It was evening. Richard and his Italian girlfriend, Elena Conti, were having a dinner for some friends—my mother among them. Such are the incestuous circulations of real estate in a provincial Italian town. Opposite the mailboxes and the clanging iron gates that open to the front steps of each of the Via Maddalena properties, there are no houses. There are no buildings at all across the street. There is a railing there, and usually a few parked cars. And there is a litter-strewn drop to a stream that runs down from the hills and from the mountains above the hills. Via Maddalena is parallel to the stream, and like the creek, it seemed to have no ending. This was a distinction that I always felt suited the street’s holy namesake—a childhood notion I wisely kept to myself. I was not permitted to attend Mass when I was a little girl—a ban that made Sundays quite lonely for me on Via Maddalena. My mother’s anti-Catholicism is an even more stubbornly held belief than her other tenets of faith: her own work; the sculpture of Michelangelo, Bernini, and Constantin Brancusi; the music of Gato Barbieri and John Coltrane; the songs of Jacques Brel and Leonard Cohen; the writing of Italo Calvino and Charles Dickens; the effect of blond Lebanese hashish rolled into black French tobacco and smoked with her first coffee of the morning.
