I’ve stopped telling my sister I love her every time we drink together. We’ve talked so much. I told her if I got back together with my wife, I’d want to kick out the couple living in her old place and move in there with Barbara. Irene said it was bound to happen sooner or later—a brother and sister living together after forty is pathetic (we had an old couple like that in my parents’ building in Rome)—but until then, she was happy to have me.

She came up to Milan in the spring.

She wasn’t used to panoramic views, and she suffered from vertigo. But she did enjoy seeing the tall buildings at a distance, from my sister’s living room. For ten years, she’d lived on the main floor, and in Anzio, she grew up on the main floor in two different places. At Irene’s, she never leaned over the long balcony, to watch the boulevard. The railing was a neutral color, and we both felt it put us far too close to the emptiness beyond, and sometimes, just for the pleasure of feeling ill, we’d play at seeing who could stay out there the longest, huddled on the pavement, back to the wall. We’d goad each other to venture farther, to the point where it felt like we were floating. We didn’t remind each other of that balcony where we’d made love the night we first met, when neither of us admitted to our vertigo.

She came up to Milan with her winter wardrobe, which she put away in the hallway walk-in closet, a space with shelves and two bars, all hidden behind a curtain.

She went out to network. A woman she knew had a publicity agency for cultural activities. Events, book launches, film premieres. At night she told me about it. She never felt like going to parties or bars or restaurants. After dinner, she played cards with Irene, or went through the LinkedIn profiles of her many new contacts in Milan.

We talked almost exclusively about work, comparing Rome to Milan, the former in free fall, according to everyone, filthy and irredeemable, the latter cruel, modern, and rich, its private foundations constructing buildings in the business district, works of art like the Feltrinelli-Microsoft headquarters: was this humanism or the end of humanism?

Right away we told each other that we mustn’t pressure the relationship to succeed, that we should just be together in that apartment, in that city, and not force anything: and sometimes she understood that we were getting along and starting to communicate again and then she’d grow frightened because deep down she felt the urge to trust in us, but also not to. Then she usually called her father, which put her in a bad mood, because her father had no capacity to listen. Now bothered, she could focus on that interminable problem and stop thinking about us for a few hours.

Would we ever settle down? And what does settling even mean—is it only a metaphor?