My sister and I asked our waiter to wrap up our ceviche leftovers, and we finished them off at home, after smoking a joint. Sprawled on the living room couch, I started stressing about my friend, now my future boss, that he might be looking to start some kind of perverted love square between the four of us: him, me, my sister, and Francesca, an anxiety I kept to myself. (Now, seeing him daily, I know him as a man whose wants are illegible, who’s so involved with his family that it’s almost as if he has no desires of his own. He often gets free tickets to see AC Milan, and we’ve also gone to see Juventus play in Turin, sitting in a fashion house’s skybox, with spumante and out-of-season strawberries in that lounge overlooking the field.)

My sister gave me the master bedroom and continued to sleep in her half of the living room, behind the dividing wall.

Her vulgarity in speaking of money, while perhaps her most annoying trait, is the golden glitter of freedom. When she was surviving in Bologna by working in coffee bars and sewing clothes, she’d already decided that she couldn’t separate from the family without a pile of money. In the end, out of the three of us, she was the one who most resembled our father.

It would be easy to portray Irene as my savior. But a woman who saves someone is a woman who winds up punished on the following page; the role of savior that men apply to women in some narrative form is our wooden horse, concealing our desire to penetrate and destroy.

But if she doesn’t save or damn someone, what does a woman do on a page written by a man? This is what I’m trying to find out. If she doesn’t save or damn someone, maybe this female character wanders, appears, and disappears. Until, perhaps, I’m truly attached to them and stop feeling that they’re only floating shadows …

After all, in the real world, a woman appears and disappears and wanders with the same moral freedom as a man. No—better—if she contains this freedom within herself, if she doesn’t buckle to the model that insists she either save or damn someone, then nothing prevents her from moving about according to her own principles. Then we start to tell the story of her life and discover we’re asking her what she does, who she belongs to, while the son gets to enter and exit the father-narrator’s house as he sees fit. But what does a woman become if we treat her like a man, or like someone else, neither man nor woman?

The woman caught in our prose net is fixed to the paper with a pin. What’s she free to do, now that I’ve pinned her in my display case, along with the others?