They stopped in a small bar in a side street in Dorsoduro – crowded with voluble Venetians, the glass counters heaped with salumi, mozzarella, crostini, pickles – for a caffè stretto: took their drinks outside to stand on the pavement in the warm air. Bats flickered across the canal in knots of darkness. They talked about Sandy, who had dropped out of studying for his degree for the second time; Alex was disappointed in his son. He had waited impatiently for Sandy to enter into an adult understanding of the world and now couldn’t bear his ignorance of history, his lack of interest in books. His life was infantile, Alex said. — Lying in bed until the middle of the afternoon, absenting himself from conversation on his headphones, indifferent to ideas. He has no clue that there could be any other kind of life. There’s a scene I keep remembering, from one of my father’s novels – actually I’m translating this novel at the moment, I work on it at night when I can’t sleep. The scene might be from his experience, I don’t know, I never asked. I wish I had asked him more things. In this scene a boy watches his own father, a farmworker like my grandfather, given instructions in a heavy downpour of rain by his master who stands dry under an umbrella: his father’s face is blind with the rain.

— Sandy has his music, Zachary insisted. — He’s really talented.

— So you keep telling me. But he’s lazy.

— You should trust him. Wait and see.

— And I hate that music he plays.

In all honesty, Zachary said, Alex’s liking it was not what mattered. Liking it was for the young. Anyway, he liked it.

— But then, you’re eternally young.

— And you hate too many things, Zachary said affectionately.

They leaned on a stone parapet which gave back to their touch the heat of the day; the night air was balmy with warmth and wine and the water’s undertow of rot. Camouflaged among voices raised in Italian, their English speech drew them closer. — I suppose I do, Alex conceded. — I’ve always felt that was my task: to be vigilant against liking the wrong things. But it’s a mistake, perhaps. I suppose it’s what’s stopped me writing.

— Do you think? asked Zachary cautiously. Alex never spoke about not writing.

— The heavy hand of the critical law on the scribbler’s hunched shoulder. Thou shalt not! Also, this impression that I was living in an aftermath, in the bland time after the real things have happened and the real books have been written. The age of commentary follows the age of making.

— You could have done with a catastrophe, to write about.