On our vacations to the beach, my parents’ friends always teased my mother for her complete lack of irony. She clobbered their Catholic University professor-friends at Trivial Pursuit, which they didn’t take very well. She didn’t like the sea but made us stay for three months. She loathed the beach. She’d shuttle us back up to the house after lunch, in our scalding-hot car, before we’d really started enjoying ourselves, before the informal soccer games starting at six, when the sand was tolerable.

In the nineties, she was spending way too much time lying on the sofa, and then we learned, after she had a long discussion with our grandmother, that it was decided Mom could do what she loved most—study. She enrolled in Pontifical Gregorian University to study theology.

She became friends with a Brazilian nun, a psychologist whose dark face was perfectly round. She didn’t complete her dissertation because the professor assigned her Habermas, and she wasn’t interested in Habermas.

I don’t know much about my mother. At times she’s expressed particular hurts by doing things carelessly. Once she dropped some eggshell into the custard she had in the mixer; out of sheer laziness, she didn’t do it over and served us crunchy custard. She pretended this wasn’t annoying.

But talking about my mother, my language is muddled, imprecise—it’s all hearsay.

One afternoon, we were talking together in our new calm manner. “I decided not to pursue my teaching license because I didn’t want to leave you by yourself.” She wasn’t complaining when she said this, just owning up to her fears. “Maybe I could’ve done it after all.”

I don’t remember much. Bags from La Standa stuffed with junk food, handed out to us and polished off in an afternoon. And incredible trips to America where we bought all kinds of crap at drugstores and ate it in our motel room. And the apartment in Rome where nothing happened, and I’d read, write, play music.

When Dad came home at night, he felt like an outsider; we were already deep into our own slow rhythm.

My mother can really provoke my brother: he’ll be talking about something he finds important, and she’ll always ask the wrong question, be rude to him. With her grandsons, too, like that time when Gionata was nervous, and she shut him up inside a room with a glass door. On the other side of the door, he was anxious: “It’s all closed! It’s all closed!” And she stood there, arms crossed, telling her grandson she wasn’t going to open up for him. I stood behind her. And it’s not lost on me that the only time I really portrayed her in the preceding sections was in that Christmas scene when she drove Gionata crazy with jealousy, asking him if he was happy that the twins were born.