After that first Christmas of unemployment, I felt the urge to go see her in Milan. My newfound intimacy with Barbara had brought up emotions I didn’t know I had. At my parents’, I looked through photos from when we were little, before Luca was born, and in these pictures, Irene was so vibrant—a messy little girl who played dress-up on her own, wearing scraps of cloth, bangles stacked on her wrists, red plastic roses taped on like brooches—so full of love and feeling that it made me feel unfamiliar to myself. I wanted to know her, I felt tender toward her, and I regretted never having known any other way to live than as I’d lived. Even at my wedding, such a short time ago, I hadn’t managed to talk to her, to approach that gray-blue wig of hers, not even when she started flirting with Barbara, charming her …

Besides, I wanted to know if she’d felt the same sense of sadness and death that I’d experienced that winter, if hidden in her heart she felt the same happiness I did at the bare plants in the courtyard or the shadows on the walls from the weak morning sun: she must have experienced that same sadness. Our extremest pleasure has some sort of groaning and complaining in it; would you not say that it is dying of pain? The beauty of dead flowers, indigo yellow orange and white: I waited in the cold for them to bloom again in a few months, and for the first time in my life, I felt the passing of the seasons.

I wrote her that I needed to take my mind off Rome for a bit and asked if I might stay with her a week. She responded to say that she didn’t have any business trips planned and would love to see me; if she had to go somewhere, I could stay at her place.

I arrived at night, like the time we moved her, fifteen years before. The light bulb factory was gone, replaced by a multilevel building with a garden out back. In the piazza on the corner, there was a bookstore-bistro that was well-known in my world. I’d always suspected it was near my sister’s, so I’d never gone when they’d invited me to literary events.

I remembered how we’d thrown the gate open to get the couch through. I called on the entry-phone, then stepped into the garden area: the print shop had been torn down and the courtyard ended at the orange construction fencing for the latest town houses in this growing complex. On the right, I recognized my sister’s large windows, low light coming through, her door open …