The performance hasn’t started. We’re in the fourth row, the theater’s filling up; my mother wants me to tell her who’s who, and we discuss famous names, famous faces.

“I’m the only one who doesn’t know anyone.” She states this without condescension, embarrassment, neurosis: succinctly and nicely put.

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.