Still, her grandsons adore her, look for her, climb all over her, always want to sleep with her, are desperate if she takes a trip to the Holy Land. She’s a baobab tree, all three of them will climb her. She’ll sit rigidly on the couch, wearing lace, and let the twins scramble onto her. Then she’ll lean way back against the couch, while they hold on tight, laughing, mumbling, turning to leap, and Gionata, already down, returning to grab and squeeze the twins, to try to pinch them and pull them off, and all of this happening while

in my mother’s arms

Gionata’s like her, weird, an end-in-himself. He says to her: “Grandma, always in church. Too many Masses. Let’s not go anymore.”

My mother will go around the neighborhood during the day giving Holy Communion to the sick.

I talked about my mother a long while. We wanted to get some fresh air, but I asked Francesco if we could stay inside, not go out onto the balcony: I was afraid of falling. We’d turned on the stereo; A Love Supreme was playing. I was stretched out on the floor again, with him on the couch. We were separated by a coffee table. We’d stopped drinking a half hour before.

“What’s your mother got to do with anything?”

I thought about it. “Because you said you felt like you haven’t done much and my mother’s story is beautiful, moving—it makes you forget about those patterns.”

He got up and made two gin and tonics and brought them back, along with some caciotta and pane carasau. He knelt and set these things down next to me, on the floor.

I rolled onto my side and nibbled a slice of caciotta.

For me, I said to him, being forty meant only two things: not getting worked up when you’re judged; and for the first time, feeling aches and pains and knowing they’re only going to get worse.

Rather than some inspired monologue summing up what was being said even while it was drifting away, forgotten by both of us, I want to talk about what sort of body I had just then: