“I’m sorry. It’s just all these people. It’s the way they talk. Everybody is so intense—see the way their muscles are rigid—as if they are on the point of shouting the whole time. But what is it they are shouting about?”

Pina laughed. “You know, we’re spoiled in the Crypt. We emerge as helpless as nuns evicted from their convents.”

“I don’t know.” Lucia pointed to a group of three nuns in simple pale gray vestments. Chatting brightly in a small pavement café, they all wore sunglasses and expensive-looking trainers, their cell phones set among the cappuccinos before them. One wore a baseball cap over her wimple. Rome always seemed full of nuns, here to visit the Vatican, and perhaps to catch a glimpse of the pope, El Papa. “They seem all right.”

Pina linked her arm through Lucia’s. “Come on. When we get to the Villa Borghese I’ll buy you an ice cream.”

Lucia remained unhappy. As usual when out of the Crypt, she longed for its calm and order, where every direction she looked she would see a face like her own. But she knew that even back in the Crypt, even in her dormitory, she would have trouble finding peace. She was layered with secrets now—the painful mystery of her menstruation, Rosa’s peculiar pursuit of her with her hints of an assignment to come—secrets, huge painful bewildering secrets, in a place where you weren’t supposed to hold any secrets from those around you, not even the smallest.

Still, she was relieved when they reached the river, and the crowd thinned a little.

They crossed over the Vittorio Emanuele bridge and walked northeast, following the great curve of the Tiber. There were houseboats moored to the banks; Lucia saw people sunbathing, laid out over the boats’ decks like drying fish.

The Villa Borghese was in an area where wealthy Romans had built their country estates since imperial times. It had been saved from the twentieth-century property developers when the state had bought it, and preserved it as a park. Lucia had always liked these gardens, with their winding paths and half-hidden flower beds; she and her sisters had been brought here when they were small. It was best to avoid the weekends, when the population of Rome moved in here en masse, overwhelming the place with yelling children, chatting mothers, fathers with radios clamped to their ears for soccer scores. Today, though there were plenty of children, brought here by their mothers after school, their shouting seemed remote and scattered.