Normally, if we meet some parishioners on the way home, my mother will criticize my clothing in front of them; today she didn’t. And she’s also not putting on the naive attitude of someone who’s “too humble” to attend premieres—humble in the Christian sense of being meek, poor in spirit. She’s comfortable, in her own way, anxiously waiting for the lights to dim and for the writer to appear onstage, my friend, the writer whose book inspired the monologue, which she’s read. Apparently, my mother knows how to be at the theater, understands the proper etiquette, though she hasn’t been in decades. I’m mesmerized by this. I don’t think I’ve ever gone with her. The Auditorium is five minutes from her home.

The lights go down, the writer makes his entrance, microphone twig against his cheek, and starts talking. My mother listens closely; she listens like an intellectual, nodding, following the cause-and-effect relationships in the monologue, approving with comments like “Right, right…” I can’t look at her straight on, but every time she shifts in her seat, I feel it vibrating in my legs and back. I also tend to nod and whisper, “Right, right,” and tonight, we both wind up saying this at many of the same lines. This tendency to nod and whisper that I got from her has shaped my life and world, my relationships, work, habits, lovers. In my mother, it’s a curiosity that’s survived her moral and religious choices, like people who stopped playing tennis after adolescence but immediately regain their form if they play again.

At intermission, we eavesdrop on the depressing conversations going on around us.

I mutter: “They’re all talking about people who are either sick or dead.”

“We’re an old country.”

When it’s over, we leave, and I greet some famous writers, happy for her to see. “Oh, that’s X, right?” Outside, in the cold of the colonnade, by the bookstore windows: “This was nice—thank you. And the Auditorium’s so close to home.”

Clipped sentences, restrained, fleeting, orchids that don’t flower every year.

I was sad to see her walking even a little slower than the last time I’d noticed her gait. Other times, I would’ve tried to raise her hackles: “Why are you being so normal today? So it turns out you do know how to be civilized?” I didn’t do this, and as I write now, I take some pride in knowing I refrained from lecturing her on her behavior that generally annoys me.

She lets me take her home. I park the car in their garage, hand over the keys, watch her take the stairs after the gate, down to the main entrance. I head for my scooter and, feeling emotional, I peel out in the freezing cold. Piazza Ungheria, piazza Fiume, Castro Pretorio, San Lorenzo, all the traffic lights still operational.