Mid-December. On a silver-blue morning soon after her fifty-ninth birthday, Mehran takes a trip with Riccarda. They are on San Francesco’s trail; in the span of a single day, they visit Gubbio and Assisi. Many years ago, they had seen Dario Fo at London’s Riverside Theatre, reading a monologue he had written about the saint. In Fo’s version, Francesco was not only an animal-loving man of peace, but a clown, a subversive, God’s jester. Who better to visit his shrine with than Riccarda, the musician and cradle Catholic? Mehran, lazily mystic rather than religious (but resolutely Muslim), is entranced by the day; by Assisi, by the tomb’s tranquility. He lights a candle, shuts his eyes and prays for Riccarda’s health as he would at the shrine of a Sufi saint.

1993

An April morning. Lilla phones at dawn. She’s ringing, Mehran thinks, with belated birthday greetings.

She says: ‘Be strong. She’s dead.’

He’s been wondering why Riccarda didn’t call on his birthday a few days before, as she always does. ‘She lived like a warrior,’ someone says: ‘She didn’t give up fighting, even at the end.’ But she forgot her Italian and her English in her last days, and spoke only Spanish.

Neither Lilla nor Mehran go to her funeral.

O cuore! Congedati, e vivi.

He spends some weeks in silence.

Then Lilla calls again. ‘Come over to Rome. Take the next flight you can get. We can talk about her, spend a little time together.’

Mehran hesitates.

She says: ‘I’ll drive you to Assisi. Have our own memorial for her. She’d like that.’

Mehran books a flight and flies out two days later.

When Mehran reaches Rome, he calls Marco – on impulse, or from a sense of duty to the past, he doesn’t remember why. Marco drives over immediately to pick him up.

‘I’m sorry. I don’t really know what to say. I know how much she meant to you.’

Somewhere in his eyes, Mehran thinks, Marco must hold a picture of me, as the young man who fell so briefly in love, and a memory of the woman I loved then, though he never liked her.

They’re in the Monte Mario flat Marco has borrowed from his parents, with whom, until recently, he had been living in Frascati after his marriage fell apart. He sits there, opposite Mehran, as the night wears on, drinking wine and smoking Marlboros, shirtless and in shorts, his eyes threaded with red, his large hands with their short fingers resting palm upwards on his bare knees, and he tells Mehran, again, in a hot torrent of broken phrases, how Marvi had propositioned him in Mehran’s sitting room that evening on his last trip, before he left London.