He doesn’t understand my conundrum, doesn’t see why I insist upon being stuck in my life. Even the fact that I am here taking care of him does not strike him as being ironic. He will recover, but it is his first setback, and he’s at an age where this signals a decline.

More and more he will need to rely on other people. ‘It need not be you,’ he says. ‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I have money. I’ll get a nurse. And if I outlive my money, then I’m the problem of the state. Not you.’

‘But what will have been the point? Why breed? Why have the structure of family? Why live together for years and years, bearing each other’s inconsistencies, only to abandon them?’

Papi’s fingers itch from inactivity. He’s been forced to give up smoking but he still asks for his papers. He makes stacks of beautifully rolled cigarettes. ‘Take them and distribute them on the streets,’ he says, laughing.

I gather up the rollies and put them into Nonno Danilo’s silver cigarette case. This too is an act of connection. The smooth age of it in my palm.

There’s an afternoon when I eat lunch in Campo San Polo. It’s one of the widest, sunniest campos in Venice, so it’s always filled with children and dogs in the afternoons, and in winter they put in an ice-skating rink and around it there are stands selling sweets and glossy pink zucchero filato.

A family at the restaurant – American I think, drinking tall beers, smiling at their pizzas. Three boys, golden-haired, one of them with Down’s. He is shorter than his brothers, squatter, and his mother has cut the crusts off his pizza. They are smiling, looking at the pigeons, enjoying the postcard of their family vacation. The parents are suntanned, the father perhaps a little too pink. He leans towards the boy, squeezes his hand. It undoes something in me. I have been keeping the story of Lucia to myself. Papi will not hear too much of it, so I must ration out bits and pieces until he signals that it is enough.

I walk up to the family. ‘Excuse me, I’m so sorry for interrupting.’

The woman is in a striped long-sleeved T-shirt, her face an explosion of freckles. ‘My sister is like this,’ I say, and I look to the boy. ‘She lives in India. I’m sorry for coming over. It’s just I miss her, and I think she would like it very much here.’

The woman nods. ‘This is Daniel,’ she says. The other two sons don’t get an introduction. Daniel smiles. He has widely spaced teeth and his eyes could be Lucia’s eyes.