The seats are cramped for the two of us and we haven’t removed our coats; I note the kinship of our bodies, the same way we both rush to take our seats and then never quite settle in. She folds her arms and cranes her neck to look around, but she isn’t frenetic, like usual. We never go out together, and we didn’t used to, either, when I was a boy: I remember seeing only a handful of movies with my parents. And sometimes “going out for pizza.” And trips abroad, the world opening up to us. But our life didn’t feature fixed cultural engagements. My mother comes from a well-educated family—but Catholic—to the point of being, culturally speaking, anti-twentieth-century, averse, then, to rituals like theater or street demonstrations; my father escaped his lower-middle-class, politically right-wing, borderline-fascist background, but he worked so hard that he distanced himself from the intellectual friends of his youth, for whom, I’d imagine, entrepreneurship was essentially worse than the academic barony they’d chosen for themselves. In spite of the fact that, since their twenties, they’d been “politically engaged” and “great readers” (my mother still reads, but not literature: biographies, historical novels, newspapers, blogs on the Vatican and royalty), they’ve never been the type to take their children to the theater, which, as an adult, I found a bit odd, even eerie, because while I kept reading books and meeting intellectuals, I still held on to the belief that I was less informed, less educated than my parents were. Then, like in the movies, suggesting a night outside the norm, and finding myself here with my mother, waiting, indifferently, for the start of a performance, rediscovering how elegant she is, how shy … she won’t mention—is poised enough not to mention—her fear that the Auditorium is a “vulnerable target” for a terrorist attack, the favorite subject these days. From her composure, I sense a different sort of life she might have led, a woman of the world allowing herself some of the pleasures this century has to offer.

Normally, if we meet some parishioners on the way home, my mother will criticize my clothing in front of them; today she didn’t. And she’s also not putting on the naive attitude of someone who’s “too humble” to attend premieres—humble in the Christian sense of being meek, poor in spirit. She’s comfortable, in her own way, anxiously waiting for the lights to dim and for the writer to appear onstage, my friend, the writer whose book inspired the monologue, which she’s read. Apparently, my mother knows how to be at the theater, understands the proper etiquette, though she hasn’t been in decades. I’m mesmerized by this. I don’t think I’ve ever gone with her. The Auditorium is five minutes from her home.