Argentina 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.

2.

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.

Incidents and details — the beds and their rooms are part of a continuum, if Benjamin hasn’t forbidden that word, 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 for it to go. Some of the tension of marriage stems from this. I note this because it has nothing to do with love affairs that 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.

3.

Were I 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, 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. 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.

4.

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 also 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 diminished 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? It hinges on the unknowable, on accidents, a Monte Carlo machine rigged by destiny. We know the whole arc from the beginning, if we’re honest. We know and yet we plunge, until finally we don’t or we can’t.

6.

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, are starting points, 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 reverse 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, aware of the real cost of knowing and its diminishing returns. I’ve read memoirs reflecting on love’s repeated arc and the relief finally of having a close friend who mostly leaves us to our own devices. Life slowly brings us back to ourselves, more content with the contents of our ordinary days. Retrospect shows us the threads of substance we brought, along with our faults and foibles, even those that especially mortified us. Some mechanism in the universe settles these accounts. We learn that our sins weren’t so cardinal, unless of course they were. That some never forget is also made 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 then it ended. a bittersweet experience that led Cosima to write her famous trilogy and achieve late fame or, from her perspective, regain 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 replied. “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 were there. More likely I’m both a plant drawing water from the air and a terrace-minder placing such plants decoratively where the setting suits them. The plants and their tender roam the planet in search of suitable terraces. Together, they form 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 whatever 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 so much of our married 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.

10.

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 bolthole 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.

11.

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. Like them, 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, and from Giulia too, likely, that perseverance.

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.

12.

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 caps to change the heads’ 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. 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 some hugely wealthy families put some of their descendants at risk of penury by narrowing inheritances down to a single heir. Bourgeois families like ours look instead to the enterprises themselves and how to build them. 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 those women experience. The family 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. Such 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 scones. 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 derails affairs 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.)

15.

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 variations 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 and my own visits to so many ports — the anecdotes about them I stored 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 the names and places 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 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 historical 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 a cultural breakdown, except to 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 occasions 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. He and Alfredo helped in other ways.

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.”

20.

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, particularly 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.

21.

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 magazines, Italian and English, featuring them at their respective 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. “The car factories here are where bespoke touches scale,” she noted. “We see how it’s done, then apply it.”

Guillermo is now funded by the World Wildlife Fund, Franny said, thanks to an article in Country Life. “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.” “You strip away anything that lessens an object’s power, so there’s an underlying purity to your work, whatever its scale,” I said. “Sometimes it’s ornamental, even frivolous, but yes, 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.”

23.

I’m 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 as a lawyer, Natalia kept everything, so she needed an archivist. For me, going through it, it helps me 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 been 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, and Alma 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, paint, 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.

“I’m reading Natalia’s account of her famous list,” Franny told me. “Before and after liberation, she recorded who died or was imprisoned unjustly; who was transported and, of that cohort, who didn’t come back; and who collaborated or was treacherous. The bulk of her list 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 recorded 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 after the war, she found herself facing judges who would have jailed her or worse had they been instructed to do so by the fascists. There they were, when she became a judge herself, ‘relieved not to have to 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.”

It led Franny and Natalia to make a subtly political film for TV with Gianni. Compared to them, my life seems insubstantial. I spent it evading my real work to do others’ bidding and exhausting 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, the only one that remains.

27.

Franny motioned toward the hills behind us. “This is an old, old place. It has the tempo of nature. Modena beats faster, but it still knows its place. 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 live in Ferrara, so the properties were managed by Alfredo until we reclaimed them along with 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.

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!

In Buenos Aires 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. 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 90th 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.