Piranesi part one: Luca

1.

Piranesi, the city is called, with its high, expansive plinth looking down at a harbor bracketed by jutting rock formations, the twins, that mark the southmost part of the peninsula the city terminates and defends. I was born here and have only left at others’ bidding.

Matrilinear descent is a long line of courtesans, great beauties of legendary skill. Patrilinear is a perpetual counting house, managing the ascent, the prime, and the afterlife of these thoroughbreds. Not surprisingly, there are parallel activities in the breeding of bulls and horses, serving more or less the same clientele as the women did. An appellation attached itself to us: Piranesi is our calling card in the wider world that sporting’s pleasures and wagers attract. We took our city’s name and others gave it a touch of rubbed-off aristocracy.

Offspring of such a family, immersed in its callings, fall across a spectrum of identity that in turn determines a specific one felt apt for her or his talents and appetites. Felt is the instinct of one generation considering the next, but its feelings enter into it, starting at the first moments of birth when those present at one of life’s sacraments make an assessment of the babe taking in a new life from the standpoint of the one lately deserted.

The family’s beliefs are esoteric. Returning is assumed and each revisit moves the returning one incrementally in a given direction, the ends of which are polar opposites. And Piranesi is Triton’s concubine, opening out to the sea, the hills her bedstead.

It’s my fate to be less tethered to our enterprises, but useful to them as an envoy, detached and thus discreet and convenient. I carry the psychic cargo of my lineage, but lightly, even happily.

2.

Some days I might linger at the docks and then pay for the services I’ve just received from a sailor needing money. This speaks to my androgyny, which falls in, when coupling, with the role the other prescribes for it. Like a courtesan, pleasure is in the taking in; like a dealer in bulls and stud, pleasure is hardening and being taken in, the procreative trigger a woman pulls. These are my distractions.

As was foreseen, a journey toward womanhood recently begun, and so a bodily preference for pure types, whereas my mind loves the mix of beauty and intellect that is women’s unique attraction. These pure types vary, the sailors stoical, aroused like dogs by the scent of coins mixed with balm to smooth the passage. They are like bulls, also — set in train by the patterns of coupling. Women are entirely animated by their minds, and sparking them provokes and sustains the bodily pleasure they give and receive. In a brothel, a man who does this reliably while still paying is a desirable client. The older men they dote on are quite happy to set them laughing; with sailors, few words, an immediate reward for a job well done.

3.

“We are Phoenician,” my mother sometimes declared, as good an explanation as any for a family that curates its bloodlines casually but not without design. What’s clear is the dominance of traits like beauty in the women, an intuition attuned to the angles the outer world presents the attentive and also to the revelations, lightning-fast and illuminating everything if only we can keep it all in mind.

If we are Phoenician, I’ve arrived here an ill-equipped swimmer, sinking like a stone as a child and now doglike compared to those who swim as if born to it. No, my roots are landbound, a rooted and local cosmopolitan on whom the larger world descends. Yet the water holds my eye when I see it — brooks and ponds too, but the sea is Piranesi’s view and boundary. As we might have to flee again, it’s also an exit. When I occasionally set out on it on someone’s errand, my storehouse of memory is enlarged with sensory fragments of ships and ports. In transit, books and reverie contend with tedium. In strange towns I soak up what arises, scenes from others’ daily lives — their days and nights as they touch on mine. This is not so different from Piranesi, but long familiarity gives it a context in which strangers stand out. Abroad, much more is new and the context can be overwhelming.

“We are Sephardic,” my father said, sotto voce so as not to contradict my mother openly, “with the contributions of our port-hopping. Alexandria figures and then Tangier, Cadiz, Greek and Berber mixed in. A mobile people, then, who assimilated readily with each move, yet Mediterranean first and foremost. Your mother is right in that sense: the sea and the cities on which trade depends shaped us, while curiosity and affinity across the sexes gave us the beauty and acumen our women pass along and trade themselves.”

4.

Breeding bulls and horses can be approached in different ways, but our family extends a benign fatalism, what we would call destiny, to these creatures, setting them in open pastures to find each other and couple happily as if it were their own idea. This is a slower process, but the family believes the progeny benefit from it, as its own have.

I have had almost no involvement in these activities, but I spent summers with my cousins, staying near the field where the horses coupled, and I watched them as they nuzzled.

“Love can’t be coerced,” my uncle told me. “If the horses fail to mate, it’s better to accept this than to force the issue. If we did that, the trauma would be passed on, just as it is for women during a war This we cannot countenance. A prize racehorse and its rider share risks so they both come through, victorious and alive. That trust begins in a field like this, the horses well-fed and entirely free.”

That freedom is illusory, of course. The horses may ignore each other, but their presence in the field isn’t accidental. The family’s marriages and arrangements aren’t contracted despotically, but the terroir is what it is. This includes the port itself, of course. Not a stranger, our intuition says, when destiny hands us someone.

What we call destiny is a pure randomness in which luck and skill figure. When men write their memoirs, they thank Fortuna ritually and then attribute their success to their own efforts, not her favors. Effort and skill matter — our lives depend on them — but luck matters more. Hence our credo: “Keep a low profile and avoid hubris.” The women never flaunt their beauty, but wear it naturally, drawing the affection of others, not their envy. The family is always at the service of the city in ways that rise above its patrons’ factions and disputes. “There are no guarantees, of course,” we add superstitiously.

5.

The courtesans naturally also figure in our unusual history. When and where did that begin? In Alexandria, my father said, where hetaerae served that largely Greek port and married into the family, giving rise to our tradition. Any children fathered in such arrangements were raised by the family as its own, thus insuring both parties against any liabilities. Our women were famed for a lasting beauty stemming from character as much as nature, and for their élan. Theirs was a bespoke art, theater for an audience of one, often, tailored to mood and appetite — less a theater than serious play. The occasional offspring of these grandees made the family a kind of shadow aristocracy, with a charisma it used in its typically indirect way, denying any such connection, never naming the patron or claiming any lineage. The tiny theater of patron and courtesan is its own world whose anticipated dissolution, planned and financed, can be forestalled again and again by mutual agreement.

The play of two humans in love gets short shrift in most societies. Its outcomes may eclipse its pleasures, and it’s easily frayed by the shortcomings of its players. The Greeks grasped this, recognizing how our minds and bodies are one in the course of it, engaging each other in what amounts to a four-way conversation. Receptivity is the heart of an art that builds on an opening move or moves itself to set out a theme, elaborating its variations and fugues. It begins and ends with the art of being consciously in the world, absorbing its lessons in giving and receiving as the object–subject of pleasure.

6.

Persephone winters with the dead, returning in spring to restore the earth’s fecundity after the cold and arid seasons. This was the deal that Demeter struck with Hades following her daughter’s abduction. It accounted for Persephone’s eating a pomegranate in Hades’ palace, tying herself partially to him. We take the myth to heart as depicting a courtesan’s situation, set apart from the rhythm of nature as normally lived, but not entirely. Late fall and the dead of winter drive men indoors. Trade is curbed owing to the sea’s heightened terrors. What was stored up is tapped. Households gird themselves against the wind and austerity.

Persephone is Hades’ relief — a river still flowing that would turn to ice in the outer world. This is the courtesan’s role, dedicated to the goddess. In keeping with Hades’ promise to Demeter, spring finds her and her devotees back among their own people.

Our year is mainly agricultural, with vineyards and fields to supply our own needs, and those of our patrons and their families. All is bespoke, the bounty nature grants us when Fortuna is favorably disposed. The flow of time, set by husbandry and offset by progeny, clears the air, and stirs imagination and desire.

7.

“Envoy” covers many functions. Some are factotums, doing tasks that fall within our broad capability. Others have particular skills or aptitudes that are tapped when needed, often qualifying and practicing in a relevant profession. Envoys are tactful truthtellers whose value hinges on their acumen and flexibility in light of events. Strategies are set in motion by an idea or insight, then played out.

Writing this, I realize how an envoy in some ways resembles a courtesan, devoted to her patron but willing, perhaps even driven to influence him in the direction that she intuits will give him greater satisfaction. Her own pleasure serves as a compass, a prompt for her imagination, knowledge, the repertoire of skills she possesses. I see this confirmed when from time to time my presence is sought by one of these women, a sister or a cousin, known since childhood.

We still speak the secret language of children, rooted in the way we traded hypotheses about the adult and natural worlds around us. Courtesans and envoys share a benign tolerance, defending the slighted but also excusing the slights on the grounds that they’re as helpless to do otherwise as you are, dear slighted one. Affection runs through us, and only true wickedness is excluded. There are such people, we know, but we contrive to keep them at bay.

8.

My sister, guessing a distraction I indulge in, asked me to explain a few things that she sensed were on her lover’s mind. Men are odd creatures, I said — physically imposing, but vulnerable in ways women aren’t. With a bit of training, a child can flatten an ungirded man with a well-placed kick. Women can be taken again and again when aroused, but nature only goes so far. Obtaining the necessities for her, I went over the regimens and precautions.

I find aspects of myself in Homer, a favorite poet. I love the way he stitched his stories together and left two epics that were recited and recited until finally written out, much altered, I imagine, in the retelling. The Greeks were everywhere along this sea. In every port I visit, I find remnants of them, especially the small heads of men. Who were they, I wonder? I give them voices sometimes, a bit of commedia for the children that draws on the stock characters of the theater more than it draws on Homer, but his Iliad strikes me as a better guide to Piranesi’s leading and would-be leading men than Machiavelli’s handbook. In Homer, they sulk, lash out, sacrifice in the name of glory while the women wait them out. Entirely realistic.

9.

It’s odd in a way that a family that ended up in a port town of modest size like Piranesi not only made a commercial success of its tenure, but devised what outsiders might find eccentric. As I’ve implied, all of it is of a piece from the family’s viewpoint. It reflects experiences most of all with humanity itself — the ways it organizes fundamentals that, in a more primitive state of nature, might happen otherwise. I could cite the accounts of traders, describing peoples they’ve encountered who are entirely open about things to which we attach rules, assumptions, and judgements. Where we condemn others, they don’t — such matters barely figure. What draws their attention is whatever affects them directly. They are on intimate terms with their immediate environs, the way sailors know the sea. Cooperation is their first rule and openness the second. They have prodigious, collective memories.

I think that we share their close attention. We bear in mind what keeps the peace and what disturbs it, how hierarchies make men envious, how worldliness takes them beyond themselves. I was born here and will probably die here, but none of us ever takes that for granted. In the past, we allied ourselves with rulers, then suffered in their downfall from being seen as their agents. What, we wondered, might insulate us to some extent from such changes in fortune? Our idea of bespoke is never purely for the wealthiest or most powerful. Our patrons have the wit to share their largesse. Racehorses are an example — they know the punters take a proprietary view, favoring evidence of good breeding and handling, the best riders. It’s money well spent, they think, joining in willingly because a share of what’s bespoke is offered them, win or lose.

We take this view. On the feast days, housewives also get their portion, set aside deliberately for them. They pay more for it than they normally would, but it’s a luxury they can grant themselves, not least because we know what their consciences will allow. We want them to be happy — proud they can afford it and praised at home for a meal worthy of the day celebrated, a memorable one.

10.

My dear and beautiful sister, I added, a man takes pride in his erections and his use of them, but what he remembers is what he heard, saw, tasted, smelled, and felt. The hands are an extension of his mind, arousing her and also observing her. His thumb and forefinger can take certain measures only a woman has. It’s through touch that he knows how the river’s flowing. If she’s had children, his whole hand can be taken in if she hungers for it. Despite the bed-shaking, a man is close to superfluous at points. The best he can do is to hold on.

Men are also aware, if they have fecund wives, that just prior to pregnancy’s seasickness, women are overcome with desire, so aroused that sleep is impossible. We breed like the animals we are. Being human, we layer our denials and perversions over this. Men, some of them, long for what women experience. Slow it down is a shared request: grant us a long afternoon, unmolested by events. Most times, we rush to get it done: the docks, the brothels, wives taken before the morning starts or even after, reluctantly giving in.

11.

Whether they’re saints or not, the gods of the different walks of life continue to get our deference if not our active prayers. Candles burning in the side chapels are the tip of mankind’s tendency to hedge its bets. We pay homage to the lord of the universe, the prime mover of what looks to be a gigantic apparatus, entirely random although evidently following laws that we struggle to shake loose and give predictive value. Most of what we know is reduced to sayings and truisms that keep us out of daily trouble or reduce our mishaps across our waking hours, but are less helpful when for example we board a ship to some distant port. We know basic facts about the seasons, the state of nearby patches of sea and ground — things gleaned from travelers’ gossip and the passed-along reports of those sent out to learn what they can. Everything is a generality or a guess. In these circumstances, our particular gods shore up our spirits. We bow to whoever set it in motion, but we need others who are closer, who can allay our fears or bring us through them so we don’t succumb utterly to terror. Superstitious as we are, we need to feel their presence, imagine their intervention. The eons of lore and strictures the Church carries aim at a good harvest and a fecundity that’s palpable. Those brave shepherds of young women’s religious lives herd them toward marriage in hopes of keeping it all going.

12.

“Love they neighbor as thyself” is easier to follow than Moses’ shall nots, suggesting among other things to keep your sinful nature in bounds within your family and your neighborhood. Jesus called out the malevolent spirits that took possession of people. He could send them packing, but his earthly successors appear to lack this ability.

Machiavelli bemoaned the religion that emerged after Jesus’s death as unfitting for what had once been an empire secure in its sense of the order of things and how citizens upheld them in their everyday, raising Roman families and building Roman towns and cities. Even the farms were Roman, as Virgil wrote. If emperors were worshipped as gods, this was merely to exemplify the benevolent order they upheld. They were a varied lot, but this is true of the powerful in general, rarely rising from merit and without luck and backing, often some faction’s least-worse option. Yet it goes on and on, more orderly than not. Who arranged this? Beneath the trappings of power, the fluidity of who’s on top, there’s a riverbed that, even as the river floods and shifts, still revives the fields and supports ordinary people as they get on with whatever life requires.

The great and powerful fit themselves into this picture. If they fail to do so, fate stalks them and their luck changes. People start to despise them and this encourages their rivals. Their backers keep their distance. That all this can be avoided by honoring the mores and exercising discretion is lost sight of in hubris’s stealthy fog.

13.

The Decalogue instructs us how to stay out of trouble. If it strikes people as infringing on their freedom, this is the wrong lesson they learn in childhood. Parents make and enforce rules to preserve household order and keep children from harm’s way. Cities have the same obligation. Laws are meant to help them, but people skirt them, preferring to be the judges of their own actions, whatever society may think about it — hoping, of course, not to get caught.

Brothels and procurers find customers because men grasp the dangers of adulterous love. Posterity may make allowances, but those affected by adultery are often less inclined to do so.

Unwilling to make other arrangements, adulterers find they aren’t alone in their frustrations. Men and women can reach a point in their lives when they wonder, “Is this all there is?” This can lead to socially useful changes, but often what’s bothering them is a sense of boredom or failure that they imagine an affair can alleviate. Most affairs blow over, so the wives wait it out. Men are less inclined than women to fall out of love, but affairs can alienate a woman’s affection, causing havoc at home unless she can hide it. Jealousy arises, too. Driven by desire, affairs range beyond whatever the lovers imagined when they began. Tragedy, comedy, gossip, and cautionary tales ensue, but only rarely is any effort made to acknowledge human trajectories and arrange things differently.

14.

I write in this manner, but sometimes we just want to fuck or be fucked — after a period of unrelenting, mentally taxing work, for example. There’s also something physical about the desire for it — why we use a word like hunger. Whatever it is, we want it. To embellish it with theory or speculation is unnecessary, pointless.

Why I write in this manner is a separate question. I do theorize and speculate, as most things in life require this in order to work with them. The family’s unusual specialty grew out of a “what if” we realized we could make happen. Behind it, as I’ve noted, is a commitment to the bespoke — goods that serve the few, although with a small surplus we set aside to offer the many. This makes me think of Jesus washing the feet of the poor. The loaves and fishes also come to mind, turning water into wine. He knew how and when to throw a party — not as a caterer, but as a source of miracles.

There are feast days when the whores come out in droves, kissing babies and giving themselves to men who take their fancy. Authority turns a blind eye and even the priests wink as they shake their heads. Like Saturnalia or Carnival, it’s part of the pageantry of Piranesi.

On these warm evenings, the streets teeming, these fancied men — sailors or laborers, unwed, unchurched — let themselves be swept up, pleased for once to be singled out, taken by the hand, to sing, to dance, to be genuinely loved. Miracles happen just often enough to inspire belief and keep hope alive. Jesus is the patron of this.

15.

When an arrangement ends, we take every last piece of the setting to a nearby convent, where the nuns give it all away to women who lack frocks, bedclothes, chairs, beds, rugs, drapes, blankets, sheets, plates, flatware, serving dishes, art, and items of the toilette. The nuns distribute it or give it to a woman deserving in their eyes. If the latter, the patron sometimes adds anonymously to her dowry as a token of his own good fortune. And we match whatever he gives.

The courtesan can do as she pleases with her private income. She is independent of the family, although loved and protected by it. In fulfilling the arrangement, she retains the right to end it if her patron mistreats her or makes demands to which she can’t agree. In this respect, she has more rights than a married woman, but more obligation to honor the arrangement, body and soul, once agreed.

To be a patron of such a woman is not a casual thing. There’s a desire for it that’s very like these men’s love of horseracing, a love that extends to the thoroughbreds on which they dote.

Independence means that what follows is the woman’s decision. What transpires between two people is their affair and they’re both bound to discretion, but attraction has a life of its own. There may be offspring who, despite having no claims on their fathers, are often in their affectionate thoughts.

Bespoke is largely by word of mouth, and the patrons talk among themselves, recounting visits to the horse farm or the bull pen, who caught their eye in the countryside as they mixed with summering young women, those remarkable cohorts of sisters and cousins. And they form their own cohort — eligible men who for reasons of state, property, or enterprise are destined for dynastic marriages.

16.

Every husband has experienced his pregnant wife denying that he had anything to do with it. The mother of Jesus is a special case, a truly bespoke arrangement that required marrying her off so her husband could attest to her virginity, as we’re still called to do. And then, animals that they are, women live or die trying to perpetuate us. Fortuna reigns. Beautiful racing horses stumble and break a leg, or they win races and end their days happily in pastures. Sporting men, given to racing, love a horse that’s spirited and not easily sated.

17.

It’s up to her how she proceeds, but when she does, it reflects a mutually agreed-on understanding. This is contrary, in my experience, to how it works in most affairs owing to the human tendency to form emotional ties and then elaborate on them as a parallel life that tries to supplant the original one. If divorce looms, the parties to it are often shocked to find their assets haven’t doubled to cover the cost of a second household. An arrangement can sidestep these complications, sustaining pleasure instead of miring it in raised expectations and awkward conversations.

18.

Télos must number among the gods, a weaver of stories that strike us as personal, our destiny, and resemble river currents the way they carry us along. If we resist them, Télos obliges us with another that vies with it. Sometimes it’s more like a riptide. Eventually, we try to write our own stories, truer to ourselves and our experiences.

Consider gender. We’re born into one sex or the other, bear its nature, but find from our lived experience that this is a clear fit, a fit more or less, or no fit at all. In the cauldron of youth, those who fit well present themselves as the standards and look down on those who don’t measure up — anyone whose ambiguity earns their disdain or worse. We emerge from these terrors to find our places in the order of the adult world. A port like Piranesi is a relative haven for apostates, not aggressively persecuting them for being true to their natures so long as they exercise discretion. What men and women do in relative privacy is their own affair, most people feel.

As we get older, our real natures appear more evidently complex than we realized. We surprise ourselves in dreams and thoughts, but the frisson or shame of our own rule-breaking diminishes. We are just someone’s aunt or uncle, some child’s parent, some neighbor’s familiar face. Within, we are ever more clearly who we are. Even if we know others we resemble, no one is quite like us, in reality.

19.

To know is the pertinent verb when it comes to this other who gives herself to us. Women can put men out of their thoughts entirely who they knew in this sense, but men cannot. Women infect them in the course of knowing with their particularity. Conversation is part of this, as knowing frees the knowers to speak in the same register.

Young children, primed to soak up life, know it with their senses. A remembered smell or sound takes us back to a place and moment. In ordinary, harried life, we curb our senses and navigate by habit, then something jars us and we light up, remembering ourselves. To know another leisurely is to revive our childhood self, not simply to grant license but forget the concept. We aren’t primitives, but our play is like a child’s, pursued for its all-consuming sake.

Against this is the reality of most women’s lives — their monthly bleeding, the necessity of bearing and raising children, running a household. Men heedlessly take their sons or force them and their families to flee or be subject to tyrants and invaders. Some men see women as their inferiors, but we would be nowhere without them. We share a common fate, the family believes, and their condition is one sure measure of the actual enlightenment of a city or a people.

20.

To know is mutually subjective, yet also two subjects interacting with two objects. Unavoidably, because we can only know so much. Yet we intuit, and this is the source of our mutual subjectivity. I’ve been challenged, using the phrase “I understand.” It’s true that I didn’t, and yet I knew well enough. Everyday speech, the phrases we say to one other, is pragmatically sufficient. At other times, I’ve been accused of using rhetoric when plain speech would be better, and of being hurtful when I’ve spoken plainly. This is the downward slope of a love affair, a descent in stages.

Fecundity attracts men, despite their being aware of how it will disrupt things. Within a love affair, tension gathers around this shared dilemma, the télos nature hands us and the reality that surrounds us. We struggle to resolve it. A man has to reach an age when he is supposed to be dispassionate to escape it, although I doubt there is any complete end to desire for another. What tempers it is the realization that affairs are hopeless and something short of consummation is the only possible way to befriend a fecund woman.

When we set up our peculiar sideline, we considered the situation of powerful men, on whom so much depends. A small circle of them drew our attention — patrons of artists and artisans, bespoke tailors, architects and masons, horse breeders and trainers, composers and musicians. Their interest in them is personal, friendships rather than dealings. We saw how they value what we know and look to us to put this knowledge at their disposal, enlarging their lives’ canvases.

21.

When Caterina was young, I took her for walks at the harbor. It was in early autumn, the sun warming us, when an older man, his clothes worn but not terribly so, came up to us. He asked if we were natives. Yes, I said. “I’m no longer of much use, but this was decided here rather than in my own city, which I was in the habit of leaving. I work a bit, but it’s soon spent — not enough left over to pay for the trip back or at least subsidize it. I try to find ship work from the sailors, but they see me as an unlucky portent. In this respect, I’m useful — a negative example — but it isn’t helping me get home.”

Tell me where you work, I said. He named three places, three people. I knew them — fixtures of certain alleys around the harbor where sailors congregate and those needing sailors can find them.

At no point in our conversation did he ask for help from me. He just wanted to talk. Adrift in the cosmos, he was aware of his place in it. Conversations like this can be worth having. Done with us, he walked off after saying a kind farewell.

22.

From time to time, I’m sent off on errands. What they involve depends on what’s at stake, the means employed, the atmosphere between the parties, the season. What’s at stake determines a lot.

Even exotic ports resemble each other in that they support trade, with all it brings along, open to others and yet simultaneously wary of them, closed off and defensive. It was said of Genoa that the leading families never understood how its bankers made their money, financing the Spanish crown and able to set up almost anywhere. This was beneath the dignity of the grandees of their home city. Piranesi isn’t like this. Trade comes along with a fertile countryside, and a local talent for manufactured and bespoke goods. Everyone here understands how the one hand feeds the other.

When sent, I go. This is an envoy’s lot. As I gained experience, the errands changed. Let’s take him, because the situation is delicate or tenuous or explosive. He’s so remarkably calm — keeps his head, figures it out, will help us pull one more rabbit out of one more hat.

It can take as many good minds as we can muster, some errands. It has to be pulled off in a way that brings credit to the man or men on top. The risk of failure and being blamed are attendant dangers. At school, teachers and your fellows can inexplicably round on you. I learned early on to sense and sidestep these irrational flareups.

The important thing, therefore, is to keep everyone’s mind on the reason for the errand — what we’re here to do and how, as reality presents itself in its mostly partial way, we improvise accordingly. Most important of all is to make the top man or men part of this, so he or they will accept some responsibility for these adjustments.

23.

As I’ve noted, considerable ambiguity exists between the pure types of our species. Our outward forms reflect major and minor themes where people settle — relative consistency roiled by invasions, armies billeting in a city or simply marching through, sampling as they do. Our inward forms float between the poles. We may deny this, yet we’re aware of our contradictions, how desire catches us out.

We fall in with what nature gave us: the body of a boy or a girl. Household ideas of what comes along with one body or another — its télos — attach to us, but life’s situations put these ideas to various tests. Nothing, it turns out, is final. Households get caught up in the need to get through another day. Emotions flare, but pragmatism usually prevails. Most of my skill in the world stems from this.

This is why some households survive upheavals of a personal sort that would break others. There’s a sense that the root cause is unavoidably how life itself works — its pressures, its shortcomings. It makes everyone a little mad and in need of healing. The afflicted wander in and out, yet the household lurches on. Some of them appear just often enough to be counted present, and they usually don’t discuss their absences, because really what’s there to say?

A household has other concerns and we, the pragmatic ones, fulfill this familiar aspect as a ritual of sorts, honoring the minor deities who guard our doorways, hearths, children, and prosperity. A little madness now and then, yes, but we don’t lose our grip.

Some of it comes from trying to fit our ambiguous selves into a generality that thwarts whole categories of personal expression. Partial selves struggle to find and express themselves, to cast against their outward form and assumed inner life, at odds with their mad impulses. Households give rise to this. In a way, it’s one of their principal exports — damaged goods to be sent back or sent away.

24.

Social mores acknowledge what we share with others: birth, propagation, raising progeny (ours and others’), decline and death, prematurely or due to natural causes, and so forth. You’d think this basic commonality would unite rather than divide us, but no, our acknowledgement is partial: you may also experience this, but our rites, what we grant or fail to grant, are entirely our own.

Those who set themselves against prevailing orthodoxy are the most likely, in their self-assertion, to be inadvertently solipsistic. As public celebrations — royal weddings, births of scions, their official birthdays, particularly in their dotage, and funeral rites — remind us, sovereigns set the tone for how to mark these sacramental events. In the rungs below, local prominence follows suit. Seeing the bride, the babe in arms, the patriarch or matriarch, alive or dead, we doff hats or otherwise note the tangible sign that each personifies. Such signs suggest they’re like us after all, but of course our hats are doffed.

Orthodoxy saves us from ourselves. It’s seen it all, and can rise to truly awful occasions with time-tested nostrums that enable life to flow on without doing the injuries the less experienced can inflict. It also proves to be remarkably accommodating unless pushed to be what it’s not. Surrounding orthodoxy is everything it tolerates or passes over. It puts up with a lot, believing that time will sort it out. The grandees are nominally orthodox. We count prelates as clients.

25.

Piranesi for me is a tableau, a drama, and I’m loathe to give up on anyone, since there’s no way to know how it ends except to live it out — and even then, I’ll die speculating. Despite knowing firsthand how the discontinuous deal with life, it always shocks me when the extent of our time together counts for nothing against their displeasure. If there’s a narrative, it’s the one now being handed us — a denunciation waiting to be said, apparently, across all that time when things between us seemed to go better.

Am I deluded? Very likely. It’s not that the discontinuous lack a narrative, but its focus is their personal trajectory, which others either help or hinder. That’s how they pragmatically divide their world. Narrators like me are incapable of losing anyone to whom we’re emotionally tied. Even minor characters still figure. It follows that we think and write about others’ lives narratively.

The discontinuous are wary of any narrative they don’t control. They want their letters back or burned, imagining those who wrote them will turn on them and use them as weapons. But we rarely go back to what’s already in our heads. Letters are for historians, but will they be interested in us? Our descendants may be — a thread of narrators runs through such families, curious about their lineage.

26.

The family takes great care to understand its patrons first, serving them as valued clients in situations that reveal a sympathetic nature. We’re not in the business of supplying them with courtesans. On the contrary, we’re intermediaries for a certain kind of woman. Other families would make her life hell. One such woman’s needs led us to respond differently. She mentored those who chose to follow her and guided their intermediaries. Others have succeeded her.

I emphasize the word “chose.” The family’s women, when they come of age, are offered an income sufficient to live independently. They are free to pursue their own interests, take lovers, live openly or privately exactly as they wish. Or they’re given a dowry to marry. All these roles are in view, experienced growing up in our large and rambunctious family, a sisterhood in reality, almost a matriarchy.

27.

Family trees are inexact about the so-called bloodlines that mark the generations’ descent through time. Historians of the powerful stray from their official acts to dwell on other conquests and the resulting progeny, whether or not they were acknowledged, what became of them and their mothers — the part of history that draws readers. Not much of this shows up in family trees, but ours scrupulously records, in the manner of the Old Testament, every fruitful liaison. Thus, we know that certain matriarchs were paired with men of higher status, several of whose offspring prospered owing to their fathers’ support. Our family’s prosperity both benefited from these relationships and gave them the right context — in power’s orbit but no threat to it.

The beautiful Giulia makes an analogy to the horses we raise so lovingly. It’s her sense that the sheer excitement of the race gives them immense pleasure, a more than sufficient reward for their earthly lives. Those that survive go on to breed, to pasture, yet she feels they remember all of it — that a kicking, frolicking colt brings it back to mind, the heady pleasure of the rider and the ride.

28.

The analogy to riding is true of long afternoons. We shift to the time our bodies keep, unmoored or unconstrained, each moment slowed.

Our bodies have their own desires, connecting us to that primitive ground from which all life arises. At points, they take over, coupling in the sense of mating — our bodies want this, beneath all the rest.

A season of lovemaking is shortened or prolonged by fate in its several forms. Fertility varies and timing is all. This is life’s context. Pregnancy outside marriage causes tension. Many couples believe themselves immune — a common delusion. We plan for progeny.

A patron’s life is steeped in risk. He learns early to tip the odds in his favor by prowess. Sports are a training ground for power, giving immediate lessons in the perils of inattention and hubris. A patron shapes his life around attentiveness and receptivity, not just skill. To focus on skill alone distorts a man. Prowess is much more than skill. It’s a kind of generosity about life, accepting its randomness, being grateful for pleasures it affords and mindful of what comes along. It is most of all a realism buoyed by confidence in self and others.

To be ones in whom the patron can be confident — this is the heart of the family’s relationships. The main risks are known. Fate doles them (and others) out, but the presiding spirit remains the same.

29.

Love and war are paired in the maxims men repeat, few hearing the warning conveyed therein. Beneficial as it might be to their young and heedless lives, we wait until they’re old enough to know what they want. We live in seven-year increments that, gathered up as 21-year cycles, define us loosely from coming of age through middle and old age. Each has its tasks and themes along with its traps and perils. Télos and fate divide our lives between them, and we do our best with what nature and context give us. Our creativity is sparked by the dilemmas that powerful men face in life. We do our best to support them and this requires us to break with tradition.

Tradition has its place as collective wisdom, but some of it is tales. Moreover, history and myth both explain how tradition soaks up life’s unfolding, absorbing gods and goddesses, recognizing unions that orthodoxy frowns on, crowning talent that forces itself on it. All talk of purity, of bloodlines, is made up to impress the credulous.

30.

Giulia was in her early thirties when I visited her country house. Her son Paolo, my cousin, and I were friends. This was the first time I was asked to join them for tea. I often saw her outside with her sketchbook. On a wall in her house, I noticed a portrait of a man who I thought resembled Paolo but wasn’t him.

When I mentioned it to my father later, he told me, “A painting in someone’s house is theirs and yet, because visitors can see it, it belongs to a slightly wider world. This can pose a conundrum when our intuition suggests its importance If we give in to our curiosity, what we learn may deepen our dilemma or prove to be the key to something we need to know. But when should we ask? Reticence invites us to let the matter rest, possibly until it’s too late. Or we ask too soon and offend the one who could tell us. I would wait a bit, Luca, as life itself may provide an answer or the beginning of one.”

31.

Love makes people incautious, but the need to hide love brings them up against the stories they tell themselves about their destiny with another, so momentarily important. As their stories are crushed by events, those believing them are left bereft. Women in particular hold against former lovers any knowledge of themselves they shared with them. It matters not at all who set desire loose.

If love ends, if a particular story is ground out, all possibilities seem to die with it — the loved one an unwanted reminder of this. Yet love leaves traces, small fragments of affection that can be fleetingly sparked. This is disconcerting when one believes the past is safely the past. Some enforce this belief with an implacable will, crossing the street or leaving a room, but the gods of these things sport with us or, more charitably, remind us of what we had, what magnificent love we made when it had no barrier and we both believed in it.