterina. Specifically, she asks, why is her history important to me? A good question! It was important to her, but as an accident of fate that protected her but the protection itself was a source of guilt, and it was confusing also to have two fathers, even if both made no claims. Perhaps the claims a father makes simply by being unquestionably the father are desired by the one so claimed, desired that is to be without ambiguity. Yes, she says. I wanted this child with Federico to be unequivocally his, although I know how irrational this is. I nod and take her hand and squeeze it. You were no accident, I say. I was bred, Jo replies. You were bred, I affirm, and breeding in our family is no clinical matter, as I believe you can attest. We are this odd mix, women in particular, but the men too if raised in traditions like ours. Your father is himself the outcome of a lioness's choice, just as I was. He never knew that lion and to this day refuses to allow science to have the last word. Caterina reconciled herself to it, deciding finally that two fathers don't cancel each other out, but perhaps make their feelings for her more from the heart than from the blood. And this was what Genia wanted to give you and Ben, that heart of her man. He's my brother, and it was and is impossible for me to be jealous.

In a marriage, children are the leavening that turns passion into longevity. Whose children is the least of it, as we learn from history and literature. How many children were rescued by a relative or a bystander? And this continues. Not every Jo finds her Federico, but in general we've had remarkable luck, we Piranesi. Bren is mine. You and Ben are ours. Genia is your luck, a remarkable woman. In some odd way, you are exactly what she foresaw. She and Leo are in their very different ways quite similar, possessors of a teleological imagination and a semi-conscious will to persuade.

Jo took this in, looking slightly stunned but not unreceptive.

23.

I brought Franny's manuscript," Jo said, changing the subject. “It's the book she wrote from Natalia's journals and letters, all of which she donated to her mother's archive in Piranesi while holding back the manuscript itself and apparently never trying to publish it.”

“I wondered about it,” I said. “It figures so heavily in my mother’s retirement. Did she think of Natalia's, ‘Is this a life worth reading?’ She might have felt that it would be badly received in Piranesi, hence her holding back the manuscript, leaving it to others to uncover an essential aspect of Natalia’s story: Nora. She may also have felt her life was overshadowed by her mother’s. And, like Caterina, she felt guilty about skirting the disasters that fell on others. But I'm speculating. Let me read it."

I cooked and we had a cross-generational women's dinner. I felt it was time to discuss our several backstories. I led off, asking Leo if it was really true she had doubts about Trent's parentage. "No, despite hedging. It's true that Gianni and I were lovers, but the lion was pure happenstance as well as the lioness's estrus taking over. Men aren't designed to let it slide by unless it really, truly fails to register, so it went as planned."

I'd told Bren that Jo and I had talked. What I didn’t say is this: "You and your baby share the venue of your breeding. It's a lucky spot, that hut, and I think that's it's actual purpose. Bren's clinic should book it on occasion. And, to anticipate your question, it was definitely breeding that they did, like the pasture the Piranesi set out for their thoroughbreds. Like the old lion, Trent was swept up in it, buoyed by estrus. But all of us, including Genia, wanted you and Ben to be bred in the bone, not basted in some kitchen ritual."

Bren looked at me. "Lina is my Nora, from what I know about the Piranesi history. We complete each other, and our love has endured because of this. Neither of us is possessive, but this is most of all because we knew ourselves and arranged our lives accordingly, once we made it through the preliminaries." I said that the men are credited with our arrangements, but in fact the women took the initiative and arranged things for others. Nothing is ever accidental, although the illusion of free choice persists. Leo nodded. "Like our horses." Then Jo spoke. "Paola told me she was attracted to Federico, but they were cousins and they both thought it was weird. Yet Paola wanted him in the family, more than just a cousin. I think Genia knew this. And you, Leo, had your own reasons to pair us."

Leo smiled, almost to herself. "Federico and I used to talk sometimes when he was younger and I saw that our view of scale is similar. The world struggles to find its bearings, and Federico sees that as a project. It's wrapped up in enterprise, of course, because that's how bourgeois families make their ideas actionable. How to scale and not destroy, bring the benefits of small, its beauty, to a wider circle: this is our shared question. I did want him in the family, it's true. As Luca once put it, if someone promising arrives, we take him in."

25.

"I've been thinking about the foundation," Leo said. "Thank God!" Jo blurted out, which made us laugh. Leo nodded her assent. "I apologize for putting cart before horse, or money before purpose. But time has clarified things a bit. Here's what I see. Trent's part of is clearer, and Giulietta shares his love of film. I foresee that thread continuing quite naturally, with seed money for new projects. Paola is the genetic payoff of my encounter with the lion. It's in her blood. We talk. She wants to come back, finish at the poly, and immerse herself in the enterprise Carlo and Marco founded. Ben she says is Bren's true son, and I agree, although a different specialty."

Then she looked at Jo and me. "You two are harder to categorize. You're both in transition, and Modena is part of it. In your different ways, you're our historians, a role that's been passed around since Luca's day. Caterina’s novels and stories are another source. These histories deserve the foundation's attention. San Rafael, the Andes, and Buenos Aires should figure, along with Montevideo. Wherever the Piranesi touched down is worth documenting.

"The creche and the clinic are my most tw0 important buildings. I’d like the foundation to support them,” Leo added. "I've given that some thought,” Bren said. “Issues arise, often enmeshed in politics, that affect our work. It's clear to me that the clinic and the creche share these issues, because everything that forms the contexts of everyday life are caught up now in the 'body politic.' We lack a forum to discuss these issues as a community and with others.” Jo spoke up. “A seminar, with Lina convening it!" I felt the spirit of Roland Barthes drift through the room, nodding approvingly.

Jo quoted from the poet CD Wright (she said later): “I am looking for a way to vocalize, perform, act out, address the commonly felt crises of my time. These are spiritual exercises.'" We heard Bren's low whistle of assent. "We experience society’s crises as situations that emerge in practice as dilemmas. As we’re still attached to the Church, 'spiritual exercises' is an appropriate term for what needs to become our daily regimen.”

Leo nodded. "Designers face this too all the professions, likely. It accentuates their displacement from power, but we're in a period when power is being contested on every front, without clear winners and with a noticeable lack of cooperation on issues where one would expect it, even demand it. 'Spiritual exercises' have two purposes in this context to arrive at reasoned responses and then pilot them."

Jo lit up. "That's what Federico believes!" Bren, sitting close to Jo, put her hand on her shoulder. "A good pilot! I agree with Leo that we need to address both, to act as well as to discuss and plan. " "You can't really separate them," Leo said. "This is Federico's point and I agree. By committing to try things in the world, you bring the world into dialogue with your ideas. The dialogue is as important as trying things, but they both make it possible to tune, rethink, even let go if something really doesn't work or exposes another set of problems. But 'spiritual exercises' reminds me that mass is also a community gathering to celebrate its shared humanity and awe. It's the only definition of mass that seems right to me, complementing bespoke."

In this mix are my convent school, and a role that's meaningful for me and compatible with going home to compose. I didn't say this when Jo, Bren, and Leo brought the conversation back to me, but "In principle, yes," I said, quoting my mother to her uncle. I'm not sure she got the reference, but I've been reading her journal.

Like Nora for Natalia, Monique Wittig hands me back to myself. A review led me to her essays, especially "The Straight Mind," and a series of resonances with what I'm finding inferred in these journals, even if it's in fragments: Luca's fluid nature and his sense of the contest life poses, corralling what he desires in order t0 step into required roles and manage to perform; Giulia's sense that we're all human "as God intended" and her "fitting in unfittingly," a model we pass along as a possible, relatively failsafe way forward.

Not that I'm as militant as Wittig, but her militancy is, as she says, from frustration. Better the bourgeoisie dissolve than the proletariat supplant them. Better that men slip into homosumthan see women as not us. Better too that women promote this than celebrate their differences, if Wittig is right that dissolving one dissolves the other.

Not a matriarchy, yet tipped away from patriarchy by its emphasis on desire's legitimacy and a sense of the order of things that results if desire's taken into account. (Wittig sets it aside, and yet there it is.)

What I'm outlining here is a metanarrative in which I figure. I like it that Wittig emphasizes the individual, condemning Marx and his followers for setting her each of us against the mass. That word again! Our "bourgeois" is so particular that we need another term that captures the humanity and individuality we mean by it. Homo sum, but more than this: homosapiens , faber , ludens , and so forth. Or we defend the term, make it our own and then dissolve it along with gender so homosumcan emerge as a circus of individuality.

We still find each other, pair up, arrange accordingly, a borrowed brother here, an old lion there to keep us going, progeny not yet shifted to the lab, although perhaps Bren can work on it? I never asked her if Trent was good in bed, but then she had Jo by the same means. I envision the lab as Paola’s breakthrough project, this lab that will free us to be homoludensuntil our desires are finally sated.

Taking a break from myself, I pick up TheWhiteGoddessand read Graves' assertion that, just as Luca's father had it, we're all descended from seafaring Mediterranean traders ("mercantile" he has it). It's a good antidote to contemporary certainties. Jo shows me an article about a Japanese "bourgeois Marxist" who wants to bring decroissanceto that growth-obsessed country, arguing that growth in that vein is killing Japan (and us, by extension). Federico is making a similar argument. The subject of the article is less into farming, he admits, although volunteering at a coop of some kind.

Jo is in love with her Federico, with their baby, God willing, with autumn’s cooler weather. At points this summer, I longed for Berkeley and Inverness, that climate, and Bren misses her family despite their visits. This makes us wonder if we can give our lives some decroissance , be less harried by the several clocks, human and institutional, that mostly shape our days. I think back to my pandemic insight that it was wrong to cut life up this way. Bren speaks of adjusting her role here to be less immersed in the doing while still guiding how it's done and why as unfolding questions. Her seniority makes this a natural transition.

In my heart of hearts, I want to be the writer I set out early to be, within the labyrinth of scholarship and an academic career. I found the thread and made it to here, out in the light, one could say. I want to be the writer I set out early to be, and I have the means now to do so. If I have the talent, the staying power, is a different question.

Luca produced considerable late work, freed at last from the rest. In her selection, Caterina helpfully annotates the periods in which he wrote and provides a brief but astute reading of their impact on the poems not literal, but suggestive. She really was his daughter.

Yet Bren's insistence that the questions that arise for her need serious, ongoing discussion resonates with me. They arise for all of us in this fraught era, if we're honest. From our terrace, it all looks pretty rosy, but t00 many past examples suggest it may not be.

Genia visits and we compare notes. "The lives of these others are like a garden party," she says. "Afterward, you remember snatches of conversations better than the rest, and the laughter at a joke better than the joke, if you even heard it the expression of the joke-teller."

After she leaves, I sit on the terrace and ask, not for the first time, "Who are these Piranesi?" Genia asserts that our two families have converged in some sense, citing Caterina, herself, and Jo, the vessels of her theory, bearing its proof. I'm unsure, remembering her older daughter's wedding, the fact that Jo acquired a title. Although not adverse to titles, our family doesn't bestow them. Yet she's right in the sense that her ancestor, faced with the eclipse of nobility, took up the attributes of the class that supplanted it, grafted it to a nearly dead tree and made it bloom again. Smaller, but still an expanse of land, these farmsteads, held in trust by the hereditary affection of peasants for her family, and vice versa. I idealize it, but it's true that they arrived at an arrangement rooted in their mutual interest. It’s here that our two families find their common ground.

Although seafaring traders, we preferred the land, and limited trade to a handpicked clientele, including those we bedded, desiring most of all to live our lives as we saw them. While Genia's family left a trail of culture, it bore the weight of administration, maintaining power, holding together a family stretched by ambition. Our family exists to make life supportable for its members. I use the word in the French sense of modest affluence, a byproduct of its abiding interest in a clientele of a certain type and its constant urge to edge past the implication of bespoke to find others wanting it: the best cuts of meat on feast days; the prize horses on race days; goods they could pass down that didn't cost the earth to purchase. Women benefit specifically, their desires unusually taken into account, or is this an illusion, "We were bred for it. We were the lure." Both are true, Monique Wittig notwithstanding. Language does that, and both sexes can play these language games, as Wittgenstein called them.

30.

"My studio has 40 tables, one for every project," Jordi Savall told his audience at Berkeley's First Congregational Church. I only have one table in the room that also holds my writing desk, but it has four sections in emulation of him: Wittgenstein; the bourgeoisie's split; Bren's seminar; and the family history. The last is why I'm on a train headed for Piranesi. I want to revisit places I saw before and speak again with the women who met me there, but I also want to take a walk with Luca and his daughter. They could be a fifth project.

The family history is clear enough that I made an outline. It's a kind of nine patch, I realized, sketching it, with repeated motifs that come along with the Piranesi, partly owing to our intermarriages. If I knew more about them, Maria and Guillermo would be a 10th. It might be one of Jo's projects a side of us we've left unexplored.

Luca should open the history. He keeps appearing, not only in his own journals and letters, but in those of the women who knew him. In postmodern fashion, I should get equal billing, since I'm doing the work. (Natalia's labors for Cosima rebuke me.) I’m tempted to include Caterina, my affection for her revived by the letters she and Luca exchanged. Maybe a future project?

As this account suggests, some of this work might bring me back to Berkeley or my old terrace on the ridge. We solved our dilemma by ignoring it or at any rate postponing it, although Bren ruled out returning to Kaiser, very much liking the scale of my mother's clinic. The seminar she envisioned is under way, ad hoc still so my absence isn't problematic. I'd like it to take that impromptu form if possible.

The train tunnels through to Piranesi and the sea air penetrates the carriage, much as it does when we arrive at the ridge house. I miss the sea in Modena, but here I am, in some sense home again.

"Triton's concubine," Luca's gloss on Piranesi, makes sense. My harbor walks with him and Caterina never took in the Twins, but I'm on the west one writing this. They're like two spread legs, knees forming lookout points, the rest fortified battlements that command the harbor. Where they meet the sea, beacons mark the entry. It's fairly wide, but still treacherous, especially in the fog. Sailing in, you have to tack from the last buoys against a north wind, Luca said, and rocks are rocks. The locals know the ropes, but other may not.

Her knees are level with the town, the harbor lower. Stormwater channels, once a river, cut through it. Giulia sometimes sketched here, views that look across and back. I doubt she had Luca's image in mind; more likely the sheer materiality and the light.

To see their work again is one reason I made this trip. It can be seen elsewhere now, their reputations growing. There's an economy of line and an innate power to it that remind me of Zen's Hakuin.

Leo remarked the other day how her stay with them helped her see where her affinity for form came from. They were so intent on making their art, she added, despite their great age. I don't yet fall in that category, but am old enough to be aware how it affects us when the props of our unexamined lives start to fall away. Leo is now older than them. She’s also inherited their tenacity about their work.

My informants introduced me to one of Nora's descendants, a young writer. She's quite determined to do something with her formidable ancestor, so pertinent right now. I mentioned Franny's unpublished book on Natalia as the place to start. Then I sat at our poet Luca's harbor bolt hole desk, laying my hands on it again, feeling its vibes as he likely did, and imagining the divan creaking.

John J. Parman has lived in Berkeley since 1971, but grew up in Singapore and around New York City. An architect-planner by education, he worked in those fields for 40 years, writing poems, essays, and fiction on the side. Here he is at The Pallas Gallery in San Francisco, photographed by his daughter, Elizabeth Snowden.

Text & photo-collages © 2024 by John J. Parman

(Photo left: Elizabeth Snowden at Pallas.)

The Piranesi took their name from the Italian port town where they settled. These three linked novellas follow them across 100 years and three continents, drawing on their journals. Husbands and wives, lovers, siblings, and patrons accompany them. Desire is one theme and anxiety is another. Thoroughly bourgeois, they imagine, and the women all convent school girls, but is it enough? They're never sure.