Modena

MODENA JOHN J. PARMAN

“Every moment is a moment of judgement concerning certain moments that preceded it.”—Walter Benjamin

Part one: Franny

1.

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

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

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

2.

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

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

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

3.

Leo was three when Natalia and Giulia first visited San Rafael.

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

Cosima and Marta want to move back to Piranesi, I heard from Luca. Laura and their sons own and rent apartment buildings in Montevideo, so they're not ready to join them. Property has always been Laura's business. Matteo and his son Alfredo ran the Piranesi end of things in their absence, avoiding seizure. Who owns what has all been straightened out, I heard from Natalia.

Matteo, Giulia, and Carlo are still in reasonably good health. As Luca foresaw, they were left alone. Matteo's ties to Argentina and his position as its consul, which was my mother's idea, also helped.

They shut the consulate down once the rat line made an appearance.

It's odd how Argentina is now a haven for those murderers, or so Luca tells me—they haven't shown up in San Rafael, as far as I know. Argentina took in a lot of fleeing Jews when no one else would, so Peron may think it's only fair. The stuff of nightmares, though, such men. I worry about their influence on the military.

Peron thinks he can control everything, but can he? Luca says the Americans quickly snapped up the German scientists, worried that the Russians would get them first. My mother writes that there's no appetite at home for pursuing the fascists, either. "As your father predicted, they shot the worst ones and then life went on."

4.

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

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

Leo is another topic, this wild girl of mine. Luca is confident she knows what she's doing, is very much of her time and place. She still spends the off-season hunting in the Andes with her father, but she's also close to Maria—they all chatter away in Mapudungun. Paolo and I speak our Piranesi Italian, as I do with Luca. The local Spanish and our Italian are not so different, apparently, as Guillermo and Maria can follow us when we talk, but this may reflect the amount of time we've all been away from its source.

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

5.

I come from a long line of women who did what they wanted.

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

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

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

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

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

They're both attentive students of those arts, more so than me.

6.

Both my grandmothers figured when I was growing up. They're so different. Giulia knew Alma before Natalia married Gio, because she sold medicinal and cosmetic herbs, oils, and ointments from her tiny shop on the market square and, less often, from a stand there— dried bunches of herbs, I remember. I spent time with her and she taught me a lot about the plants of the region and their uses. It was one way I bonded with Maria, extending my knowledge to this new terrain. Together, we taught ourselves the rudiments of viniculture.

Giulia consulted with Alma, as did my mother. They shared a distrust of doctors when it came to women and children. Gio had his mother, so I don't think he ever saw a doctor. Paolo saw them.

Matteo knew Alma, a stalwart among the Etruscans, but he had a doctor. Every woman in Piranesi saw Alma for something, I think.

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

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

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

7.

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

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

Marco brought the company he took over from Carlo through the war, promptly shifting it to meet the allies' needs, and again as the postwar era took hold, always broadening its lines and sniffing out new markets. He took a lot of risks in the war, secretly supplying the partisans, hiding Jews, and holding the businesses of some who fled or were transported. Not all of the latter made it back, but he squared things with their families—a fair dealer in the tradition of our family. This aspect of a successful enterprise gets overlooked.

There are many shortcuts to tempt entrepreneurs, but if fair dealing is omitted, it eventually proves fatal.

I'm sure some would argue. There are a lot of bastards running successful businesses, but karma may be a genetic trait, like a weak heart or a tendency to get cancer or some form of madness. With a family, as with horses and vineyards, generational proof is what's demanded. That idea always feels endangered. Will it be more so?

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

8.

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

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

There's a part of me that would like to go back, not necessarily to Piranesi, but definitely to Europe. I like Buenos Aires and could imagine living in a city like Paris or Milan. Yet I also like San Rafael.

I've lived in Argentina for more than half my life, so, is this home? If it means keeping quiet about issues I care about, then no. Guillermo is quite at home now in Buenos Aires or Montevideo, mixing with the owners who pay royally for our horses and his consultation. The word spread quickly in those circles that he's got the touch.

I speculate, but then so does Luca. Over coffee, he frets about the regimes of our respective, adoptive countries. He has a finely tuned ear for the politically untoward. He sees Peron as populist froth that obscures the military's love of oligarchy and its own place within it, "a problem too in Uruguay and Chile." The Red Scare in the USA will find echoes here, he predicts, "to our detriment." As always with Luca, his first thought is for the family and its enterprises. One more reason, he says, to get Leo on the road "before she torches the city."

He didn't elaborate, but I can guess, thinking of Natalia's "scrapes."

9.

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

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

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

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

10.

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

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

Am I a pure type? I think Guillermo is one. We briefly catalogue the family's pairings, which produces a fair amount of ambiguity, known or inferred. Giulia, we decide, is pure, at least in reference to Matteo, and perhaps a necessary pure for the ambiguous Carlo, Luca suggests. Gio and Paolo seem pure, like Matteo, but then there's Nora. Luca compares her to Carlo. I wouldn't know, I say facetiously, which makes him laugh.

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

The world, though, is in general badly organized for this reality.

Ambiguity can be a lot of work, especially if it means playing a part.

Many of the ambiguous are happiest on their own, although some end up happily with others who share their particular ambiguity.

Cities are havens in this respect unless (until?) they prove otherwise.

11.

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

Through Luca, I've come to understand some of the mysteries of my immediate family, particularly my mother and grandmother. His working theory, or one of them, is that desire is a problem in life that each person solves in her own way. Convention or orthodoxy is one readymade solution, but then life is usually drawn out, with ample room for the problem to arise again in new forms. Giulia exemplifies the ability of some women to burn through an excess of desire then live on the residue while turning their attention to their work.

Others find long-term relationships that sustain desire without it overcoming them. Natalia is an example; I may be one, but in the context of a marriage without an appended lover. Men, Luca says, are all over the map. A few, like Matteo, know their own minds and arrange their lives accordingly. Most fail to do this, and many really don't know their own minds at all, either lurching from one thing to another, reactively or opportunistically, or responding to signs the gods set before them, likely for their own amusement.

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

12.

The Mapuche hold the Andes sacred, marking their territory by the farthest distance from which they can still see them. They never built pyramids out of a sense of deference toward these mountains.

The Mapuche's idea of their territory is based partly on the way they read into it then link it to reference points like the Andes and also to the cosmos and microcosmoses. Everything is a signpost for them, and some of the signposts are rewritten as they pass through them.

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

Leo and I sometimes discuss how she sees this. It's one of the topics that she and Luca touch on. Luca thinks the world's divided between the rooted and those who set down roots, although it's an illusion, traced back—everyone's people came from somewhere else.

Some will perish if dislodged, while others can find themselves in a better place than where they left, reestablishing themselves there and continuing in a direction they carry with them like a compass.

My sense is that Leo has benefited the most from this innate habit of reading into places, and also from Guillermo's decision to teach her to hunt, to be totally at ease in the milieux of that life. She rides purposefully rather than for pleasure, or at least it's a different kind of pleasure than Europeans take, uninterested in sport and display.

It's almost disconcerting to see this unusual and already urbane young woman, so apparently at ease in the city, to be so utterly calm in the manner I remember at a very young age whenever I was with Matteo at my grandmother's—not very often, but he had a way of being still that suggested motion or the possibility of motion, not randomly taken up, but purposeful, as if he already saw and knew. It comes from Guillermo, this quality—the way they hunt—because hunting is most of all a matter of patience, a foreknowledge of the game, and the self-assurance of the huntress, alert but unafraid.

13.

For whatever reason, a Russian has befriended my husband.

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

Leo sent me a book in English of poems by Yevtushenko, the Russian poet. I brought it with me to the office and he noticed it, but made no comment. The Russians can be garrulous, but in the office, they scrupulously avoid controversy, fearing that we're all being overheard—not just the phones, but the walls and lamps. Is it true? If so, a waste of time, as so little gets done. But later, we were in Deauville and the Russian phoned, so we invited him to lunch.

Relaxed around Guillermo, master of horses, he let down his guard.

One of his topics was my book and its main poem, "Bratsk Station."

It was his project, the biggest ever, meant to industrialize Siberia, and it failed, despite heroic effort. All possibility of advancement vanished, but he managed to secure this post in Paris. He lost his faith comprehensively—that was the word he used. (We spoke French. "It's lucky I'm fluent in it.") As the poem conveys, these monumental projects were genuinely "of the people," galvanizing the popular imagination with a future to which Sputnik and other Soviet triumphs pointed. For him, for his generation, their failure was existential—also his chosen word. "So, here I am in Paris, involved with development in ex-colonial contexts and I have no faith at all that the projects we fund can do anything."

By an entirely different route, I arrived at the same conclusion.

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

14.

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

If we do this, we'll sell the apartment in Paris and the house in Deauville. I like them both, but my life with diplomats, high officials, and cadres of experts and specialists is wearing. It's lucky, of course, that I have a secure position, which insulates us from reprisals. Everything in San Rafael is tenuous, but Luca assures us we’ll be back in business there once this all blows over. He and Paolo got our money out. Ensconced now in Santa Barbara, Paolo write to me wondering if he'll live long enough to go back. As Matteo's son, he may not be as long-lived as us. I hope not!

Natalia and I went out to her parents' old country house. The farmstead is still in the family, thanks to Alfredo, and the house is now a venue the family uses for grand occasions. Less formally, it's a museum of their work, open to visitors and scholars. Giulia is gaining art-historical interest as a transitional figure, a "protomodernist," as Leo put it, whose work is figurative, cubist, and abstract-expressionist in turns. Carlo also has a following for his late work as a painter and also for the small works, often in fired clay, that "experiment brilliantly with form," in Leo's estimation.

15.

One pleasure of our visit to Piranesi was seeing Marco. We favor our respective parents. Alma said that Natalia and I are bound together, which I think is true. Gio is closer to my brother. Both are level-headed and pragmatic, but Marco is also Carlo's grandson, confident and extroverted. My mother and Alma both maintained that Gio was the source of my confidence, but Luca credits Giulia.

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

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

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

16.

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

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

17.

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

Later, encountering her in Buenos Aires, I recognized the marks my mother used to come back with, "scrapes" acquired in the country, noted without elaboration. When I saw Leo with them, it dawned on me where they came from, the particular marks women leave, or this anyway is my assumption, my inference. I never asked, because it wasn't my place to ask, but I did have a very tangential conversation once with Luca, who assured me in his elliptical way that Leo could handle herself. What threw her off was that girl, the student from Mendoza who shot herself. I don't think it occurred to Leo that this was humanly possible, so she was shocked. It snapped her awake, was my impression at the time. Luca was her confidant or maybe her analyst, and he grasped her need for a change of scene.

I remember her interest in the church that anchored her convent school, her quite accurate drawings of how it worked. Its homegrown exuberance was underpinned "not very elegantly in places," she reported, but the big moves were clear to her. When Leo recounted this to Luca, he ran with it. He's attentive, and he'd read about the modern architects in Brazil and Mexico. It all seemed to converge on New York, so he pointed her there.

I would and wouldn't have predicted it. I mean, it was there, the part that's observant and adept, but then also the part that was feral, that took real pleasure in the hunt, in the objects of the hunt.

Guillermo was like this too, and they'd disappear for a week, hunting together. Maria saw nothing wrong with it—just their nature, she said. It's hard to square this now with her older self, as if her passion for it burned away. That would be Luca's explanation, but Leo’s beloved Huntress may also figure.

18.

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

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

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

19.

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

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

The film was shown in Italy and, subtitled, in France. I haven't seen that man again, so I have no idea if no one was murdered or if they did in a dozen or if that threat was even real to begin with, but at least one observer, writing in Paris, called it a political allegory.

"Your mother really looked the part," Luca wrote me. "Holding up her list, she was like a hanging judge from commedia. And you, Franny, coming on about Peron and Argentina like a good-will ambassador from the 1950s—you were marvelous! Giulia always said the best way to get into their heads is by indirection."

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

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

20.

I catalogue our contradictions or is it our wisdom? What comes to mind first is our Catholicism, an elected assimilation that we've maintained scrupulously since arriving in Piranesi. Guillermo and his mother fit into it, and Lina is destined for convent school, like the rest of us. This persists despite the wildness, arguably, of our desires, or their unorthodoxy. We arrange then decide, each in her own way, what to do with it. I married mine and raised our daughter. My mother built her life partly around Nora or perhaps vice versa, to cite Leo's theory of hunters and their prey.

It's odd then that some of us were at risk when they came after the Jews. Who was more Catholic than us? Where was the backsliding?

But their idea was racial taint. Isn't this the source of our beauty? I look at Leo and think so. Lina has it too, a kind of lustrousness.

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

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

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

21.

In Piranesi with Natalia discussing the nature of our work. Luca sometimes joins us. After one conversation, Natalia observed that he combined in one person the attributes of P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie and Jeeves, hapless and then shimmering in to rescue himself.

She wondered aloud if Wodehouse meant in some sense for them to be taken as aspects of a single character. We decided no, but later I told Luca about this theory, which made him laugh. "That's me."

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

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

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

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

22.

A woman I know gave me an article by an English Marxist that she translated for an Italian journal five years ago. In it, he discusses the unique alliance of English city capitalists and large landowners in the country who farmed for profit. The urban bourgeoisie in Italy and France were split off from the peasantry, which left them in a worse situation than the entrenched bourgeoisie in England. But some of the supplanted dukes and princes whose landed estates dotted the Italian provinces emerged as bourgeois landowners.

Caterina married into one such family. They had a relationship to the city, which bought what they raised. (In a book Marco sent me, bought in New York, a woman named Jane Jacobs argues that the countryside is inevitably part of the economy of the metropolis that buys from it, so I guess Caterina's family's farmsteads orbit Milan.)

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

23.

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

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

I think sometimes about Peron, who I saw as a champion of my causes, but actually paved the way for the military, murderously asserting its "rights" in the name of a made-up "order" that rests securely on corruption. Yet in Peron himself there were impulses to break free of the past and put Argentina on a new basis, infused by peoples like the Mapuche. This was what attracted me. He reminded me of Matteo, I confess, a reflection of my own tendency to idealize our deus ex machina. It was naive of me to imagine Peron transcending his contradictions and staying clear of the generals with their own ambitions and their industrialist backers. And the bother of democracy, which they're only too glad to dispense with.

Peron paved the way to this, but it may also be the nature of these self-made countries.

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

24.

This traces back to my grandmother Giulia, and also to Maria, two very different takes on peasantry. Giulia loved the farmstead, even as she saw it very much as an extension of a family of traders in her mind for which it was visible proof of their rootedness. Maria saw herself and Luca as midwives, bringing germs of ideas to fruition. This cycle, what she and Guillermo called husbandry, also made the Piranesi farmstead compelling to Giulia. They were immediately close when they met. Maria was in her element, like Guillermo with horses, an intuition that comes from deep understanding. (Like Alma, come to think of it.) Everything with Giulia came back to her self-knowledge: not an artist, but one who sketched and painted the cosmos from an inner necessity to set it down. Not a courtesan, but a woman who desired a particular lover on her particular terms. Natalia thinks they were fearless, Giulia and Carlo, but it's more that they lived for their art.

The peasantry, which Giulia called countryfolk, are a leitmotif of our bourgeois family. I suspect that what saves the English is their attachment to the land, which is why Guillermo resonates for them.

But this is also a sentimental attachment to a vanished peasantry. In Giulia's time, it hadn't vanished. Just as traders knew the sea and ports of call intimately, farmers knew their fields and hands. They shared the same ingrained fears and propitiations. All they knew was insufficient if luck turned against them. Guillermo's sense of fate is similar, but colored by hunting, whose central mysteries are the bond of hunters and prey, the element of chance, the moment of knowing there's none left, so, how prey give in, but also how both accept whatever happens, their own injury or death included.

25.

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

Afterward, I was approached by a woman I remembered from university days in Buenos Aires, not a friend but an acquaintance.

We started tentatively, which I saw was from our respective fears, like the man who spoke of retribution at my café table in Paris, so I recounted this episode to her and it broke the ice. I also mentioned my mother, because her example during the years of fascism seemed germane. Tell everyone to make notes, I said. Hide them carefully.

It will end, and the perpetrators will do what they can to evade a reckoning. These notes are the charge sheets of history. Even if a reckoning is forestalled, it will happen eventually, but only if there's documentation, and time gives notes like this remarkable veracity, not least because of their sheer quantity, the way they corroborate each other in naming names and pointing to crimes. My mother, I added, has always doubted that she did enough, but what she did proved to be enough: her list is famous in Piranesi, owing to its thoroughness, and its appearance brought out dozens more, a host of notetakers, each privately recording the terrors of their everyday.

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

26.

In Piranesi, I confer with Natalia about her journals. We discuss an organization in France that's aiding refugees from Chile, just as it aided the Jews in the war. She spoke with the director, she said. I didn't know him, which I found embarrassing, although my mother didn't appear to expect that I would. My focus is on Argentina and I only follow events in Chile on the news, but it's essentially the same.

The Americans are implicated in Chile through the CIA and the Chicago economists. It means Guillermo and Leo can't fly into Santiago anymore to see their cousins. It's all off limits.

"It's far away, so no one pays much attention," Natalia said. She's growing frail, but her memory is intact. She regrets that Paolo died in Santa Barbara and she couldn't attend his funeral, but they were never especially close, she and her brother. I was, of course, and Luca, too, but I think Guillermo took his death the hardest. We went to Santa Barbara for his funeral. When Paolo left San Rafael, he hoped to return “when they’re gone.” Alas, he didn’t live to see it.

My father is also frail—this man of action, as Natalia typifies him in her journal, conflating him with Matteo and Paolo. It's Luca who's still mobile. He seems to have a girlfriend in Rome, which perks him up like it did in Buenos Aires. This one is just a friend.

"Not an affair, just talk."

Part of me wants to put my causes aside and focus on the family.

They engage Natalia reflexively, and I should be too, given all these years of advocacy, but they overwhelm me or maybe I'm just worn out—they've worn me out, these devils and their endless minions.

27.

Luca says that Modena reminds him a bit of San Rafael. I'm glad to have his company. Leo also. Leo told me that Luca saved her life in Buenos Aires, filling in a few missing pieces in her upbringing. I can see that. Natalia would have been a better mother for Leo, but these things skip generations. Luca understood my daughter's inbetweenness. He also grasped her talent.

Luca describes his theory of sexuality as evidenced by our women.

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

"Mads may be the key to this," she said. "I often think about her.

She was attached to Mike, of course, but that would normally not have stopped me. A hunt has an emotional center, randomly sparked and in constant motion until it plays out. The desire to be taken is part of it. If the prey is rabid, though, hunting is too dangerous. I felt that way about Mads, a mania I saw around the edges. She was a fabulous actress, so Mike was oblivious, but I wasn't. Mike's film pins her death on her provincial upbringing, from which Buenos Aires was just a temporary reprieve. He thought she couldn't make the break her future required, but I think she knew herself too well."

Luca nodded. "It's harder among humans to spot the rabid. You saw it, but you wondered about others. It cast a pall on your life in that period, scholar by day and huntress by night. You might run into someone similar, but without the opportunity to observe her."

"I think it's the main danger at certain points in life," Leo said.

"So, you told me to hit the road, go to another place entirely, and pursue what the gods put me here to do besides hunting. You told me, 'It's obvious you're an architect. It's considered to be a man's profession, but your father taught you the basics on that score.'"

28.

In Rome, visiting Luca's professor friend. She came to his funeral and I caught up with her and introduced myself: "Professor?" She's recognizably Luca's type. She'd planned to head back, not inflict herself on the family, but I convinced her she was on safe ground and that I was glad finally to meet her. We broke through the reserve of two people who knew each other only indirectly.

She's 38, unmarried or, as she said, "married to my work." Leo was a source of wonder to her, she added—how she managed to find a place quickly, unlike herself "in these medieval institutions."

She shook her head as if to dispel the thought. "Luca told me I should go to California. He ruled out New York City based on Leo's depiction of it as 'a city of lions.' I think he saw California as more open to experiment, less caught up in tradition. We argued the point, as the American east coast can be iconoclastic, but some of the iconoclasts drift west, I understand. History argues for Rome, but it breeds corruption! Yet it's also beautiful. It's hard to imagine living somewhere else, but Luca felt I should free myself from it, live the life I actually want, then come back if it still attracts me. It's foolish, he said, to be sentimental about a city if it works against you." I nodded. It was why we left Paris, San Rafael, and Piranesi.

We realized later that it freed us. Guillermo is the least sentimental of men, carrying his territory along with him. My freedom came with a sense of guilt that Natalia's selflessness exacerbates. I haven't done enough. On the contrary, I'm on life's sidelines.

29.

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

A new decade, I reflected on the train. Leo turns 50, I turn 70. I miss Luca's political commentary, but Guillermo has stepped in. He thinks the world is in a big shift, quite different than it appeared to be when the war ended. "Not that we really noticed in Argentina."

This is why the whole region slipped into dictatorship. "It's like they had to experience it themselves to understand it."

My bond with my mother is unaffected by death. We saw each other much more when I started this project in earnest, and I think I cleared up most of my questions, at least about her life in the world.

Her personal world is there too, more straightforward than other matters on which she often wrote in haste or guardedly. Nora is remarkably present for one who often noted she was hidden. Of course, she was hidden—still is, really, despite a loosening of things.

Natalia was pragmatic about desire, helped in this by Alma, never shy about stating things plainly. She might also have seen how this made the marriages possible that both women valued. Luca would have put this more elegantly than I'm doing here, but I think he'd agree with my assertion of pragmatism. His sense of our family was predicated on it, "our genius." Guillermo has similar admiration for our bourgeois habits, how we turn all that we touch to profit, but he admits that this is a partial picture, that there's a streak of piety and also of affection and her sisters, tolerance and compassion.

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

30.

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

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

He smiled, almost to himself. "I've made provisions for this. No pension if it falls apart, but my years abroad have taught me the discreet art of squirreling it away. I have a second passport. The main issue is timing and of course placement: when and where?

These are the perennial questions, There's a side wager whether the apparatus will take notice or lose track—and will I live long enough to be noticed later? It's a version of the Trotsky problem. Not even Mexico is far enough away in these cases. Am I one?" He looked at us. "I spend my days like this. The conference isn't so interesting, but my mind is elsewhere anyway and it's usually racing. It's only here with you, among friends, that I'm able to allow it to pause."

31.

Desire drives the women our family in some sense, along with a feeling for timing in our relations with each other and with the wider world, the world as given and the bourgeois effort to work with it and within it, to make it work for us. We share the latter quality with our men, most of whom are less caught up in desire.

There's a dialectic to my descent from Giulia through Natalia—not just inoculating me against fear, but enabling me to see at firsthand how they dealt with desire in their respective ways, how they constructed lives that either moved on from it or built it in. The painting of Matteo and the fact of Paolo were as evident to me as the marks Nora left. Nora was an arrangement like Giulia with Matteo, outliving both their marriages. It left me determined to marry only for love, but Alma chalked it up to my nature. How does Paolo fit into this? Guillermo thinks that he intuited in short order the importance of the Mapuche as he and Maria personified them, and our mutual attraction. "Paolo is Fortuna's child," Alma told me when she visited, "like Leo." She saw Maria and Guillermo as proof of Paolo's luck, and my own.

This strange epoch. I wonder if I'll see the millennium? On paper, I've dodged every disaster. What I have to show for it is less obvious. Certainly, I've never lingered when life pressed at me.

Compared to Natalia, this looks like cowardice, but she denied it, relieved and relieved again that I was out of harm's way. My accomplishments reflect their moments, just as Natalia's story in my hands reflects her presence these last few years and these journals, which raise a sense of obligation in me that never arose in Paris, that capital city of willful inaction, the barricades notwithstanding. All I managed to do was to point to Natalia's example.

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

Part two: Jo

1.

"What does she mean by 'his type'? What was Luca's type?" I asked Leo. "He liked women whose minds played across their beings," she answered. "That sounds ambiguous, doesn't it? But I can see them, and he helped them see themselves. His attraction to them was as an animator. Laura was still attractive when I first encountered her in Montevideo, but she’d been a stunner. Everyone was surprised she married Luca, the one man who couldn't animate her in this sense, despite their children. Yet they had a remarkable bond. She found Luca funny, which he was. Her great affair was a disaster for him, but necessary for her, I gather, and he was the one man who saw this clearly. He said that the women just appeared, and he had a premonition of this, just as he and Laura seemed to recognize each other at the start. He felt that life had these counternarratives and he was helpless to resist them, but only the last one, his friendship with that professor who later helped your mother, proved lasting. Yet Franny was right that she was his type, but he found other ways to animate her. By then, he was fine with that. He felt affairs were impossible and envied the arrangements the women made, especially Giulia. She was his ideal, more so than his sisters. That tradition ended with them; we made our own arrangements, like him, but he thought we were better at it than he was, although it's clear that his poems owe everything to it."

She picked up one of Luca's little Greek heads. "He was good at seeing every side of things but crazed at times by heartache. Most of the men in the family, even the bisexual ones like Carlo, are more or less who they are, although Carlo made one big shift, a kind of retirement, I think. Luca was much harder to pin down. He was a consummate fixer, able to deal with situations that taxed others because they were drawn out, complicated. Life is like that, he'd say.

It's a different skill from Ko or Marco, as indispensable as they were to me at other points. It's not a clear line, though. Marco told me he pulled me into his enterprise on Luca's advice, but we had a rapport like mine with Ko and Ro. Like Maria with Paolo. You come from a long line of such types. How I got Carlo's strand I'm not sure.

Enough from the women, too, to live like a man."

2.

How well did you know Cosima? I asked, reading her letters.

"She left me a legacy," Leo said. "I met her when I studied in Buenos Aires. She helped me find work building stage sets—she knew everyone in opera and theater in the city. That was her one interest in life, their world. The translation of her Milan trilogy was popular—people identified with the epoque her books celebrate, but she was genuinely, deeply interested in performance and the culture it engendered. She was especially close to Luca, who organized the translations in Spanish and then in Portuguese, with editions by other publishers. I still get royalties from the television rights. And she loved my mother and grandmother for taking her seriously as a writer and turning her notebooks into publishable texts. Natalia was a wonderful editor, which she attributed to being a lawyer. She had an eye for the story and brought it out from under the welter of details Cosima habitually noticed, without losing their power."

Cosima's letters are to Franny. Her Montevideo journals are at her house–museum in Piranesi, but the letters are in the same vein, recounting episodes, especially with people she knew and observed.

The focus is partly on Buenos Aires, where she had an apartment for the season. Her sister Marta sometimes joined her, as did Leo and Franny when they were in Buenos Aires, according to Leo. In those periods, her letters are written like a critic surveying a scene that her readers have also experienced, remarking on its highlights.

She also wrote in this vein for one of the Montevideo papers, articles that Luca collected and published later.

"One thing that surprised me when I lived in Buenos Aires was how familiar she was with the film scene there. Of course, there was a lot of overlap, but she knew Mike and Mads. She asked me about Mads' death and even mentioned details about her family, 'gossip, probably,' that I hadn't heard. She and Luca were good at ferreting out the backstory of a given situation. They always had a theory."

Cosima and Marta were both striking as young women, their photos reveal. Leo still has her family album from San Rafael. Their splendor may have rubbed off on Luca, made his marriage to Laura explicable. This was Leo's feeling when we looked at the album.

3.

I share my work with Giulietta, my cousin and half-sister owing to the peculiarities of my parentage. Trent, my uncle who is also my biological father, is his father Gianni's filmmaking successor. Lina is focused on the family history, with particular reference to Natalia and Franny. Genia, Giulietta and Paolo's mother, is working on her own family's history, so they're actively comparing notes. Summers we spent on Modena always included staying at the farmstead where they have a country house. It belongs to Genia's family, who were once aristocracy in these parts.

Leo wonders what her foundation might do when she's no longer here to influence it. I wonder about my place in the world. Lina may be wondering the same thing, but I'm not sure. Of my parents, Lina is moody and self-critical, while Bren is buoyant and outgoing. Leo admires her devotion to mothers and babies. It is, as she puts it, a fucking miracle that Lina and Bren are a couple. I infer it's because Bren gets Lina and is okay with her neuroses, as Leo views them.

Gianni was "such a reliable man," she told me, and Bren is Lina's Gianni. "We treated Lina as one of us, growing up, so her childhood was unusual in some ways." Well, mine too.

Leo learned from her father to see the world as a shared territory marked by paradox. He was "the only realist," she says, but it was a pragmatic, ironic realism, amused by his luck, bemused by his fate.

4.

"He was in no sense a primitive," Leo said of her father. "The Mapuche were into horses, cattle, and farming; hunting was a pastime, not what they did, but their idea of land still reflected it. It was my grandmother, Maria, who brokered the deal between her people and the newcomers. Guillermo's father died resisting them.

An implied threat of violence is one tactic in negotiation, but my grandmother distrusted it, since it left her widow. She raised their son in this new culture, baptized Catholic and bilingual like her.

Guillermo was culturally ambidextrous; Paolo and Franny saw him as a different sort of outsider, an aristocrat they instructed in their bourgeois arts. When my father explained how he saw 'territory,' Luca said it was like his idea that we carry what we’ve accrued with us from place to place."

A pause while she glanced behind us at the Apennines. "Hunting with him took every form, sometimes on horseback, other times on foot, with others or paired or alone. He was really patient yet always prompting me to test myself against whatever arose. I was on a horse as soon as I could hang on. I knew the night sky and the sun's arc as they shifted, how the weather changed, especially in the Andes, when to shelter and when to tough it out, how to keep my head. He showed me how the patterns of life persist in different guises, often harder to grasp until things unfold and you finally see the situation for what it is. You have to be alert if you aren't sure, especially to whatever seems familiar but might not be."

5.

"Franny struggles to reconcile Peron with what followed," Lina told me. "Chile under Pinochet doubly cuts Guillermo off from his family, yet Franny is relieved to be securely back in Europe. She also notes Guillermo's immersion in that part of French life that reminds him of his own in Argentina as horse whisperer, as we say now, a reputation he trades on that leads to his third act as an ecologist in the World Wildlife Fund tradition. She finds the UN incapable of meaningful action. They outlast Argentina's dictatorship, and she lives to see Pinochet seen off, but Europe breaks the hold of their past. All she feels she accomplished was to encourage people to document the horrors they witnessed, like Natalia's list."

I get these running accounts of her forays into the journals. I also hear, less often, the questions she's posing to herself. I learned from her to do this myself, not that my answers satisfy me. Convent schools give us verities we come to doubt and yet return to. Leo is also their product. They encouraged her to clamber to plumb the mysteries of form, and perhaps taught her how to be a woman when she chose or needed to be, this huntress Franny brought them.

6.

"Why was it a fucking miracle that Lina met Bren?" I asked again.

Leo laughed, then turned serious. "The charts and readings lay out your nature, but you still have to figure out who's real among the facsimiles and poseurs. At the beginning, this matters less, but as your sense of what you're after sharpens, it can be a problem, because the truth is that only direct experience can tell you, at certain points, who another person really is. When you learn, it can be unhinging. This is true I think of anyone who figures, not just a prospective partner. There's an aspect of betrayal to it, even if it's inadvertent on the other's part—not directed at you, I mean."

We were at her parents' house, but Lina and Bren were out. "A kind of fluidity runs in our family, with exceptions. Franny was one.

Giulia would have happily spent her lifetime with Matteo if he'd been available, but she illustrates what was also true for me, a need for a suitable father. Gianni was that man for me. He understood me like Bren understands Lina. Fit and reliability enable you to take your joined-together life in stride, bumps and all. Or else there's an indelible bond, like Luca's with Laura, pulled by their diverging desires, yet allowing time to sort it out."

She glanced at a photo of her parents from their days in France. "I think luck runs in our family," she said. "We have our moments of doubt, but then we recover or are helped to recover. Luca helped me, and his professor friend helped Lina. She knew the world Lina struggled with, its particular human perils, predatory mentors and unreliable if not actively sociopathic colleagues. Luca's friend pried her out of Milan and off to Berkeley. The fucking miracle was her meeting her complement, reliability herself. Bren was my goddess's gift to us, wanting babies. One of life's conundrums is to find this other amid raw desire, intuition, reason, fate, destiny, our collisions with others' galaxies. Fecundity is there too. It's quite spectacular."

7.

Trent has always been in our lives. My parents named him as our father early on, and every time we visited, it was a little clearer how we both took after him. Genia is a writer and film critic—she wrote about the two filmmakers, Gianni and Trent, and Leo pulled her into their orbit, "her orbit, really." It was Genia's idea for Trent to be our father, once it was clear that Bren would do the birthing. I learned the details from her. When I came for Giulietta's wedding, I stayed with them and Genia and I took the opportunity to talk.

Why Trent as donor, I asked? "Lina is so attached to her family that I felt she'd suffer if there was no actual connection. Bren was amenable. They were visiting and wanted kids, so I suggested it."

Why does Trent resist a DNA test? (I'd discussed getting one with Giulietta.) "Leo always says she wasn't sure. I've looked at photos of Louis Kahn and there's a resemblance, but he also looks like Leo's father. So, I think it's out of deference to her. There's also the film Nathaniel Kahn made. He and Trent have met—Trent loves the film—but he came away with the sense that there were already many claims on Kahn as a father, and one more would be an intrusion. Leo felt this, too. And Trent loved Gianni, of course; they shared a lot of instincts about filmmaking, among other things, two natural collaborators. Leo's relationship with her father was similar, 'an affinity, not an influence' is how she puts it. I think she saw Kahn similarly. Even if Trent isn't his son, Leo absorbed something from him and then made it her own. She took him to bed on a whim—he was the one modern architect she respected completely."

8.

I went with Trent and Genia to their country house. The Piranesi have two connections to her family, Genia told me. "Ercole, the one who made us bourgeois and agrarian, bought bulls from the Piranesi. After we lost our estates, Ercole approached his former tenants and they bought them back together, making each farmstead part of a cooperative that the family managed on their joint behalf. Your family invested in that. The other connection is your grandmother's cousin Caterina, who married Cesare. Do you remember Federico from your summers here?" I did. Five years older than me, so closer to Giulietta when we were younger. "He's taken over his father's role as the go-between, serving customers among the top restaurants and the best food halls across the region.

His father is the grandson of Caterina and Cesare. Cesare spent time in Piranesi and got to know two grandees connected with your family, a father and a son. They arranged the marriage. One curious thing is that Caterina's surname is the same as her mother's. I asked Leo, who she said that maybe, finally having a girl, it seemed fair."

I think back to Genia's comment about Leo pulling her into her orbit. We're a family of arrangers, ready to make something happen if it looks promising. Is it a model for the foundation? Whoever runs it needs a sixth sense. Why on earth then did Leo choose us?

"A small world," Trent said in the car as drove here, apropos of something. It sometimes feels a bit incestuous, "like having a sibling for a father," as Bren once put it, but Trent in person dispels this.

9.

"I was immediately attracted to him. I think that's what she saw."

This from Genia, elaborating on her "in Leo's orbit." Spending time with him, I find that Trent is at his best in the context of a task or a project—warm, forthcoming and conversational. Not that he isn't a good father—his daughters adore him, clearly—but it's harder to raise things with him if they're approached directly. They come out as passing remarks, as if they just occurred to him.

There are parallels between our families, Genia said, if you take Ercole as a hinge, shifting a 10-century-old ducal family into his idea of the landed bourgeoisie. The Piranesi did this by a different route.

Federico appeared at the party this evening. Paola texted me from Berkeley that he might come. She and Giulietta call him Freddy, but I remembered him as Federico—a serious person, even then.

10.

"While we were seizing Ferrara, you ran the Spanish caliphate," Genia said. "In Kyoto, women were inventing the novel, bedding whoever caught their fancy, and watching as the men jockeyed for power by marrying off their sisters." Don't overlook the Etruscans and the Mapuche, I added. She nodded. "When we look back, our different strands come forward. Lina tells me that being here has put her academic life in perspective. She misses parts of it, especially her students, but she thinks her field is the wrong one for her at this point. I'm not an academic. My articles and books reflect some fairly deep interests, but I tire of them. Yet as time passes, I'm starting to see how they relate to each other. Lina says she's writing her family's history to clear her head. I think mine has a similar impulse. You have to approach things obliquely sometimes, write a narrative that has nothing to do with them so your thoughts can marinate a little."

She added more hot milk to her bowl. "Lina has a characteristic of your family, which is to move quickly if the situation demands it.

There's something visceral about its history. We made dynastic marriages, but the Piranesi women maneuvered by intuition. They burnt their fingers sometimes, I gather, honing the art of this."

She laughed when I noted that some of them married aristocrats.

"The famous Cosima, who had no children, and fled for Uruguay.

And Caterina, who did and didn't. When I suggested that Trent be your father, I wanted somehow for you to get a bit of me, to be part of my family in the same way I'm part of yours. It's mad, I know, and ironically, it's possible now to have three parents, thanks to genetic engineering." I took this in. Whose orbit am I in, exactly?

11.

"Leo's approach to design always implies an unknowable future somehow to be contained, given identity, an organizing principle that will be self-evident to those who follow." Genia sums up after I shared my fears about the foundation. She feels it should be set up like the rest of Leo's work, as open-endedly as possible.

I asked her about Lina. "’Sprang like Athena from God knows where,' Leo told me. She and Gianni were affectionate parents, but neither of them knew what to do with her. She's brilliant, yes, but at what? Franny helped Lina with that, as did Luca's professor friend, but 'at what?' is an episodic question for her." I can relate.

Did she know Caterina? (I'm reading her letters to Luca.) "The generation of my grandparents. Cesare and his son Francesco organized harvest dinners at the family's farmsteads. She died when I was in 23. She lived in Ferrara, where her novels are set, but her memoir describes the Piranesi of her childhood and a visit she made to Uriguay before the war to see her exiled family. She saw Cosima in Montevideo and again later, but Giorgio Bassani was her champion." Lina is reading Bassani's Novel of Ferrara.

12.

"They're really different, Genia told me. "Trent is a filmmaker like his father, unwavering in that ambition. Lina is more ambivalent."

After dinner, she put her book down and turned to me. "Leo is like Saturn, its rings drawing the eye. Lina is like Venus, a cloudy planet, but she's also like Jupiter with all its moons. Perhaps she wonders how to put her two planets in dialogue?"

At night, to the sounds of a summer farmstead, this conversation replays in my head. Who is this Jo? Is this even the right question?

Leo always considers the outer world, wondering what to do with it. Genia is another model, not an academic but a journalist and critic respected in the cultural circles she inhabits. I assumed, growing up, that Lina had a community like Bren did, but talking with her now, it's clear that students were her main concern. They move through, although a few become friends. Her "community" is the atomized one of specialists, and she's steadily lost interest in it.

She told me that she and Bren want to rescale their lives. That's an interesting thought. Leo and I also talk a lot about scale, which she sees as the great conundrum, "the edge conditions past which we find mass society with its anonymity and shallowness. And yet everyone has individuality and depth, in reality. How to serve it?”

13.

"Hello! Here I am, living your foggy life." Paola texts with a photo from the window of my room. It's morning there, early evening here.

"I heard you met Freddy," she added. He must have told her, confirming my impression that I made one. I try not to put too much store in this. Not unhappy, though, to see it confirmed. "I did," I text back. "Off to studio," she replies.

Genia says that Bren and Lina will join us tomorrow. Leo may come, too, but it's not decided. Brent will fetch them. He's been going back and forth, so his old Land Rover is here and he's teaching me how to drive it. (It would be ideal for Inverness.)

Paola's photo leads to a wave of nostalgia. The pandemic meant I was home three semesters out of eight, cutting into the distance I'd sought. Did I really want it? I was the one who demanded Lina come, but it was really Bren's idea, luring her. Like Franny and Guillermo, they're very much a pair. I said as much to Genia, but she countered that once back together, they quickly staked out their separate domains. She's pretty observant.

Giulietta texts me, asking when I'll be back in Modena. I've been so caught up in this place, my conversations and self-questioning, that I've let things drift a bit. She says that Trent stopped by and they talked about the film part of the foundation. She wants to update me. Maybe they should come up? She'll talk with her mom.

Putting my phone down, I remind myself that I'm codirecting this thing, that Leo chose us to help give it shape. She's not immortal. It would be easy to fritter the time away and disappoint her. Trent told me that she always hands off to others, so the trick is to understand her intent. His part of it is clearer. If Paola wasn't away, I wonder if Leo would have picked her instead, an architect like herself? But in our conversations, she emphasizes the social or human aspect that drove her work, despite her reputation as a form maker. "Yes, forms, but what people can do with them is my main interest."

Federico seems to appreciate that I call him Federico, as always.

14.

I'm awake and it's three a.m. My head's full of anecdotes—family histories mixed with the incidental stories I heard about work, love, marriage, walking home or taking the train or going to a concert.

Incidental is to say that they range from hope to hopelessness and often back again—the friend who went away for a week and came back to an empty house, the boyfriend or husband proving to be sociopathic, the realization that he’s a dud, or that the marriage she hoped to break up wasn't breaking. In the golden age of the Piranesi, someone watched out for us, but it was a cultivating sort of watched that attended to our desire. It suited them, their journals say, and they managed to get past it and on with their real work.

This Federico, here by chance or having a look? Because a look was what he was having, however much this pleased me. I could text Paola to ask if she set it up, but no—to the texting, that is, not the thought that she set it up. If she did, it epitomizes the Piranesi motive: reading the mind of the other, intuiting her hunger.

Leo, where does she fit in this? Her choice of me and Giulietta has a basis in our interests and abilities, but is there something else?

And where is my arranger? How did a tradition so obviously useful die out? Also, there's the small matter of my actual hunger, actual desire, against the background of my paradoxically conventional upbringing, in which not a word was ever said about it, yet I was dropped into a convent school in a city with a homophobic prelate.

Don't mention the parents! Yet just enough Mapuche to be vaguely indigenous, unsure what box to check on those forms, because I'm as bourgeois as they come, in reality, despite my aristocratic halfsisters with whom I share a Piranesi father. Jesus! I say this aloud, invoking our patron, our guardian against hubris, our unconditional wingman, spade in hand. He sees me through my little hours, my few minutes, of doubt and despair, reminding me that I'm Etruscan somehow and Mapuche, more specifically, at home in the world despite my attachment to Inverness and the sea.

15.

An update from Paola: "He's smitten. I have it in text." I take this in. Lina's making dinner, in her element. Bren is talking with Leo about the clinic. Genia and Trent are talking with Federico, as I persist in calling him, who's here again. Giulietta grabs me. "I'm pregnant!" she says. "Only Vanni knows." He's helping Lina—a man who loves to cook, which is lucky for her. I take this in. My life is unfolding in tiny cataclysms.

Earlier in the day, talking with Bren, I told her how I invoke Jesus sometimes and identify him with our family. "I was raised Anglican.

I love the old service, but the Madeleine's priests are believers; that wasn't always true of the Anglicans. You Piranesi are attuned to Jesus as a reminder to rein it in, but He also protects you against randomness. I agree. Medicine frames life scientifically, but our stories all end with our extinction. I tell my patients, 'You might die. Your baby could die or be incapacitated.' I pick my moment to say this. I could quote the odds, but I don't. We're all gamblers in some sense and Jesus is there with us at the table. I'm there too, of course, because God helps those who help themselves."

16.

At last night's raucous dinner, Giulietta revealed her pregnancy as Vanni beamed. Bren gave me a look that I think referred to our conversation. This morning, Federico and I talked. He opened with variations on "Who has this Jo become?" This appealed to me, and I returned the favor, wanting to know how he sees himself now.

"A négociant is what the French call it, in constant conversation with the market and the producers, in my case the wholesalers and chefs across the region, and the cooperatives on our farmsteads. It a bit like being a gardener, advising them, but my talents are market savvy and sensory assessment. What they produce is pricey, so does it live up to the expectations that come with that? I can also describe those qualities convincingly to the buyers. I have a feeling for both sides of it, acquired by accompanying my father, growing up."

I'd made him a cortado and he took a sip of it. "My father sent me to business school to test my interest in the role. What I got from it was a clearer idea of the border of mass and bespoke. It's not hard and fast, but you see where credibility is stretched. Mass sometimes wants to be taken for bespoke, and bespoke always looks enviously at scale, wondering how far it can go without looking foolish."

Another sip. "We carved out this niche when there were landed estates and someone had to handle the trade. It wasn't a road to glory except when the accounts were read out, when banquets were held, and whenever the family needed to display its largesse."

One last sip. "It seems prosaic, no? I find it interesting, though, a dialogue that's been going on for eons, interrupted by the stupidities of power but finding ways through and around. There's always a desire for it, like other things that mix pleasure with necessity."

17.

"But he is a gardener," Lina said as I recounted our conversation.

She cited a Taoist parable: a Confucian mandarin points out to a farmer the folly of his slow approach to watering his plants, since machines exist to water thousands of them in short order. "Then I'd be a machine," the farmer answers. I have to repeat this to Federico, I think. Then Leo spoke up: "He's tied to the land." Giulietta added, "He lives in two worlds, He couldn't do his job if he didn't know them both intimately. And he trades on our family just like you do, mom." Genia laughed. "I write under my family name, so it must be true. I'm not sure 'trades' is right, but yes, we do."

I like this image of Federico, bridging between the farmsteads and the metropolis. He left earlier, but will return. I note suddenly that no one, not even Giulietta, has called him Freddy after I called him Federico. He's acquired some gravity. Not too much, though, hopefully. I like a little buoyancy, especially in bed.

18.

"I dreamt of your father last night," I told Leo. "I dream of him too," she said. In my dream, he was wearing the tailored suit he wore in the photo with Franny at Deauville. Trailing after him, sometimes forming a background and other times a cloud, was what I realized on waking was the territory he brought along. We sat on the terrace of their house in the rattan armchairs that are still there, and the cloud evaporated. He pointed at the view. "I like to pause here and then go back into the hills to talk with the wolves, the boars, and the deer. Some are hesitant to put roots down here, but I understood why to do so when I laid eyes on this," meaning the view, to which he pointed again. "It was the end of my journey, there was no point turning back. I planted trees here to shade my descendants. A few of them may come as far as I did in order to feel properly at home."

Then I woke up. In the half-light, I felt he was still present, although we were distant from that terrace. Brings it with him, I thought. It might be the view out to the bay or the next ridge.

Would I miss them? Yes, I would, but Federico could make it worthwhile, even inevitable, I thought. 'Recent graduate lapses into fantasy,' I said aloud, but it was true, the thought was there and it seemed likely Guillermo knew it.

19.

My siblings are on my mind. We're a cohort, but what, exactly? I asked Leo, since we're all her grandchildren, and she pointed to the unusual way we're tied together, a symbol she thought of how life has evolved to address the demands that télos makes on it. She reminded me that she's an only child, unusual in both families. This may account, she said, for her close relationship with her father growing up and her independent nature.

I think of Ben, my amiable brother, very much Bren's son, drawn by medicine at a young age and just going with it, the way Trent was drawn by film and seems very much Gianni's son, although maybe not. Such ambiguity floats through the family. Perhaps what floats through is a tolerance for it in its various forms, inner- and outer-directed. Leo ventured a theory "in Luca's memory" that the Piranesi unconsciously seek safety without really knowing what it means, even as they doubt it's possible. It can take such forms, she added, as assuming another identity, if this is possible, or wearing its clothing, if it isn't; and appropriating the bloodlines of any and all available primordial cultures."

Paola texts: "OMG, I'm dreaming in forms like grandma!" LOL, I reply, but it's also possible that her father's lineage skipped a generation. Our father's, I should say. My parents don't fit the tropes, but I give Lina the edge as the dad. Bren was put on the planet to be her helpmate, her among many others. Lina is a bit selfabsorbed, there's no way around that, while Bren is out to save her small part of the world, including us, thank goodness. I feel closer to her because when she's with me, she's there. That this is bedside manner doesn't make it untrue. To Genia's point, it's who she is.

20.

I've been staying at Federico's primitive hut. We're an item. The path to this included a road trip to see the cities where he plies the cooperatives' goods. Each city has its own network of suppliers, and there's a farmstead or several to cater to its needs. Federico has an encyclopedic grasp of these long-established relationships, "sunk knowledge," he calls it, that would be lost if he left the business, for it is a business, and not a particularly easy one, despite its longevity.

His hut is a stone cottage on a farmstead in the vicinity of Ferrara, the family seat and the eastern end of its territory. They have properties across the region and he has the use of various apartments wherever he does the family's business. Our knowledge of each other thus far has been gained in such places, a timely break from the collective Piranesi. He's in Ferrara now and I'm here in the country writing this.

Federico is the same wherever he is, in my observation, and aware that the ideals he values come with contradictions. He speaks admirably about Leo's efforts to give scale to the bespoke. “A lot is broken in agriculture,” he says. “The EU isn't helping. It should be possible to find a middle ground, but a lot weighs against it. Yet it's as crucial to resilience as the rest. Whenever you look into mass in an agrarian sense, it doesn't add up. It's either logistics or chemistry, and the cost is too high, environmentally. It's also bad for people.”

Regions are the largest possible area when it comes to scaling "sound agrarian practices," as he puts it. I mention home, as I still think about it, despite the intervention of college and Modena, and then blurt out that we should go there together, then wonder if he'll find this be off-putting. He picks up on this. "I'm not irreplaceable here," he says. "My work is an extension of my childhood, and I feel uneasy about abandoning it, but your region is another agrarian one like this that could be scaled in the manner I envision. Looking ahead, I could imagine our making a business of such a process, once we prove it. I'm not sure I want to be a negociant my entire life. It may be why my father insisted I get this schooling!"

I love this reply. I met his parents in Ferrara. It went well.

21.

While Federico acknowledges his family is bourgeois by choice, he's focused on limits and the tendency to ignore them that capitalism's cyclical self-destruction reflects. Bourgeois democracy is better equipped to deal with this, he thinks, being freer of ideology. China is grappling now with this tendency. He believes it will go badly.

"Entrepreneurial better describes us than bourgeois," he says.

Pushed by circumstances to diversify from locally bespoke to larger markets, we reached an apogee with Leo. Her tendency to let others run with her innovations after piloting them, using licensing and regional partnerships, has agrarian possibilities, he believes. It's hard to ignore the longevity of his family's relationships with its farmsteads, so it might be better to find roughly comparable entities to cooperate with on a wider basis. "Leo's model," I say. He nods.

I agree that "entrepreneurial" better describes the Piranesi, who "could make money from anything," as Leo said, quoting her father.

He, anyway, was proudly bourgeois as a kind of embellishment of his native aristocracy. Not unlike Federico's ancestor Ercole, who made lemonade so successfully with the lemons handed his family.

22.

In a passage in her journal that I just read, Natalia writes,

This dreadful period we've lived through and are now coming to understand in specific terms is captured for me by the camps as the mechanical aspect of state murder ratcheted up in efficiency to the factories of "scientific management," and the murder of some 600 civilians—men, women, and children—in Oradure-sur-Glane, burned alive in the barns and a church to which they were herded, an act of depravity and blasphemy by "hardened Nazis," as they're called now in postwar accounts. Fascism oscillates between these poles. That we had smaller versions of its oscillation doesn't let us off the hook for the crimes our fascists committed, yet it takes my breath away, the industrial scale and the wanton folly.

Now we watch as certain people try to exonerate themselves.

That they do so is understandable, but I lament the tendency to permit it on the grounds of expediency or a sense of "where will it stop" if a reckoning is made seriously. Italy is worse than Germany in this respect, but even in Germany, the prevailing bias is to let it go, imagine that the worst offenders were dealt with in the trials or will be hunted down, leaving others to be rehabilitated or, if not, to write their self-serving memoirs in a bid for sympathy.

It's an illusion to think fascism has been stamped out. It has a hundred disguises, but its central theme will continue. As the horrors of the last two decades are forgotten, they too will recur.

I had to google this village. Jesus. Lina compared the war in Syria to the Spanish civil war, saying it was a warmup for something worse.

Is the Ukraine that something? It seems equally wanton.

Franny often commented on politics. Looking back at Peron from Paris, she saw how populism led to fascism in its military form, a feature not just of Latin America, she noted. Her Russian friend predicted his country's immediate future, but also Putin's petrofascism. Who designs their uniforms? Giulietta asked, putting down her phone. "Now that's a Milanese question!" Leo said. "They do look like duck hunters."

I'm back in Modena. In Ferrara, Federico proposed marriage.

23.

We laid our cards on the table. He went first. "It's hard to leave."

I nod. "And impossible to give you up," he added. Is this a marriage proposal? I asked him. He looked at me. "It is. If it means living in California, then I'll do it." I answered, "I've given it a lot of thought.

When the pandemic lifted, I came here immediately, I notice. I want to make a life here, not somewhere else, and I want to make it with you, Federico, so yes, I accept. Absolutely."

Paola wrote me that she misses her boyfriend and Modena. She finds her architecture studies both disconnected from and overly connected to reality as she understands it, but this, she adds, may reflect this odd region, which is recovering from Tech and the pandemic. Everyone seems in shock. She'd like to come home.

I feel a bit like Franny must have felt in San Rafael, so distant from Piranesi, deciding to cast her fate with Guillermo. Federico is not so landless, but I identify with her youth and appreciate her confidence. Nearly a century ago, that decision, and now three generations of her descendants are gathered here.

My parents were "supportive but wary" in Left Coast fashion, worrying that a summer fling was being cemented prematurely. But Federico called on them, asking for their blessing, which they gave, his sincerity being manifest. He's central casting. These negociants don't lack for charm.

They say that Franny knew at once she would marry Guillermo.

Can it be true? I think she looked back and saw a trail. Leo told me to come, I reflect. Little with her is accidental, I've come to realize.

Trent and Genia are on board. "You'll even have a title," she said.

24.

"Who is this Jo?" I take inventory of my foremothers. Lina is the only scholar, although Leo says her mother was a serious student.

My experiences to date with higher education remind me of Leo's account, gravitating toward what appealed and evading the rest. I lacked the singlemindedness of Ben's long march toward medicine.

Could I support myself? It seems doubtful, although stories abound of equally feckless ones finding footholds in strategy and such. Even the scholars are competing for those jobs now, as academic posts are fewer and pay worse now, Lina says. She backed the grad student strike and disdains the bloated, overpaid cadre of administrators. Things certainly ground to halt when they struck.

Am I sidestepping this dilemma? Doubly sidestepping it, as the family took me on and now Federico's taking me on. I don't dream of forms, like Paola and Leo. I have a good mind, if I say so myself, but my efforts on behalf of Leo's foundation are questionable and I keep waiting for her to express exasperation, but she doesn't. I'm no Ko, however. She'd have it up and running. What am I resisting?

Why is Federico's project so appealing?

Tangibility, for one—the same resonant sense of "land" that I felt in Inverness. Purpose, too—seeing how much it matters to Federico and sharing his conviction. But both are present too in Leo's work and Gianni's. Leo told me that while she gave her archive to the polytechnic, she doesn't trust it to handle a bequest wisely. It's like Lina's reservations about the university. Could there be a school?

Genia and Lina could run it. They're at a similar point, wanting to shift things so they do more of what they genuinely want to do, in a setting that's small enough to almost run itself. Is it a school? That's probably the wrong word, although certainly Lina loves to teach.

An institute, a seminar, a lab, a studio—something that combines study with making, that invites conversations and builds on them.

What Federico has in mind needs this sort of apparatus. Finding a place for it here is one piece of this thing I'd like to construct. It's a Leo sort of thought, this, my own version of dreaming in forms.

25.

"Maybe just call it a foundation," Genia said. She's here talking with Lina and, finding her on a terrace, I told her my idea.

"Foundation doesn't suggest expectations or point to fields or professions. It's open to all sorts of things that aren't typically found together but in the right hands might cohere. That sounds right for the Piranesi."

Can it survive without Leo animating it? "She told me once that she's a big fan of lateral thinking because its creator, de Bono, saw that the path to a good idea goes through a lot of obvious or stupid ones, so, let things emerge through dialogue. I imagine she wants it to have a form that's open-ended about exactly what it does."

The famous ambiguity of the Piranesi, recast as a virtue. But likely it always was a virtue, "flexibility" in light of events, and principles like honest dealing, personal pacts with the gods, no to hubris but yes to ambition and desire, a scrim and exit strategy handy, ironic distancing, a layer of calm. This sums us up, I think, and now I'm marrying into Genia's family like she married into ours, another dip into another gene pool, more rooting, possible added safety.

Modena Foundation sounds plausible, although Ferrara, scene of our ongoing debauchery, is growing on me. Eros attaches to such places, as one of Cavafy's nights-in-Alexandria poems makes clear.

26.

Have you ever seen wolves in the mountains? "Yes," Leo said, "and that's an odd story. My father often hiked up to one or another of the huts we made together. He would leave early and return before dark, but one evening, he failed to return. My mother telephoned, and I drove up to their house and, without giving it much thought, set out with a headlamp and the one clue he left behind: a note on the table that said "No. 2." The huts were numbered, and I guessed that this was his destination. The note itself was unusual. He came and went, completely at home in the mountains."

She shifted in her chair. "I knew the path quite well because we'd traversed them a lot while the huts were being built and I went with him sometimes. There was a moon, so I didn't need the headlamp.

The second hut marks an edge, my father told me, beyond which the real nature of the mountains started. Like all edges, it was porous. I also remembered him telling me that wolves are like cougars and jaguars in that it’s possible to befriend them. The second hut lay at the upper end of a meadow. I saw that a man, likely my father, was seated, propped against the wall, his arm draped over a big dog, on first glance. Alerted by my footfalls, it rose, larger than I thought, and gave a low growl. I stopped, and opened my jacket to let the wind carry my scent. It sniffed the air, raised its head, and howled, and this was picked up by other wolves apparently in the vicinity. I'd come closer, but it turned to my father and licked his face. Then it retreated uphill into its own territory. My father was dead, I saw, but peacefully so. There was an emergency phone in the hut, one of those old wind-up ones connected to foresters lower down. I told them my father had died while hiking, probably a heart attack, and we were at the second hut. Bring a stretcher. They sent a helicopter.

Times had changed and medics were called in as a bureaucratic precaution, even if it was medically useless."

Another shift in her chair. "I sometimes wonder if I dreamt it. I never told my mother about the wolves, as it would have frightened her. My father wouldn't have mentioned them, either, She put up with our adventures when I was young, but she avoided the Andes.

A city girl at heart, her interest in nature ended at their fence line."

27.

At dinner, Lina mentioned Bassani's Novel of Ferrara. She said it reminded her of Natalia's journals, tracing how fascism made its way to Piranesi. Federico said he'd read him. The repercussions of the Jews' removal from Ferrara are still felt there, he added. The city's bourgeoisie deserted them, despite their long presence, only abandoning the fascists when its own interests were threatened.

Lina described her book's thesis that hostility to the Jews split the bourgeoisie after WW I. This led to a discussion of modernism.

Leo cited Ivan Illich's critique of the Enlightenment for defining and applying universals, and its overconfidence in science and technology. She noted that modernism had two traditions: the locally aware, humanist one of the arts-and-crafts movement; and the hubristic and exploitative one of industrialization. Traces of both still unfold concurrently, often by the same architects, oblivious to the contradictions in their work. Yet some can look critically at it and preserve the local without losing sight of the question of scale.

This applies to agriculture too, Federico said. The terrible effects of imposing universals onto locals are only too clear, yet the sheer demand for food makes it harder to resist its continuing imposition.

Healthcare too, Bren added. "It's a constant battle to keep track of the individual patients as human beings rather than bodies with conditions, to know them in a more personal sense, so you can talk them through the arc of pregnancy and birth meaningfully." (I noted to myself that this remark had more resonance with me suddenly.)

Leo felt that this dilemma is built into life, how the local vies with larger forces even to be heard, let alone preserve its prerogatives. If the Piranesi have any claim to evolutionary success, it's how they've managed to find fertile middle ground between the cosmos in its many forms and the local that's its immediate base and opportunity.

"We also benefited from the older cultures we married into." Lina said that this was characteristic of the Sephardim, assimilating by intermarriage and constantly extending its idea of family. It worked for some but not for others, but our inherent wariness led us to have a Plan B. Every port hop probably reflected one.

28.

At dinner, Lina raises her objections to Slow Food. Citing Laurent Berland, she argues that junk food has its place. Federico listens calmly. Leo notes the precarious situations that many live in, while supporting his desire to give scale to sounder agriculture.

"Tobacco is an example of how junk food might evolve, left to market forces," he says. "Stung by its association with ill health, the industry is trying to vape or warm its way to a post-smoke product line that holds on to the smoker image and of course the nicotine.

But junk food was there earlier, adding vitamins and non-cancerous dyes, touting each and every innovation as healthier. I don't think an arc like this gets us anywhere. It would be better if we touched the mass market more frequently, the way the wine industry manages to do, steadily improving things at both ends in order to educate taste and create a demand for sounder practices in the vineyards. I know, apropos of Leo's comment, that this doesn't solve the precariat's issue of falling below what such producers can economically deliver.

This is like housing. You have to subsidize supply or demand. Right now, there's no appetite for subsidies beyond the subsistence level."

Lina objects that for some people, nutrition may not matter. "Yes, and convenience is also a factor. Inadequate housing and lack of time work against cooking your own meals, but this is also a lifestyle choice," he replies. Yet there are ways around this, like cohousing and communal gardens. In wartime, there's more interest in these solutions, then the market reasserts itself. But they exist. They work.

It comes back to education, demonstrating again what's possible."

Leo notes how she used this strategy to show people how to live in new ways, using products that better met their needs. She feels that the case for farm to table, conveyed in human terms, hasn’t been made effectively, but “your coops have a head start on that.

"What brought me back to this," Federico says, "is the example of my father and our branch of our family, tied to the land and proud of what comes from it. I think this is true of many family enterprises, a sense of purpose that's genuine, seeing profit as the means to reinvest, weather reversals, hand them on to the next."

Leo beams at him approvingly. I sense that Lina is torn between her not inconsiderable family feelings and her theoretical apparatus.

29.

The next morning, Lina sought us out. "Why am I resisting the points you're making?" she asked rhetorically. "It goes back to Berkeley, the way Slow Food manifests there and junk foods are condemned. In principle, I agree, but the assumption is always that nothing can be questioned. Of course, there are questions, and I've raised some, as if I were back there, my skepticism prompted. But in fact what you're proposing is an enterprise like others that our family took on, cleaving to fair dealing, trust, shared values, and longstanding relationships as a way to sustain ourselves."

We were out on the terrace, and she paused to take in the view. "I support what you propose. Let me be clear about that. It takes time for my head to clear, to remember that an idea can have value, even if some of its advocates try to make a religion of it. I don't hear you proselytizing. If Leo was with you totally last night, it's because it's exactly what she did across her career. People think of her as a formgiver, but scaling what doesn't seem very scalable is her specialty."

I set my notebook down and spoke. "Something else runs through all of this. A calling is the word I'm after, leading to art, poetry, lovemaking, memoirs of Milan, and creches and clinics that support women and children. If some of it seems frivolous, it’s the yeast from which life rises." I mostly take the notes but find my voice on occasion. "It's our religion, our orthodoxy," I added. "Also, not to change the subject, I intend to marry Federico this Labor Day weekend." The yeast waits for no man, I thought but didn't say.

30.

Thanks to Genia's interventions, we found ourselves in a tavern as old as the church where we wed not long before. I had proposed a civil ceremony, but his parents might be put off, Genia said, and things were unorthodox enough. The tavern is along what seems almost like a country road, but is part of Ferrara proper, left as a remnant of a grand plan for the city of one Federico's ancestors. The food is medieval, he told me, a culinary history kept alive by the owner. It made for a memorable meal within this long, dark space, out of the midafternoon’s late summer heat.

Genia rose and made a short speech directed at her cousins, his parents, noting that Ben and I were "practically siblings" of their Giulietta and Paola, and that Federico first met his bride at the farmstead tended so well by Giorgio, his father, in his role as its négociant. Across this summer, she added, she had come to know us both, this couple, Jo and Federico, who found each other again and will make common cause in the service of our agrarian family, like Jo's ancestors did for our Ercole, many years ago.

Then Giorgio rose and replied in kind. Taking the hands of Elisabeth, his wife, and Lucrezia, his daughter, now my sister-inlaw, he welcomed us to their family, our family; welcomed Ben and Paola, who had flown in from Berkeley for the occasion; welcomed my parents and Leo, noting "their many good works" in Modena; and then said finally how happy they all were on this marvelous day.

The rest is a blur, but we ended up at the Ferrara house and then made our way to the primitive hut, the scene of our past revels.

31.

"Are you okay?" he asked after I threw up one morning. I could see him running through what I ate, sources of contagion, but there were none, I assured him. "I'm pretty sure I'm pregnant." He turned pale and then flushed, a sequence that pleased me immensely.

In The White Goddess, Robert Graves mentions in passing that Roman babies born in May were mostly the result of Saturnalia, a kind of mid-summer lid-lifting also popular in the sun-starved north, and so it was that we, two besotted celebrants, are blessed with this possibility, quite fitting for an agrarian-minded couple. The yeast and I must have a secret code, because I knew—and didn't care.

This was confirmed, given the family's OB/GYN close at hand.

The news was relayed hither and yon. Genia was ecstatic. "I never understood why everyone delays. Get on with it is my view."

I was worried that Leo would feel Giulietta and I were letting her down, overlapping our pregnancies like this, but she shared Genia's enthusiasm. We were alone when I told her and, quite remarkably, she said that she felt all along that I was intended to be here and that Federico was part of that intention. "Perhaps too you were the lure we needed to draw Lina here, to free her from that life so she could join Bren and make another. No coincidence that you found those boxes, and maybe that Franny left them there for you to find."

Part three: Lina

1.

When Giulietta and Vanni married, I found myself speculating. It seemed premature—Jo is young, I told myself. More likely that Ben will marry first. Still, I pictured Trent giving Jo away. I thought at the time that Genia would likely resist this, even if it his being her father was her idea. And then Jo married into her family! Yet she wanted the opposite of Giulietta's extravaganza, which was what Genia hastily arranged—the minimum that decorum allowed, which meant that church, priest, and celebratory feast were modest. But Jo is like this, her beauty so incidental to her that it's a shock on those occasions when it's brought out. Leo gave her one of Franny's Parisian dresses to wear. It fit her without alteration and she looked stunning. I have no idea if Federico's father wrote down his remarks beforehand, but the emotion he conveyed said he was won over.

I felt like a fifth wheel in some sense, despite also feeling love and pride for this creature we raised together, a surfer girl and coastal hippie whose agrarian streak we failed to notice. This was biology talking, though, and I shook it off. Fortuna, I reminded myself—it's not a good idea to resist what she proffers. And now she's topped it!

Bren was and is ecstatic. Her baby. I get it. And I see her in Jo, a beauty also worn lightly, but yep, I fell for it. Federico's a human after my own heart. Ben and Paola meanwhile have gone back. Do I miss it? One terrace is as good as another, but where's my convent school and the fall semester's innocents? And what besides a history am I composing? These questions lack answers.

2.

On a whim, I visit Piranesi after a long absence. I stay at a small hotel not far from Cosima's house, where I stop in later to introduce myself. First, though, I walk the harbor, locating Luca's old bolt hole, now my grandmother's monument. It's closed, but there's a number to call to make an appointment to see it. I call, telling the woman who answers that Natalia was my great-grandmother. Wait there, she says, and in seven or eight minutes, she appears and lets me in. Luca's writer's desk is still there, along with the divan. The woman steps outside to smoke and I sit briefly at his desk. I can't resist and also sit, carefully, on the divan. It appears up to its task.

This homage is repeated later in Giulia's studio.

I sat at Luca's desk in the interest of sympathetic magic. Is it Franny who mentions it or Leo? More than hunting, I surmise, in her Mapuche tutorials, a counterpoint to the nuns and university, but then perhaps coming up again at Cooper Union, the osmosis that characterizes her way of working, although that might be us, the Piranesi us. But anyway, I need it and this desk may have it.

Then I visit Giulia and Carlo's country house. The harbor curator kindly phones her colleague, so I'm shown in without a reservation.

We talk and she explains how the house and its art are kept as they were, but now there's an annex that's partly for storage and partly to show a changing array of work, there being so much of it. She takes me to see it and while there, I notice a painting that reminds me of the famous head of Matteo—the same size and painted in a similar style, of a woman who looks uncannily like Matteo. "Who is this?" I ask. "On the back, Giulia wrote 'Caterina," she replies.

3.

On the train back to Modena, notebook open, taking stock. The twin to Matteo stays with me. (The curator let me take a photo.)

I chalk Jo's marriage to Franny, who wasted no time once she saw her future in Guillermo. I had to pass through thickets of timewasting men, each initially plausible as well as desirable, then falling short in their different and sometimes disastrous ways, causes of unhappiness that led me finally to quit Milan thanks to something like divine intervention on the part of Luca's friend, my patroness.

Genia is also at the back of this somehow. We're closer now than ever, thanks to our parallel projects and now this added tie. I'm also grateful to her for stepping in, gauging how best to spring us on her cousins, mindful that Jo needed to arrive unencumbered and be free to explain herself on her own terms and in her own sweet time. Bren has these issues too with her Central Valley family, not necessarily on the same page with us politically or culturally, but time and kids layer particularity on these reflexive biases. One reason, though, why Jo kept the wedding tiny, but its announcements widely shared.

Bren is thriving at the clinic. She strove to create a kind of haven within Kaiser for her moms and babies, but this is the real thing. I don't yet see a comparable situation, but I'm also immersed in this history and how to convey it meaningfully. As Natalia asked herself, is it a story anyone would want to read? This is my problem, though, not the family's. The raw material is compelling.

My convent school idea keeps coming back to me, some way to reduce the scale of my scholarly and pedagogical life so that what appeals to me is still there, but with time for real conversations with colleagues and students, and room to write in a broader sense. I was struck by Luca's observation that his real work finally came forward after he stopped the rest, valuable to others, doubtless, but an evasion. Does such a school exist or will I need to invent it?

4.

The passing scenery is a blur of fields and occasional villages. The only immediate passenger is a composer, apparently, his score laid out on a table like mine, a pencil in hand, intently focused. I thought of a passage in Natalia's journal where Nora speaks up for visibility.

It's what we all want, to be visible as we are, others seeing us as we see ourselves, inclining towards us, taking pleasure in the sight.

Tolerance isn't what Nora wants. Her bravado is intolerant of it.

Like her fingers under Natalia's nose, she wants acknowledgement.

Across time, the desire for it is likely undiminished, while receptivity waxes and wanes, or has its places—islands, ghettos, and safehouses at times. Piranesi is looser than elsewhere, the journals say, content to overlook what stays out private. Nora wants to be a man in some sense, that tightrope walk between pure types that Luca describes.

On divans or borrowed beds with Natalia, this was possible.

The composer makes some erasures. I keep thinking he'll start to hum, but apparently it's all in his head. Some have this ability, while others voice their thoughts aloud or are caught up in conversations, a word or two slipping out. Bren and Ben are like this; Jo and I are not. Am I, as Giulia might put it, thoroughly conventional?

I realized when Jo wore Franny's dress that she's my model of a woman of a certain age. I wonder if she wanted to be a professor?

It's clear she disliked the UN, but she’d have found academia just as trying. She dressed the part, and that part was her authority. Leo had her own version, mannish, but letting it play against her figure.

It was of a piece with her exoticism, subtle and uncanny. Leo is an actress, although a natural, as Gianni said of her father. Even now, she plays the part of a design doyenne flawlessly. Whatever serves the plot, keeps whatever her latest project is in motion.

I always felt out of place in Berkeley, only getting away with it by remaining Italian, that persona and those tailored clothes. Well, I am Italian, of course, and I've shed that look once back in Modena, or loosened up, influenced by Genia, queen of the tailored bucolic when not called to Milan. I've mostly dodged the big city, tending my terrace. I never wanted to be a man. I don't think Bren wanted me to be one, but it's not something we've discussed. She doesn't pose questions like this to herself, at least not so I could hear them.

5.

Iris Murdoch strove to keep out of her diaries any cause of future embarrassment, and to examine her past thoughts "constantly." The first impulse is like the warning to wear clean knickers in case you were hit by a truck. The second is worthier, but maybe an obsession.

Our family journals throw caution to the winds, except for Natalia's hiding hers in wartime, but looking back episodically and critically is a trait. Not constantly, which strikes me as an impediment to action, although from what I know of Murdoch's life, I bet her revisits were also episodic. Was there a secret diary, or did all of that seep into her novels? Bois quotes Freud on dreams being overdetermined, and diaries can be like that. He also says that critical theory keeps history from being mere facts. What about White's "it's all narrative"? Bad novels dwell on the litter a given moment, as Tomasi de Lampedusa noted, so, Bois is right—narratives per se are no guarantee.

Nora is very much in the picture in Natalia's diary, but it only has the salient details. Giulia links "memorable lovers" to obsessions, hence the need for an ending or a cure to be free of it. Natalia and Nora are the obvious exceptions. Passing over the sailors, it's clear Luca preferred women to men as lovers, but never found his Nora.

He's the family's theorist and a critical one, cleareyed about his faults, discounting his talents and what they meant. I know the territory, shared by my grandmother and her mother, but not by Giulia or Leo. And Jo? I should ask Jo to set down her take on the journals. She's read enough to have an opinion, and it would shed light on where she places herself in this constellation of ours with moving planets, yet another now evidently fecund, unlike her ambiguous parent.

6.

On the terrace, shaded by a wall. The heat is stupefying. That it is so elsewhere, a very generalized condition, is attributed to climate change. Elsewhere are floods, a generalized disruption. Stupor is a kind of statis but also a kind of inability to react. Politics is like this.

A century ago, our ear was to the ground, a list of options in hand, the port close by. We knew by long experience when to head out. I wonder if we haven't lost this instinct for self-preservation? It makes me long for a cigarette, not a very frequent desire. I smoked when I was 12 and gave it up nine years later with my first bad sore throat. I only enjoyed really strong cigarettes, unfiltered, and not in quantity.

I had no difficulty stopping. My main vices are self-centeredness and my inability in the distant past to admit it wouldn't work and/or the man wasn't worth it owing to the usual causes, experienced one by one. Bren is far more than a process of elimination, yet also that.

The ground laid by others freed us to be a traditional couple with a few quirks of expediency and family or families added in. As I get to know Genia better, I see how immersed she is in her family, how Jo's marriage to Federico falls into her narrative arc of which I'm also part, a narrative that's fundamentally generous but an instance of what Giulia calls largesse. This fits with the Piranesi narrative.

I should be alarmed, I think, putting down The Economist. Why am I not? It may be Berkeley that puts me in a state of reflexive skepticism, aware of the dangers but discounting them. "First time as tragedy, second time as farce," but what if it's the reverse?

Ben phones, mostly to talk with Bren. Bren is mom unless they're hungry. They're discussing some aspect of his residency, based on her replies. Paola and I now have similar conversations, as I'm the closest thing she has to an informant about the university. She finds it baffling in ways that I recognize, because they are baffling—what academics bring along and inflict on their students, like Larkin on your parents: not always unintentionally. It's better than it was, we tell ourselves, but Paola tells me no, an exasperated no.

7.

My Piranesi query drew an email from Montevideo.

Like many others, I'm interested in genealogy. I'm descended through one of his sons from Luca Piranesi, so you and I are distantly related. My research put me in touch with another cousin descended from Luca's daughter Caterina. She is a bit mysterious to both of us, a novelist who was baptized with the surname of her mother. As you know, she stayed behind when her family left Piranesi, ending up in Ferrara, where my cousin lives.

We decided to do DNA tests, and hers revealed that Caterina had the same mother but a different father than her brothers. I attach copies of our tests, which may be helpful to your history.

The cousin's DNA test indicates that Matteo's oldest son Alfredo was likely Caterina's father. He and Paolo are close in age, and part of the same cohort as Luca and Natalia. How did this play out, I wondered? The journals note upheaval in Luca marriage, but the cause of it is never named. I decide to take this up with Leo.

8.

Leo thought Laura might have talked to Alma when she first knew she was pregnant. Finding the card, I phoned the curator who let me into Luca's bolt hole, asking if any of the archives include Alma's. "Yes, but talk with Claudia," she said. "She's going through them for a book she's writing on traditional medicine." I called her.

"Alma kept logs along with recipe books. She didn't keep many letters, but her notebooks—that's the format—are preserved. I'm going through the recipes, but I can check the logs. She was very methodical, although it's in a shorthand I more or less understand."

I gave her a likely range. "Give me a few days." I was doubtful that she'd find anything, but then an email arrived: "There's a note, L+L ≠ B = L+A

followed by tiny drawings of a baby and an angel. The baby has a bow in her hair and is circled. I can send a photo, if you need one."

Married, at odds with her husband, pregnant by his friend, she might have asked if she could abort this accident. Alma, who likely sensed it was a girl. said so to this mother of boys. She also knew Luca, the one man in Piranesi who would let it go, and love and raise Caterina as his own. This is a guess. Anyway, they stayed married and Caterina was born. "They carried on as before," Giulia comments somewhere. Story of our lives. But Giulia's remark that future onlookers would ask, "Who was that woman?" after seeing her portrait of Matteo, also came back to me. It was Caterina, to whom Laura gave her surname, an Etruscan like herself.

Did Alfredo know? His continual support of Caterina, and the help he gave Laura to protect her properties in Piranesi, argue for it.

But I don't think Matteo and Paolo knew. Luca only seems to have known there were problems with his marriage, not that Caterina wasn't his. Her letters to him only and ever address him as Papa.

9.

I'm reading Wittgenstein, one year at a time. He makes me think of books I want to write, have considered writing, should have written. This despite my project, which I pursue in a doglike manner: single-mindedly and with affection, the journals floating past me at night like voices in the street.

Wittgenstein turns sometimes to the Jews—this is 1931, before the mess but not before its prelude. The Piranesi are Jews to the extent that it marks their vulnerability, to speak to my mother's point. How to assimilate so thoroughly that it ceases to be a source of fear is one of the family's questions. How to deal with desire is the other. If transcendence underlies them both, it's in the sense of getting past a necessary condition and get on with life's other necessities. Only Luca's father says it, sotto voce: "We are Sephardic." His mother says we're Phoenician, while Giulia says we're Spanish. Luca's father points to larger categories: Mediterranean, cosmopolitan.

Luca identifies with the Greeks, takes Homer as his model. That we're Jewish is like being Cretan or Maltese, part of a story, but the story includes fleeing, port-hopping. There's also a sense of "that useful family" whose past efforts to assimilate didn't work. A long line of convent school girls, aware that self-protection is a deal one strikes with the deities at hand, in which one is or isn't confident.

Can it really be true that Jo is the culmination of this long arc? I see her through the lens of desire, that Etruscan sign, whole or split.

Like Franny, she knows her man when she sees him, and yet Leo's account feels right too. But then Paolo becomes a grandee and has to abandon San Rafael. Who knows what enmity he attracted?

Leo discusses the family with the authority of a witness. Natalia reminds me that any such account is layered. Wittgenstein is my new crush, speaking to me across the decades like WB before him.

10.

"Gender change is like religious conversion," I wrote last night.

Late this afternoon, I elaborated the thought. If I say "I am a man," despite the biological refutation of this, or if I go further and alter myself so my body conforms increasingly to my self-assertion, then the rejection of this, from the outset, is like the rejection of those Jews who became Christian, a doubt that their conversion is real, is sincere, can be relied upon because their nature is supposedly otherwise. Nora pictures this in her famous address to Natalia, linking it to the condition of her people, colonized, forced to be in the background the way matriarchy lives in the background, an order thrown over, a rule by women who, Graves among others says, killed their consorts after a year, the agrarian year.

I link these things as she did. Although they're nominally separate, Nora has a point, treating them as one case, the judgement of some "other" who limits my self-assertion, won't let me alone to be myself, an inherently changing condition. I want to tell these changelings to live for a time as they see themselves, get acquainted with it. but this requires something more than Piranesi's tolerance, which only goes so far, remains tolerantly orthodox, but orthodox nonetheless.

But who are these ever-affronted ones for whom a self-asserted "I am a man" gives rise to umbrage, is a catastrophe, a social problem to be solved by suppression? When Luca saw Bruno's statue in Rome, did he wonder that the Church’s earthly shepherd burned him alive? Jesus would have said this defeats the whole idea, that you expel the demon and preserve the man. Bruno's apostasy was a threat to the Church, and it wrapped its response in orthodoxy. A similar displacement is happening now, rightwing authoritarians quoting scripture as demons are said to do. What is a man to them?

Cannon fodder, dupes and marks. And a woman is a cow to breed others of this stripe and submit to this self-proclaimed new order.

Resist, I tell my changelings, but don't martyr yourselves! If I say this, am I not false to Nora and their desire to be seen? Perhaps.

They'll come for us too, of course, working their way down their list.

11.

We went into Milan, to the polytechnic's "Leo symposium." Her, me and Bren, Jo, and Giulietta. Genia and Trent joined us. At Leo's suggestion, we slipped into the second half of the afternoon session, avoiding "the apparatus," versions of which she'd seen. A festschrift is planned. Her talk was fairly brief, politely alluding to others' work and even quoting from it to make an introduction, then adding that her roots were never in theory but always in observation, which is a kind of history and in its own way perhaps a theory in the original sense of explaining something to yourself and then trying it out.

She thanked a nun from her convent school in San Rafael who encouraged her to clamber around the vernacular baroque church and others like it, notebook in hand, working out how they did it and also why they did it, how light is intrinsic to form, how there's a sleight of hand to it making use of distance so that not everything has to be so carefully done, "like film sets," she said, recounting that work. With amazing brevity, she traced her arc, thanking those who helped her and also the specific work that meant something to her.

She described Ko and Ro as invaluable collaborators, but said that ordinary people—"babies to very old women, mostly"—deserve the credit for generating almost all of their ideas. She thanked Maria for her basket, the idea of malleable, porous, open-ended forms that serve as artifacts in Aldo Rossi's sense, "overdetermined as dreams are, as Freud says. His observations are always acute, Freud, and if his theories are wrong, they're still interesting." From Bois via me.

"I still dream in forms," she concluded. "I still carry a notebook and consider what to do with what I dreamt, whether it has some place in the outer world. I still have conversations at the creche and at the clinic, to hear how it is now. Ko is off in Japan, so I find others to ask questions while I sketch and make notes. It's not so easy now, but once a year, I stay at the hut in the Apennines I designed with my father—number two, where he died quite peacefully. We had informants when we worked on it, but we also drew on vernacular forms, a record of others' theories and intentions in that place."

Giulietta is visibly pregnant; that Jo is pregnant is only noticeable to Bren and me. Federico and Vanni arrived and we all went out for dinner after Leo said her goodbyes to the conference organizers.

Her talk was filmed—Jo sent me the link, already on YouTube.

12.

Did Caterina know that Alfredo was her father? I raised this with Genia, recounting everything I'd learned. She took it in. "Let me look into it." After a few days, she texted. "I have an answer."

Very typically, Genia rang up Federico's father, summarized what I'd told her, and asked his opinion. Consulting the archives of his branch of the family, he found a carbon of a letter Cesare wrote to Alfredo, thanking him for dealing with the authorities on Caterina's behalf. The letter followed the enactment of laws against Jews.

I called my curator friend in Piranesi to ask if any of Alfredo's correspondence survives. Yes. I gave her the timeframe and asked her if she'd look for any interactions with the authorities about Caterina. A week later, she told me she'd found an official receipt for an affidavit Alfredo submitted, attached to a handwritten note: "Re: Caterina, to secure her future. Wrote to Cesare, affirming this 'as we discussed.'" Being the curator that she is, she also tracked the affidavit down. In it, with his lawyer as a witness, Alfredo swears that he's Caterina's natural father. Nothing private ever remains so, as I imagine Alfredo knew, so it was honorable of him to take this step on Caterina's behalf. In character with the man, I gather.

13.

Jo, getting wind of this story from Genia, tells me about a note.

"Among Franny's stash of letters, there's a handwritten one from Caterina after Luca's funeral. It's brief, but it might be helpful." I found it. She says she was glad to see Franny again in Piranesi, and also to "have the chance to talk with your mother, still very sharp!"

Then she adds, "I understand your feelings of frustration about the events in Argentina. I also feel I didn't do enough when it mattered, and that I was shielded from terrible things that others were not."

I asked my curator friend if she could look through Natalia's personal papers to see if there were any letters to or from Caterina in the period following Luca's funeral. A few days later, she texted: "Check your email." And there it was, a letter to Natalia from Caterina, handwritten and sent from Ferrara.

I was very glad to see you again after a long while. Returning to Ferrara, I reflected that you're the one person with whom I could have had this conversation! Yes, I remember the portrait Giulia made of me. It was the first time I realized my resemblance to the family of Matteo and Alfredo, who were always so kind to me.

When the fascists passed their laws, Cesare was in Piranesi. He and Alfredo talked and "made an arrangement." He didn't go into details, but I was never bothered by the authorities, as I feared I might be, despite having my mother's name. When I asked Cesare about it later, he said Alfredo had claimed in a sworn document that he was my father. Was it necessary? I asked. "Alfredo thought so. He was the one who suggested it." Earlier, before we were married, he told Cesare, "in case it comes up," that I was "family."

It didn't. Cesare's family had shed its ducal habits, although I have a title. I knew Alfredo was our go-between, but not the rest.

I’ve always thought of him as a benevolent uncle.

I could ask my mother about all of this, but I doubt she'd want to discuss it. "Long ago," she'd say, giving me a vague look and then changing the subject. Giulia's painting and his solicitude argue for Alfredo, but Luca was Papa starting in childhood. I am in their debt, these two kind men, who loved me unconditionally.

14.

Rabbits in foxes' clothing, or is it the reverse? Giulia, who strikes me sometimes as the wisest of the Piranesi, captures the family's two-directional approach its inner and outer worlds. It would like to disappear into the more secure milieu of its patrons and bear their children while viewing this as a possible side-effect of desire for certain of their men—not just possible, but desirable. Yet it recognizes through direct experience that the security of its patrons is illusory and their institutions imperfect. Conversos, as the Spanish called them, taking the teachings of Jesus seriously and yet conscious always of the tentative nature of their status. That too bought us no security, yet it gave us a viewpoint. We're all convent school girls, but we're convent school girls who reinterpret the outer world, resist it, witness it, give it a new form.

These are the women; with exceptions, the men just "arrived."

(Not for me, but then Bren showed up.) How rabbity and/or foxy are we still? Leo lives up to her name and Giulia exempts herself from such analogies. Am I a hedgehog who looked in the mirror one day and realized, like Orlando, she'd become a fox overnight? And now has to live with this and find a milieu suitable for foxes?

(Thoughts of Orlando remind me how that film was a favorite of ours when we met, rented and watched a little obsessively. It took me a while to settle in, whereas Bren just went where her heart took her. Not that I was unsure of her, but more like Tilda Swinton's Orlando having a look at what he's become.)

Jo has a good deal of Bren, I realize. I always think Ben got it all, but it isn't true. There's an outdoors/agrarian thing that's not mine.

I like to look at the countryside, but I rarely hike in it. And I never cared at all for gardening. Leo and Gianni let me be, luckily, and we pretty much did the same with Ben and Jo, so it's nature.

15.

Fate and télos, terraces and bolt holes, a dream: this mélange is mixed in with my morning cortado. I dreamt I was in the pitch-dark offices of several academics, but the sun poured in through side windows obscured by their office doors. I'd made a précis of a paper or article written by a third party, and the academic, a man, was on the phone discussing it with him within earshot. "She transposed your chart into characters, but then, having named them, didn't give them any characteristics" is an example. He went back to his desk, then gestured that I should join him, but the contrast of light and dark made it hard to interpret this. We went into his office or a conference room. You'll need to take notes, he said. I picked up a yellow pad on the desk, and it was full of someone else's notes, so I went to look for my Moleskine. The larger space was now lit up and I encountered a colleague I hadn't seen for a long time. I couldn't find my little notebook or a pen, and decided simply to walk out.

Then I woke up. "My experience of academia?" I wondered. Just now, I thought about WB, trying to navigate unfolding situations that always broke against him, yet doing so led him closer, I think, to his actual work. But this is retrospect considering the matter. In other circumstances, he would have won his professorship or become a celebrated critic in a more liberal Germany or made it to America, or finally finished his monumental project—this series of possibilities that were not to be, fate running in opposition to his télos, giving him situations to which he heroically rose, an epic improviser, always looking for suitable places to live and work, and the money to do so, doled out in inadequate increments handed over slowly, ungenerously. The life, when I read it, made me cry out, wanting to fly back in time and intervene. Arendt envies his posthumous reputation, but even if he had an inkling of it, he couldn’t monetize it. Posthumous is not a useful reputation!

Compared to him, my life has been almost without incident, my productivity sufficient to secure a middling reputation that leaves me, in the midst of middle age, with a slew of questions. Even my dreams express my coming up short in my own mind, and yet the image I had of Vivaldi and his convent school girls persists. What would I compose? Where do coteries of putative virgins gather?

Should I, like St. Francis before me, just declaim to the birds?

16.

"Atopia"—Barthes contrasts it with utopia. Not "placeless," but more to do with the way places, from terraces to mountain ranges, have a certain interchangeability or form a catalogue of possibilities or experiences, remembered or anticipated. Is this WB's now–time in a spatial guise, or do we bring this to the places that resonate for us? Is that resonance there as a lure, a background that momentarily comes forward to remind us of its correlates? Is it a genetic trait, making our exits less jarring, and our entrances too, giving us the confidence that we'll find new correlates—new terraces or country houses? Barthes' workspace takes the same form in three places. Is a notebook like this? (How small can a correlate be?)

Leo would likely disagree. Can I summarize her argument? It begins with form as a container, but one that's visible, malleable, detached from function sufficiently that imagination can project onto it and every person brings her own ideas of its possible uses.

Her objects are similar, never precisely what they seem. Stein's repetition becomes the joke she must have intended, a series out to infinity, if you care to keep it going, such distance as nature affords us, but influence or model also figures, the memories of experience that creativity replays.

Barthes, RB as he calls himself, is wary of the novel's télos. It made me return to WB, whose biography is steeped in it, a kind of downward spiral like Werner Herzog's Aguirre, "a film like a crashing plane" as a friend described it, adding how the monologue of the megalomaniacal conquistador at the end shows how German by its very nature gives depravity a veneer of sense. RB cautions me against viewing WB, or the family, or a people, in this manner. Yet it seems true: we wander between fate and télos, pushed and pulled. If I apply it to myself, though, I'm forced to agree with RB. Up to a point, I'm also forced to add, the Etruscan in me talking. Jo is my current patroness of this impulse to go along, like Guillermo.

17.

I'm in Ferrara, going through Caterina's archive. Jo and Giulietta are pushing to make headway with the foundation before their babies arrive—so she and Federico are in Modena and I'm staying at their place. Caterina's papers mostly relate to her work as a writer, but the correspondence between her and Luca is what drew me. It confirmed what I knew as a child—how Luca conveys his interest and affection by constantly returning to shared themes.

Their letters reflect on their encounters, heightened by their abilities as writers to elaborate. They illustrate how letters continue conversations, and vice versa, admitting no clear boundary between them. As Caterina's writing gains force and finds a publisher, he becomes a close and appreciative reader. They also discuss what they're reading and both mention conversations with other writers and editors. Occasionally he inserts a short poem. There are letters from her to his poems' publisher. Only after his death, she tells him, did she understand the extent of his poetic work. He named her his literary executor, a task she took seriously, going to Piranesi to look and then borrowing his notebooks so they could be properly edited.

Giulia was apparently his only consistent reader. That he managed to keep everything, moving it from Piranesi to Montevideo and back, speaks to what it meant to him. She waited until Laura died before publishing a selection. It's gone out of print, and I feel I should honor my childhood promise to him and revive it. Leo has Franny's copy. Giulia's take on Luca's poems is accurate, but what he shared with Caterina in the letters stayed clear of such matters.

There are letters from Alfredo. It seems significant that he never fails to note her birthday. But, like Luca, Alfredo may never have learned from Laura if he was or wasn't Caterina’s father. Perhaps only Alma knew? Yet there's Giulia's "Who was she?" Surely Laura said something to Alfredo, given all he did for Caterina. Surely her resemblance to Matteo and his son gave the game away to Luca. Or not. The evidence remains inconclusive, so I’ll have to keep digging.

18.

Caterina's archive includes her personal library. I ask to see it. It's mostly first editions of her books, with her annotations, but there on the shelf is her copy of Luca's Selected Poems. Taking it out, I find, inserted at the very back, what proves to be a folded note-to-self.

In Milan, during our last conversation, as it proved, Luca told me that Alfredo invited him for lunch in Piranesi. After reviewing his dealings with me and my mother—introducing me to Cesare, the "dowry" he facilitated for Laura to protect her properties, and the affidavit he swore later to protect me—he said that he was actually unaware of any connection to me until Alma approached him. She did so, he said, after Giulia, who guessed it based on appearance, came to see her and Alma told her that it was likely, but also that neither he nor Luca had drawn this conclusion. The Piranesi were anxious about the fascists, presciently so, and Alma told Alfredo it was Giulia's desire that he help me, whatever their actual tie was.

Then Alma added that she had no doubt that I was his daughter.

Hearing this, Alfredo vowed to her that he would protect me.

Following this conversation, I asked Cesare about it. He told me he'd been reluctant to get into details, since it was clear that Alfredo didn't want to supplant Luca, his childhood friend.

Alfredo's account squared with his memory, Cesare said. "Your safety was his concern. Claiming you as his daughter meant you weren't a Piranesi. He said he hoped it would never come to that, but the situation of such families was perennially insecure." This was at the outset, when they were discussing the dowry. Later, when they thought I might be in danger, he and Cesare spoke and the affidavit followed. Whether it was true or not was never discussed or confirmed. All I knew was that my fate was severed from my family, still a cause for guilt for me given that so many perished who lacked this accidental exemption. Bassini told me later that I wasn't responsible for this chain of events. It was kind of him to give me this absolution, not that I've ever accepted it.

Well, I thought, here's my answer. Funny no one else found it.

19.

Reading Peter Wollen on Warhol, I asked Leo about him. "I knew of him, of course, but he was an artist. There was some overlap, but it the French philosophers had more impact on the architects."

I asked her if “late modernist,” her self-description, looks back at Greenberg, for example. "No, the same term means different things.

When I use it, I mean modernism's revival after postmodernism.

Architects we thought were hinges, like Isozaki, Rossi, or Stirling, seem less so now than their predecessors Kahn and Scarpa. Warhol was at home with repetition. He was originally a commercial artist and his work anticipates mass customization. The best architects try not to repeat themselves, but it’s almost impossible if they become successful. Seeing this, I limited my architectural work to buildings that struck me as prototypical. Others could emulate them, but they also generated many, many product ideas that we could scale.” She picked up a book on Corbusier's Ronchamp. "Form’s scale suits its context and contents. This was innate, a reflection of our humanity, but we’ve lost sight of it, particularly since the war."When we use the word “bourgeois,” we mean the in-between of power and the street, aiming to be useful to both and still be able to cater to our own desires. It comes from trade and enterprise. Their necessities are not unlike desire's." She gestured at the photo of her parents in Deauville. "My father said it was our genius, openness and wariness that prompts reinvention. This is what we mean by bourgeois."

20.

Disorientation, singular for Leo, is how it often is with me. Time inserts distance, nominally, yet things come forward on their own, bidden by associations yet unbidden or forbidden if it were up to us.

I can conjure him up, the charlatan who strung me along with his facsimile of a relationship, positioned deliberately between love and friendship, taking love's liberties, including the freedom to be cruel.

I'm never obsessed, much as Leo is never disoriented, but with him, I made an exception. It was Luca's professor friend who labelled my ailment and its cause, then recounted to me how a cabal of academic men wreaked havoc in her own life.

“Leave Italy!” she said, echoing Luca’s advice. She felt that the strictures the grand universities imposed on women were to be avoided. "It cost me a marriage and children, and for what?"

Now I'm back, close to three decades later, as disoriented as ever.

Adrift is more accurate, and I remind myself that it's not necessarily a bad state of mind, a sign of openness that's also a sign of closure. It forces me to ask myself a broad question about talent and desire. Or are they separate questions? No, it's one question, or needs to be.

But so many subsidiary questions, like here or there. It was easy enough to arrange this hiatus, but how compelling is it to stay on?

It's Bren's question too, yet I think she's happier with the clinic's scale, its dedication to women and children that reflects her own. If I dream of Vivaldi's convent school, it hasn't surfaced yet, although reading about Barthes' love of the seminar gave me some ideas.

I thought Bren would miss her family more, but our being here is drawing them. My family's presence is orienting; Jo's perpetuating it here is orienting, even desired, but how does my work fit with it?

Is this even the right question? I'm so used to a certain apparatus, a seasonal rhythm, despite the pandemic's disruptions. Barthes notes that a seminar ideally is just a table and a few chairs.

21.

Giulia's question, "Do we seek exemption?" sticks with me. It's true, but it's also a bourgeois trait, she writes. The family's idea of it arises from trade and also from its insights about the dance traders do with their xenophobic patrons, not omitting the street to which it makes holiday offerings, at least to the housewives, at cut price. Nor is it much use when things turn leaden, like art too. But art is what Giulia desires to make, once making love is less consuming. And to be bourgeois is useful in that sense, like Natalia's neutral gown.

Raymond Williams' criticism of C.P. Snow's novels could be levelled at us in that we describe an unproblematic world whose edge conditions are like the pandemic I viewed from my terrace.

Natalia and Franny are aware of them as danger and injustice, but it's Giulia who notes how a new story supplanted an older one that fused civic conscience with Christian charity. The Etruscans figure too, resiliently indigenous and outside the grasp of this new order.

Guillermo, my Mapuche forebear, is a version of this, but he's also, like us, an assimilator, marveling at our family's ability to survive on its own terms, take a blow to the balls and stagger on. Leo wraps all this into her celestial gown, her comet-like energies devoted (there's no other word for it) especially to women and children. Like Giulia, her self-confidence is unwavering, despite terrorists at the margins.

Aristocracy floats through us: Federico, like Cesare before him, is a safe harbor, viewed from the backs of mind of the Piranesi. Or is it the other way around, one more instance of the lure? Also floating through are the complications of our natural fathers, known or not.

There are accidents, less-than-accidents, and outright contrivance.

There is, relatedly, the mix—Etruscan, Mapuche, Latvian—the purest of pure mongrels, an aristocracy of an often-exiled sort.

22.

Jo comes by. Out of the blue, she asks about her conception.

You'll have to ask Bren, I say. I wasn't there. You don't know? she asks incredulously, and I parry with a reference to our agrarian, horse-and-bull-breeding families, including Genia's. She rolls her eyes, considering this a dodge, but then asks me about Caterina.

Specifically, she asks, why is her history important to me? A good question! It was important to her, but as an accident of fate that protected her but the protection itself was a source of guilt, and it was confusing also to have two fathers, even if both made no claims.

Perhaps the claims a father makes simply by being unquestionably the father are desired by the one so claimed, desired that is to be without ambiguity. Yes, she says. I wanted this child with Federico to be unequivocally his, although I know how irrational this is. I nod and take her hand and squeeze it. You were no accident, I say. I was bred, Jo replies. You were bred, I affirm, and breeding in our family is no clinical matter, as I believe you can attest. We are this odd mix, women in particular, but the men too if raised in traditions like ours.

Your father is himself the outcome of a lioness's choice, just as I was.

He never knew that lion and to this day refuses to allow science to have the last word. Caterina reconciled herself to it, deciding finally that two fathers don't cancel each other out, but perhaps make their feelings for her more from the heart than from the blood. And this was what Genia wanted to give you and Ben, that heart of her man.

He's my brother, and it was and is impossible for me to be jealous.

In a marriage, children are the leavening that turns passion into longevity. Whose children is the least of it, as we learn from history and literature. How many children were rescued by a relative or a bystander? And this continues. Not every Jo finds her Federico, but in general we've had remarkable luck, we Piranesi. Bren is mine.

You and Ben are ours. Genia is your luck, a remarkable woman. In some odd way, you are exactly what she foresaw. She and Leo are in their very different ways quite similar, possessors of a teleological imagination and a semi-conscious will to persuade.

Jo took this in, looking slightly stunned but not unreceptive.

23.

I brought Franny's manuscript," Jo said, changing the subject.

“It's the book she wrote from Natalia's journals and letters, all of which she donated to her mother's archive in Piranesi while holding back the manuscript itself and apparently never trying to publish it.”

“I wondered about it,” I said. “It figures so heavily in my mother’s retirement. Did she think of Natalia's, ‘Is this a life worth reading?’

She might have felt that it would be badly received in Piranesi, hence her holding back the manuscript, leaving it to others to uncover an essential aspect of Natalia’s story: Nora. She may also have felt her life was overshadowed by her mother’s. And, like Caterina, she felt guilty about skirting the disasters that fell on others. But I'm speculating. Let me read it."

24.

I cooked and we had a cross-generational women's dinner. I felt it was time to discuss our several backstories. I led off, asking Leo if it was really true she had doubts about Trent's parentage. "No, despite hedging. It's true that Gianni and I were lovers, but the lion was pure happenstance as well as the lioness's estrus taking over.

Men aren't designed to let it slide by unless it really, truly fails to register, so it went as planned."

I'd told Bren that Jo and I had talked. What I didn’t say is this: "You and your baby share the venue of your breeding. It's a lucky spot, that hut, and I think that's it's actual purpose. Bren's clinic should book it on occasion. And, to anticipate your question, it was definitely breeding that they did, like the pasture the Piranesi set out for their thoroughbreds. Like the old lion, Trent was swept up in it, buoyed by estrus. But all of us, including Genia, wanted you and Ben to be bred in the bone, not basted in some kitchen ritual."

Bren looked at me. "Lina is my Nora, from what I know about the Piranesi history. We complete each other, and our love has endured because of this. We are, neither of us, possessive, but this is most of all because we know ourselves in this sense and arrange our lives accordingly, once we made it through the preliminaries." I said that the men are credited with our arrangements, but in fact the women took the initiative and arranged things for others. Nothing is ever accidental, although the illusion of free choice persists. Leo nodded. "Like our horses." Then Jo spoke. "Paola told me she was attracted to Federico, but they were cousins and they both thought it was weird. Yet Paola wanted him in the family, more than just a cousin. I think Genia knew this. And you, Leo, had your own reasons to pair us." Leo smiled, almost to herself. "Federico and I used to talk sometimes when he was younger and I saw that our view of scale is similar. The world struggles to find its bearings, and Federico sees that as a project. It's wrapped up in enterprise, of course, because that's how bourgeois families make their ideas actionable. How to scale and not destroy, bring the benefits of small, its beauty, to a wider circle: this is our shared question. I did want him in the family, it's true. As Luca once put it, if someone promising arrives, we take him in."

25.

"I've been thinking about the foundation," Leo said. "Thank God!" Jo blurted out, which made us laugh. Leo nodded her assent.

"I apologize for putting cart before horse, or money before purpose.

But time has clarified things a bit. Here's what I see. Trent's part of is clearer, and Giulietta shares his love of film. I foresee that thread continuing quite naturally, with seed money for new projects. Paola is the genetic payoff of my encounter with the lion. It's in her blood.

We talk. She wants to come back, finish at the poly, and immerse herself in the enterprise Carlo and Marco founded. Ben she says is Bren's true son, and I agree, although a different specialty."

Then she looked at Jo and me. "You two are harder to categorize.

You're both in transition, and Modena is part of it. In your different ways, you're our historians, a role that's been passed around since Luca's day. Caterina’s novels and stories are another source. These histories deserve the foundation's attention. San Rafael, the Andes, and Buenos Aires should figure, along with Montevideo. Wherever the Piranesi touched down is worth documenting.

"The creche and the clinic are my most tw0 important buildings.

I’d like the foundation to support them,” Leo added. "I've given that some thought,” Bren said. “Issues arise, often enmeshed in politics, that affect our work. It's clear to me that the clinic and the creche share these issues, because everything that forms the contexts of everyday life are caught up now in the 'body politic.' We lack a forum to discuss these issues as a community and with others.” Jo spoke up. “A seminar, with Lina convening it!" I felt the spirit of Roland Barthes drift through the room, nodding approvingly.

26.

Jo quoted from the poet CD Wright (she said later): “I am looking for a way to vocalize, perform, act out, address the commonly felt crises of my time. These are spiritual exercises.'" We heard Bren's low whistle of assent. "We experience society’s crises as situations that emerge in practice as dilemmas. As we’re still attached to the Church, 'spiritual exercises' is an appropriate term for what needs to become our daily regimen.”

Leo nodded. "Designers face this too—all the professions, likely.

It accentuates their displacement from power, but we're in a period when power is being contested on every front, without clear winners and with a noticeable lack of cooperation on issues where one would expect it, even demand it. 'Spiritual exercises' have two purposes in this context—to arrive at reasoned responses and then pilot them."

Jo lit up. "That's what Federico believes!" Bren, sitting close to Jo, put her hand on her shoulder. "A good pilot! I agree with Leo that we need to address both, to act as well as to discuss and plan." "You can't really separate them," Leo said. "This is Federico's point and I agree. By committing to try things in the world, you bring the world into dialogue with your ideas. The dialogue is as important as trying things, but they both make it possible to tune, rethink, even let go if something really doesn't work or exposes another set of problems."

In this mix are my convent school, and a role that's meaningful for me and compatible with going home to compose. I didn't say this when Jo, Bren, and Leo brought the conversation back to me, but "In principle, yes," I said, quoting my mother to her uncle. I'm not sure she got the reference, but I've been reading her journal.

27.

Like Nora for Natalia, Monique Wittig hands me back to myself.

A review led me to her essays, especially "The Straight Mind," and a series of resonances with what I'm finding inferred in these journals, even if it's in fragments: Giulia's sense that we're all human "as God intended"; Luca's fluid nature and his sense of the contest life poses, corralling what he desires in order t0 step into required roles and manage to perform; my "fitting in unfittingly," a model we pass along that isn't us exactly, but is a possible way forward always.

Not that I'm as militant as Wittig, but her militancy is, as she says, from frustration. Better the bourgeoisie dissolve than the proletariat supplant them. Better that men slip into homo sum than see women as not us. Better too that women promote this than celebrate their differences, if Wittig is right that dissolving one dissolves the other.

Not a matriarchy, yet tipped away from patriarchy by its emphasis on desire's legitimacy and a sense of the order of things that results if desire's taken into account. (Wittig sets it aside, and yet there it is.)

What I'm outlining here is a metanarrative in which I figure. I like it that Wittig emphasizes the individual, condemning Marx and his followers for setting her—each of us—against the mass. That word again! Our "bourgeois" is so particular that we need another term that captures the humanity and individuality we mean by it. Homo sum, but more than this: homo sapiens, faber, ludens, and so forth.

Or we defend the term, make it our own and then dissolve it along with gender so homo sum can emerge as a circus of individuality.

We still find each other, pair up, arrange accordingly, a borrowed brother here, an old lion there to keep us going, progeny not yet shifted to the lab, although perhaps Bren can work on it? I never asked her if Trent was good in bed, but then she had Jo by the same means. I envision the lab as Paola’s breakthrough project, this lab that will free us to be homo ludens until our desires are finally sated.

28.

Taking a break from myself, I pick up The White Goddess and read Graves' assertion that, just as Luca's father had it, we're all descended from seafaring Mediterranean traders ("mercantile" he has it). It's a good antidote to contemporary certainties. Jo shows me an article about a Japanese "bourgeois Marxist" who wants to bring decroissance to that growth-obsessed country, arguing that growth in that vein is killing Japan (and us, by extension). Federico is making a similar argument. The subject of the article is less into farming, he admits, although volunteering at a coop of some kind.

Jo is in love with her Federico, with their baby, God willing, with autumn’s cooler weather. At points this summer, I longed for Berkeley and Inverness, that climate, and Bren misses her family despite their visits. This makes us wonder if we can live more expansively, give our lives some decroissance, less harried by the several clocks, human and institutional, that have mostly run our lives. I think back to my pandemic insight that it was wrong to cut life up this way. Bren speaks of adjusting her role here to be less immersed in the doing while still guiding how it's done and why as unfolding questions. Her seniority makes this a natural transition.

In my heart of hearts, I want to be the writer I set out early to be, within the labyrinth of scholarship and an academic career. I found the thread and made it to here, out in the light, one could say, but Theseus betrayed his Ariadne. That's not my intention. I want to be the writer I set out early to be, and I have the means now to do so.

Whether I have the talent, the staying power, is a different question.

Luca produced considerable late work, freed at last from the rest.

In her selection, Caterina helpfully annotates the periods in which he wrote and provides a brief but astute reading of their impact on the poems—not literal, but suggestive. She really was his daughter.

Yet Bren's insistence that the questions that arise for her need serious, ongoing discussion resonates with me. They arise for all of us in this fraught era if we're honest. From our terrace, it all looks pretty rosy, but t00 many past examples suggest it may not be.

29.

Genia visits and we compare notes. "The lives of these others are like a garden party," she says. "Afterward, you remember snatches of conversations better than the rest, and the laughter at a joke better than the joke, if you even heard it—the expression of the joke-teller."

After she leaves, I sit on the terrace and ask, not for the first time, "Who are these Piranesi?" Genia asserts that our two families have converged in some sense, citing Caterina, herself, and Jo, the vessels of her theory, bearing its proof. I'm unsure, remembering her older daughter's wedding, the fact that Jo acquired a title. Although not adverse to titles, our family doesn't bestow them. Yet she's right in the sense that her ancestor, faced with the eclipse of nobility, took up the attributes of the class that supplanted it, grafted it to a nearly dead tree and made it bloom again. Smaller, but still an expanse of land, these farmsteads, held in trust by the hereditary affection of peasants for her family, and vice versa. I idealize it, but it's true that they arrived at an arrangement rooted in their mutual interest. It’s here that our two families find their common ground.

Although seafaring traders, we preferred the land, and limited trade to a handpicked clientele, including those we bedded, desiring most of all to live our lives as we saw them. While Genia's family left a trail of culture, it bore the weight of administration, maintaining power, holding together a family stretched by ambition. Our family exists to make life supportable for its members. I use the word in the French sense of modest affluence, a byproduct of its abiding interest in a clientele of a certain type and its constant urge to edge past the implication of bespoke to find others wanting it: the best cuts of meat on feast days; the prize horses on race days; goods they could pass down that didn't cost the earth to purchase. Women benefit specifically, their desires unusually taken into account, or is this an illusion, "We were bred for it. We were the lure." Both are true, Monique Wittig notwithstanding. Language does that, and both sexes can play these language games, as Wittgenstein called them.

30.

"My studio has 40 tables, one for every project," Jordi Savall told his audience at Berkeley's First Congregational Church. I only have one table in the room that also holds my writing desk, but it has four sections in emulation of him: Wittgenstein; the bourgeoisie's split; Bren's seminar; and the family history. The last is why I'm on a train headed for Piranesi. I want to revisit places I saw before and speak again with the women who met me there, but I also want to take a walk with Luca and his daughter. They could be a fifth project.

The family history is clear enough that I made an outline. It's a kind of nine patch, I realized, sketching it, with repeated motifs that come along with the Piranesi, partly owing to our intermarriages. If I knew more about them, Maria and Guillermo would be a 10th. It might be one of Jo's project—a side of us we've left unexplored.

Luca should open the history. He keeps appearing, not only in his own journals and letters, but in those of the women who knew him.

In postmodern fashion, I should get equal billing, since I'm doing the work. (Natalia's labors for Cosima rebuke me.) I’m tempted to include Caterina, given my childhood affection for her, revived by the letters she and Luca exchanged. Maybe a future project?

As this account suggests, some of this work might bring me back to Berkeley or my old terrace on the ridge. We solved our dilemma by ignoring it or at any rate postponing it, although Bren ruled out returning to Kaiser, very much liking the scale of my mother's clinic.

The seminar she envisioned is under way, ad hoc still so my absence isn't problematic. I'd like it to take that impromptu form if possible, allowing for guests, etc., that have to be pinned down in advance.

The train tunnels through to Piranesi and the sea air penetrates the carriage, much as it does when we arrive at the ridge house. I miss the sea in Modena, but here I am, in some sense home again.

31.

"Triton's concubine," Luca's gloss on Piranesi, make sense. My harbor walks with him and Caterina never took in the Twins, but I'm on the west one writing this. They're like two spread legs, knees forming lookout points, the rest fortified battlements that command the harbor. Where they meet the sea, lighthouses mark the entry. It's fairly wide, but still treacherous, especially in the fog. Sailing in, you have to tack from the last buoys against a north wind, Luca said, and rocks are rocks. The locals know the ropes, but other may not.

Her knees are level with the town, the harbor lower. Stormwater channels cut through it, once a river. Giulia sometimes sketched here, views that look across and back. I doubt she had Luca's image in mind; more likely the sheer materiality and the light.

To see their work again is one reason I made this trip. It can be seen elsewhere now, their reputations growing. There's an economy of line and an innate power to it that remind me of Zen's Hakuin.

Leo remarked the other day how her stay with them helped her see where her affinity for form came from. They were so intent in making their art, she added, despite their great age. I don't yet fall in that category, but am old enough to be aware how it affects us when the props of our unexamined lives start to fall away. Leo is now older than them. She’s also inherited their tenacity about their work.

My informant friends here are wonderfully supportive. I met one of Nora's descendants, a young writer, who's quite determined to do something with her formidable ancestor, so pertinent right now.

I spoke with a Piranesi cousin about the possibility of buying a place here, borrowing Cosima's instructions to Luca. I sat at our poet's harbor bolt hole desk, laying my hands on it, feeling its vibes as he likely did once, and imagining the divan creaking.

This is the third of what I think of as the Télos trilogy, tracing a family and their intermarriages across a century. I started it in the summer of 2022, inspired by writing classes from Berlin led by Clare Wigfall and encouraged locally by Laurie Snowden. My daughter and editorial partner, Elizabeth Snowden, kindly sells the printed copies at Pallas, her gallery in San Francisco, my sole distributor.

—Berkeley, February 2024

Published for @_p_a_l_l_a_s_—thepallasgallery.com

by Snowden & Parman editorial studio—spedit.net Text & photo-collages © 2024 by John J. Parman (Photo left: Elizabeth Snowden at Pallas.)

Modena is the last of the Télos trilogy, "a family saga in nine acts,"

that follows the Piranesi from the Italian port town from which they took their name to Argentina, northern California, and Italy again.

Franny, who traded one set of fascists for another, leads off. Jo and Lina follow, having joined Leo, Franny's daughter, in Modena, all the strands of intermarriage, and personal tics and desires in tow.