If I drink too much, my heart trembles in my chest. I no longer get acid reflux, that went away with the physiotherapist’s massage, but I feel a pressure on my sternum and I know my tissues are breaking down, even if it doesn’t hurt. When I go out dancing, if I get into a rhythm, after a while my heart starts pounding, and I get scared and have to slow down. Running to catch the tram takes a lot out of me, and then, once on board, I break into a sweat. The physical therapist tells me I clearly have thyroiditis—I sweat an unnatural amount, like someone with a fever, unrelated to real exertion. I take a pill every morning for the thyroiditis. I have lumbar problems, and they say I need to stop playing soccer. An andrologist told me my sperm count’s low. I ruined my right arm playing soccer—I took a shoulder charge, and the contusion caused nerve damage, and ten days later, my right arm shrank to half the size of my left. I had physical therapy and regained part of my muscle mass, but my right arm has never been completely rehabilitated: it has way fewer nerve endings now. Mornings, I’ll stretch in bed, and a nerve twists in the crook of my arm and I’m shocked by the pain. I notice how weak that arm is when I wash my face. For two years now, I’ve had to eat much slower, because I can’t seem to swallow properly. Maybe it’s psychological, tied to the fact that when I was six months old, I was rushed to the hospital for an inguinal hernia; they intubated me and left me alone for a long time without my mother, so I’ve always been terrified of choking when I eat. But now I have to strain to get my throat to work, and sometimes I’ll sneak into the bathroom and spit out the remnants of what I’ve been exhaustedly chewing. But I’m not sure if this problem is physical or mental. It might be physical: I’ve read that too much acid reflux can weaken esophageal movement.

That night, too, I felt an irregular pulsing in my chest. This was something new that happened when I drank too much or had too much sugar.

“But there’s a difference here,” Francesco said. “There’s your mother, this intelligent woman who’s lived through such a contradictory time, then seen this period devolve into the eighties, the nineties, the new millennium, and now the decade after that.” He paused. “And then,” he said, “there’s me. Just some ahistorical dumbass.”