Piranesi part three: Natalia

1.

At some point, I realized that it’s impossible to hide. Not that I don’t make a constant effort to blend in, to be one more among so many others, but this never completely forestalls my sense of foreboding. This may make me modern in contrast to my parents and even to my brother, the Apollonian Paolo.

A bulwark against calamity — is there ever such a thing? When I studied history at convent school, it was clear to me that life regularly divided into two — partisans on each side who loathed the other and wished them only death. The nuns, bless their innocence, spoke of how God healed these divides, but then studying law at the suggestion of my father brought home to me the atmosphere of strife that attaches to humanity. Carlo, secular and pragmatic, saw in me a lawyer. It seems a contradiction; a woman in a man’s profession is a sure way to stand out, but I find it beneficial to be in the world of the courts, grasp its mechanics the way Luca grasps the world of trade and its negotiations. They’re related. We sometimes discuss the points of overlap — how the powers of a given day seek to bend the world to their devices. “It’s odd,” he says, “how they misjudge the balance of things, being used to local deference.” In the courts, the balance tips toward them, but even then there are rules, some written and some not, that are dangerous for the powerful to transgress. Some hope to overthrow convention. It works for a time, causing upheaval, and then it doesn’t. These men are ignorant of history or believe it won’t dare apply to them.

My sense of foreboding waxes and wanes depending on the presence of such men on different stages of possible action. To be modern is to have a feel for the pulse of things, I think. My mother’s awareness is fixed on the land and seasons. Carlo has a wider vision.

2.

I was seduced by the gowns that students wear, a tradition lawyers and academics maintain. A gown is a protective guise. The law too has been a refuge for me in a life less well arranged than my parents’ lives, despite their oddities. I’ve made ordinary an art, a state of neutrality much like a gown affords me. To be ordinary is to stand within life inextricably, hoping to avoid what it throws at you — its capacity for surprise and reversal. My mother speaks of this in relation to the countryside, but hers are a painter’s observations, her love of places and their inhabitants. I’m more often in the thick of men’s affairs, as we call them, although women too are caught up in these disputes. Luca attributes them to bad planning, but ordinary life is rarely planned beyond the plotlines we learned growing up. The sacraments give each section its title, some longer than others.

I always try to find a language suited to my ordinary state, but my thoughts run away with me. This doesn’t happen to my artist parents, although I have no memories of being in the room with them when they made love. As makers, their thoughts are focused.

3.

The law courts are demanding when a case goes to trial, and even the petitioning that’s part of it is time-consuming. The rest of life becomes the background. A client’s story can be like a serial, the details emerging piecemeal despite my questions. Even those given to candor talk in layers, not knowing themselves what’s important. We’re both wallowing in anecdote and incident, but my task is to find a narrative that serves the trial — necessarily taking account of the law as context and support, and the court as a mechanism, a relentless machine that sometimes kills or ruins people.

Is this what causes my unease? It prods me to prepare far better than most, to scour the lawbooks for precedent, to press the client for lacunae and discrepancies — any small opening, because I never know how it will go. Whether the case is civil or criminal, animus is always in the mix, warping arguments with raw emotion.

Intuition has its place in court. Opposition and doubt have to be checked and countered without harming anyone’s amour-propre. If I trample on a man’s, I may lose the sympathy of crucial others, so instead I have to let my narrative do the work and set traps that force admissions or expose the frailty of counter-arguments. An art to this is what I mean, with intuition guiding how I put it forward.

4.

The mind is a nervous creature, “like a thoroughbred,” as my mother puts it. I suppose that dressage and the steeplechase are what the practice of law demands of me in predictably uncertain combinations — the need to adhere to an array of conventions and nuances, recall from memory the tracts that are the courts’ terrain, and yet also jump over hedges and hurdles at high speed, careening almost recklessly in order to prevail.

If I have a mare’s perseverance, I’m saddled with the need to feign interest or at least hide my boredom or disdain unless its disclosure is a card worth playing. Breeding, that family fixation, makes such cards talismanic. Even as children, we grasped that life has rules the elders set out in parables and looks.

Wisdom though is more reliably gained by narrow escapes and cautionary tales. The Luca who occasionally skirts disaster in his affairs is like that stock character of commedia, the servant of two masters. That he skirts it is part of the fun. As on the stage, Luca in these situations can be hapless, inexplicably lucky, and altogether human — we grasp that his hunger is harmless, a source of his charm and his poetics, rooted in the way he lives, one wobbling narrative serving as a counterpoint to another he knows in his heart will prove more enduring — his marriage and the family as he idealizes them. But this knowledge is episodically set aside in search of another.

The courts face their own dilemma — their combination of accrual, everything handed down to us, and temporal intervention. Cities too face this tension between was and is. Luca knows the wider world, but sees it as an extension of the Piranesi that for him is its anchor. My mother’s world is smaller, but she’s more secure in her sense of self. She’s a kind of lioness, knowing instinctively what the lions want of her. I lack this confidence. Like a thoroughbred, I have to walk a path first to be sure there are no snakes, and even then, I’m never completely convinced. If Luca has qualms, he ignores them.

5.

Piranesi was once a Greek outpost, I learned from the nuns. It was a polis, they explained — everything was decided out in the open by its citizens. And even if they were in fact an elite, they had to persuade their peers before, having all agreed, they would act.

I see remnants of the polis in the courts and the marketplace. In both, we see how life gives people luck or undermines them, and how, faced with this, they learn early on how to talk, bluff, and brazen their way through it. They live amid signs and portents they interpret and propitiate. Yet they continue to treat the courts and marketplace as more or less unchanging, an order they rely on, exploit, hope to make their way through unharmed.

My parents believe in their art. Will it save them? I don’t think they’ve ever asked themselves this question. I’m the one asking it, but I’m a lawyer, not an artist. I would argue for them, but I doubt I could make an effective defense, should one be necessary. “Should one be necessary”: this is a pessimist talking. Luca has the optimism of a charmer, one who’s long studied the bluffers and the brazen.

It should have bothered me a little that Matteo was on our wall and Paolo resembled him, but Matteo has always treated me with great affection. My nature is like Carlo’s, seeing the form of things, then rendering it convincingly so others can see it. Giulia sketches — preliminary studies that she puts away “for later.” Her studio is like a pantry that she episodically empties to make her art. Carlo’s studio is like a workshop, filled with his assistants. Giulia has her models, but only for sketching. Her real work is done alone.

6.

Luca and I have always been candid with each other. Paolo is a straight arrow. He has a sixth sense about commerce, whereas Luca’s intuitions go deeper. Thus, he grasped the depth of my attachment to Nora, my lifelong friend, first met in convent school.

There’s an old divan in my mother’s country studio, covered with a cowhide throw. On a hot summer afternoon, my school friend and I found ourselves alone. The heat was considerable and we shed our clothes. “We should go out on the terrace,” we told each other, but no, she began exploring the terrain she’s known better as our lives were rearranged by marriage and children, by time itself. These encounters, barely planned, arose from the outset within a friendship that shares the everyday that Piranesi provides us both.

Did anyone but Luca notice? We’ve left no trail, except on my body. My mother’s comings and goings have often provided a place and distance. Does she know? She thinks of me as a convent girl, and I’ve always used this as a subterfuge.

7.

“I brought him with me,” Matteo said, gesturing at Gio, and there he was, this man I married, the father of our children. I knew at once that he was taken with me, and it’s true that I was striking. Yet Matteo had picked his moment to introduce us, in the countryside where he knew I’d be most myself.

Most men are outwardly focused. Matteo, Paolo, and Gio are men of action. The introspective Luca is an exception. After we married, our children drew their grandmothers, Giulia and Alma, and throngs of cousins and chums. Women can be subsumed by their households, but my profession brought me out of it.

Why did Matteo introduce us? I’ve never asked him, but would guess that he felt our temperaments were compatible, that we’d find our way as a couple without ever losing a deep affection. Laura and Luca’s marriage has been stormy, but they seem tied to each other.

Gio’s mother Alma is an herbalist and apothecary, from an ancient family, like Matteo’s, that was here before the Greeks. Every woman in Piranesi sees her about something. “An adept,” my mother says.

8.

My mother and I were both convent girls. It was where my interest in the law began. The Nicene Creed, how it was taught to me and how it actually read — I can trace it there. Law mixes traditions, Roman and Canon. At school, the latter predominated and the old ecclesiastical conservatism still cast its long shadow. Both my parents are fearless in the sense of truly lacking a sense of fear. Luca and I are rooted in it, but he responds with a subtle boundary that enables him to stay calm. I mastered authority’s guiding texts and mechanics with an eye out for any and all exceptions to its givens.

I once discussed the Incarnation with my mother. “Mary was filled with the Holy Spirit,” she said, referring to Jesus’s conception. As she continued, I realized she was conflating the Holy Spirit with God. “No, no, that’s heresy!” I warned her, as the nun drilling us had emphasized that Mary incarnated God’s son. “But that stream of gold! Yes, God, but He got her pregnant! It’s not like Zeus, playing the swan or bull. Leda and Europa weren’t virgins after he was done with them.” This was the first time she’d broached conception in such physical detail, and she went on to elaborate as the nun did not. But I was struck by her emphatic look. In her mind, there was no confusion: “Look at the paintings!” Yet the nuns made it clear that people had been burned for this. It could happen again! Giulia’s catechism must have been like mine, so she misremembered, not that this would bother her. The sins and afflictions of the world are real to her, but her belief that she’ll die peacefully in bed and not from malevolence — a pact she made early on with God, Nicene Creed be damned — gives her a buoyant attitude.

I read and reread the thing, trying to figure it out. But laws too can be like this. If they weren’t, justice would be even more rule-bound than it usually is. Judges become blind and deaf from the quantity of human chaff thrown at them, and it’s a miracle when real justice is done. Jesus spoke forcefully against this, which must be why we were discouraged from reading the Gospels on our own.

9.

“A port city is where exiles like us wash up,” Luca said. “Coupling with the locals, we hope in time to make our histories less visible. We restart our chronicles on arrival, stripping the past of specific ancestors. Yet we keep them assiduously.” What will happen to them, I wondered, if the family has to flee again?

Successive generations embed themselves in the local culture, suppressing any differences. If there’s a weakness to this strategy, it lies in the tendency to ally with power so closely that any cataclysm that topples it makes our own lives perilous. We share this risk with the bourgeoisie as a class, but ruptures like this can quickly split it.

Luca felt I’d be protected by my relative distance from the family, but my profession might be a problem. My mother is protected by Matteo and Carlo; others are more vulnerable — him, for example, but not Laura, given the way bloodlines would likely be parsed.

“Where are we from?” I once asked Giulia. “From Spain,” she said.

10.

The gossip of the court is worth following. I know the bailiffs, and they’re a good source. They joke about the lying that goes on, how those who apprehend are also caught up in the vices they suppress. Nothing gets by them, including occasional moments of truth and revelation. The reputable judges take note if a bailiff’s courtroom mask slips. They’re barely noticeable, these lapses, because these are practiced actors. Most lawyers identify with the judges, but I see myself as part of the same troupe as the bailiffs. When they realized this, they warmed up to me, joking and teasing at first, and then saying more. I learned to decipher minute signs of emotion that surfaced of their own accord in court, suppressed as soon as felt. Taking this in without drawing attention to it is a skill I acquired watching the nuns. They never gossiped in our presence, and yet we knew by constant observation what lay in their heart of hearts.

Nora is plainer, more mannish, and yet, as she notes, more feminine than me. We’re each other turned inside out, I think, and we play with our dissonances. When people feel that their lives are constricted, they try to pry them open, sometimes desperately. So, a piece of luck that we found each other.

Luca wishes the family’s flair for arrangements that leave no trace, that fold up into themselves, included him. He’s forced to be the impresario of his affliction, while Carlo runs his private theater. Like Matteo’s painting on my parents’ wall, Luca’s poems and Carlo’s sculptures could be read into, should someone choose to do so, but both men love women in their different ways. unlike other men who disdain women as lesser beings, parodies of their own perfection. Doubts would arise, then, if they were accused of unorthodoxy, and enforcers of orthodoxy hate ambiguous cases, in my experience.

11.

Lovemaking and friendship between men and women are incompatible, Luca says. Is it true? Giulia managed it with Matteo, but he feels their situation is unique.

Girls can be brutal to each other, a cruelty that reflects their anxious vanity. Nora lacked this and my anxieties never took this form. Nora is like Carlo in that her evident physical strength is tied to a volatile nature that, if challenged, she checks only with obvious, mounting effort. Once, walking home from school, she was set on by three or four of our classmates. Her actions made it clear that she was too dangerous, unchecked. After that, they kept their distance.

I suppose I put myself at risk, loving her, but she’s in no sense possessive except when actually possessing me, that lashing in that’s the other side of her lashing out. God help me. This too traces back.

Childhood is where we form our tastes for certain things, where our narratives begin, our sense of self and others. Luca is a literary man, and he maintains that literature is to one side of life as lived, an effort to make sense of it. We conflate people and events because it makes a better story, makes the life we lived coherent or forgivable.

Early on, Nora saw that she could possess beauty and make her shake with pleasure. Her man is strong like her, but calmer, more purposeful, and patient. Carlo is like this at home. When naturalists discuss lions, the domesticity of their family lives — in between mauling gazelles, scrapping with other lions for dominance, or fucking — is emphasized. That lions maul, scrap, and fuck is barely mentioned. No need. Like us in this respect.

12.

“He fucks like a dog,” Nora told me. It was so memorable that I repeated it to Paolo without attribution. He passed it on to Luca, who told me later that men like it because they can see a woman’s backside, which excites them. Nora likes my backside, I reflected.

Luca is someone you can tell anything and he takes it in and says something useful or nods and a week later says something useful. When he’s with you, it’s as if there are no gaps between all the times he’s been with you. It’s a trait of Nora, too, but her “no gaps” are bodily. Nothing escapes her.

Lovers have their private lexicon, a means of conveying affection. Families have this, too, and the habit passes from parents to their children, and from siblings and cousins to each other. What the lovers take away is bodily memory. That Nora is easily aroused was clear to me early on, but she stays on that high plateau throughout. My theory is that in the aftermath, everything resurfaces and finds its denouement. My aftermaths are sleep, the pain of scraped skin in a hot bath — scrapes owed to other causes, plausibly.

Nora is the naturalist of my body, the range of which astonishes us when she applies her knowledge. Gio is aroused like any married man. I really only need one such — with women, infidelity reflects dissatisfaction with the marriage. With men, maybe with life itself.

Luckily for my life in court, I’m not especially fertile. This is the hazard of marriage. I love Marco and Franny, but I have work to do. Gio does his part, holding us in his affection. He’s a good man, just as Matteo understood. If he knows about Nora, beyond our long friendship, he’s never mentioned it. He never interferes.

13.

“We’re Etruscan,” Matteo said. “We were here before the Greeks, before everybody. When everyone else is gone, we’ll still be here. Compared to us, they’re just parvenus.” The sea is here and my family traveled over it, but his people are rooted here like old vines that continue to produce prized vintages. The man I take to bed is of this same ancient stock. Bits of the past surface momentarily and we grasp their potent originality. This gives Gio and Matteo their confidence: others threatened to sweep it all away and yet it wasn’t. The trick is to live through it and thrive again in each aftermath.

My nature is the residue of exile, the thoughts that come with it. If both my children are confident, I could say it comes from Giulia and Carlo, but it’s from Gio. Nora is also one of them, an Etruscan, as she told me when Gio and I were betrothed. Her husband, also.

When we studied history in school, the Etruscans were treated as a mystery, a civilization that went to ground. That they deserved the term was evident in the archaeological remains, but who were they? They take on elemental forms that combine with others yet remain themselves. I see this in my children. Matteo, who’s known me from childhood, understood my fundamental wariness, so Gio was his gift to me and them, to break that chain.

Luca claims that the outer poles of males and females, his “pure types,” bring out their opposite, and that the ambivalent crave those extremities. Is this true for Nora and me? Our pairing was at our own initiative, an elixir that, taken episodically, keeps us whole. I think Luca’s still looking for it. I’m not sure it’s possible for him.

14.

Justice is a woman, blindfolded and impartial. I grew up with this image — that civilization calls for this, marked progress from less enlightened eras. Something of this idealism persists in courts of law, just as faith persists in churches. It’s part of their orthodoxy.

Brazen or lurid crimes, and anything that frightens the powers that be, have a public dimension. Public means that it can be swayed by hearsay and the newspapers’ framing, but what follows, being in the public view, exposes the courts’ machinery. Most of my work is civil, but I’m assigned other cases or implored to take them on.

Passion can win leniency or exculpation. The accused is crucial to this, as are the witnesses, if any. What’s said has to be emotionally true, which often means telling a story full of pathos. While this can be enacted on a stage, the court is too closed in for any but the most human drama. Life has to speak for itself in harrowing detail, as Justice isn’t really blind and definitely has ears.

This is the excitement that law affords me, why it’s my calling, although I’d rather be at my desk, searching for precedents on which to hang my theories, or questioning my client and any friendly witnesses to unearth whatever might convince a judge. Also, I have to be convinced, both that it’s credible and that it’s compelling.

15.

“Thoroughly conventional,” Luca said, quoting my mother. Then he laughed. “I wonder if she means the convent?” I asked, as much to myself as to him. Luca was doubtful. “She sees you in relation to their lives as artists. Carlo knows what you’ve accomplished, wondering where this talent for the law came from, but Giulia thinks it’s a wall you erected in an effort to calm yourself.’” It’s true — along with Gio’s name and our Etruscan children, I wanted the law and the law courts close by, their officers on a first name basis.

Luca is as observant as my mother, but what he sees fuels his theories and his poems. He’s like a barometer about Piranesi, or maybe a meat thermometer stuck deep into the body of the place. Life sticks mostly to its patterns. The trick is to sense disaster.

Luca lives an outwardly normal life onto which he layers his own necessities and those that others impose on him. He describes himself as a fixer who knows how to get things done and how to deflect trouble. It’s not always possible, but he does his best.

This is the way of the world, is it not? Trouble arrives anyway.

16.

Assimilation is an art rooted in hope and fear. In this sense, I’m a true daughter of my mother’s family, although my mother lives neither in hope nor fear, in my view. While I tell myself I’m securely embedded here, doubts arise. I have in common with the family its strategy of being close to power but hewing to fair dealing and probity. Power is shared between the potentates and the street, both unpredictable and possibly dangerous. The family joins the former in being visibly generous, but a mob may not remember this once the existing order is supplanted. When things go haywire, the machinery freezes and those who operate it may change sides, making the courts for example less fair, crueler, more lethal.

Gio sees this from the other end, an order supplanted long ago. His people are indigenous, as the anthropologists say, but a backdrop rather than marked out in any sense. My family is not exactly visible, either. Our watchword is discretion, everything handled privately, “bespoke,” as Luca puts it, which lets us choose our clientele. All our dealings are personal and some are almost hereditary, since dynastic wealth here is relatively stable.

Our arrangements reflect the contradictions of the established order. Class, custom, and orthodoxy work against the natural attraction that arises between two people — like Giulia and Matteo, unable to marry and yet drawn to each other. Matteo’s arrangement began as a conversation between two grandfathers, according to Luca. Had Giulia demurred, that would have been it. Instead, she got Matteo, her painting of him, and their Paolo.

17.

Giulia is in Milan with Luca’s sister Cosima, so I’m in the country. Nora came with me, but has now gone back. The divan is still there with its cowhide throw. It’s convenient that my mother’s studio is isolated from the rest of her house.

Now it’s just me and my mother’s helpers. They live on the farm and come up in the morning to prepare the meals my mother heats up when she feels like eating. Her horses are stabled elsewhere when she’s away, so I haven’t gone riding. Since Nora left, I’ve spent time in Giulia’s studio, going through her work. I looked carefully at the walls of the house, too. It’s her gallery, I think. There’s work by others, including my father’s sculptures, uncharacteristically small, and a surprising number of his sketches — studies, mostly, that reveal his careful observation and his feeling for his subjects. They have this in common, I realize. She has this way of building up her point of view sketch by sketch, then with small gouache paintings, testing the colors, how the light changes. She waits for a place to tell her what it’s about. Her painting of Matteo, is it similar?

This isn’t the first time I’ve made this pilgrimage here mainly to see the house and her work. Nora was a vacation from everything, my Nora who leaves me so sated that my mind is clear and opened. What strikes me is how good the work is, whether dashed off or brought finally to a conclusion. It has the kind of audience the family acquires — word of mouth. She occasionally exhibits with Carlo. If interest is expressed, she’ll give the work in question to that person.

Luca thinks Matteo burned away most of Giulia’s desire; Carlo gets the rest. I doubt she ever made love to a woman. She just loves those two men, her children by them, and her art, taking them in along with everything else that merits her close attention.

18.

“Cosima feels Milan has changed,” Luca said. “The glitter is still there, but cultural life is under siege.” This wasn’t what I heard from Giulia when she came to see me. She talked about being immersed again in Cosima’s world, which she finds both a spectacle and hard going — -as usual. She’s always liked her cousin, who’s long urged her to move to Milan or at least spend the season there. Next time I saw her, I mentioned Luca’s comment. “Commerce sets the pace in Milan and the money spills over. Most of it is spent on distraction, but there’s an art to that — livings can be made. Artists find patrons, there are galleries, fashion, design — raffish, deliberately provocative. The grandees tolerate it, but there’s a risk of a reaction. Loose rules are tightened and then used against the artists. Mobs appear, egged on by politicians. Cosima sees this and it makes her anxious. Thank God we live in Piranesi. Only the paraded Virgin draws a crowd.”

19.

At court, everything is as it’s always been. I ate lunch nearby, at a place frequented by the bailiffs. As it cleared out, the most senior of them lingered — older, rotund, always kind to me even when I started out. He came over to my table. “You seem anxious,” he said. “Forgive me for saying so. It made me worry.” I gestured for him to join me. “Everything is fine,” I told him. “But the political situation concerns me.” He nodded. “Rome is far away. It takes time for change to rattle through the formal channels, and then someone has to come here to see if it’s taken seriously. That’s usually how it goes.”

He sighed. “We have a small farm. My hope is to live there peacefully, but our children and grandchildren, what about them?” He got up from the table, slow and almost ponderous. “God put us all here to try our luck,” he added. He pressed my shoulder. “Don’t worry, Natalia! Piranesi is older than Rome. We’ll survive.”

20.

“Cosima is coming,” my mother said. “A visit?” I asked. “No, she sold the house in Milan and is moving back. Luca has been helping her find quarters. She finds Milan oppressive — ‘too modern.’ “ Later, when I finally tracked Luca down, he confirmed what Giulia told me. “The society she loved belongs to the past. Milan wants to be the capital of business, the young men in sharp suits, their women skipping La Scala for nightclubs. To them, Cosima is a relic.”

I wondered. She seems as single-minded about her social life as Giulia is about her art. What comes next for such a person? I posed this question to Giulia. “She kept a diary. If it records the sorts of things she noted — whatever struck her as ‘splendid,’ the pathos, all recounted with animation — if that’s in her diary, it’s worth reading.”

I asked Luca about Cosima’s new place. “She was specific: not large, not in the center of things, but close enough that she can walk to shops, to church, and to see the family. Quiet, with a room where she can work. She’s ordered bookshelves and a desk. Space to have people over, but not for big occasions. ‘If I decide to have a party, I’ll rent a restaurant,’ she told me. ‘It shouldn’t remind me of Milan. Oh, and Luca,’ she added, ‘I want the sea and ships to be visible from one of the rooms — just a slice, not a panorama.’”

21.

“I want to be visible,” Nora said. “I want us to be visible.” It came out of the blue. There was a pause, almost a minute. “Not just us. I want all of us who hide ourselves because we’re made to hide to live openly.” Another pause. “Islands exist where people love openly. We love each other, and we have to find rooms out of sight and hearing. I want to parade our love, to parade with everyone else whose love is also hidden — to celebrate ourselves, for once, as all we really are.”

We were in Cosima’s flat, furnished for her impending arrival. I’d been asked by Luca to have a look, and brought Nora along. There was just a sliver of a view — we could see it from the bed, a slice of the harbor and the sea through one tall and narrow window, placed so the privacy of the room was undisturbed. Nora spoke again.

“I dreamt that my people threw off all those layers of conquest and stood again on our own ground, welcoming others like us — Romani, men in women’s clothes, men embracing men, women with their arms around slim beauties, more tattoos than pirates on their arms. It was summer and most of them wore next to nothing.”

“Rooms like this are where we overlap — like that divan in your mother’s studio. I want to pin a note on it: ‘We were here again. Natalia came seven times, each more splendid than the last. You have your painting of Matteo, Giulia, and I have Natalia’s gasps.’” She laughed. “We should leave Cosima a gift.” She passed two fingers under my nose. “Maybe I’ll bottle some of this for her.”

22.

She arrived, Cosima, helped by Luca, visited by Giulia. I listened to their accounts, but then I received a note asking me to call on her. So, I went back to her flat with its narrow harbor view, the bed on which I’d come seven times by Nora’s count. Cosima received me, dressed simply, barely a trace of makeup — a spareness that suited her, as her face, her whole demeanor really, is striking. The summons had to do with legal matters: could I suggest someone? They fell mostly into what a clerk could do, but needed a lawyer to prepare a final version. “I’ll organize it,” I told her. She thanked me, stopped to pour us tea, then looked up. “It wasn’t just Milan that drove me away, Natalia, although in truth it became unbearable. I came here to write about it — my life from the time I arrived there until I left.” She motioned to what Luca told me was her writing room. “I have shelves of notebooks. Without thinking much about it, I wrote whatever struck me — people, events, their settings, the conversations. I realized I have the raw material for a history — one woman’s story — of one era giving way to another. My task is to make something of it. What it is — a novel or just a record — doesn’t really matter. I’ll see as I write it what it needs to be. This is a better use of my time than living on in Milan. Culture breaks with the past, that’s its nature, but so much that’s happening there is just reaction decked out in the latest clothing. So, here I am. Piranesi is my refuge, at least for now, and my writing place.”

23.

“I suppose one could think of us as courtesans,” Cosima said, several conversations later. “We thought we chose them, but little was left to chance. And we were the lure.” She paused to pour us some tea. “God knows, we were bred for it, not just for beauty but for desire. We loved intensely in that brief season our breeding brought us.”

She waved her hand toward her desk. There was a neat stack of notebooks. “I’m rereading them,” she said. “I owe it to Francesca, Natalia — she took one from a shelf when she visited me and kept reading. It made me realize that I write in the same way that Giulia sketches. This is the freedom we won for ourselves. It’s different now — I mean, you have a career as a lawyer, a profession. I’m not sure we could have done that, even if we’d had the opportunity. We went where our interests lay. When I came back, I saw immediately why Giulia stayed here — it’s her subject matter, as Milan was mine.”

I asked Franny about the journals. “When I talk with Giulia, I see how she takes everything in and then uses it in her art. I think Cosima is like this, too. She’s a writer, not a painter, but the attention she pays is the same. The journals are her sketchbooks.”

As for my life here in Piranesi, it takes place at home, in court, in Giulia’s house and studio, on the street or at the harbor. So, half a dozen sets and how many characters? Even in the courtroom, it comes down to the client, bailiff, and judge. Intimacy is a theme. What do I do with this, I wonder? Is it a life anyone would read?

24.

“No coincidence,” Nora says. It’s one of Alma’s catchphrases. Gio is untouched by anything mysterious, but his mother’s roots go deep into the primal ground that gives her certain insights. When Franny came of age, she visited Alma and came home with a chart: columns of symbols, faint lines indicating how one column related to another. I described it to Nora, who nodded, “I have one, too.”

II called on Alma after Franny’s visit. “Making charts is passed down among our women. A chart suggests if she’ll marry in or out, if her desire will be fully for that person or split, and if split, how. The central column is hers. The inner two are her closest connections. The outer two are important, but how? Men’s charts only have three columns. You figure in Gio’s and also in Nora’s. You and Nora are split, but life has made you whole. You square your chart with life as lived. People and situations can seem to fit but don’t. Connections can be good or bad. We only see this clearly, if we see it at all, in retrospect.”

25.

I think about desire in a bodily sense, how I immerse myself in it, carried away, and how I’ve embodied it, too. We attribute to our hearts the feelings that arise, how we give form to what we’re given. I come from a long line of women who produced marriageable daughters whose nature and bearing strike others, not least in their nonchalance about their looks, their native ability to pull themselves together and rise to occasions. Where does this come from?

Giulia would say that it always comes out well in the end, that life is like her endless sketches and, episodically, we pull them together. She has remarkable equanimity, but also a finely tuned sense of what she wants and doesn’t want, and the courage to make it happen. I tell myself I’m more fearful, less single-minded, but then I have all I ever desired, am complete on that score, as Alma observed.

I want to ask Nora to show me her chart, the column and symbols that describe this peculiar woman, Natalia. But will this help me? My fears are always to do with what’s ahead, my tendency to extrapolate a malign universe based on rumors and portents. I suppose this is the legacy of my family, that I’m so easily set off, but I’m enough part of Gio’s family that I resist the idea of fleeing. And fleeing is being discussed now in our family “as a precaution,” Luca told me. “Istanbul, Haifa, and even Johannesburg have come up, but Paolo thinks Argentina. He and Matteo are in conversation.”

26.

Luca lets me use his harborside bolthole when he’s away. It’s been years since the sailors brought him to the docks, but he kept it as a place to write. It looks a poet’s quarters. One morning, Nora joined me, noting a divan “very like your mother’s,” and then wringing me out over several hours. Did Luca choose this place for its isolation?

Nora’s rhythms take me over, as elliptical as Mars’ orbit — difficult to calculate because improvised, yet reliable. Her hunger builds slowly; my fate to be its occasion and the well of her knowledge.

After she left, sitting at Luca’s desk, I thought about my strange life. Am I just my work and my receptivity to others? I’ve lived according to my lights, though, working in a bodily pleasure I’ve managed to stretch out. Not even death seems really final, oddly. This may be the nuns’ doing — their sense of the porosity between life and the Afterlife, whatever it is, however we find it or it finds us.

27.

Inflamed by my brother, Franny dreams of Argentina. I foresee that she’ll soon be an ocean away. Does her chart predict this? Does someone await her there, Piranesi just an address for letters and occasional photographs? I mentioned this to Alma. “You lack possessiveness so, in your mind, Franny is free to come and go, despite your love for her. Not many have this. You pick up where you left off, no gap. Nora isn’t possessive, either, but she hungers.”

28.

Death is part of country life, unhidden, as natural as the animals rutting and whelping, their offspring savoring their brief, joyous lives. In town, such aspects of life are mostly private. What makes me anxious is the way people visit death on each other, not just in anger, but also at a remove. It’s bad enough that vengeance is meted out by the courts, but strife wells up so easily, stirring up mobs and old hatreds. Perhaps the world is divided between those rooted in a place regardless and those never truly at home. If things fall apart, they move on. Have I lived my way from one to the other, so rooted here now that Franny can pull our tendrils to the ends of the earth without breaking them? Or will her absence not figure for either of us as separation, unnoticed until we meet again? Perhaps it’s both.

29.

It’s hard to square Cosima as I see her now with the doyenne that we knew in Milan. She’s made the premises of this new era, its simplifications and stripping away of ornament, her own — a spare figure in a setting that’s also consciously minimal. It’s a version of Giulia’s country life, like her studio with its whitewashed walls.

When Carlo took up painting, he became a more regular presence at her house, shedding the apparatus and detritus of his former life including many of its distractions. Alma made me more conscious of a person’s divided self and how it evolves. Painting is what Carlo brought with him, or the impulse to paint. You age out of eras of your life, I think, and then look around for what you’ve aged into.

30.

I dreamt that an angel defeated an evil one threatening Piranesi. “Shouldn’t you kill him publicly?” I asked, a lawyerly question. The angel shook his head no. I took from this that we speak of God as a shepherd but He lacks control of things except in the sense of having made our world, and given it seasons and its tendency to be fertile and habitable despite its catastrophes, including us. Yet there’s a rough justice built into it, which must also be His doing.

In the countryside, the greatest sin is cruelty, the one malign trait that inspires others to move on the perpetrator, hunt down and cull what’s universally seen as an aberration. Like death, cruelty in other settings is locked away or shopped out to third parties. War is terrible in large part because it gives license to these brigands.

We sat with Alma interpreting my column and its symbols. “I saw this when we were 12,” Nora said later. “You have your gown, your profession, but I can’t be a man in Piranesi.” I nodded. “Situations tell me who I am, so, who am I, really? But every old divan makes me amorous for you and then you hand me back to myself again.”

31.

Suppose that Paolo and Franny went to Argentina, and Matteo became its honorary consul here? Suppose I gave up my practice and, as his deputy, ran a consulate in Carlo’s old studio? Piranesi is a place of arrivals and departures. Even the Etruscans must have felt this, the inevitable fate of a port among others serving farms, quarries, or what have you — whatever’s traded, coveted, changes hands. Anyone in trouble with this “new order” could with our help quit it for a safer place that’s already half Italian. Matteo’s immunity and visa-granting will make life less anxious. And then, with her grandmothers and Nora in tow, I can travel to Argentina to see Franny — vessel, means, and lure — and her progeny, as foreseen.