My father was calling me “honey,” his voice tender.

“Dad, I’m not sure I’m doing the right thing. The truth is, I’ll have to do Christmas books, cookbooks.”

“Yeah, but how satisfying, honey. You’ve made it to the top.”

“But what if I lose my reputation?”

“You’re a poet—how can you lose that?”

“It’s a blow to my ego.”

“Take the weekend—relax a little with Barbara.”

“I’d be giving money, visibility, to people who already have it or don’t deserve it.”

He grew impatient. “Come on now—you can’t complain when things are good. These are terrible times. You should be proud.”

“I’m tired,” I apologized. “I’m really tired. I just need the weekend.”

“I can tell, honey.”

“I’m so tired.”

“You’re doing great. You’re really amazing, honey.”

My scooter was parked in front of Banca d’Italia, in a row of about thirty others under the security cameras. The young guy parking on the opposite sidewalk, looking at me funny, had done the same two days before, when I left. My Vespa—a beat-up Indian copy—took off, coughing smoke. My heart was heavy. I couldn’t reach Barbara, who was at a block party on the piazza. I drove along by the aeronautical building with the enormous Rationalist-style eagle that was lit up at night with the three colors of the flag.

I’ve always been in debt to my father. In spite of my career, it was only four or five years ago that I stopped asking my father for money. The industry doesn’t pay well.

He has this method, a computer file of all the money he lends us. It’s a professional hazard, since he’s been an angel investor for twenty years—before that, he was an entrepreneur. He invests in startups, which he began doing when we—my brother, my sister, and I—were in college, because he felt he needed to help our generation that’s been “raised in a Europe with no political leadership.” He offers grants to entrepreneurs and economists who don’t have the backing of family capital. His world vision is capitalist but anticorporate.

He’s a member of a group that helps connect startups with foreign investors: this model, Singapore-inspired, schedules meetings between investors and entrepreneurs who gather to listen and discuss ideas and projects. He also helps young people come up with business plans. Then he helps them expand, obtain more money; he withdraws his investment when foreign assets arrive: he’ll bank double or triple the amount he put up and leave the young people in the hands of those with more money.

Before the 2007 crisis, these earnings occurred at least once a year, at fifty to a hundred thousand euros a shot. Now they’ve gone down and he feels it but continues to invest because of all those in his generation who know they’ve “robbed” ours of a future by adding to the national debt.