Marriage, I mean the legal act, not the reality, was that threshold beyond which we were still chucking objects at each other while we fought. Maybe, over there, we’d recover our torn-up books, our shattered glasses, as if in a ghost story.

For our party, my parents suggested the beach house, which was actually located in Anzio. It would be the first time we’d invited her family to my parents’: our families had never met, not on the beach we all went to, and not because of Barbara and me. It wasn’t so strange that we’d never met in Anzio over the summer—I don’t recall making more than a couple of friends there, and that was just in elementary school; plus, her family lived outside the city center, while my parents, like all their friends, had bought a place high up on the hill overlooking the train station. The station cut this long, sloping town in two, neatly dividing the port area from our neighborhood on the hill.

We decided to throw our own party at the end of September: no reception, just a lunch on the side—but in Rome—for maybe twenty relatives and some friends.

And so, at the end of August, I was driving along Via Pontina, the car trunk filled with cases of liquor. Barbara had her knees up against the glovebox while she slouched, sweating in her seat, the window cracked open (she’s phobic about objects flying in), and talked about her job, the event she was trying to organize.

She’d finally found an opportunity to plan a festival in a medieval villa she was crazy about, an enchanting place she’d made her early escapes to, with her grown-up boyfriends. For some time, she’d looked for just the right event, and she’d finally found one: an evening, next January, on the subject of violence against women. She happened to meet a member of the family who owned the villa, and this person told her about a recently discovered ancestral diary which documented the violence inflicted on this woman by her husband, and it was written with an “unusually modern sensibility” for the mid-nineteenth century. This noblewoman, Barbara explained, already knew one hundred and sixty years ago that this type of sex “wasn’t a conjugal duty. It was murder without a corpse.” They’d decided to hold this event on the anniversary of this woman’s death, in January: a date that was alarmingly close, but that Barbara felt compelled to accept. The public notice of regional cultural activities could be modified to include this event. But it was a delicate affair, given that the Mafia Capitale scandal had been a main topic of conversation since June, and names related to this woman were under investigation: a change to the notice, though in good faith and with no personal gain, had to be carefully worked out so as to avoid being misconstrued. Now and then, Rome was keen on complying with regulations, and during these brief periods, you had to do everything very precisely, but doing everything very precisely was impossible. She knew that throughout the proposal process, she’d face all kinds of bureaucratic obstacles, lazy administrators, who, if they couldn’t steal, wouldn’t risk anything in the name of beauty.