Argentina part three: 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 our parents’ enterprises. Their work is popular again, my mother tells me — as it should be.

2.

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 had kids, Ben and Jo, and married when it became possible — a new but also very 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.

Like comparative lit before it, critical theory is a tent city of exiles from other fields, some with bullhorns. I only shout from pleasure. (This also runs in my family.) Medicine 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.

3.

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.

An exception to this fitting in 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 fungible 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 there 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.

4.

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 listening to Leo on the speakerphone with her Brooklyn colleagues. I mimicked their accents, 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 jacked-up 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-yet-decided order? Stripped of our former context, we look provincial. Recovering our region’s sense of itself might be a good thing, 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, would leave us with Augean stables 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 colleague 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’s 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 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.

Capitalism 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 extraction. 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 those 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.

10.

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 Fredric 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.

12.

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 the 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 self-sufficiency — 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 self-sufficiency isn’t quite right. The women 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 their marriage. Natalia is an odd case, desired across her life by Nora. That Nora always initiated their tectonic interludes, by her 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. Both split or incomplete, Alma said, but together they were not.

Unlike his sister Marta, Luca failed to live on blamelessly, acquiring other habits. His incompleteness was chronic until late in life he met his (and my) professor friend. By then, he’d 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 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 deus ex machina Paolo 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 at 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. Before the pandemic, we were more social. I do the cooking. Bren does the cleaning up, being used to mess.

16.

The real memoir of Luca is to be found in his poems. Homer and 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 and pains of the affairs were 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 tries to exclude or diminish, 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 when she and Natalia made a trilogy of her Milan journals. It 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. We’ve never discussed this and both our journals break off, which is so strange. I immersed myself my field and this place. 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 her 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. As soon as the pandemic lifted, Jo 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 there are others now to help her. Her house outside 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 she suffered from a double bind. In Milan, he made a film about her. “It was hard to make,” he said. “The ending is 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 relearn how to navigate. One reason I quit Milan was to see the night sky more clearly. 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. If Leo thinks in forms, 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 often 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 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.

22.

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 journals for posterity, and yet there’s an imagined reader I address. If Cosima decided to recast 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 sired. Not above giving destiny a 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 contemporaries. I loved being in Milan with them 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 references were Homer and Horace — that tradition — and I understand this. Antiquity provides the purest forms. You see it in a building like 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.

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

25.

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 our family, 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 that 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 and then said to me, “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 Yve-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 in a new direction, but what? I focus on my family’s history because the sources are at hand, but is this really just a delaying tactic while I figure out my next move?

27.

Friends induced me to hear the Wildcat Viols, an early music quartet, in St. Mary Magdalene’s parish hall. Bren was raised Anglican, and All Souls and St. Columba are closer to one house or the other, but I come from a long line of convent school girls. “Who am I to judge?” The Pope’s question is 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 my reconsideration. Has it done so for her? We spoke for two hours, which I take as a yes.

28.

Fredric Jameson cites WB’s different 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 bildungsroman nature, 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 had others 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. Glück is 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.

I’m 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 of them, long-lived, wrote the looks back lucid old age affords. Leo still looks ahead, taking the train into Milan to visit the polytechnic, and engage the students and her colleagues as they work on something together, her curiosity and her talent unabated. She’s amused by her current fame. “It’s odd to 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.

30.

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. She thought to write something, she said, but this was easier. In passing, she 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 fecundity.”

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.