It was a sudden gift, a gift of time I would not have thought to ask for: her afternoon bath was sacred. And yet there it was. We walked together across the piazza, spurned Florian, and went through to the piazzetta, because an orchestra was playing there, and because we could see the sunshine on the water. It was a beautiful day, clear, with a slight breeze, and we sat at an outside table and talked and felt the air and the sun and the freshness of the water beyond us, and listened to the sentimental music of the orchestra. Did they play the song I was to hear from a car window a few months after my mother’s death? Perhaps they did; certainly it was that music that returned this Venetian day to me. What I remember about sitting there at the café, while my mother sang along to some of the tunes and played out the rhythms of others on the table, abstractedly, with one hand, and talked to me about what time we would have dinner, and about her first trip to Venice when she was in college, and about friends and small events: what I remember most about it is that I was, at that moment, completely happy. It was the simplest, easiest, most unlabored sense in the world. I felt that there was nothing I wanted on earth that was not mine, that to be there in that café, eating—who knows what I was eating—perhaps ice cream, talking to my mother and listening to the faint strains of music and the man whistling at the next table, watching the pigeons group themselves around a few scattered tourists—it was fairyland, as full of enchantment as any promise my mother had ever made. She of course looked beautiful, and she, too, was happy, and I was a part of her happiness as much as she was a part of mine, and so our happiness seemed to form a sort of cloud of magic in which we sat, like the lucky Queen and Prince in a fairy tale. I saw—or rather, see in retrospect—not simply that it was a lovely moment, but that I was unscathed, in a way that I was soon to lose and will never reach again. For an hour or two, I felt a total and absolute rapture that nothing could mar. And what is most astonishing to me is that I didn’t have any inkling then of how rare such feelings are. I thought that this was simply what life was, that every childhood was full of such love, that everyone in the world went on much as I did, felt what I felt, knew what I knew. I understood by the time I was thirteen that I was lucky to get to Venice for spring vacation, but I had not the slightest idea of how remarkable it was to grow up in the constant radiance of my mother’s affection. Nor indeed did I know, then, that I had already embarked on a course of exchanging easier for more difficult pleasures, that my mother’s love was one of the most difficult pleasures of all, that I had been paying for it for years and would go on paying for it forever. I did not guess, then, that emotions so profound and so far-reaching might come only to those who were willing to suffer (I do not remember being asked if I were willing), that I could have such tremendous joy only if I gave up the anodyne pleasure of ordinary freedoms. I did not know that those children who grew up outside of this passionate empathy might live to the end of their days on the easy satisfactions of the manifest world, while for me love itself would remain so perilous, so engaging, and so entire as to be almost inconceivable.