I remember her stretched out for hours on the living room couch surrounded by journals, books, plates with bits of cake, all lying on a bright tomato-red, black, and ocher rug. I was a teenager.

She had a benign tumor, has done postural gymnastics, sometimes walks with a limp. She’s basically healthy, except for one real problem: phlegmons, abscesses that emerge in places I can’t see, around her stomach, I think. Every time I ask her about her health she answers: “Oh, everything’s fine, just those phlegmons…” We’ve never tied them to any particular illness, so they feel more symbolic, a memento that ills do exist. “You wouldn’t believe how disgusting they are…”

She has a flawless complexion, and a weak chin like her mother and first grandchild. She loves wearing pearls, but she isn’t the least bit vain, except when it comes to bragging about her sons.

[Characters in books get one description only, as if there’s a starting point and then the changes inflicted by the plot. But in life, we’re continuously taking stock of the people we know, describing them afresh, to see if we’ve understood something new. So maybe a character description should be left for the end of a book, a final sum-up. Ecce Mommy—she can’t be “Mommy”—I have to call her “my mother,” or my wife will think I’m a baby. The task in describing someone real, someone you know: there’s so much to synthesize, year in and year out, endless discovery, fragments, I see a bit of who my mother is, with each passing month, the eye thaws a little, sees a little more, discovers moles, a twitching eyelid, a certain motion to the hip … Barbara, for instance, unnerved me when she pointed out that Gionata gestured just like his grandmother, and this felt like a conspiracy, not the detail per se, but that I’d never noticed before, the way someone might feel detecting an airplane contrail up in the blue sky, suspicious they might be spreading mind-controlling substances.]

After dinner we sit in front of the turned-off TV set; we’re on two couches arranged in an L, my father and I on one couch together. My mother has her iPad beside her and my father, a mini in his lap. I ask him about his leg: rehabilitation’s good, physical therapy’s a trip, perfect for someone his age, he’s always wanted to do it, he says, every day, some new method to get more out of life: “I’m very pleased.”

I tell my mother: “I’ve got two tickets to the Auditorium, to something I’m sure you’d like, about the Gospel.”

“Oh, wonderful, if I don’t have to help out over there. If Luca and the nanny say I can, with Daniela away … I said I was available, so I have to be around.”