Modena part one: Franny

1.

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

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

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

2.

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

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

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

3.

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

Laura owns apartment buildings in Montevideo. Property has always been her business. Matteo and his son Alfredo ran her Piranesi properties when she and Luca went into exile. Who owns what is being straightened out, I heard from Luca and Natalia.

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

4.

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

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

Leo is another topic, this wild girl of mine. Luca is confident she knows what she’s doing, is very much of her time and place. She still spends her holidays hunting in the Andes with her father, but she’s also close to Maria — they all chatter away in Mapudungun. Paolo and I speak our Piranesi Italian, as I do with Luca. The local Spanish is not so different, so Guillermo and Maria have picked it up or perhaps we all speak a dialect now that’s unique to us.

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

5.

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

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

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

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

I do worry about Leo, of course. Buenos Aires isn’t Piranesi or San Rafael, but then she’s hunted with her father, holds her own among his brothers and their sons, the way we did summers at the farm. She also shares Guillermo’s fascination with our enterprises.

6.

Both my grandmothers figured when I was growing up. They’re so different. Giulia knew Alma before Natalia married Gio, because she sold medicinal and cosmetic herbs, oils, and ointments from her tiny shop on the market square and, less often, from a stand there — dried bunches of herbs, I remember. She taught me about the plants of the region and their uses. It was one way I bonded with Maria. And then together we expanded our knowledge of viniculture.

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

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

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

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

7.

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

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

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

I’m sure some would argue. There are a lot of bastards running successful businesses. With our family, though, as with our bulls, horses, and vineyards, generational proof is demanded. That idea, so fundamental to us, always feels endangered. Will it be more so?

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

8.

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

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

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

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

9.

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

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

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

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

10.

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

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

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

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

11.

In conversation, Luca has provided a history of our family as he understands it. It’s one benefit of living “an ocean and a sea distant” from Piranesi. It means that he’s less forthcoming about his sisters and especially about Laura except as she sometimes figures in his expressions of regret for his “stupid affairs,” as he describes them, the origins of which — that is, the schism that arose in their marriage — he blames on himself. As the decades pass between its origins and now, Luca’s stock has risen in Laura’s estimation, I gather, in part simply because the marriage continued, everyone connected with it more or less intact despite the turmoil that arises in such situations.

Through Luca, I’ve come to understand some of the mysteries of my immediate family. His working theory, or one of them, is that desire is a problem in life that each person solves in her own way. Convention or orthodoxy is one readymade solution, but then life is usually drawn out, with ample room for the problem to arise again in new forms. Giulia exemplifies the ability of some women to burn through an excess of desire then live on the residue while turning their attention to their work. Others find long-term relationships that sustain desire without it overcoming them. Natalia is an example; I may be one, but in the context of a marriage without an appended lover. Men, Luca says, are all over the map. A few, like Matteo, know their own minds and arrange their lives accordingly. Most fail to do this, and many really don’t know their own minds at all, either lurching from one thing to another, reactively or opportunistically, or responding to signs the gods set before them, likely for their own amusement.

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

12.

The Mapuche hold the Andes sacred. They never built pyramids out of a sense of deference toward these mountains. Their idea of their territory is based partly on the way they read into it then link it to reference points like the Andes as well as to the cosmos and microcosmoses. Everything is a signpost for them, and some of the signposts as they pass by them.

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

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

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

13.

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

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

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

14.

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

If we do this, we’ll sell the apartment in Paris and the house in Deauville. I like them both, but my life with diplomats, high officials, and cadres of experts and specialists is wearing. It’s lucky, of course, that I have a secure position, which insulates us from reprisals. Everything in San Rafael is tenuous, but Luca assures us we’ll be back in business there once this all blows over. Ensconced now in Santa Barbara, Paolo writes to me wondering if he’ll live long enough to go back. I hope he will!

My mother and I went out to her parents’ country house. The farmstead is back in the family, thanks to Alfredo, and the house is now a venue used for grand occasions. It’s also something of a museum of their work. Giulia is gaining art-historical interest as a transitional painter whose work is figurative, cubist, and abstract-expressionist in turns. Carlo also has a following for his late work as a painter and for the small sculptural works, often in fired clay, that “experiment brilliantly with form,” in Leo’s estimation.

15.

One pleasure of our visit to Piranesi was seeing Marco. We favor our respective parents. If Natalia and I are bound together, Marco is closer to Gio. Both are level-headed and pragmatic, but he’s also Carlo’s grandson, forceful and extroverted. My mother and Alma both maintained that Gio was the source of our self-confidence, but I give some credit to Carlo.

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

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

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

16.

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

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

17.

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

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

I remember her interest in the church attached to her convent school and her quite accurate drawings of how it worked. Its homegrown exuberance was underpinned “not very elegantly, but effectively,” she recounted to Luca, who recounted it to me. He was very attentive to her, and he’d read about the modern architects in Brazil and Mexico. It all converged in New York, he thought, so he pointed her there.

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

18.

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

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

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

19.

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

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

The film was shown on TV in Italy and, subtitled, in France. I haven’t seen that man again, so I have no idea if anyone was murdered or if that threat was even real to begin with, but at least one critic, writing in Paris, praised it as a political allegory. “Your mother really looked the part, holding up her list like a hanging judge from commedia.” Luca wrote. “ And you, Franny, coming on about Peron and Argentina like a good-will ambassador from the 1950s — you were marvelous! Giulia always said the best way to get into their heads is by indirection.”

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

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

20.

I catalogue our contradictions or is it our wisdom? What comes to mind first is our Catholicism, an elective assimilation that we’ve maintained scrupulously since arriving in Piranesi. Guillermo and his mother fit into it. Convent school for the girls: this persists despite the wildness sometimes of our desires, their unorthodoxy. We choose, then we arrange, each in her own way, what to do with our desires. I married mine and raised our daughter. My mother built her life partly around Nora and vice versa.

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

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

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

21.

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

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

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

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

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

22.

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

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

23.

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

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

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

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

24.

This traces back to Maria and to my grandmother Giulia, who loved the farmstead. She saw it as artificial, yet also as proof of the family’s rootedness. Maria saw herself as a midwife, bringing each year’s harvest to fruition. They were immediately close when they met, both in their element, like Guillermo with horses, an intuition that comes from deep understanding. (Like Alma, come to think of it.) Everything with Giulia came back to her self-knowledge: not an artist, but one who sketched and painted the cosmos from an inner necessity to set it down. Not a courtesan, but a woman who desired a particular lover on her own terms.

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

25.

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

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

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

26.

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

“It’s far away, so no one pays much attention,” Natalia said. She’s growing frail, but her memory is intact. She and Luca both regret they couldn’t attend Paolo’s funeral. Guillermo and I went together to Santa Barbara, representing the family. Paolo left San Rafael hoping to return “when they’re gone.” Alas, he didn’t live to see it.

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

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

27.

Luca says that Modena is a good place for us to have ended up. Leo and I are glad to have his company. Luca saved her life in Buenos Aires, she said, and filled in a few missing pieces in her upbringing. I can see that. Natalia would have been a better mother, but these things skip generations. Luca understood my daughter’s in-betweenness. He also grasped her talent.

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

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

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

28.

As she left his funeral in Piranesi, I introduced myself to Luca’s professor friend. She’d planned to head back, not inflict herself on us, but I convinced her she was on safe ground and that I was glad finally to meet her. We broke through the reserve of two people who knew each other only indirectly.

She’s recognizably Luca’s type, unmarried or, as she said, “married to my work.” Leo was a source of wonder to her, she added — how she managed to find a place quickly, unlike herself, “in these medieval institutions.” She shook her head as if to dispel the thought. “Luca told me I should go to California. He ruled out New York City based on Leo’s depiction of it as ‘a city of lions.’ I think he saw California as more open to experiment, less caught up in tradition. I argued the point, as the American east coast can be iconoclastic, but not a few of those rebels drifted west, I understand. History argues for Rome, but it breeds corruption! Yet it’s also beautiful. It’s hard to imagine living somewhere else, but Luca felt I should free myself from it, live the life I actually want, then come back if it still attracts me. It’s foolish, he said, to be sentimental about a city if it works against you.”

I nodded. It’s why we left Paris, San Rafael, and Piranesi. We realized later that it freed us. Guillermo is the least sentimental of men, carrying his territory along with him. My sense of freedom comes with a sense of guilt that Natalia’s selflessness exacerbates. I haven’t done enough. On the contrary, I’m on life’s sidelines.

29.

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

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

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

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

30.

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

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

He smiled, almost to himself. “I’ve made provisions for this. Only a UN pension if it falls apart, but my years abroad have taught me the discreet art of squirreling it away. I have a second passport. The perennial questions are timing and placement: when and where? There’s a side wager whether the apparatus will take notice or lose track — and will I live long enough to be noticed later? It’s a version of the Trotsky problem. Not even Mexico is far enough away in these cases. Am I one?” He looked at us. “I spend my days like this. The conference isn’t so interesting, but my mind is elsewhere anyway and it’s usually racing. It’s only here with you, among friends, that I’m able to allow it to pause.”

31.

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

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

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