‘Would you go?’ she had asked. ‘After everything you now know, would you still go?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It would be too terrifying.’

In the St Michele cemetery I search for a grave bearing my own name. It was common, wasn’t it? Italians, naming their children after dead grandfathers and grandmothers, never thinking how morbid it might be for a child to stumble upon a marker with their name etched in moss. I don’t find a grave with my name on it, but I do find a Giacinto Marisola. Even though I know it’s not my father, seeing his name on stone fills me with dread, a feeling of being orphaned.

Later that afternoon I agree to meet with Ilaria’s friend Roberto, who brought me the keys to the apartment. An idea settles that I might allow things to happen between us, should they proceed in that direction.

Roberto is a mathematician who works at the University of Ca’ Foscari. He is a small man made big with ideas. He’s wearing a waistcoast, a leather jacket and slim, mud-coloured jeans. He has delicate hands and disorderly hair.

We get a table on the sunny side of the Campo Santa Margherita, close to his office. It is a busy place, overrun with students. Roberto doesn’t drink alcohol or coffee. ‘It overexcites me,’ he says, somewhat ashamedly. He compensates with pear juice and crisps.

I order Proseccos and listen for an hour about the theories he’s working on. One is about how atoms reflect the movement of tourists on bridges in Venice. Another is about the dynamics of lists. Still another is about genes and homosexuality in men, and how this is in fact not a Darwinian paradox.

‘The research shows that homosexuality is linked to the X chromosomes,’ Roberto says. ‘It finds that women related to a gay man’s mother are more fecund; they have more children. And so it’s a kind of by-product evolved in women, a tax for this super-fecund woman. The gay male son balances the process. The genes don’t get washed out, but they spread around. We refer to it as the cock-loving gene. Passed on by the mother.

‘We were barking up the wrong tree forever. Of course, homosexuals are more obvious and noticeable than fecund women, so it was much subtler. But the penetrating gaze of science tells us we were looking at things wrong.’

‘What about lesbians?’

‘Oh, different story. It’s not clear yet. Do you have children?’

‘No.’

‘Do you want them?’

‘Not particularly.’

We sit like this for a while longer, watching as children and dogs race around. There is a fearlessness about them. They have no need to worry about cars, to look left or right before crossing.

Roberto’s phone rings. ‘Arrivo, arrivo!’ he yells into it. ‘I’m sorry, but I must go. Let’s meet again.’ He places €20 on the table, pecks both my cheeks and heads off with a strut.

I walk back to the apartment and what I think is this: that my life seems to have passed without any great tumult of feeling. Only music has had the capacity to upturn me. I have longed for more, for all the grand emotion that stems from sex, friendship, nature, art, God – but I have always found myself lacking. What has mattered after all? Not family. Not love. Not politics. Not literature. Only music, with its dark mutability.