An exchange lasting only a few seconds, that I’ve homed in on, out of a trivial conversation about parties and getting drunk. While the conversation resumed its cheerful tones, I felt like a hit man sent from Rome to break my sister’s heart. I’d prepared her for months, reassured her, manipulated her into opening up, and now that she was open—in just a matter of seconds—I’d stuck a knife into her gut. Maybe, as a son, I had no choice but to obey, and I was the scorpion on the frog’s back, letting the frog carry him across the river, promising not to sting her, but doing it all the same, because it’s his nature.

I went back to the Auditorium with my mother and Barbara. Pappano, the music director, was performing Brahms on the piano accompanied by the first violin and first cello of the Santa Cecilia Orchestra.

At intermission, Barbara got up to greet some ex-colleagues and collaborators. My mother and I chatted in our seats.

“What do you think? It’s a nice space, isn’t it?”

“Dad would like it,” she answered.

“So next time, we bring him, too.”

“He’d gladly come,” she said, “from Heaven.”

Her father’s been dead for thirty-five years, so generally when she uses this word, she’s referring to my father. The tenderness in her voice embarrassed me.

When the performance was over, while we slowly took the stairs, among the crowd, I slipped my hand in my jacket and discovered the toffee, softened now, that Gionata had given me that afternoon and that I’d dropped into my pocket and forgotten. I was holding the candy by one of its little yellow paper ears, waiting for it to harden in the cool night air. I started to unwrap it, and my mother asked: “Is that the toffee you offered me?”

I said it was, handing her the unwrapped candy.

“You have more, don’t you?” she asked, and popped it in her mouth and started chewing.

All those moments will be lost in time, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

The night before my fortieth birthday, Francesco helped carry the party supplies from my car up to their apartment. He was in between jobs; I was free to return to Rome that week because I was preparing interviews pretty much on my own; Barbara was starting to take on individual projects with a Milan agency; and Giò had no steady job. We joked about my fortieth birthday party being held at their place—we still had renters—at such an unusual period in our lives. The party was set for tomorrow but the four of us, dear friends, would wait for midnight together.

Out on the balcony, Barbara and Giò were kissing and hugging and asking questions, sharing news, while Fra and I set the cases in one corner of the living room–kitchenette. Then the two of us went out to have a smoke on the porch swing: Barbara went into the living room, taking over, discussing with Giò how things should be arranged.