It was still spring when I learned from my mother that some entrepreneurs my father had helped, a group of twenty-five-year-olds, had wound up in the newspaper, because an important Norwegian investor had confirmed his “soft commitment” after exercising “due diligence,” and these guys, inventors of an app to monitor the stress level of small-business employees, had closed an “investment round” at over two million.

All of this was realized in the group that paired Italian startups with foreign investors, and my father had offered to be their initial backer: now he could sell off his own investment for a much higher yield than normal. My father loved projects that combined IT and health; he’d been tempted to go into business with these kids, had proposed being their principle investor, but then—my mother was telling me this by the window in Luca and Daniela’s apartment, one quiet day, a car zipping around the corner by their building, cracking the silence like a gunshot, with the brief stink of exhaust fumes before the warm air smelled again of pine trees and geraniums—but then my father decided not to go back to being an entrepreneur; still, owing to the cruel, Übermensch magic of capital, he’d earned four hundred thousand euros from this operation. And the beautiful thing, my mother said, a hand to her damp neck, is that he was “just about to pull off” another deal, for a machine that diagnosed osteoporosis: it was “a good year.”

While she spoke, I was kneeling by the living room door, taking apart and oiling the door handle: it squeaked at night and woke my brother when Daniela got up with the kids.

“In this awful decade,” my mother said, “we could really use a nice, solid payment. Poor Daddy—thank goodness—a little satisfaction.”

My mother was more terrified than any of us that somehow our fortunes would change, and we’d “end up under a bridge.”

While I was screwing in the plate on the edge of the door, I asked her: “So when’s Dad getting back? I’d like to congratulate him in person.”

My mother said she didn’t know and changed the subject; with her quick mind, she’s easily bored. I stopped listening, let my mind dwell on something else. That money, I thought, could buy Barbara’s apartment. My parents had bought a place in Milan for my older sister, Irene, and it had been years since I’d asked for a dime, unlike Luca—he may not have asked for the patriarchal purchase of a home, but he lived with our parents and received help with the expenses for the newborn twins, this financial assistance starting from the moment his wife, Daniela, began staying home and he was earning the fixed salary of someone working for the governor of Lazio—not much, because he didn’t steal, and he didn’t steal because he was rich, and my father had always spoken calmly, persuasively, and with utter contempt of people who were rich and took the liberty of stealing.