I went through the portico and found her in the garden, smoking a cigarette. She wore a blouse in an old Venetian style with the bodice cut square. Her figure was fuller than mine, more voluptuous. Her eyes were darker, warmer. She looked at me appraisingly, as if she had seen the likes of me before and there was no reason to ask me what I wanted, or why I was approaching her, because she already knew. She had seen me before in a hundred guises.

“Do you have a cigarette?” I asked.

“You don’t look like a smoker.”

“I shouldn’t. But I enjoy it so.”

I smoked on occasion, but I didn’t have any real passion for it. I wasn’t an addict, not yet, but I enjoyed how the smoke spiraled upward, off the edge of my fingers, through the branches overhead. We smoked under an arbor hedged with wild roses.

“This rose,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”

“It’s red.”

“The petals—the touch is very soft to the fingers. And the color—”

“I see the color.”

“It’s just so beautiful.”

“Impatient?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do. Regardless, it will wilt and die.”

“It’s still on the branch.”

“The oil from your fingers will kill the petals.”

Isabella drew hard on her cigarette. The gesture accentuated the sharpness of her jaw and narrowed the lines about her mouth. I could see up close the fine spidering around her eyes. I saw her age. It didn’t matter. When she let the smoke out, the way she turned her head in profile—she was devastating in her beauty.

“Well, I suppose everything shares the same fate,” I said. “Except Rome, of course. Rome is eternal.”

“No,” she said. “Rome is dead. In all the important ways.”

Behind us, the stones creaked. It was my brother. Isabella reached down and crushed her cigarette into a flowerpot. I did the same, imitating her, and felt a sudden craving for another.

“Yes, Rome is quite dead,” said Johnny.

The sentiment was fashionable in certain circles, and Johnny was aware of that. More than once, we’d heard artists and writers complain about the very things that brought so many people to the city. All the ancient art, the massive efforts at restoration, the eternal focus on what had been done in the past—it was too much, they claimed. It stifled them. It made it impossible to do anything new.

“But I don’t mind the dead,” Johnny said.

“No?”

“They were hard workers,” he said, gesturing at our surroundings. “And they left such beautiful things behind.”

My brother looked Isabella up and down. He was a flirt, my brother. Everyone in Rome flirted. Isabella regarded him with a mix of suspicion and pleasure, the way people often regarded Johnny. My brother had that softness in the eyes, that smile.

“What do you do for my husband, exactly?”

“I keep people happy.”

“You’re just a boy.”

“I’m thirty years old.”

“A man, then.”