“In style?” I said. This was the same woman who’d sat, so dignified and pleasant, on a red orchestra seat in the second performance hall in the Auditorium.

“Certain life choices are also meant to wound,” she added, of course referring to Irene. But it feels forced for me to explain that exchange: it would betray her nature: religious, allusive, serpentine. Like an oracle, you could take that comment as referring to the two of them, my parents, instead of their daughter. “Certain life choices are also meant to wound.” What a heroic admission that would be. Or maybe it was intended as a universal truth to contemplate. As I write now, I can visualize both my sister’s thin hair under her wig and my mother’s hair, so dull. I jot down: “incomprehensible incomprehension.”

I don’t remember what else we said on the phone, but I remember my mother’s small voice, strange, not my mother: for the rest of the call I kept thinking this wasn’t my mother.

Irene joined me and my colleagues in that bar, then Barbara joined us, and I did something I’m ashamed of. They could tell I was sad, and I told a group of colleagues, along with my wife and sister, that I’d just gotten off the phone with my mother. As you do with people our age, joking that parents can be such a burden. This bad habit of exorcising the mystical journey you take in your relationships with your aging parents … I said they didn’t feel like throwing a big party. I’d already asked Irene if she might organize something in Milan and invite the family and she suggested having it at a restaurant, having lunch together (I hadn’t brought up that our parents thought Barbara and I were renting something on our own, not staying with Irene, and I also hadn’t explained to them that Irene wasn’t living in the apartment she owned), but anyway, she agreed to my proposal about a family celebration. Now, in front of everybody, I told her: “They don’t feel like coming to Milan. Maybe we’ll just go down to Rome, but I don’t really know if we’re going to do some organized thing with them.”

“Some organized thing”—what a stupid thing to say. At these words, my sister, who’s shorter than me, her hair cut short right now, like Mia Farrow’s, dressed a bit more butch than usual, a wild boy, maybe because she’s hanging out with lesbians more than straight people, my sister seemed to shrink in size, and she stared ahead with the same expression I saw on Gionata’s face at Christmas, when my mother asked if he was happy about his brothers being born.

But different from Gionata: Irene’s furrowed features smoothed over into a docile smile with such fluidity, it was painful to watch. She said: “Don’t worry. I’ll come down to Rome anyway for your birthday. If something happens with everybody, great.” She’d adopted that same vagueness typical of our family, but a sweeter version. “Otherwise, plan a nice party at some bar, and I’ll make sure to be there.”