Argentina

ARGENTINA John J. Parman

"All means are sacred which are called for by the inner need." Wassily Kandinsky

Part One: Leo

Leonora' s the name they gave me, but it's Leo, thanks , an in-between brevity fitting for one like me in a place like this at a time the newspapers celebrate as a new beginning. It's not the worst moment to be half European and half Mapuche. Some mise en scène: my family here splits its time between the agrarian pursuits of my uncle Paolo, based in San Rafael, and the businesses managed by his cousin Luca in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Luca's wife Laura owns property in Montevideo, home also to Luca's sisters Cosima and Marta. Luca brought Cosima's Milan trilogy, edited by Natalia, my grandmother, to Latin American readers. I met her in San Rafael before the war, and in Piranesi afterward. Maria and Guillermo, my Mapuche grandmother and father, are Paolo's partners in San Rafael. making wine and breeding horses. Much closer to the Andes than Buenos Aires, San Rafael lies within Mapuche territory. After a treaty ended the strife that killed my grandfather, Maria ran the farmstead Paolo bought. My mother Franny learned Mapudungun from her, then fell in love with her son. This was anticipated on both sides of my family, although their divination methods differ. The Etruscans make charts, while the Piranesi intuit the infant's nature at birth. Mapuche adepts like Maria go into a trance to read a child's character. All agree it's not exactly predictive. What this means in practice is a bit unclear.

1.

To call a place in time a midcentury is to divide a longer expanse in two, leaving me among others to look back and ahead, extrapolating from my own and reported experience what it meant and might mean, this lived and unlived thing whose midpoint is here and now. I find this odd, arbitrary, yet fitting given that I'm unclear exactly where I'm headed.

Luca, friends with an exiled Polish writer, quoted him to me on how we find our way only by trial and error, weighing things and acquiring tastes. Luca is reliably forthcoming on certain topics, good at citing from life the foibles we bring to our encounters, and Exhibit A, as my grandmother Natalia might put it, of the charm that foibles give people, despite their efforts at propriety. I take courage from him when, ambiguously dressed, I swagger into a bar said to harbor women of a rougher sort to understand how they disport, what they discuss, how they size up the trade. In such a sizing up, I honor my Etruscan lineage, Luca tells me.

I'm a bit exotic, mixing two very different ideas of beauty. My namesake Nora has a bit of this a full Etruscan with a temper, "docile as a volcano" (or a crocodile). Hunting in my blood gives me the patience to stalk and an endurance honed by Andes passes I've crossed with my father and my cousins. When my parents wed, Paolo invited Matteo over to bless their marriage. His presence awed the local gentry a real grandee as opposed to their provincial facsimiles. Franny and Guillermo were viewed thereafter as landowners with a touch of aristocracy, natural and otherwise, that led our European neighbors to grant them a certain latitude. I also benefited, half-breed that I am, accentuated by Guillermo's raising me to hunt and trek. He did so at Maria's behest, she says, based on her reading of my nature. Accurate, I think.

A huntress like Diana? My mother brought me up on stories of such goddesses, told in her family's Piranesi dialect. Luca and I speak it with each other. It lends a bit of protection to our frankness. When Franny and I speak it, though, it's our personal version a mix of Piranesi Italian, Mendoza Spanish in its San Rafael variant, and Mapudungun, with the addition now of the Spanish of the capital and even the Spanish of Luca's capital, especially the slang. Languages come easily to us, but I'm a magnet for catchphrases, odd phrases, and the jingoes I hear on the street and the radio snatches of songs, bits of poems and novels. The Mapuche have local dialects that my father and my cousins taught me, growing up, but they have a rich vocabulary that runs parallel to words. It's also true in the city, how much is conveyed by look or body. Hunting involves silence and attention to things like scent, including your own. The wind is a screen and also a revealer.

Yet I also fall into the matriarchal lineage of the Piranesi, a convent school girl who's now at the university in Buenos Aires, following my mother's example once she made up her mind to advocate for the Mapuche and others like them. She could have been a lawyer like her mother, but her interests are sociological and political. Natalia went into law with the encouragement of her father, but Franny charted her own path. "She has the self-confidence of her grandmother," Luca says. Can our ancestors' traits reappear in their descendants? Natalia told me in Piranesi that my mother is so grounded because her father Gio is of Etruscan stock, able to hold his ground no matter what blows through. But it's really Natalia who's rooted in Piranesi. My mother's roots are portable.

I wrote the previous three entries in 1950, when I was 20. It was a heady moment in the capital, filled with promise, but Luca suggested I move to Manhattan, "a better place to end up than Brazil," as he put it. (I was intrigued by its daring architecture.) He and Marco did business in New York, so they helped me get a visa. I presented myself at the Cooper Union, a venerable institution, focused on engineering, with a small architecture school. I noted my background and my lineage of artists, including Carlo, a maker of monumental artworks, and his wife Giulia, who I described as an Italian cubist. One of them knew Marco, who comes to Manhattan episodically and is also a fixture in the revived trade fair that draws the architects to Milan. They let me in. My studio mates taught me the ropes, but I have an affinity for form, materials, and fabrication. I envision a form and then work out how to make it. I spend time with the fabricators. I also went to Italy to visit quarries and see the aged Carlo at the country house near Piranesi he shares with Giulia. A miracle being with them and reading his invaluable notebooks.

Carlo admires modernists of pure form, "like sculptors." He counts some structural engineers among them. (The engineers were among my most interesting teachers.) "If I were starting again, I would design buildings," he told me.

4.

As the last entry suggests , I found this notebook and began adding to it. There are others an account of my nights out hunting in the bars and clubs of Buenos Aires, written in a kind of shorthand; topical ones made at school; quarrying and notetaking in Italy; and "miscellany."

My university in Buenos Aires gave women a great deal of freedom, believing that most of us would end up married. Professions were in the picture and it also produced serious scholars like the Church did for women prepared to devote their lives to them. I studied eclectically, believing that what came readily was likely right for me. The engineering school in Manhattan was idiosyncratic about architecture and content to leave me to my devices. Speaking in ersatz English to my models and drawings, I demonstrated how my ideas could be realized the materials and fabricators and why.

Nightly hunting in my university days led me to foreswear this deadly sin. What's deadly about a sin is its repetition, as shown by the shorthand of my entries and the blurred nature of what I remember. Manhattan is a different terrain, a place overpopulated with lions, every young thing a gazelle to be quarreled over. There are lionesses too, but it's exhausting.

My interactions with Luca were a window onto a family of women who in different ways arranged their lives around their desires. In this same picture were the men who aided them. Together, they formed a persistent lineage, not so much dynastic as attuned to the need for desire itself, as if this cosmic motor kept the world going, which of course it does.

Luca observed the paradox at the heart of our family, its ability to root itself convincingly, marry into whatever was oldest in every new place Etruscans or Mapuche and have children whose names and parentage reflected this grafted-on older stock, like Paolo's vineyards. I'm one such, alive to my individuality among the indigenous. Yet the family is ever on the verge of moving. Part of our mobility is the elasticity of our roots, tendrils that are more like radio waves, my mother thought, enabling her and Natalia to feel connected despite the distance and the gap in time that the war imposed.

"Rooted cosmopolitans" is Luca's twist on the accusation laid at the Jewish diaspora by those who consider them to be outsiders. No, he argues, we turn up and turn ourselves into insiders. For my own initial foray into architecture, I attached myself to one of the lions as a form-maker. Not the only one, of course, and my presence was resented by some of the men. It made me see how remarkably free of this my school was. These men view women as accessories to take to parties, to fuck, to raise their children, to run the house. It's also true of the city's artists and writers, mostly lions or would-be lions.

I have no patience with these situations. When a fabricator I knew, Tino, asked me to join him, I accepted. He knew Marco in Rome before the war, a friendship they revived. I met him while still a student. He taught me how to bring beauty and strength out from the materials. After Carlo expanded on this in Piranesi, I brought his lessons back to Manhattan, intent on applying them.

6.

We fall into two categories that usually overlap and less often are distinct. What marks the family is its awareness of this and its constant efforts to find ways around it or mitigate the damage it can cause to self and others, unresolved.

The categories have to do with self-interest and whether it is seen in a narrow, parochial sense or more broadly. The former can be individual or tribal, while the latter sees past these identities to acknowledge how bound up we are in the lives of others. The former prowl the territory they hope to dominate; the latter view it as artisans and gardeners do: a collective future engendered in a fertile, collaborative present.

It means thinking of time itself as the unfolding of seasons and of our lives within them. Modernity in Manhattan shrugs this off, muscling through its brutal winters and summers with heat, air-conditioning, and lubricant. Elsewhere, life adapts, collectively remembering times of abundance and stress. Such living accumulates and contributes knowledge. The locals favor modesty over hubris for self-protection.

Is this Manhattan or is it any big, modern city where men and women, full of themselves, disregard others, even their own children, fueled by alcohol, cigarettes, diet pills, the rest? A few are monsters. Most are just people I want to avoid.

The cosmopolitan nature of our family leads us to be local wherever we make our landfall, to look for openness "heart" as Cosima put it, describing Milan, a local culture in her view despite presenting itself on a grand scale. I see it here too, the best of it, like Tino, talking with his clients the way Paolo talks wine or my father horses. These men see women and children (and lovers and friends) as family, not possessions. The atmosphere is supportive and they make room in their lives so that new things, like our workshop, can take form.

The overlap I mentioned comes with experience. Few of us are saints (and saints are a pain in the ass, Luca observed). A lot of our self-awareness comes from others' responses to our behaviors. We learn from this, although occasionally too late.

Carlo described how his studio became a factory, now run by Marco as a workshop of artisans. Marco cultivated a network of architects and designers, extending fr0m manufacturing to bespoke fabrication. Tino and I turned to him to transform our small workshop into something more substantial. Marco gave us capital and his imprimatur. Tino suggested we open our new workshop in the Brooklyn Naval Yard, a vast set of redundant buildings that, he reasoned, would be undisturbed as Manhattan grew. We kept the old workshop as a staging area and meeting place with clients. I built a tiny studio for myself in the Brooklyn workshop. I live here, which is illegal and quite conducive to my work.

For an architect, or whatever it is I've become, scale is an issue. Most architects apprentice with practices that work at the scale that interests them, often with a specialty. When I produced forms on demand for the lion, part of the tedium of it was the repetition of buildings in response to the market. Materials were dictated by cost, so conflicts arose between ambitions for form and the means to achieve it. If one begins a project with a clear sense of its constraints, it's possible to produce something good, but the reverse situation makes at best for compromise and at worst disaster.

What Tino and I have in mind is to tie form to fabrication so the conversations with clients are always about what it takes to realize the desired ambition. Experimentation is also in play, trying out new materials to understand them a lab in collaboration with others and a testbed for manufacturers.

Form is partly illusory its effects can depend on distance or vary depending on one's vantage point. Stage sets and film sets exploit this, a fact not lost on architects and decorators. If a form is tied to momentary fashion, its fabrication should focus on effect. If endurance is the object, then the form itself is the focus and everything has to serve this.

9.

When I finally received my Etruscan chart from Nora , she explained how those five columns of symbols were made and what they meant. "We think of it as a commentary on the game we're born into, among a cohort of people who are also players." Everyone, she added, finds herself in similar straits, but we have the benefit of a chart that isn't predictive, no, it's more about our nature and that of significant others. It's not clear if their significance is good or bad, nor can we even be sure that this one or that one is significant. "Life throws facsimiles at you," she said. "It's why we consider it a game. There must be some other plane where everyone meets to sort out who was who and make up the next one. But having a chart is an advantage that we pass on to our descendants.

I'm 30. Since arriving in New York City, I haven't had a lover. The lions put me off. I spend my days with my clients and collaborators, and spend my nights dreaming of forms. Episodically, I immerse myself in my sources. The churches at home were early ones, but form is everywhere. Lineage is another given vines that emerge through the floorboards when I set my forms aside and dream of other things.

Piranesi after a long while, the culmination of a journey that began when Marco telephoned. I flew Alitalia to Rome and we met. He plans to shift to Milan and wants me to head it up. What about New York? "It will be okay!" arms waving. Okay, let me ponder this, I said. In principle, yes, I added, to my own surprise. A big smile and nodding head. I took the train to Piranesi, where I'm staying with Natalia. I visited Giulia and Carlo, who both seem much frailer.

I called on Nora. She's so open and frank about life, how we try to fit into it and at the same time exert our will to get what we need. "All the arrangements your family has made for you are about your work, because that's your ruling passion. When I was in San Rafael before the war, I spoke with your grandmother Maria with Franny's help. She said that some hunters lose their taste for game because they know their prey too well. Their prowess leads them to disdain any power that assumes they owe it deference, not from pride but self-confidence. She was glad your father raised you as he did. 'Just as I was,' she told me."

I've turned myself inside - out, I note. Holed up in my little studio in Brooklyn has given way to holding court in Milan. Not that I was a recluse exactly, but my role has changed. I now run the creative side of the business Carlo established. Here I am at 33, an industrial designer. I still think of myself as an architect, free under that title to design whatever, but I like this new title's factory connotations. At my suggestion, we put ours in Modena, where they originally made airplanes and then switched to making sports cars. Like San Rafael, it has two rivers and a mountain range nearby. I bought a country house there, inserting another small studio into the factory. We bought a flat in Milan big enough to entertain that serves as a showroom for what I generate in the office/studio below. I'm teaching at the polytechnic. Every two months, I go back to New York to tend to things there. Thank God for jets!

Postwar Italian workers are Communists, but their party is splintering Our family is bourgeois, ever and always, relying on fair dealing and epic flexibility. Artisans are their own men and their products are bespoke. I want to bring some women in and start designing for the mass market. Bespoke induces a wider desire is what I'm seeing. We need to do both.

I need a wife. A husband is optional. Perhaps a couple who could raise the children? I daydream about this. I'm not sure it matters if the children are mine or theirs. I crave domestic life the way I crave the countryside. This is where my desire's gone. Where is my Nora? Natalia's arrangement made such sense, but I don't actually crave another lover, just affection.

So, I'm on the hunt for one or ones, or open to that. Is this hunting, to be open? It's not an idle question. Hunting, as my father taught me, is a long game. It's one we play together, hunter and hunted, and neither of us is exclusively one or the other, despite our delusions. I suppose that yes, it's hunting.

Everything is a long game I think all my lines of descent would agree with this. We play to keep the game going. And children are part of this, aren't they? We need new players.

Recently, I read about William Morris. He tried to extend bespoke to ordinary goods, to give solidity and beauty scale. His only real success was Liberty, fabrics anyone could buy. Wallpaper, too. I read his NewsfromNowhere . He loved women, but they were unreliable, so, back to his loom or to Iceland to heal his wounds. Not a lion, a man. I want one. (We'll both need a wife if I'm going to get anything done.)

In Brooklyn, I worked out as I drew or modelled them how to fabricate a variety of forms. That process drew as much attention as the forms themselves, because the art of making there is hit or miss. In Italy, that form-giving and form-making are tied together is a long tradition, part of the culture. How to give it scale is the issue, as it was for Morris.

13.

My polytechnic colleague Alessandro asked me to dinner and I met a young Japanese couple, Yukiko and Hiro. I was struck by her, so flamboyantly Italian. Sandy told me that Hiro is on some Japanese company's long leash. "They send them to Milan for two years and then they reel them in."

I was so taken with Yukiko that I invited them to stay with me in the country. Meanwhile, I asked Marco to take Hiro to lunch, show him our office/studio and the current line, note our factory in Modena. When I fetched them, we stopped off there to look around, then had lunch with the couple who run it for us. It was a holiday, so their return to Milan could wait.

They had a cottage to themselves and came over for meals. Ludo, half of the Modena couple, took Hiro into the back country to hike. Yukiko and I had lunch together on her little terrace. Unexpectedly, she burst into tears. The return home weighed on her like a death sentence. "You don't know," she said. "Here, we're both free. There, I won't be. My life will narrow down to nothing. Hiro will soon forget me, coming home late and drunk like the others, likely having a mistress." It seemed melodramatic, but it was clear that she meant it.

Ko and Ro, as I call them, are part of what's forming in my head, a cooperative of many parts linked by mutual trust and shared ambition. I picture an enterprise focused on what we need, what we want, what we desire, what we dream "what we," in short, with couples like Ko and Ro personifying it, "it" being their young lives, but with others appearing over time as we add to our lines.

"No," I said, "I won't stand for it! You'll stay here with us."

Form, my preoccupation, is nothing without a context. At any scale, what we notice is what's around it, how any one thing is part of something larger, or isn't too different from the rest or unworthy of them or they of it. My sense that my Milan flat is a showroom is exactly right what appeals to people is the total picture, the effect a place provides, more than the objects, more even than the enclosure, but each one fits even if it's added later, as we bring it to life, living in it. The tendency of designers is to linger on the object, details thought to be important, and of course they are important, an art to their making, proof of proficiency all we hammer into students at the polytechnic but animation wins the day, the eye seduced by beauty in motion, which life itself brings out.

When I realized this, I called Marco to tell him we have to revise how we present it all. Nothing without its place and no place without a family that suits it, a couple, a child or two as proof of happiness and fecundity, the coziness of winter, spring's reopening, warm summer, autumn's harvest. Our products can live with others, with artwork, houses, any plausible thing to fill out a picture, tell a human story.

It liberates me, this shift. I feel so much is cold, but life is warm and colorful, softer, slower. Yes, city life, but a balcony and greenery, a country place. They're bourgeois at heart, these moderns, dreaming in spite of the industrial nightmare. It takes me back to Morris, holding art up to the factories, giving women Liberty, patterns steeped in effusive nature. I think that everything is about to heat up. Not always good.

Thirty - eight. My son Trent is four, his sister four weeks . I named him Trent after my favorite of his father's works. Gianni gave our daughter a name from his family, Carolina, so a family now, presided over by the WhatWe co-founders, this coop and emporium whose ads run in magazines and on the tele, our ideas and his photos and films. Everything we make arises from the laboratory we've created with Ko and Ro, this incidental couple I encountered at the polytechnic like Trent's father, stopping off to give a lecture. Was it luck or estrus? Both, probably, and he rose to it. Not the first, I learned, but I never followed up nor did he inquire. It's fine. Trent is his own man, solid as his lineage suggests.

Natalia is ecstatic. Nora, too. Both baptisms were held in Piranesi. Gianni is very familial, better than me on this score, never rushed by time. I lost some of my famous patience, but he's given it back to me, barn cat that I seem to be, or barn lioness. I needed that old lion to give me a son, while Lina was from pure affection for my children's father.

A laboratory, I call it, because the ideas emerge from the lives of these others, a network loosely or tightly involved in the coop. Ro is one of the main designers, but Ko is a genius at needs, wants, and desires. We raise our kids together. Her babies drew their grandparents, inevitably, and all was forgiven. Even Ro's old company now pays him homage.

A few years ago, I saw the film RedDesert . Everything I do aims to be the reverse of that and to reverse it, since it has a certain truth about where postwar life has brought us. Most designers read Domus , but I prefer Abitarebecause it seeks out what's alive amid these horrors. It takes courage to make architecture these days and imagine it will be used in an optimistic spirit and not as background to something more appalling, even as we look on, decked out in the latest style.

My students pass tracts around declaring work is bunk and society a spectacle. They eye me suspiciously, maker of ads to seduce unwary housewives, agent of the bourgeoisie, yet the Czech spring came and was suppressed. Ex-colonial wars continue, and they idealize one side and demonize the other. I throw them off, talking about the Mapuche and the Jews in my lineage. Jesus has a high standing in the family, though, even with my father, owing to His willingness to point to the heaven within us, our neighbor as ourself, loaves and fishes if they're needed. Our allegiance to this reformer has kept us modest, wary of hubris, grateful for our good fortune in the midst of life with its constant potential for the opposite.

I gather ideas, dream of forms and reforms. I'm still an architect, ready to do anything, and an optimist indeed, a mother of two, keeping humanity going despite the papers, the news as hawked by the different parties. Ko is happy, so that's one good thing I've managed to do. At least, she seems happy. The Japanese have their own nightmares, which she sometimes recounts. Aware of what's suppressed at home, she makes herself read about it. I admire her for this. When bad dreams put the rest on the side for a moment, when these remembered terrors get to her, we talk about it.

In the film NeveronSunday , which I saw when I was 30, the Piraeus prostitute played by Melina Mercouri gives tragedies a happy ending "They all go to the seashore." I remembered from university that Euripides had two versions of Iphigenia, unable to leave her to her wretched fate. The postwar order is unraveling and people are taking to the streets. Life dogs us and yet the beach is still there.

Ko and I corral our children, tend our kitchen garden, feed the animals some pets and others here as food, or both, as a child makes pets of everything, including objects like a pencil to which he apologizes and even cries if in rage he breaks it. I take out my notebook and we talk, I sketch. We ask ourselves what might relieve even for a moment the gravity of living, lift us a little from the floor, the bed, stove, sink the everyday in which we live, a scene of pleasure if we can bring it out a bit.

Recently, unexpectedly, I was asked to design a creche. It came not long after I made a pilgrimage to a grove said once to be the site of a temple to the huntress. No sign of it, but it must have been there since I got the call. Yes, I said. Yes.

Putting my notebook down, I said to Ko, you must come with me. I need you there like I need you here, to give words to the forms that come to me from God knows where, attach them to the way you catch reality, as this helps me see it too.

In these moments, I realize that I love Ko as I'd longed to in my hunting days when I only saw their slim bodies and heard the songs they sang to me as they shed their flimsy clothes. I no longer hunt, but my affection is boundless. In this spirit, we're designing a creche for the working women of Modena, a gift of the namesake maker of sports cars.

I forgot that Ko is instantly recognizable from the ads, so why exactly was she here? But then, "We'll need eight staff, eight mothers, and eight children as informants, first on their own and then mixed groups," said crisply, like an order, in Ko's perfect Milanese. Yes, they nodded. I was impressed.

18.

I took the children and flew to Santiago, then went inland to the mountains where my father still hunts. He, Franny, and Maria joined us at the compound they use when San Rafael is too hot. I wanted Trent and Lina to know them. We spoke a mix of Spanish and Mapudungun. The children have heard it before. Like me, they have an ear for language.

I also wanted Maria to read my children, which she did, slipping into a trance and then speaking while I took notes.

The journey let my past seep in as dreams of trekking and my father teaching me to hunt. I was a predator then, hungry but patient. In Buenos Aires, the sight of flesh only made me hungrier. Back in Modena, Diana appears in my dreams to remind me of my vows, even if I gave myself to men. She speaks the same Milanese as Ko, I realize, only showing up after I understood that Ko was my much-desired wife.

The creche is nearly finished, a ring hovering above the old building and its courtyard. They loved it, they said, but it was too small. What a shame to move although the donor offered them a site. I saw a solution. To convince him of it, I noted that a Turin carmaker has long had a racetrack on its roof.

19.

Letters from my mother and Luca. Military coups are likely. Paolo can likely ride it out, but my mother's visible activism will make her vulnerable if the government shifts rightward. Her work is backed by liberal Catholic reformers, who are at odds with the military. My father is subject to the colonial assumption that the natives will turn treacherous. (We were never conquered!) Luca has a different problem a denizen of cafés in both cities, he's befriended many intellectuals, publishing some of them, and has had run-ins with their opponents. As always with Luca, he's the odd man out not unlike what he faced in Piranesi long ago, so it's time for him to move on. My mother has a standing offer from the UN in Paris. Paolo assured my father that they race horses and play polo in France and England, so he'll be in demand. Luca will return to Piranesi with Laura and his sisters, but their sons will stay on in Montevideo.

Milan is unsure what to do next. Broad license was given to its postwar rebuilders and the results are mixed, as the Milanese have noticed. Politics is again cynical and corrupt in turns. In the midst of this, the industrial designers set out their wares: desks, chairs, typewriters, wall calendars with their nubile women. Sports cars drive quickly past the blank suburban towers while the train takes me back to Modena. Soon after, I'm again in the countryside's slower tempo.

My parents are in Paris. My father is much in demand in the same circles he catered to in Argentina. He's very striking in his tailored suits. My mother finds the UN sluggish and subject to Cold War politics, but is popular with her peers. As a precaution, they've both become French citizens. At home, if I can still use that word, things are getting worse. Heavy, someone said the atmosphere is leaden: melts in the heat, but not immediately; accumulating, it induces madness. Paolo bought a vineyard in Santa Barbara, my mother said, fulfilling a dream Luca had decades ago to extend the family's enterprise to California.

Our creche wins an award. At Ko's suggestion, we reduced our fee in exchange for access to the creche in operation as a source of ideas and testbed for new products. Its publication had led to new commissions, including a maternity clinic that we intend to design in our conversational way, ferreting out what's needed and how to support it. I want to make it an open-ended vessel, as the field is changing rapidly. How do you accommodate these changes in such a sacred space? Medical science aims to thwart outliers like infertility, the tendency to miscarry, premature or hard births, defects. A clinic will be in constant motion, but I want a calm like the old hospitals attached to convents. Its garden's grove will honor my personal virgin as well at the Holy Mother.

These mothers and babies distract me from the terrorists. Public gatherings draw them, and airplanes attract hijackers. It's mostly inconvenient unless you end up tortured or in pieces. I tell myself it will get better. Such bourgeois optimism is in my blood, despite my cocktail of lineage.

21.

My father visited. " A Frenchman now," he said. "They call me Guillaume. They like horses and also eat them, like us," meaning the Mapuche, whose language we mostly spoke together, throwing in the other languages we've acquired. We're all sponges in this respect, taking on the trappings of wherever in the cosmos we find ourselves.

We spoke of hunting and how readily I took to it. His mother told him to take me. "She was right, you were born to it." My father knows horses like a country doctor knows his villagers. It doesn't occur to the horses to be afraid of him. He's like a barn cat, only interested in the mice or a nap. A hunter, they grasp, but not of them, so unthreatening, calm.

"An odd life," he said. "Our land seemed endless, then we lost it, then it was restored in part. I went along. I had good luck Paolo and Franny were gifts to a landless peasant. And I went along when Franny found her way to Paris. 'There are horses in France,' Paolo assured me, and there are. Many."

Is this Luca's "flexibility"? My father meant something more the flux we live in, how a territory we took for granted slipped away, yet it's there and we slip back in or recreate it.

Flux is a horse from colt to pasture or glue or a meal. Not so different for us. Go with it, I think, but what, who, where? Born to it, my grandmother said. A huntress or a barn cat? Estrus works its magic on the cats, but Diana was a virgin, a patroness of wild animals, protectress of women giving birth.

The forms of things well up in me and how they might best be made follows along. I have a talent for finding others who fill out both sides of my endeavors. Fill in is more accurate, as I'm constantly leaving them to run what I've started so I can move on to something else. I still cross the ocean to spend time in Brooklyn but I'm so close to my colleagues there that a great deal is transacted by long distance, cheaper than the flights, and by sketches and notes air-freighted between us.

In Modena, we work things up from sketches and conversations. Ro runs the products end. The buildings Ko and I do with a small team, working with the best builders I can find. My approach is simple: create a volume to contain the constant variety of human experience, flexed as it is by human progress. Since everything inside will change, the vessel has to appear solid but remain open and porous.

Aldo Rossi categorizes such buildings as artifacts, able to accommodate new uses over centuries, beloved by their communities, yet not monuments. A creche or clinic has this same possibility of evolving in ways that no one anticipated.

I continue to design embellishments that add beauty to the settings where people gather. Form plays off form here, an elaboration or a counterpoint to my work or another's. Part of the pleasure of this work is exploring materials and their possibilities. We have to ask them, as the maestro says.

Dear maestro, your letter awaited me at the polytechnic, written on the stationery of your hotel in Calcutta, mailed from there. You needn't have apologized for the long silence. It was enough to know that I was in your thoughts, that our memories proved coincident around your central theme.

Thank you for that compliment and also for noting how much you liked the creche. I like your "affinity," better than influence. Had you made it back here I could have shown it to you and introduced you to your son, but your letter reached me a day after I read that you were dead, a death almost anonymous apparently until it wasn't. It makes your letter more of a treasure, doesn't it? A son is one way I remember his father, gave him a different form that, being human, surprises me with gestures and ideas that speak of influence, to use that word appropriately what you gave him at the outset of his making, this remembered encounter.

You saw our creche in Casabella , you wrote, praising the photos. My husband did a remarkable job of bringing it alive. My anticipation led me to agree to a marriage with a suitable father, as our son would need one and you, maestro, were elsewhere My elders are dying off and now you've joined them, constant motion foreshortening a life that should have run on forever. Your helpers will see through any work that's pending. I have them, too. We didn't write there was no need still, wonderful to get this unexpected letter, to know that in a Calcutta hotel, reading a magazine you brought along, I came back to you. To give our affinity human form I needed your collaboration, so, thank you. I couldn't live without our boy Trent, a credit to us both.

24.

My parents bought an old farmhouse in the foothills east of Modena, higher up, its grounds opening out to woods. I helped them renovate it and often go hiking with my father, on our own or with the children. When it's just us two, we reminisce about the Andes. He misses them, but appreciates the Apennines as equally old territory. He's himself in the mountains, calm amid predators and prey, assuring the locals they need both to keep the balance nature intends this said in Italian with a trace of Piranesi, which confuses them until they meet Franny. We sometimes break into Mapudungun, then explain that we're discussing hunting in the Andes. This lends added authority to our recommendations, as it should.

My mother is helping Natalia pull her papers together the record of a respected lawyer and judge, editor of her cousin's famous trilogy and keeper of a journal that goes back to her convent school days. They're all getting older Paolo sends Franny snapshots from California and when she sees them, she asks aloud if things will ever change in Argentina. News reaches her from there and it's mostly dreadful.

How far back into childhood does my vow go? Is Diana the patroness of every wild thing, even the ones in the hedges? I suspect so. And where does childhood end? Too few carry its spirit into adulthood, resisting its mechanical stupor. We get inquiries from schools that follow children over an extended period and base their pedagogy on careful observation. I admire their pragmatism, grounded in a spiritual sense of what childhood is, the miracle of being here at all. Most schools are museums, preserving an idea of schooling that is frighteningly old, despite their modern wrapping. There's a sense that modernism is at an impasse. I'm not entirely convinced, but occasionally you have to throw a big thing over to see if it can right itself. While it lies there, waving its legs, we'll get some terrible buildings, I imagine, but some interesting decoration, a pastiche of the past simplified or overlaid, collages made without much understanding. Whatever we design, we imagine people living with it. Technology changes, but the form it takes can still persist. Talking with the clinicians, we saw how to redesign their equipment to make it easier to use and less intimidating to their patients. Not long after, we were off talking licensing with the Swiss. We stayed at the Kraft, where I gazed at the Rhein. Terror passed through Mulhouse, "but that's in France," our hosts assured us as we haggled over terms.

My mother sees the Malvinas War as a spat about honor as the protagonists understand it. "Argentina will lose, which may hasten the revival of democracy. Only idiots like them, possessing arbitrary power, would start a war like this, thinking they'd get away with it. The English, Mrs. Thatcher in particular, are offended, which provides her own hotheads with a shining moment." Meanwhile, Chile cements its dictatorship. Is this the fate of these countries? For the Mapuche, there's no border they still hunt on both sides of the Andes, come and go as always, yet the countryside is more dangerous guerillas and partisans, some local and others fleeing there to regroup. Mendoza is vulnerable, but San Rafael probably isn't, she thinks.

In the capital, I imagine life goes on despite crackdowns and violence. What sparks the desire to talk, dance, and have sex is inertial. The atmosphere is likely more destructive. Some will self-combust faster who would otherwise drink and smoke themselves to a slower death, but the survivors will write their novels, poems, and memoirs. Truth will out.

According to Luca, our family's women burned through desire in something like an organized way. (Is the lion in this tradition? I think so.) In the past, it was organized for them. In my generation, I had to do it myself, although much else was organized for me. And our Carolina, will she be left to her own devices? She won't have Luca to help her, alas!

Women can hunt each other, but with men, we're expected to allow ourselves to be hunted. This is how I would restate my youthful practice as an axiom. Thoughts in this vein come to me when I take a train. The rhythm of the tracks triggers it. Freud associated trains with penetration, yet that's not exclusively gendered, is it? Slender hands and long fingers these thoughts don't induce me to haunt bars as I once did.

An architect, a woman, won a competition recently with an entry that drew my attention. It looked challenging to build, and I started sketching how I'd do it. Such thoughts arise on trains I do a lot of work, shuttling between these two cities. The architect's entry is all form, I noted. I never stop there, but wonder about form's raw matter and its poetics. These notebooks are my cookbooks, filled with what I've gleaned from visits to quarries and factories, from the conversations Ko and I have with informants, them talking, me sketching.

Two years ago, Calvino spoke at a Buenos Aires book fair. My mother noted it, a sign of Argentina returning to normal. He died a year ago. I like his books. Some are fables that we read to the children when they were young. We've done well. I could afford to stop, but I get new commissions that spawn new lines of products, while Gianni's projects find backers. His telenovela of Cosima's trilogy is a big hit here and in Latin America. I wish they were all still alive to see it!

We only take on a building project if a group of people is identified who will spend a good part of their future in it. Whatever form it takes will arise from a context fleshed out with opinions and interpretations by those who best grasp what matters: how they live with each other and with their surroundings, including nature, such as it is these days. They know the coldest cold, the hottest hot, and all the pleasures in between. We generate the building together, along with a host of product ideas prompted by talk and observation.

My father decided in favor of the Apennines. "The family has infected me," he said, in that ironic voice that mixing with the Europeans has given him. As my mother predicted, the war over the Malvinas ended up toppling the regime. The horrors may be over, but the nightmares will continue. She blames it on Peron good for Argentina and then bad for it as he was blind to or unable to resist the military's corrupt, reactionary, and ultimately treacherous rule.

Any discussion of Argentina reminds me of Luca. When I was adrift in Buenos Aires, which was often the case, there he was at the dock or rowing out to find me. Less a question of desire, I was thrown by an unexpected death, inexplicable to me and yet demanding that I unravel it. I was disoriented, which was also an entirely new and unsettling feeling. Luca promised me that it would pass, that I would find the thread like Theseus in the labyrinth. He also pointed to my talents and told me it was high time to take them on the road.

An academic couple lectured at the polytechnic and then visited me in Modena. Their term for my work is "critical regionalism." But no, I protested, surely I can claim to be cosmopolitan? From their replies I gathered that one foot in the cosmos permits the criticality, while the other foot rests securely in the local. After they left, I thought about it. The creche has two antecedents the beloved old building, with its stone walls, and the bespoke carmakers. Ro and I have engaged them in a running dialogue about the potential of the new materials. Modena's carmakers built airplanes before the war, and race cars have much in common with them

For the upper half of the creche, lightness and strength were paramount to avoid overloading the original building, not just physically but visually. Stonework's solidity is partly an illusion, as earthquakes remind us. The clinic is almost a stage set for this reason. Is it postmodern, I wonder, in its conscious inauthenticity, or simply modern? Is it regional?

Ettore Sottsass, whose gorgeous Olivetti is on my desk, is now part of a movement that makes colorful sculptures that double as household furniture. Memphis, it's called, splitting with function but not quite. Function is like a Catholic wife, doggedly opposing divorce no matter how flamboyantly her husband provokes her, cavorting with Sottsass's strumpets.

When I look around me, I conclude that "late modernist" best describes me among the labels the magazines paste onto architects. It's a return to form after a fling with exposing the parts, reviving the engineers' aesthetic Paxton and Brunel favored. Reyner Banham was its theoretician, but Archigram and the Metabolists got there first. I like Piano and Rogers' one in the Marais, but I resisted turning buildings inside-out.

What makes me late modern is the way I cleave to purpose and plumb the depths of materials and assemblies as I give it form. Form is how a building comes together, just as humans do. Beauty is in the form and the possibilities it embodies.

This last sentence also captures what I sought in bars and bedded in rented rooms, moving from one to another to hide my tracks and then retreating to the women's dormitory to cool down, a typically doubled life in a city just big enough to pull it off. From what Luca told me, this wasn't so unusual among the family's women. "Your mother is the exception."

Whenever I see a crescent moon rising, I think of my goddess in her grove and the babies, mothers, and wildlife she protects. No virgin, clearly, I still honor her when I can Recently, asked by my father, I designed some huts in the Apennines, shelters for hikers and larger quarters for its stewards, as it needs them now to give voice to its wants and complaints. I'm out there listening, letting what I see and hear give form to these small buildings, built traditionally by locals and then filled with whatever's useful, containers for life itself. Is this what they mean by "critical regionalism"?

1.

"A memoir isn't an autobiography. " Time differs between them, Walter Benjamin argues, and I infer that he sees the former as more faithful to time as it is, despite our tendency to gather it up into narratives rather than leave it as anecdotes or even random thoughts we jot down. Having lived it all, we feel they're somehow connected, the way a familiar place lulls us into imagining we know it. My sister Cosima's elaborate journal entries came together as a trilogy in part because she wrote like a journalist who was also an insider, often a critic. As her reader, we trust her veracity and also her judgements.

I have the advantages and disadvantages of retrospect. On the one hand, I'm distant in space and time from past lovers, who live on in memory but are unlikely to read this, should it ever find readers. Not that there were very many, but when I look back, these episodes stand out. No woman is like any other, yet inevitably we recognize types, categorize. A reader of novels or a patron of plays and films certainly will do this, but the idea of types falls apart in a woman's particulars, especially if their number is small. Relationships are fated or are the result of projection these are possible explanations, not necessarily mutually exclusive, as fate is just an occasion.

So, retrospect, that belvedere, except mine looks in one direction, the other bald-faced and foreboding, and the view, however close in mind, suffers life's erosive nature, which has to be mentioned, although my mind is reliable, as far as I know, and retains a great deal of sensory effluvia when I write this word, I think of features that became so familiar, not to turn them into fetishes, but rather to wonder at them as elements of their beauty and their remarkable animation.

Not an autobiography, so I won't start at the beginning, yet affairs trace back sometimes to more than raw desire. As I write these words, I doubt them or have second thoughts. If we dissemble, it's often to justify ourselves after the fact.

Failing to recount leaves me with incidents and details, along with theories and cultural, anthropological, and sociological observations. It's probable that the latter will predominate, despite the way the former well up at times unbidden. "This is how it is with him" I hear at least one woman saying the one who compared me to a stock character from commedia. Ah, but which one?

Incidents and details the beds and their rooms are part of a continuum, if Benjamin hasn't forbidden that word, with other furnishings and surroundings, even including taxis and trains. Sleeping with one with whom one normally doesn't is odd. I always preferred long afternoons, and often we had little choice anyway, fitting things in deniably.

Life is made up of details that accrue from unlikely sources, and these can inadvertently spark desire, often with nowhere to go. Some of the tension of marriage stems from this. I note this because it has nothing to do with love affairs that unfold in and consume greater amounts of time. No, an inadvertent spark with nowhere to go burns on in consciousness the way the sheen of a lover's pubic hair survives the terrible, drawnout ending of the relationship that brought it into view. Are they fetishes or are they icons in the side altars of memory, each with its array of small candles? If I light them all, will its hold loosen, or does memory keep its altars well stocked?

What freed me was aging past the need. It's the other end of an awareness of the oceanic pull of fecundity that plays havoc with us unless other factors make us immune, at least in theory. (All those longing, would-be fathers, by their own accounts, doting on their nieces!) In between, fecundity is the air we breathe, the risk we run, the why of every plunge.

If I were to venture a theory of these affairs based on my own experience, it would focus on their situational nature and their roots in a very human rebellion against life's finitude, which strikes us reasonably as a kind of violence unworthy of our position collectively of apparent dominance. Much else comes into it, but fundamentally, we're unhappy to encounter limits that strike us as arbitrary or outdated, so we ignore the omnipresent warning signs tradition waves and their echoes in all those cautionary tales.

Situational because an affair is shaped by an arc of arising and denouement, and while I don't have so many instances on which to generalize, each is as singular as those involved. This raises the subsidiary theory that in each instance, I too am singular, not the one who plunged in before. Of course, the woman with whom one plunges differs in significant ways from any predecessors and successors. It's also situational because it's a situation one encounters, familiar and not. I know this is a truism, life falling into a finite number of settings, but each situation is a collection of them particular to itself. Each is a field for actions we recollect later as the scenes enacted there, in a specific order retrospect gives us.

This post-facto recreation has its reasons. Their journals reveal that the love affairs arranged by and for some of the family's women were talismanic in their afterlives. Although less organized affairs are often more painful, they resurface eventually as monuments to initiated desire. If the marriage they disrupted continues, they may be "forgotten," yet they live on in memory and sometimes also in progeny.

Praxis, inevitably, runs ahead of my theory, which omits and simplifies. Outruns is more accurate, given how much I've left out: attachment, for one; ego for another; pride, hubris, delusion; the waxing and waning of desire; our tendency to demand more of life when there's neither time nor space for it. We tire of what we're allotted, scraped from the everyday. We tire of the asymmetry of our situations, often. The awareness of pain inflicted outweighs the pain we sought to alleviate. It becomes clear, not for the first time, that what's ignited isn't easily kept at a simmer, but flares up almost by design, then flares out a process that differs wildly in each instance. The denouement is affected by the things left out of my theory. In some cases, a friendship can be salvaged, unless expectations were raised and crushed, or the breaking off of the affair was unhinging. Was it a facsimile of love? Later, we see that, no, the love itself was genuine, but it had nowhere to go.

My family arranged things, but not for its men. Not for the generations of women beyond a certain point, either. And by choice on their part, valuing their independence. The class structure that made marriages "below" impossible fell apart. And it's a matriarchy in many ways, internally tolerant yet externally conventional. This too has broken down, though, as things have loosened up. The landscape's very different.

Yet the underlying nature and dynamics of affairs likely haven't. Even the stakes are roughly the same, despite the advertised sophistication of current times. I speak here of any adulterous couple eking out its affair on the side. It can be memorable, of course I remember all of it but our couple may find its pleasures are outweighed by the improvisations the affair requires. A few upper-end hotels are the last bastion of these liaisons, but their bespoke falls lamentably short of what we provided. It's all "business," a transactional rather than a relational sense of life, despite the image they put out.

"Like Aldo Rossi," Leo said, mentioning the architect's "scientific" text and contrasting it to those of Louis Kahn, her favored poet of forms. That I'm given to theorizing too is an ancient fault, much noted by the women in whom I confide, now including Lina, not that affairs are among our topics.

Affairs are the sonnets or maybe the arias of carnality, as against the dynastic epics most marriages prove to be. This is true even of marriages that seem mired in stasis an endless round of meals, small talk, and errands divvied up by gender and/or convention to pay the bills and have something left over "for the children." Within such marriages, if one dissects them, are unspoken dramas. When they cart someone away, the neighbors may discover an unsuspected passion if the survivor is stricken with grief or regret they find inexplicable.

Lina queries me about the past "What was it like?" she'll ask, mentioning a point in time and imagining I remember it. It's a useful prod to memory, I suppose. Others in the family could look it up in their voluminous journals, but mine are discursive. Often my poems better reflect whatever the day brought or the season, more likely, as they well up from the fields life randomly seeds, fecund and barren in turn.

I was vain enough to believe in virtuosity and its reception, failing to see the self-contained nature of my partners, their doubled X in contrast to my incomplete, in-need-of- XY. I was just their pretext and projection, a bauble taken up then tossed away. Hence a later assumption of compliance or deference despite ongoing neglect this being seen as a charitable halfway house preferable to outright dismissal.

What science explains this? We speak of chemistry and pyrotechnics, but they hinge on the unknowable, accidents, a Monte Carlo machine rigged by destiny. We know the whole arc from the beginning, if we recollect honestly. We know and yet we plunge, until finally we don't or we can't.

Retrospectively, my memory is buoyant, yet I feel the need to tote up everything that weighs against affairs. The loneliness and helplessness that comes with desertion and alienation, as one knows but the knowledge isn't useful, is a starting point, and often a prod for action or reaction.

My realization that separation was untenable and divorce not an option precipitated a breakup and an aftermath of recrimination. This knowledge wasn't useful, either, it turns out. I tried to arrange the next affair in light of it, but it didn't go as planned. Instead, and this may be positive as well as negative, my ego was ripped to shreds when she broke up with me. Even as I saw the reasonableness of this, I was plunged into despair. In that state, my actions bordered on obsessive, leaving me to wonder what kind of monster I'd become. I tried the next time to be forthright, but that affair proved to be the reversal of the previous one and I ended up doing what was done to me, despite my intention and brainwracking efforts to square the circle which, I finally figured out, can't be squared. I also learned that, despite closeness, little or nothing of it carries over. Writing sifts the residue. That sifting brings out the parts that argue for experience despite its perils. Still, I'm unwilling to suspend disbelief again. I suppose it's also a result of getting older, valuing friendship over knowing, acknowledging the real cost of knowing and its diminishing returns. Sated, I guess this is.

I've read memoirs that reflect on love's repeated arc and where it leads, the relief of having a close friend who mostly leaves us to our own devices. Getting older brings us back to ourselves, more content with the contents of our ordinary days. I see in retrospect the threads of substance I brought, along with my faults and foibles, even those that especially mortified me. Some mechanism in the universe settles these accounts. We learn that our sins were not so cardinal, unless of course they were. That some never forget is also clear.

At my suggestion, the family bought the count's old house , renamed The Hotel Cosima in honor of my sister and her trilogy. A nostalgia for the era she depicts is alive again, one strand in an effort to "put distance between contemporary and modern," as Leo explained to me, summarizing a lecture she heard at her school. The passage of time has split these two words, apparently, the latter seen now as a movement that belongs to the past. Its death is constantly announced, but it persists as I do, my senses miraculously intact.

I came up from Piranesi and stayed briefly in Milan in the very room I occasionally slept in as her guest, not as frequent a guest as Giulia, on whom Cosima doted, but often enough to feel the glamor of her life there and hear in real time how it was ending, a disillusionment not unlike others, bittersweet, but it led to her trilogy and late fame or, from her perspective, a renewal of her cultural importance.

I took the train to Modena and, with Gianni's help, made my way to Franny and Guillermo's retreat in the foothills. We were joined by Lina, then fetched by Gianni, with a stopover at his and Leo's house closer in. My visit led to talks with Lina, who navigates her world by queries and hypotheses. "How is it," she asked, "that the people who've lived in many different places end up rooted mostly in one?" This made me think about distance. "You can live in the same town and be so far from another that you might as well be on the moon," I said. "Someone who was a friend, I mean, and then wasn't." She took this in. "Franny told me that she and Natalia were connected in a way that let them be apart without missing each other," she said. "It's like those plants that pull water from the air so you can carry them around," I answered. "You can be as rooted to a place as a tree, but a windstorm might knock you over or beetles might bore into your trunk and hollow you out. You have to make yourself at home on whatever terrace you happen to find yourself."

Before I quit Piranesi for Argentina, I would have said my roots are there, but more likely I'm both a plant that draws water from the air and the terrace-minder who places plants like that decoratively and makes sure the setting suits them. The plants and their tender roam the planet in search of suitable terraces. Together, they form something with legs and arms, able to cajole, arrange, even seduce, and move on if the climate grows too sticky. I didn't say this to Lina, as the image of the rootless plant I drew is benign until its defects are discovered or pointed out. She will learn this. And yet distance can be entirely elastic, as it was for Natalia and Franny with their tendrils. With Laura, it's a bond we share that fate gave us. So, our marriage continues. She's put the past out of mind, but I find it shows up regularly at three a.m.

In memory, it began across a table, but in reality it goes back to the accident that first brought us together. We can never be sure what made an impression, which is why we chalk it up to destiny the gods sporting with us for fun, but granting us a taste of it. Still, a table has its place, just as a bed does. These are the stations we pass through no resurrection but a rich afterlife once our mangled fingers can hold a pen again.

In memory, the fault is always mine the shortcomings I brought to the occasions that were crucial, a kind of myopia. Maturation improved things. I gained stature, wised up, lost or abandoned certain habits, became more discerning. This was helpful with Laura, as marriage often fights the last war, pairing protagonists in an earlier drama who are no longer who they were, and yet remain uncannily familiar. Too bad then that we spend most of our adult lives dealing with this.

Affairs are one means we use, as unsatisfactory as all the others except absolute acceptance. Here's the place to which a long life brings you, as unconditional as parents are with young children, realizing the futility and captivated by their oddly familiar-and-not selves. We come back to this, I think, the result of surviving but also our familiarity finally with this here-and-now companion of so many years.

"My fault entirely" is an archaic sort of admission, a bow to the unreality we preserve out of politeness and fellow-feeling. It takes a certain kind of woman to accept it in this spirit of simply giving in, wanting no more argument. To reply that this can't be, that surely we share culpability, while likely true, misses the desire "entirely" conveys for absolution. In this sense, its rejection is apt, chalking up one more fault noted.

Equanimity is the last refuge of scoundrels, I learned on the job as an envoy and inveterate fixer, the one who listened while civil servants hemmed and hawed, trying to divine what would clear away the obstacle and seal the desired pact, deal, or sale. You learn not to panic, as calm is how the game is played. "Of scoundrels" because it's also true for the broad category "illicit" that takes up several rooms in my head or do I exaggerate? They seem like rooms, furnished as we encountered them. A sense of style guided our choices, and they reflect it; their ephemera have different associations.

Walking back through them, my regrets are minor or even nonexistent, as if it all happened to someone else. This is the oddness of retrospect you're there and you're not. Regrets seep in when the distance collapses, but they drain away by morning and, scoundrel that you are, you are equanimity itself at breakfast. Sleep comes in an eyeblink, but then you wake up and remember. In time, you learn to ignore the whirring waking brings that's initially so hard to shake. Equanimity is an extra layer, feather-light and barely visible, that holds at bay the recriminations one visits on oneself, as I've lately experienced, but no sure thing. Every day has its small adjustments as we wind down in the inexact way nature forces on us, feeling grateful we're still here, unwinding.

What was I thinking? A harbor bolt hole was a bit obvious, but those times were looser, despite orthodoxy. It was easier to drift out of sight for a while and organize transactions on the side. Contemporary life is losing this murkiness. I was thinking I could satisfy a hunger. Hunger and its venues take new forms even now, despite the refinement of my tastes.

But much of this is better captured in my poems. I miss Giulia, my one consistent reader. She maintained that I had an epic in my head that came forward in the theatricals I invented for the children. I never wrote down these stories, but they come to mind when I look at the small Greek heads I collected when I served as factotum to the gods and errand boy for the family. I'm authentically ancient now, a curious figure to my dwindling audience, now including Lina.

Her mother has come a long way from her university days in Buenos Aires, where I'd encounter her bearing the marks of whoever it was she was bedding, tactfully but insufficiently hidden. I have an eye for those things her grandmother had them too when we were young. She attributes her facility as a designer to clambering around her convent school's chapel, notebook in hand, working out how its effects were made, a process she repeated with whatever she encountered next. At university, she mined the library and archives, and built sets anything revealing what went on behind the scenes. She gets this impulse from Carlo, our founding maker of forms.

Leo's early love life sated her desire sufficiently to allow her to transition to a calmer, more orthodox existence, to which, I gather from her son's appearance, she made one exception. There's no painting nor any mention, so I'm speculating.

My epic's hotheads are cruel spoilsports, making war or otherwise interfering with life. Homage to Aristophanes, but also to eons of anecdotes told at their expense. Our sojourn in Andalusia in its golden age gave us an indelible sense of what a civilization could be, briefly freed from their impositions. Our dispersal meant carrying this in memory and recreating it a spirit of openness that informed Paolo's San Rafael just as much as it shaped our lives in Piranesi. Hotheads are an intermittent menace, like winter storms or droughts, but menacing with intent, actively hating our looks.

My theatricals make this baleful situation visible to a young patron like Lina not as tragedy, which she'll encounter later, but as the amusement of watching a schemer's schemes come to naught while ordinary lives sidestep his stupidity. I give the girls leading roles, along with their brothers and cousins. (I give the heads hats to change their sex.) Adults figure, but offstage or briefly appearing like gods and goddesses. I don't make use of divine machinery the girls and boys figure it out on their own, managing to prevail, as is proper to commedia. There's also a chorus, needed to answer rhetorical questions as to the hothead or schemer's character.

I don't have much appetite for tragedy. Cracking jokes as death closes in, a practice arising with the first stirrings of the mortality that haunts us, comes as naturally as dodging it. I joke and dodge, and eventually I joke. Jokes come to mind the way poems do, and I can't help saying them aloud. Or so I tell myself, being old enough now to wear mortality on my skin. Even in dreams there's no reprieve, yet morning comes. Lina laughs on cue. Although on the cusp of losing interest, she still demands to know when my theater will reopen.

Bourgeois through and through, I conclude, reviewing the annual summaries I receive as a party to our enterprises. Leo has extended what Carlo founded, while Paolo brought his diversification into wine to California. Whether it can all be kept in the family is a question. Some of it is off the books, but that's always been the case with the family. Summaries, then, are not quite the whole picture, but the proceeds help to pay for my dotage. I didn't expect to live so long.

Aristocracies and hugely wealthy families put parts of their families in risk of penury by narrowing inheritances down to a single heir. Bourgeois families like ours look instead to the enterprise itself and how to build it. We take a broad view of each one's contributions, as too much is undecided to push for specifics or impose them. Instead, we experiment. Life demands this openness to situations and intuitions.

Yet I'd be remiss not to note how our family is a kind of gyroscope that orients us and provides forward momentum. It led us to try to resolve problems other families ignore or deny, especially the problems women experience with desire. The men helped arrange things, but not much was arranged for us in this respect. I can only blame myself for failing to act on the implications of affairs, halting or avoiding them. These failures are eminently human, but that's no excuse.

I am we are seated at a small round table separated from the sidewalk by a railing. There's coffee and a scone. Later, on a train platform, we embrace and I wonder what will happen or, more accurately, if I can perform. That night, I dream I'm on a farm wagon filled with hay, and there she is, naked, and I pull her up next to me. At lunch the next day I recount the dream and observe that she's trembling. It breaks the spell. I continue to have doubts, but not with her.

"We embrace." Desire arises or it doesn't, and this traces back to the aspect of being a man that's like a test, a highly reductive one between the sexes, measuring hunger as well as desire. Marriage tempers both with affection.

If solitude is my leitmotif, marriage makes more room for it, even encouraging it, while affairs founder on interruption and their expectation-raising similarity to courting. This is the fatal psychology that gives affairs their brevity unless it's faced squarely, but what exactly are we facing? It's only clear with considerable distance, even if we tried to face it with a few truisms we picked up that counted for nothing. Finding a room and a bed that's what transpires when we plunge in. (It should be "I," even if it seemed we plunged in together.)

A tendency in looking back is to overvalue what was lost. Leo is exemplary in this respect, constantly pushing toward the next thing while others exploit the last one on her behalf. As I write this, I think that it's the family's strategy applied at a different tempo. And she would argue for the constancy of her formal imagination, despite its variation in scale and use.

I look back and bemoan a variety of losses, even as they live on in my head, the subjects of my poems. They populate my epic despite its references to antiquity and to the family's sojourns in so many ports the anecdotes about them I took up as so many pregnant snippets, each the beginning of a tale. Epics begin and end, but our family's story unfolds in spite of efforts to snuff it out. Sidestepping an ending drives the plot, but our tendency to root hides this to some extent.

Dragging myself back to the present, I note how a balance of town and country persists, and a wariness of the capitals as places of residence. I use the word loosely, counting Milan as one certainly of culture in the heyday of our countess. I don't mind it, just as I didn't mind Buenos Aires, but it was a relief to return to Piranesi, just as it was a relief to cross the Plata by ferry to Montevideo a city, even a capital, but of a different order, proud and protective of the difference.

Listening to my theatricals with Lina, Gianni told me that I should write them out. He cited Calvino, a spinner of tales. Are they tales or are they an epic? Am I spinning parables or aiming for a grander narrative? If the latter, then the outline is hazy, like the bleak January sea off Piranesi's jutting coast, the ships emerging long after their horns are heard, winter's foggy chorus. If I were to write my epic, I'd follow one cast of characters, even if their names and ports changed. Is this just that I've lived long enough to see our descending traits? As each generation emerges, I'll recount the situations it faces.

Theatricals are the best medium, the Greek heads as standins. My audience has seen it before, and yet there's something new to discover every time my epic's performed.

16.

A poet at his desk is a misnomer, really. I carry a notebook with me and write on trains, in hotels and cafés, etc., yet there's a desk, my desk, and a room that contains it, "a poet's room," Natalia called it, and this artifact and its setting seem to be part of the act of writing for me enough so that I came up with something comparable in Buenos Aires. If I used it for purposes beyond writing poems, a doubled or tripled sort of setting, that was conducive to bringing my preliminary lines a bit closer to the intent of their writing.

To write at such a desk is an act of self-belief unsupported by acclaim. Not even Giulia did more than express pleasure in my sheafs, as she called them. Soviet dissidents call this writing for the drawer. I write for the shelf. Another holds diaries and jottings such as this.

To write at such a desk is to imagine others who did so: St. Jerome or St. Augustine in their respective rooms. Blackand-white photos of poets in their suits seem incongruous, yet how many poems have I written in a bourgeois guise? I'm suspicious of the idea of poets thinking of themselves as poets instead of thinking about the poem itself. Leo dreams of forms, but she also carries a notebook, has shelves of them.

Giulia's sketches were steps from source to depiction, but a poem is unsure at first even of its subject. It moves toward something it can't make out, arriving inexplicably. Then I set this aside so the poem can be a poem, if it has that possibility. Does the poem actually have that possibility? I'm never sure.

17.

I reached the point where I only desired a close friendship with a woman, unencumbered by a relationship. Destiny has figured with desire, signaled by recognition in three cases. In Rome, the third was sitting with an older acquaintance and I introduced myself. She became the close friend I wanted. It means we can discuss a range of topics without fear of giving offense. The only question is when to give advice. I try to wait until asked, but don't always manage. Recognizing my humanity, she protects our closeness with affection.

I'm lucky that solitude doesn't tear at me. Some can't bear to be alone. I have my work, and time isn't really distance for me a trait I share with most of the women in the family. In my case, I can bring to mind the totality of encounters. This makes absences less noticeable, which was a problem in the affairs I conducted. This may be why a precipitous ending to an affair is so jarring. Ruptures occur in marriages too, but there's a deep familiarity that heals them more often than not.

I make no claims now except here I still am, sheafs in hand or on the shelf, aware of her beauty, but its stirrings inspire only our conversations and correspondence, and my poems.

18.

I wanted to call the Milan hotel "The Courtesan," but I kept this idea to myself. Since it was the house Cosima's count bestowed, its real name is apt. I admire her for seeing the literary and historic value of her journals, "a unique record of an era" as they're always described. To me, they display her ability to see a deeper meaning in the events she witnessed, easily lost sight of in the glare of spectacle. She knew they took an army of artists, writers, performers, artisans, and workers to produce. The impresarios came and went, along with their circles. This and the ravages of time on the immortals of a given day provided all the drama. Despite their repetitious egotism, her affection and respect were undiminished an innate sympathy for this world of artifice that she observed so carefully.

She had no such sympathy for politicians. She and Natalia saw eye to eye on this, believing in the old school of patrons who ran Piranesi with a benign self-interest local enough not to lose touch with its citizens and denizens. This too broke down everything did around the time we left for Argentina. Breaking down politically has more propensity for tragedy than cultural breakdowns, except for those who experience it directly. As Cosima foresaw, the latter can be predictive of the former, whether it's the horrors of trench warfare or mass annihilation. Inevitably a "post" follows, aiming to expunge and revive but in reality just starting the cycle over again.

19.

It was in Argentina that I found my footing. I think this was true for Paolo, also that placing ourselves in an entirely new milieu and having to rise to its occasion gave us the roles we knew how to play but had never been given the chance. I watched Paolo become a grandee, earning Matteo's full embrace, and helped keep our interests intertwined so the Piranesi holdings could be reclaimed after the war. Laura's interests were always separate from mine. Matteo and his family looked after hers, so they were never appropriated. Family or families they blur together, a mix of indigenous stalwarts on two continents and our band of port-crawlers, talented at blending in, enterprising, privately creative with notable breakthroughs, like Leo's vast output, Cosima's trilogy, and Giulia's now-collected art. After I gave her a poem about spring, Lina said that Franny calls me the poet in the family and she, Lina, will gather up my poems and make me famous. Is posthumous fame my only hope? I told her that my daughter Caterina also likes my poems. "She writes novels and stories, so perhaps she'll help you."

The Buddhists counsel us to live in the present, while the Church points to the Afterlife. Writers see their own possible afterlives, a spur to keep going. A family like ours creates a chain of memory shared by its enterprises and creative works. My present blurs at the edges, is adrift in time, and yet it forms a meandering line that I can trace, especially now. My real regrets trace back to my youth, especially to the period when I confronted my nature for the first time in an overwrought, volatile fashion. I outgrew this, but memories of excess and transgression haunt me: a close friend attacked when he dared to leave me; a young love cut short when I mishandled her dog; my hysteria, unable to stop laughing or crying. These are waking thoughts from an unrecoverable past events that introduced me to shortcomings I learned to temper to some extent but are still carried along. Regret is mostly between adults, so there's an element of hope to it, but the regrets of childhood never lose their potent sting.

I spent some days near Modena and in the Apennines at the invitation of Leo and her parents. It was good to get away, I realized to be elsewhere than Piranesi, where I find myself missing the family dead. Even Milan can be a little haunting, but it's the hotel that does it, not the city.

Leo showed me two magazine articles, Italian and English, showing their extended family at their country houses. "The English care only for farming, fishing, and hunting," Franny said. "And clothes," Leo added. "Ko styled us." Ko and her husband Ro are Leo's indispensable collaborators Ko frees Leo to design, while Ro is a designer–fabricator at home among Modena's concentration of those types. "Modena's car factories are where bespoke touches scale," Leo told me. "We saw how it's done, then applied it."

Guillermo is now funded by the World Wildlife Fund, Franny said, thanks to an article in CountryLife . "Some royal, impressed by his remarks about hunting with nature, sent the British consul to our door. Ko quickly set up a foundation. Now Gianni's making a documentary." He nodded. "For the BBC. Guillermo has a lot of presence, a natural." His star, looking like the aging Picasso, smiled.

Seated on her terrace, Leo and I discuss the past. Lina is with us, apparently reading, but I sense she's listening. "You always described yourself as a fixer," Leo led off. "To me, you've always been a philosopher, someone who looks at life objectively, questioning it. You'd rather be writing poems or chasing women." A flash of memories. "I remember our life in Buenos Aires," I said. "We were both a little notorious, burning through it together." She nodded. "I was my father's daughter, 'hunting with nature,' as he puts it."

Noticing Lina noticing us, she switched topics: "It's odd in these times to design things to endure." I replied: "You strip away anything that lessens an object's power, so there's an underlying purity to your work, whatever its scale." "Yes," she said, "my work is steeped in antiquity's rough, unelaborated forms New materials arrive and I press them to tell me what they can do, but this is also from antiquity, really."

With Franny on the porch of their house in the foothills. She's editing her mother's journals and correspondence with others, including me. "My grandmother told me that Natalia needed an archivist, but as a lawyer, she kept everything. For me, it's also a way to fill the gaps from our many years apart."

Did she retire to take up this work? "The UN is a dumping ground for old men too difficult to get rid of at home. There are some idealists, of course, some hardworking types, and all the right causes in abstract but endlessly delayed by those in charge, who mostly dine out, being too old for other things, and neglect their duties, if neglect isn't in fact the reason they're there. Guillermo had his horses he was really in his element in France, but he missed mountains and wildlife, so we found this place, closer to Leo and Gianni, where he can hunt and tramp around. That he knows so much about horses is almost an accident they'd just as soon eat them, like the French. He's never said this to his English clients."

24.

"No mention in their letters, but her journals are frank," Franny said, referring to Natalia regarding Nora, whose love for each other was clear to me early on. "Natalia thinks Giulia didn't know, imagining her to be a convent school girl. Their experiences at school must have very different!" I could have asked Franny if she was aware of Leo's university days, but I let it go. My sense is that at heart, they're all convent school girls who make their private peace with life as they see it.

"Anyway, what's the harm?" Franny asked. She and Nora were also close, a second mother in a way, more than an aunt. And Alma had explained a few things, including the fact that it might be entirely different for her, one man for a lifetime without any doubt, a rare and lucky thing when it happens.

Leo, she added, struck her as an amalgam of Giulia and Carlo with Guillermo's trick of seeing the form of things in the midst of distraction, that kind of focus or concentration. "Her work appears monumental, but when she explains it or we walk through it, I see that it's completely open-ended in how it will be used and who will use it. The products she designs also have this quality. Are they for children? Look, you can also do this with it, or you can renew it!"

"I've started sketching. When I stayed with Giulia, she'd hand me paper, pencils, crayons, and brushes. We'd go out together, me with a sketchbook she kept for me. I found it among Natalia's things and am adding to it. I told Leo this. 'I've had the same journal since Buenos Aires,' she said. She has shelves of notebooks, so she must mean a personal one."

" Right after the war, Natalia made a reckoning, " Franny told me, "drawing on her notes: who died an untoward or unjust death; who was transported and who, of that cohort, didn't come back; and who collaborated or was treacherous. The bulk was written almost immediately, but she continued to note who escaped justice, including a few ex-Nazis who fled to Argentina through Piranesi. She also noted who they saved the families they hid on the farm, then spirited into the countryside or abroad. She notes later that very few who were active in the regime or party to its crimes or those of the occupiers saw their postwar lives and careers suffer. She quotes Gio, who predicted before the war that the worst of them would be singled out for reprisal, but the rest would soon be back at work. Resuming her law practice, she found herself amid colleagues who would have jailed her or worse had they been instructed to do so. There they were, when she became a judge herself, 'relieved not to have work for those devils.' I remember that Peron condemned the Nazi trials. I think Churchill had the same view just shoot the men at the top and start rebuilding. Natalia never praises herself for having done anything noteworthy. She saw it coming and thought it was her duty to do what she could. When she finally retired, the judges had a dinner for her. The eldest toasted her as the court's conscience and the one who'd plead for them at Heaven's gate, but out of compassion, as none of them were worthy. A silence followed, then another judge said, 'Hear, hear!' Natalia took some pride in this."

"I should have stayed in Argentina to bear witness," Franny said. "I know my situation differed from Natalia's. She was always cautious, in reality, but managed despite this to be useful, even heroic. I was outspoken in my support of land reform, the rights of the indigenous, and other causes that Peron took up but his generals and their patrons didn't. Whenever I spoke up for the oppressed in Argentina from Paris, friends got death threats,. I was warned by the UN and the French government to be silent. No one really cares that much, and the Americans will back anyone, which I find strange given their war experience. It's like it didn't happen."

Compared to Natalia, my life seems insubstantial, spent evading my real work in order to do others' bidding and to exhaust desire in an elongated, unproductive fashion. Desire argues for itself, of course, when occasioned. Necessity is a better word the necessity to make art, realize form, defend others. My poems are a necessity, but just one among others.

Franny motioned toward the hills. "This is an old, old place. It has the tempo of nature. Modena beats faster, but it still knows these hills. Milan wants to be a world city. They all do. In Paris, we were immersed in an old regime. Here, Guillermo wanders and hunts, as he likes to do. The English dub his ideas ecology, but we live here like Marie-Antoinette in her hamlet. I admire her, though, for wanting to get away from those endless gardens with their oppressive hedges!"

I mentioned Caterina. One pleasure of my current life is to see her more often. Our sons came with us to Montevideo, but she chose to stay behind. She met her husband Cesare there, introduced by Matteo's son Alfredo. Cesare is from an old noble family, one of our clients. He was often in Piranesi. To protect her properties there, Laura arranged with Matteo and Alfredo to give them to Cesare as a dowry. He returned them after we came back. They've always lived in Ferrara, so these properties were managed by Alfredo's family until we reclaimed them and the Piranesi farmstead after the war.

We've always corresponded, staying close despite all the gaps. As she found her voice, it became a literary exchange.

Back at my writing desk in Piranesi, in a room with its own memories of desire, and not just mine, I intuited, returning to it long ago when Natalia borrowed it, noting the scents of lovemaking and their residue. Work fades from memory, but love leaves elaborate traces to be found again by association with one thing or another reminiscent of her. These traces are weightless, the way the poems they inhabit are nothing more than a necessity to write them out as they arise.

I do sometimes write down a line in the dark although it will be hard to make out later, but in general poems arrive. Agony isn't something I've experienced as a writer. Poems arrive when they do. It's why I don't think I'm really a poet.

The women arrived too, but I must have attracted them. It still seems inexplicable, these women and their traces, or maybe it's the force of their attraction that explains it. "West of gravity," I told one once, winning her approval. Love too is weightless, just like its traces, and yet such heaviness!

I never brought a woman here. In Buenos Aires, distant from Montevideo. I had rooms, nominally for the work I did there, that I used occasionally for other purposes, but hotels were better in the daytime, and in business to cater to it. Leo's hunting took place exclusively at night, I gathered, meeting up with her sometimes far after noon the next day.

Despite the cold, I made my way to the harbor, stopping at a café to warm up a little. Last week, I turned 90 and the family gathered to mark the occasion. At my age, the speeches sound more like eulogies than encomiums, but eulogies are wasted on the dead. The family runs now even to great-grandchildren, so, I'm recovering. Caterina and Cesare came from Ferrara, and Franny and Leo, et al, from Modena. Abroad, my birthday felt like summer, which I preferred. Piranesi is said to be temperate, but winter still nips at me. I don't like it. I could say the same about celebrations, but the celebrants made a big effort on my behalf, so I'm properly grateful. But it took its toll. Winter takes its toll.

My friend wrote to me, enclosing a small sketch she made of me from memory. I paperclipped it to some cardboard and propped it on a shelf behind my desk a sort of shrine of memorabilia. Leo has them, I noticed, these tiny museums.

Laura was in her element. She misses our sons and their children, but being able to visit back and forth with Caterina and her family is compensation. Much that once divided us has lost its relevance. We're diminished in form and yet more or less intact solvent, conversational, self-starting. I wander the harbor, but less so in the winter. I miss our dead, whose numbers are growing. Well, I'll see them soon enough.

We meet episodically but are mostly correspondents, an underrated medium for friendship that I use extensively. Our friendship suggests to me that life comes down to listening, observing, and witnessing others' lives. You learn slowly that these are their own affairs. Advice can be unwelcome even when solicited. Taking an indirect or oblique approach is best, for which correspondence is well-suited. When we meet, I'm aware of her beauty. I imagine this awareness isn't lost on her, but I'm a relief from predatory colleagues and the vicissitudes of her desire for marriage and a family. Leo avoided this by acting like a man (or a woman on her own terms), but her polytechnic is much less mired in tradition. My friend, in no sense a man, manages to find her way in a world like the Vatican, maybe I don't understand its workings, but the institutions men dominate are often warped or tainted by their fear of women's rivalry.

31.

In Rome early spring, pleasant. I came for a few days to see my friend, who kindly makes time for coffee, a lunch, and a dinner before I head back. She found a place for me on the Campo di Fiore, and I can see the famous statue of Bruno from my terrace. There's no elevator, so it's good that I walk in Piranesi now, not in the flatness of Buenos Aires. We toasted her long struggle to become a professor. She will teach at Berkeley in the autumn, she says. I never made it to California, I reply, and Paolo, my only connection to the place, is dead. "You can visit me," she answers. I nod, but neither of us takes it seriously. "I'll write to you, as always."

The Pantheon is Leo's favorite building, especially when you approach its entrance. In her honor, we had coffee at a café across from its doors, then looked in. The play of light was remarkable, but I saw Leo's point that its real power is its simplicity. You see it in men sometimes, this kinetic stasis, containers of potential energy. I noted this to my friend. "No wonder the roof has a hole!" she said. From there, we walked over to the Villa Farnese, then down past a small church by Raphael, and finally across to the castle and Hadrian's tomb. I explore cities on foot, usually, although in truth what I do is find walks that please me. The terrains I remember accrue like this, even the human ones. My friend is a terrain of inference, never known yet as memorable as the others.

Funny to have these thoughts in the spring of my 9oth year. After dinner, my friend gave me a long embrace. It brought back a party, decades ago, ending with something similar that signaled desire, I realized later. That our farewell might be the last explains my friend's, I remind myself.

Part 3: Lina

We went to Piranesi when Luca turned 90, a big event in which I met many of my cousins and their parents so many names and faces that I couldn't quite put together, but Luca took me walking in the harbor, sometimes with his daughter Caterina, telling funny stories as he always did. I loved my grandparents, but Luca was my favorite and he made me feel that I was his, although it was clear that he loved children. This first post-pandemic year finds me in Berkeley. I owe my move to the university to Luca's professor friend. I was at a conference in Rome in the mid-1990s when she came up and reintroduced herself. (We'd met at Luca's funeral, she reminded me.) We began to correspond and never stopped. She's retired and mostly in Rome, but while she taught here, she urged me to apply for a post and then spoke up for me. My field is critical theory, squeezed in among philosophy, literary and film criticism, anthropology, history, and other fields. I favor history, but critical theory pays the bills.

I could retire. I thought about it during the pandemic. I ask myself if the world really needs another middle-aged academic. It's remarkably expensive here. Should we leave? We own our house and have another near the coast. I love the climate, the bay we look out at. I have some family money, and Trent and I also have stakes in my mother's enterprises. Her work is popular again, she tells me as it should be.

1.

I have a wife, an OB/GYN, works for Kaiser. Bisexuality runs in my family, but I fell for Bren plain and simple: two lovers who married, had kids, Ben and Jo an old story. We don't discuss our work except as work its conditions; the oddities of our colleagues, patients, students, staff; the contents of our everyday, mine recently disrupted, hers rolling on a little hazardously, we thought, until it was clear that family weddings are the main hazard, along with bars.

The writing I want to do lives at the edges, amid the rest: academic writing and teaching. Luca told me once that when a man retires, he has time for his own work, only he doesn't. I didn't really understand this until he died. I sometimes think that critical theory's only function is to prolong others' work that properly speaking should have ended with their deaths.

I like history, but I often find the academic version sclerotic or pedantic. Also, when a field pushes good people out of it, something's wrong. Like comparative lit before it, critical theory is a tent city of such exiles, some with bullhorns. I only shout from pleasure. This also runs in my family.

Medicine in general here is a corporate quagmire, but my wife's specialty is secure and her wonderful bedside manner gives her enormous positive word of mouth. Even at Kaiser this carries weight. Competing networks or their agents cold call her regularly to try to lure her in, but she says no. Kaiser is a fit, and her team is highly competent. Mothers and their babies benefit, which pleases Leo long devoted to Diana.

3.

The university's art museum, especially its film archive , was where I hung out when I first arrived, but then I lost my taste for films. In the pandemic, when everything shut down, I found I had more time to write. My sabbatical overlapped part of it, so I began a history as well as my academic book. The history is to make sense of our family. It's impossible to ignore the enterprises, a running theme that plays off its sense of itself as bourgeois, but a particular sort, designed to fit in.

One of them blew up when Paolo's grandson Eduardo went into real estate and banking in Panama, laundering drug money. Poor Eduardo, found dead at a beach house, ambiguously enough that his wife was able to collect on his life insurance. Marco fended off his numerous creditors and also spirited his widow, children, and assets out of Panama.

Luca and Paolo helped Matteo and Marco consolidate the agrarian holdings in Piranesi and San Rafael into a Swissdomiciled holding company in the late 1930s. When Paolo moved to Santa Barbara, those holdings were absorbed. Leo and Marco added their various enterprises and Gianni's film company to it, the Swiss being seen as a backstop against calamity, even an unforeseen one like the hapless Eduardo.

4.

Walter Benjamin has been central to my work. He saw in the detritus of 19th-century Paris an unfolding despite the cataclysms breaking out around it. The modern era culminated the Enlightenment's desire to overthrow tradition in favor of science, reason, and progress. WB was well aware of modernity's costs (and its tendency to slip into reaction) but appreciative of its possibilities.

I posit that antisemitism split the bourgeoisie, a binding agent in Europe that might have held the center. That splintering helped open the door to fascism. When the fascists marched on Rome, the family did the math in Piranesi. It's remarkable how quickly we responded. We have a nose for existential threats and a habit of staying clear of them. (This same nose led Marco, in his role as capo, to ring fence our assets from the adventurous Eduardo while protecting his widow and children, who were blameless.)

I spoke Mapudungun as a kid, hearing my grandfather and Leo speaking it like a secret language. Franny and Guillermo also spoke to each other in Spanish, French, and Italian. At home, we spoke Italian, but I picked up American English by listening to Leo on the phone. I used to mimic her talking to her colleagues in Brooklyn. I'm a good mimic, like Luca. God, he was funny! He made me burst out laughing, which I think mattered more to him than anything, even being seen as a poet. (Caterina finally saw his poems into print.)

Trent took over Gianni's film company. Theirs are the only films I watch. I miss these elders and thank God Leo's alive. She's almost 93. Women architects are having a moment, so there will be a symposium in her honor on her birthday at the Milan Polytechnic, she told me. She's not enthusiastic about the event, "but it will draw attention to our backlist" the array of things she dreamt up and Ko sold on (and on). She and Ro are in Tokyo, still among the living With one foot in the Bauhaus, they blurred art, architecture, and design. My work is also blurry, unlike Bren's. Professions aren't to every woman's taste Cosima said that once to Natalia, I believe.

Ours is a huge, wealthy- on- paper economy with ineffective leadership, progressives beholden to the highest bidders, a jacked-up cost of living, problems evident but ignored. Tech has retreated to its ring-fenced palaces following the exodus of its urban workers. Deteriorating conditions are noticeable to ordinary people, out and about after the pandemic lifted.

I argue with myself about this. It's based on perception, while the statistics point to a smaller exodus, less violent crime, rents and house prices coming down, transit ridership ticking up. Not long ago, perception was thought to be determinant. Was ours a brief paradise of local/global upended by regional parity and paranoia, by Cold War-like rivalries grown complicated by a shifting, not-yet-decided order? Stripped of our former context, we look provincial. Recovering our provinciality might be a good thing, though, as the current oligarchs are culturally and environmentally clueless a scourge, really. It doesn't have to be like this. Decroissance , as the French call it, is a climb down from what we're facing, an Augean stable in need of composting. (And we know something about stables!)

Yet its beauty struck me from the moment I arrived.

In 2005, at a conference I attended at the university on the future of the metropolitan landscape, I heard a professor of landscape architecture say in passing that only regions and neighborhoods mattered. I'd heard him lecture in the past he studied towns in the Outer Banks endangered by the neoliberal push to transform everything to make it fit for the wealthy, these small towns providing local color. What struck me about his work was his phrase "sacred places," by which he meant anything the townsfolk valued a dock from which they learned to swim, a barber shop where things were debated and informally decided.

This aligns with my sense from childhood about the places we inhabit. Contemporary life is a struggle, at this detailed level, between what some hold sacred and others would wantonly profane. My mother shares this her interventions always begin with what's there and how anything new might fit with it or into it. She admires William Morris's refusal to clear away what accrued with time if it meant something to a place and its inhabitants. Modernity rarely had qualms about stripping the past away, but my hero Walter Benjamin also saw all it contained. Regions and neighborhoods are our most meaningful contexts the macrocosm of nature and the microcosm of local traditions. We need to learn to work across them "with nature," as Guillermo put it and rethink how we act within sometimes very long timeframes that are poorly understood or ignored. We need to grasp the limits of our knowledge and tune our interventions to them. I'm on the ridge, writing this, hearing the sea's distant pounding.

8.

Our country house is a half - mile or so from Drake's Bay , the last house of an organic architect, an unfinished wreck when we bought it. It looks out at a ridge that's part of the coastal park that dominates the peninsula. The climate is winter wet or summer bone dry. The house rises from the remains of one that burned to the ground in a wildfire in 1995. Another wildfire two summers ago came within a mile.

The nearby towns are a mix of outsiders like us, for whom this is country to our city, and locals, some genuinely so. The weekly paper describes a history of dairy farms and cattle ranches, a few still active but fighting with their neighbors. The backdrop is government in different forms. There's an undercurrent of left-coast anarchism. Cows on the road!

I feel at home here, as it reminds me of my grandparents' house in the Apennines. Such places managed to resist the onslaught of whatever the cities had in mind for them. It's not easy if it's not mass tourism, it's the conversion of farms to suburbs, villages with so many second homes that no one's left to maintain actual daily life no bakery or café. When I read my family's journals, they note the artificiality of their estate, which existed partly to showcase their bespoke horses and bulls. Yet the artist Giulia lived mostly there, conscious of its seasons and how country folk viewed their lives. My daughter surfs off Bolinas, a source of anxiety for me as an inlander. She wisely expresses her awe of the ocean, her terror. Living closely with nature does this to you. We deal with terror by taking its measure, or maybe it's our own measure we're taking our skill, our capacity for fear.

Capital ism attached itself to imperialism as its bankers and mercantile empire-builders, but it's trading that underpins the bourgeoisie an activity built on reciprocity, despite the distortions trade caused as it scaled up industrialization and resource exploitation. My mother has strong feelings about scale. Success to her is any building or object that people feel is worthy of continual acts of renewal and repurposing.

Scale sets the terms of how to manage it. The park our country house overlooks was probably better run by the farmers and ranchers who owned it originally. It's more picturesque as woods, but their pastures were firebreaks, and farm and ranch labor kept an eye on things. This anyway is my supposition. I wasn't here in these before times.

In the spirit of Luca, I argue for bourgeois modesty in the face of nature and of any human forces to be worked with or around. Such modesty includes a sense of limits, of a scale that's appropriate to a given situation, that fits. We admit our own limits, as humans, and consider our contingencies. "The door is always there," Confucius said. Today, this could be a miscalculation. On to Mars? I'm not sure Mars is an exit.

My dissatisfactions are less with tribalism than the efforts of each tribe to bend the rest of us to its view. It also irks me that these disparate views are lumped together and amplified as pledges of allegiance to momentary causes. This reflects the loss of a history I heard first hand and a tradition I'm old enough to have experienced directly. I make a point of teaching, not sloughing it off. I look for the good teachers among my graduate students, knowing the difference they can make to beginners who need to find their bearings in a huge university. A field like mine is seen as superfluous. They say the same of tribal majors, but we need them to pry the canon open. My field's pertinence is like having test strips for fentanyl a prophylactic knowledge arising from wariness. Wariness and openness, like Jo and the ocean. I suppose really that I'm a critic, a branch of journalism, but with feelers extending far and wide within culture, antennae to pick up signals and resonances from a welter of sources. Less a critic, more an observer maybe, but is this stance possible now? I'm called on to take sides, accept wholesale the nostrums of the day, fall in despite knowing their shortcomings. Arguments take form as threads. Who's blocked or vilified, and who isn't? If discussion is ruled out, then I'll sit on my shaded terrace and write, distant from all of it, old enough that my observations accrue and beg for summation theories rooted in this life I've led provisionally, finding my bearings as the planet lurches forward. I marvel at how the family manages to serve its own and others' desires, an art of doubling it has somehow sustained a bourgeois art, the family would add.

"Experiences are lived similarities," WB said (as quoted by Frederic Jameson in a book on him I'm reading). It makes me think of listening to my elders describe their lives in exile or under fascism in the human terms of what it meant for them, their friends, and vulnerable others. A theme was their wariness of whatever fell in the realm of threat. (Several of Caterina's short stories describe this in Ferrara.)

When I point to "lived similarities," I'm often met with blank stares or denials that they're related. At the same time, my students make connections that distort the past and the present, omitting contrary facts and complexities. If there's a reason to educate yourself, I tell them, it's to confront a world that's endlessly complex and yet steeped in patterns themes that recur in new guises, either promising or perilous. It's in this sense that critical theory is useful, pushing students to go further, but it gets this from its antecedents, in reality.

In the cloud are digitized family journals , back to Giulia . Luca is the exception to the rule that only the women kept them, but Luca is the exception in other ways. I share his tendency to theorize, and his sense of being unsure how his life adds up and who he really is within it. I'm Leo's daughter in certain ways, but then our women are stalwart once they put their wild youths behind them. When I arrived here, I had my own history. Luca's conflicted nature dogged him. These conflicts are unending, aren't they? One saving grace of this region is its tolerance, but it's always precarious. The day after Trump won, I was on the train headed to the airport. A white man launched into a tirade that he would never have done a day before. The pandemic was a relief from this. I find myself wanting it to continue, to leave everything behind and only work on our family's history. It feels like my reason for being, as opposed to what I prepared to do and am still doing. It interests me, yes, but less and less. Only WB interests me, the way he interests FJ, giving an unexpected lightness to a prose style that's usually heavy going. WB is too provocative to be taken in that vein. He struggled with distraction, yet he produced and produced until he ran out of time and space less a suicide than a man self-euthanizing.

13.

The intimate history of the family comes down to a sign. It's Natalia who raises it, referencing her chart and how it was explained by her lover Nora and her mother-in-law, Alma, both Etruscans according to themselves. The sign denotes self-sufficiency this is my term for it enabling a woman to get past desire or an incompleteness that prompts her to seek her complement in another. My gloss on this is inexact and self-sufficiency isn't quite right. The women who had it, including my mother, describe burning through desire in order to feel sufficiently sated to get on with their lives. In every case, there was a remnant, an ember they brought to a marriage. Natalia is an odd case, desired across her life by Nora. That she always initiated their tectonic interludes, by Natalia's account, may be what Luca puts his finger on, a self-delusion about who does what and also that it doesn't matter, that it causes itself. As far as I can tell, this continued, although at longer intervals.

Unlike his sister Marta, Luca failed to live on blamelessly, acquiring other habits. His incompleteness was chronic until late in life he met his professor friend. At that point, he also looked critically at his own past, wondering at his persistence in the face of reality's implacable inelasticity. Life has natural limits that the young breach from exuberance and ignorance, but discover soon enough. Matteo, a patron, seems to be the only man who actually managed to have a parallel life that converged in the person of Paolo granted, at a safe distance from Piranesi, a place among the gentry. An example of his largesse, Giulia might say, but Franny and Leo saw him as the deusexmachinaPaolo summoned to wow the locals.

Leo echoed Giulia in the liaison that gave her Trent. I don't think she sees it like this, however. It was the huntress in her, I theorize. She was well taught by Guillermo. Trent resembles his father. I'm the Natalia of this sequence, but that father never knew us, since Leo didn't feel it was important. This exemplifies the self-sufficiency I had in mind, which Leo has in spades: her momentum or trajectory. I'm often unmoored in the university, in it but wanting out, although I'm valued and even enjoy it. If only I could shrink it down to convent school size, be Vivaldi to the innocents who form each semester's ensemble. I would lead them and then go home and compose.

The pandemic gradually stripped away the extraneous, as I realized so much was, leaving me with certain ideas related to my field, loosely speaking, and these journals. I divided my time, such time as was mine, between them, but then I began to relook at time and form a new relationship with it. Bren came along with this reformation, because I saw that she's a continuous presence, even when absent. This is like Natalia and Franny, according to Alma. I extended this to my work, asking if it wasn't actually one undivided thing that admits no hierarchy. If time seemed to gnaw at me likely a disease of academics the pandemic may have provided a cure.

Leo once said to me, regarding children, that once you have two, you might as well have eight. It's true that two is a big jump from one, but more than two is now uncommon in the family. The journals record proximate aunts, uncles, parents, siblings, and cousins. Luca's 90th birthday brought home to me what Piranesi meant to the family, why Luca and Cosima went back, and why Natalia and Giulia never left. Their journals make me feel my life is atomized in comparison. The pandemic led me to test the deeper waters of disconnection. Bren is more naturally social. She grew up here, and has family and childhood friends nearby. Before the pandemic, we were more social. I do the cooking. Bren does the cleaning up, being used to mess.

The real memoir of Luca is to be found is his poems. He read Horace and became something of a Zen Buddhist in his efforts to get past the "ravines" where he found himself. But passing through them was necessary, he wrote later. The pleasures of the affairs are also noted. Poems didn't force him to explain. They touch on things he couldn't elaborate but wanted to set down, and you grasp enough without needing to know more. His poems are worth reading. They develop over time, shifting forms. He wrote constantly.

I admire his ability to live with his unresolved, problematic desire. Carlo, who Leo is always said to resemble, is another bisexual, sort of a predator, we'd say now, fucking the help, but Giulia doesn't see this as a defect. What strikes her, and Natalia, also, is his steadfast fulfillment of his family roles and, later, his decision to abandon sculpture and his studio, joining Giulia and painting. Natalia and Nora, epic duo, are entwined practically from the start, but Nora is entirely our contemporary in wanting to rub Piranesi in the face with her real and complicated nature, bringing with her all others society excludes or diminishes, even now. Especially now.

I don't think I've ever moved into my work entirely, as Giulia did. Natalia puts her finger on it when she describes her own life's unchanging settings. To her, it's completely ordinary, except that she's a lawyer, except that she finds a divan and allows her childhood friend to fuck her brains out, but never the same way twice. A work of art, those two, but like Luca, Nora longed for visibility. It's Cosima who got it, turning her Milan journals into a trilogy. Her success gave Luca hope for his poems, but her saga was easier to sell.

17.

When I arrived at Berkeley, I was the hot new thing, a lure to colleagues and students both. I was also on the run the way I think Leo was when she went to New York to put an ocean or a continent between us and the lacunae of our past lives. We've never discussed this and both our journals break off, which is so strange. I immersed myself my field and this place. I wrote, taught, spoke, avoided predators I found Bren, who put her own work aside to have our children.

We burn hot at the start, we Piranesi women, yet there's desire still, sufficient unto the night. Gasps, as Nora put it. What exactly do I want? This is leisure's question, I think. The enforced leisure of the pandemic made it more urgent. It's not a midlife crisis in the sense of a desire for someone new, but a desire for a life bigger than the one I have now. Or is it smaller? Different from my current one, anyhow.

Luca mentions our family tree's accuracy. I have one with Leo's annotations. Trent's father is penciled in with a question mark. I asked Leo about this and she said she was never sure, despite the resemblance. She and Gianni were an item when the form-giver passed through. Trent won't do a DNA test, but Ben and Jo are his children, half-siblings of his daughters, as Leo notes. Her thin penciled lines remind me of my chart. They could also do the test, but none has. Inverness has several foundations centered in the houses and studios of dead artists. Jo interned with two of them in successive summers, and involved herself in another's fancy magazine. There's a whole network of these quasi-cultural afterlives of iconic types. But as soon as the pandemic lifted, she went to Modena to see the family. Trent's Genia is from the ducal family that ruled the region from Modena east. We summered at the farmstead where she has a house, much like Giulia had hers near Piranesi. Now Bren is there with them. I should join her, but I'm too busy with this history.

19.

A director who knows Trent is visiting here. His wife is a cinematographer and they have a three-year-old, all staying at the Gordon Onslow Ford compound near the J.B. Blunck house two landmarks of Jo's terrain. I drove over and we had lunch. He showed me Ford's house and studio. "No photos on social media," he said a rule the foundation imposes, fearing thieves. Ford had a remarkable collection that he sold piecemeal, and faded photocopies mark where they hung. The house "is like Piano's airport terminal in Osaka," Leo commented when I sent my photos: "When the Japanese complained about the cost, he just lopped some off like a butcher selling them salami."

I had the same reaction to Ford's house compared to ours, an organic cathedral left unfinished like Gaudi's. I wake up in amazement, looking up at it. My mother preferred to revamp old houses rather than build new ones. She doesn't design houses, although she still helps other architects and designers work out unusual forms, still takes a huge interest in new materials. Ro is gone, but her circle at the polytechnic has successors who marry form and making. The pandemic kept her out of Milan, but there's Zoom and her house in Modena has become a pilgrimage site for her young followers.

I'm reading the journals Natalia wrote during the worst years of fascism how everyday life there was disrupted and how she and others coped. When the Nazis quit Piranesi, no one was sure at first if they were really gone, but then they paraded the Virgin and she attended a Thanksgiving mass.

" In Buenos Aires , a classmate, an actress, fell in love with a filmmaker. 'Mike & Mads,' we called them, because she was so high strung. Mike ended up in Milan and it was because of him that I met Gianni. In Buenos Aires, I made sets for theater productions and in the back lot of a film studio where Mike apprenticed. He also made his own close-to-silent films with a borrowed Bolex, with voiceovers he added later. Mads was ideal for this, being so visually histrionic. She had an apartment paid for by her wealthy provincial parents. One Monday, after Mike left for work, she took the gun they gave her 'for protection,' and shot herself in the head. No note. Mike only learned of it when a friend told him it was in the afternoon paper. Her family descended, cleared out her apartment, and took her body back to Mendoza. She led a double life, but Mike told me later she suffered from a double bind. Later, he made a film about her. 'It was hard to make,' he said. 'The ending is so ambiguous.' Her suicide made me appreciate our family more. It was so disorienting, and I'm almost never disoriented. Luca understood and helped me get away. In New York, I had to learn how to navigate all over again One reason I quit Milan was to see the night sky more clearly. That's the part of city life I most dislike."

Leo's account made me think about that fraught age, 20, a cusp between adolescence and something closer to maturity. The university has always been a minefield on this score; now bouts of madness are considered the mad one's private affair until she turns up bleeding, comatose, or dead. I take distress seriously. Nothing we do here is worth killing yourself over.

Modena functions for Leo like Piranesi did for Giulia, who split her time between the country and the town, sometimes going to Milan (where my mother goes more frequently). If Leo thinks in form, Giulia thought in images, "seeing what was important to her," as Natalia writes somewhere. It isn't that their visual way of thinking excludes human feeling. Its roots are empathetic. Leo is compared to Carlo, owing to their preoccupation with form, but form for her means supporting life far beyond any current ideas of it. In her journals, Giulia speculates that her work will survive but the artist and her human subjects may lapse into anonymity.

Trent and Genia split their time between Modena and Milan. She's writes about film, which is how they met. She's also writing a family history, focused on its revival in the mid19th century after losing its hereditary grip on the region. I like her, and our parallel projects have led to correspondence and mutual encouragement. And I owe Ben and Jo to her initiative, a very up-to-the-minute sort of family tie.

Their journals describe their talismans: Giulia's portrait of Matteo; Natalia's divans; Luca's Greek heads; Franny's Mapuche married, advocated, embodied; Cosima's sliver view of the harbor and her spare apartment; Leo's Diana. What's mine? Perhaps Jo can sort it out. Our journals are handwritten and always with us, stuffed in a pocket with a pen. Giulia knew her portrait's power. I have a copy of the photo of Franny and Guillermo in Deauville, Guillermo "dressed English." Was this her talisman?

I never thought of this kind of project until I embarked on it. Retrospect turns everything inside out, the journals rising usefully to the surface to explain what otherwise isn't.

I'm seated on my favorite terrace at the ridge house, off to the side under an oak of modest size, flagstones laid out along a path to what was supposed to be a pottery shed, with a metal mast similar to but smaller than the two in the house. Below, toward the lower road, I hear quail on the march. Terraces for me are like trains are for Leo, conducive to emptying my mind onto paper. I don't write my journal for posterity, and yet there's an imagined reader I address. If Cosima rewrote her journals as novels, it wasn't to distort the events she witnessed but reorder or reconstruct them, to have that freedom which I also grant myself, like Herodotus.

Giulietta, my niece, is engaged. Genia and Trent tell me separately that it's a good match, "a real couple," as he put it. I start to make plans, which brings home to me how this will repeat as her sister Paola and then Ben and Jo will marry. It strikes me how inevitable this seems, the way life reverts to a norm, how we, believing ourselves to be in the vanguard, are demonstrably conventional, yet another manifestation of our family's trope, married couples with children, however they were engineered. Not above giving destiny a gentle push.

Texts fly back and forth: Jo a bridesmaid, Ben kindly asked to support the groom; the creche's chapel the venue; dinners in town and at Genia's farmstead. It sparks thoughts and conversations, even speculations, among us.

I may stay at the Milan hotel, still in the family. Luca and I used to have tea there and I thought it was very grand. His daughter Caterina would sometimes join us. She and my grandmother were the same age. I loved going to Milan with him or Leo, a contrast to Modena and the country. Luca was a wonderful host. I think he also loved the idea of hotels.

If early Luca was a fabulist; the family were all sensualists. And they seem always to be in conversation. Later, Luca is regretful, burdened in some ways by retrospect. I asked my mother about him. "In Buenos Aires, we were especially close and I felt that he alone understood me. My mother was quite unlike me. She was Natalia's daughter, really. He was a poet, and with poetry, the value is uncertain. He thought poetically the same way I think in forms. His reference was Homer that tradition and I understand this. Antiquity provides the purest forms, the ones that transcend order. You see it in a building like the Redentore or the Pantheon. Poems are far less visible, yet a few outlive everything. The poet is never sure, though."

What about our sensual family? "Luca envied the women. His love life was always problematic." I thought of Nora. Luca lacked a comparable arrangement. His close friend was the nearest he got. I seem to fall into Franny's category, but I have a disorienting backstory like Leo's from Buenos Aires.

Luca snaps himself out of it, another of our family's talents.

Leo told me that her father admired Europeans' energy but was bolloxed by their inanities. "His interactions with them were subtly and ironically parodic, like Buster Keaton. He got on with Paolo because Paolo thought of him as part of the land itself. His marriage to Franny fit into Paolo's grand plan, the other half of which was his own marriage into the local gentry. My parents were unusually devoted to each other, although so different. Franny was Natalia's fearless daughter, with her sense of justice needing to be done and her never doing enough."

An urge for prognostication ran through the women, and my mother and I both got a double dose Mapuche and then Etruscan. Leo recently sent me her notes of the readings that Trent and I received as children. Jung argues such things are synchronous, but I relate it to Benjamin's now-time and Whitehead's idea that our actions unfold from everything that preceded them. The notes read, "Trent like his father; Lina sees into things; self-sufficient, so prone to stasis and self-isolation; keeps her family's stories. Trent too, but a storyteller," and other things of this nature.

My chart is clear that my desire for another is undivided, but much is left to be lived out among the pulls of interest, talent, opportunity, and the needs of others. When I went through it with Franny and the chart's maker in Piranesi, where Franny found her, she paused and then said to me, "Your family knows you better than yourself about certain things. They'll sometimes rescue you from your blindness."

Jo texts. "There's more!!!" My grandparents' house is more or less as they left it. Leo stays there whenever she wants "difference." Leo asked Jo to look at its contents and make an initial inventory. She found diaries, journals, and letters "way too much to scan. You must come!"

I've been pondering my selective blindness. Bren's work is like mine in that we both deal with shifting cohorts, although the pace and nature of our interactions differ. Floating above this is our higher-level work Ph.D. students and residents, the papers we write and give, books or book chapters. All this gives our days their inertial necessity. The thing about inertia though is that you need a break from it to see it accurately.

I'm reading a new book by Yves-Alain Bois that collects his work from the vantage point of age. His excitement about Barthes, Derrida, and others is undiminished. He was very lucky in his circle of friends and collaborators, and also in his era, a half-generation ahead of mine, which feels stalled, or I feel stalled, in comparison, but his example revives my hope.

Only certain writers and thinkers, especially WB, interest me their efforts to synthesize their breadth of learning, observation, and experience. My work on him is largely done and I want to set out new direction, but what? I focus on my family's history because the sources at are hand, but this is really a delaying tactic while I figure out my next move.

Friends induce d me to hear the Wildcat Viols, an early music quartet, in St. Mary Magdalene's parish hall. By rights, I should attend the Anglican All Souls closer to our house, but I come from a long line of convent school girls. "Who am I to judge?" is a question lost on San Francisco's reactionary bishop, but the Madeleine, as we call it, is aligned with Francis. Like the Wildcat Viols, "no one turned away." They play Henry Purcell, among other composers of works for four viols bass, tenor, and treble, the program said. When she took off her glasses, the Italian violist proved beautiful Our region has early music on the brain the performers are dedicated to it, playing new copies of old instruments and forming floating groups like this. It felt alive to me despite the music being composed in the 1600s. Concerts always prompt thoughts. I realized that I've met my academic ambitions and can't prod myself to go farther. Jo's text led me to text Bren later that evening her morning in Modena For a couple sharing two houses and a life together, Bren and I rarely discuss our situations' suitability as contexts for our work, especially the work we envision, even if it's hazy and insufficiently examined. Distance has spurred her reconsideration. Has her absence done so for me? We spoke for two hours, which I take as a yes.

Frederic Jameson cites WB's di fferent takes on history, and his self-positioning as a bourgeois intellectual, walled off as such from the proletariat and, by inference, the precariat. FJ distinguishes the former as most in need of hope and longing for a future whereas the latter are still angry about the past. It felt as I read it to be more about FJ's present or ours, but his comments made me think about our family's history. Its sense of itself creates a kind of conversation through time, a meta-narrative. I must be a literary historian, given my attraction to exactly this possibility of ferreting out thematic backstories arising from this seeming back and forth, and its bildungsromannature, whether discontinuous or evolutionary. They even pull Guillermo into it, interpreted as Nature's Matteo. Leo seems more or less self-invented, yet absolutely in a lineage that includes art, form, making, and the occasional bedded grandee all these women who made their own arrangements or induced others to do so for them.

Reading FJ's book reminds me how WB first piqued my interest and still does in a way that most others don't. After rereading a passage on his theses on history, I felt sure he'd endorse my striking out on a new path armed with what I've learned from him. "He wrote it for me," I think brazenly, but in reality he went where his mind took him, paying a big price for his independence. Glückis luck as well as happiness, FJ notes, a very German pairing. Was WB happy? His luck was terrible. We're lucky to have read him.

In Modena and vicinity for Giulietta and Vanni's wedding, a splendid affair as befits this daughter of her well-connected parents and her remarkably famous grandmother. Genia's family and their friends are here in force, and there are others like us who came from afar. Jo is radiant. Ben and Bren are in conversation with representatives of the medical world my mother touches we get a lot of mileage from that clinic.

It strikes me again how rooted in orthodoxy our families are. Orthodoxy knows how to display the bride so other young ones will follow her into matrimony. She goes beautifully along, in love with the idea of it. Orthodoxy wasn't quite ready for us, but our union fell in with its view of family continuation, even if only one of us did the breeding.

Fecundity is a thematic backstory with contrapuntal riffing. The women kept men in the picture, clearly loved them, but they weren't patriarchs. If some of the women loved women, was this partly because it uncoupled desire from pregnancy?

Long-lived, some of them, writing the looks back that only lucid old age affords. Leo still looks ahead, taking the train into Milan again to visit the polytechnic and engage the students and their teachers as they work on something together, her curiosity and her talent unabated. She's amused by her current fame. "It's odd to the see the old photos again. I really did look the part."

She urges us to stay on. This is easier for me, harder for Bren, but calls are made. Meanwhile we take walks and talk.

Naturally, I dove into Jo's trove. I also had a series of conversations with Leo, whose memories of San Rafael, the Andes, and Buenos Aires are so detailed that I recorded them on my phone as well as taking notes. She thought to write something, but this is easier. She also reminisced about our growing up "with such parents!" No, I protest, it was so interesting! Also, we had two sets of parents, really, in that household we shared with Ko and Ro, and their children.

"I remind myself of Maria," Leo said. "My parents noted the similarity, although she would have been shocked by my goings-on. I learned from her that everything in life is just a framework for change, even the Church, which she saw as a big basket filled with the beliefs people brought, mixing their shrines and idols with the Virgin and her saints, like Luca's Greek heads or the Etruscan artifacts Alma handed down. It stays with me, Maria's basket its forms and contents are in constant flux but the idea of it has never lost its potency."

I asked about Franny. "She and Natalia shared a sense of justice, but she was fearless Natalia had to overcome her wariness, which was innate. Only later, as a judge who'd survived the years of fascism, did she shed her anxiety. But even then, she was anxious for Franny. My parents fled Argentina because their lives were threatened. My mother always felt she should have stayed. My father became European 'one of you,' he'd say to my mother."

Luca said that it all began with "What if ?" The women posed this question, their men having the wit to take it seriously. Our family is creative, collectively and individually, in accommodating desires of different sorts. Its bourgeois nature suits this, orthodoxy providing an all-purpose screen.

Our sojourn in Modena gave us a chance to talk and come up with an arrangement. Everyone can be accommodated, even Giulietta and Paola, which speaks to the remarkable flexibility of things given the will and the resources.

Bren and I agreed to proceed in stages. She's talking with the clinic, now a women's and children's hospital, about leading an OB/GYN cohort there. I want to write our family's history. The newly found trove is a reason to do it here, but I also want to be with Leo. She's asked Jo and Giulietta to co-direct her foundation, funded by the royalties from her products and Gianni's films. They're both enjoying a revival, so the revenue is considerable. Her archive is at the polytechnic, but this new venture is her personal last act.

Ben won a residency at UCSF and Paola plans to study architecture at Cal, so they'll share our Berkeley house. No bridges burned "always an exit," as Luca would say. Yet here I am, finally, back where I started in Modena.

This is the second in a novella trilogy that begins with Piranesi . I owe thanks to Clare Wigfall, whose writing classes inspired me to write it, and to Laurie Snowden, a close and supportive reader. Two books mentioned are Frederic Jameson's TheBenjaminFilesand Yves-Alain Bois's AnObliqueAutobiography. The Wildcat Viols is a real quartet I heard in St. Mary Magdalene's parish hall in Berkeley. The rest is fiction. Print copies of my books are offered by the Pallas Gallery, founded and directed by my beloved daughter and collaborator, Elizabeth Snowden.

Berkeley, September 2023

(Photo left: Elizabeth Snowden at Pallas.)

In Piranesi , we met the older generation of this port-hopping family, named after their latest place of refuge. Argentina picks up the story in Buenos Aires, where Leo, a university student in 1950, is soon on her way to becoming a renowned architect/industrial designer at the urging of her older cousin Luca. He reappears in Italy in the mid-1970s, visiting Franny and Guillermo, Leo's parents, also exiled from the plague of dictatorships in South America. Leo's Left Coast academic daughter Lina brings the story to the post-pandemic present.