Modena 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 understood even at the time that Genia would likely resist this, even if his being her father was her idea. And then Jo married into her family! Yet Jo 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.

2.

On a whim, I visit Piranesi after a long absence. I stay at a small hotel not far from Cosima’s flat, now a museum, where I stop in later. First, though, I visit the harbor, locating Luca’s old bolthole, which now houses Natalia’s archive. It’s closed, but there’s a number to call to make an appointment. 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 him. “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 up Jo’s marriage to Franny, who wasted no time once she saw her future in Guillermo. I had to pass through thickets of time-wasting 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 than ever, thanks to our parallel projects and now this added tie. II’m grateful to her for stepping in and gauging how best to meet Jo’s desire to keep her wedding simple without offending Federico’s parents.

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?

4.

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 out 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. This same desire persists, makes its claims.

The composer makes some erasures. I keep thinking he’ll start to hum, but evidently 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 of which slip 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 type. Leo had her own version, mannish, but letting it play against her figure. It was of a piece with her exoticism, subtle and uncanny. Leo is an actress, although a natural, as Gianni said of her father. Even now, she plays the part of a design doyenne flawlessly. Whatever serves the plot, keeps whatever her latest project is in motion is quickly taken on.

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 were hit by a truck. The second is worthier, but maybe an obsession. Our family journals throw caution to the winds, except for Natalia, 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”? Bad novels dwell on the litter a given 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.

In the interest of unearthing additional sources, I placed author’s queries about the Piranesi in likely outlets here, in Argentina, and in Uruguay. I doubt much will turn up, but you never know. Plus, better before than after, I felt, diligent academic that I am.

6.

On the terrace. I’m shaded by a wall, but the heat is stupefying. That it is so elsewhere, a very generalized condition, is attributed to climate change. Elsewhere are floods, a generalized disruption. Stupor is a kind of stasis but also a kind of inability to react. Politics is like this. A century ago, our ear was to the ground, a list of options in mind, 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 The Economist. 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 inflict on their students, not always intentionally, to cite Larkin on our parents. It’s better than it was, we tell ourselves, but Paola tells me no, an exasperated no.

7.

My Piranesi queries drew this 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 relative 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.

When I told this to Leo, she said that Matteo’s oldest son Alfredo was likely Caterina’s father. He and Paolo were close in age, and part of the same cohort as Luca and Natalia. How did this play out, I wondered? In her journals, Giulia notes upheaval in Luca’s marriage, but she doesn’t give a reason for it.

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 bolthole, 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 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.

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: single-mindedly 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. 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 and get on with life’s other necessities. Only Luca’s father says it, sotto voce: “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 go to ground didn’t work, and that 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.

10.

“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 “But who are these ever-affronted ones for whom a self-asserted “I am this, not that” leads to umbrage, is a catastrophe, a social problem to be solved by repression? 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.

11.

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 short, 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, how light is intrinsic to form, and 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 noted, recounting that work. With amazing brevity, she traced her arc, citing 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. learned. “Let me look into it,” she said. 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, her found a carbon copy 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 the 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.

13.

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 thought of him as a benevolent uncle. My parents were in Argentina by then, but Alfredo told Cesare not to tell me. 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.

14.

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 to its inner and outer worlds. We would like to disappear into the more secure milieu of our 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 we recognize through direct experience that the security of our patrons is illusory and their institutions imperfect. Conversos, the Spanish called us: we took the teachings of Jesus seriously, but were always conscious of the tentative nature of our status. Yet it gave us a viewpoint. We’re all convent school girls, yes, but convent school girls who interpret and reinterpret the outer world in light of the inner one, resist it, witness it, and consciously give it new forms.

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, she’d become a fox overnight? And now has 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, but more like Tilda Swinton’s Orlando having a look at what he’s become.)

15.

Fate and télos, terraces and boltholes, 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 amounts 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?) This repetition becomes the joke Stein 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 kind of télos. It made me think again of WB, whose fate-steeped télos was a downward spiral like Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, “a film like a crashing plane” as a friend said, 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 Mapuche in me talking. Jo is my current patroness of this impulse to go along, like Guillermo: télos all the way down.

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.

As Caterina’s writing gains force and finds a publisher, Luca becomes a close and appreciative reader. They also discuss what they’re reading and mention conversations with other writers and editors. Occasionally, he includes a poem. There are letters from her to his poems’ publisher. Only after his death, she writes, did she understand the extent of Luca’s 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. 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.

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.

18.

Caterina’s archive includes her personal library. I ask to see it, and there on a shelf is her copy of Luca’s Selected Poems. Taking it out, I find, inserted at the very back, a carefully folded note-to-self.

In Milan, during our last conversation, as it proved, Luca told me that Alfredo invited him to 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. We were anxious about the fascists, presciently so, and Alma told Alfredo it was Giulia’s desire that he help me, whatever our actual tie was. Then Alma added that she had no doubt that I was his daughter. When he heard this, Alfredo vowed he’d protect me. “I thanked him,” Luca said. “These things happen in life. We owe your marriage and safety, Caterina, and so much else, to Alfredo.” 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 of guilt for me given that so many perished who lacked this accidental exemption. Bassani 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 new 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 able to cater to ourselves, to our deeper needs. The necessities of trade and enterprise are not unlike those of desire.” She gestured at the photo of her parents in Deauville. “My father said our genius was an openness and wariness that prompt reinvention. This is what we mean by ‘bourgeois.’”

20.

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.

21.

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.

22.

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, horse-and-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 parentage 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 was it confusing to have two fathers, even if one made no claims? Are the claims a father makes simply by being unquestionably the father desired by the one so claimed — desiring, that is, to be without ambiguity? Yes, Jo says, she wanted her child with Federico to be unequivocally his, while knowing how irrational this is. I take her hand and squeeze it. You were no accident, I say. I was bred, she replies. You were bred, I affirm, and breeding in our family is no clinical matter, as I believe you can attest. We’re an odd mix, women in particular, but 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 decided 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, her love for her man. He’s my brother, and it was and is impossible for me to be jealous.

In a marriage, children are a leavening that gives passion its 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 takes 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 prominently in Franny’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 it back, 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.”

24.

I cooked a cross-generational women’s dinner. It was time to discuss our several backstories. Jo led off, asking Leo if it was really true she had doubts about Trent’s parentage. “That lion was pure happenstance as well as a 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. But Gianni and I were lovers, so in fact I was never completely sure. But I also felt it didn’t matter.”

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. We are, neither of us, possessive, but this is most of all because we know ourselves in this sense and arrange our lives accordingly, once we made it through the preliminaries.” I noted 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. “Paola told me she was attracted to Federico, but they were cousins and they both thought it was weird,” Jo said. “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 nodded. “Federico and I talked 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: this is our shared question. And I did want him in the family.”

25.

“I’ve been thinking about the foundation,” Leo said. “Thank God!” Jo blurted out, which made us laugh. “I apologize for putting money before purpose, but time has clarified things a bit. Giulietta shares Trent’s love of film and I foresee that continuing, with seed money for new projects. Paola is the payoff of my encounter with the lion. It’s in her blood. She wants to finish here, apprentice, and then revive my practice.”

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 and Milan. Wherever the Piranesi touched down is worth documenting.”

“”The creche and the clinic are my two most important buildings. I’d like the foundation to support them,” she 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.

26.

Jo quoted the poet CD Wright: “‘I am looking for a way to vocalize, perform, act out, address the commonly felt crises of my time. These are spiritual exercises.” I heard Bren’s low whistle of assent. “We experience society’s crises as situations that emerge in practice as dilemmas. Given the clinic’s origin story, ‘spiritual exercises’ is right for what needs to be our daily regimen.”

Leo nodded. “Designers face this too — all the professions, likely. It reflects their displacement from power, but we’re in a period now 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.”

In this mix are my convent school, I thought, and a role that’s meaningful for me and compatible with going home to compose. When they brought the conversation back to me, I told them, “In principle, yes. The seminar is on,” quoting what Leo said to Marco long ago. I’m not sure she got the reference, but I’ve been reading her journal.

27.

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: Giulia’s sense that we’re all human “as God intended”; Luca’s transgendered nature and his sense of the contest life poses, corralling what he desires by stepping into required roles and hoping he can perform; my own ungendered nature, humanity, my “fitting in unfittingly,” a model we pass along that isn’t us exactly but is a possible way forward always.

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 homo sum than 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 word that captures the humanity and individuality we mean by it. Homo sum, but more than this: homo sapiens, faber, ludens, and so forth. Or we defend the term, make it our own and then dissolve it along with gender so homo sum can 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 homo ludens until our desires are finally sated.

28.

Taking a break from myself, I pick up The White Goddess and 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 decroissance to 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 the visits. This makes us wonder if we can live more expansively, give our lives some decroissance, less harried by the several clocks, human and institutional, that have mostly run our lives. I think back to my pandemic insight that it was wrong to cut life up this way. Bren too speaks of adjusting her roles here and there to be less immersed in the doing while still guiding how it’s done, why it’s done, 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, and now I have the means to do so. If I have the talent or the staying power are different questions.

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 reality, in this fraught era if we’re honest. From our terrace, it all looks pretty rosy, but too many past examples suggest it may not be.

29.

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, citing Caterina, herself, and Jo. I’m not sure, given 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.

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. Luca should open it. 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.)

Some of this might bring us back to Berkeley and my old terrace on the ridge, although Bren has ruled out returning to Kaiser, preferring the scale of my mother’s clinic. The seminar is under way. I’d like it to take an impromptu form that gives me some flexibility.

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.

31.

“Triton’s concubine,” Luca’s gloss on Piranesi, make sense. My harbor walks with him and Caterina never took in the Twins, but I’m on the west one writing this. Her raised knees form lookout points. Beacons mark the harbor’s gateway to the sea. It’s fairly wide, but still treacherous, especially in the fog. Sailing ships had to tack against a north wind, Luca said, to reach the opening between the jutting rocks. Locals knew the drill, but it put off invaders.

Her raised knees are level with the town, the harbor lower. Stormwater channels, once a river, cut through it. Giulia 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. 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 similarly longlived. She’s also inherited their tenacity about their work.

My informant friends here are wonderfully supportive. I met one of Nora’s descendants, a young writer, who’s quite determined to do something with her formidable ancestor, so pertinent right now. I spoke with a Piranesi cousin about the possibility of buying a place here, borrowing Cosima’s instructions to Luca. I sat at out poet’s harbor bolthole desk, laying my hands on it, feeling its vibes as he likely did once, and imagining the divan creaking.