My wife’s position, faceup, so dignified, was entertaining, and watching her, I felt a tickling throughout my body. Her narrow hips in her faded pajamas, her feet, her bunched toes peeping out from under the jumbled quilt: I laughed at her, silently, and that laughter was good company.

Daniela

And women don’t count in this family.

I mean that our women stay home

and bring us into the world and say nothing

and count for nothing and we don’t remember them.

—CESARE PAVESE,
“Ancestors”
(trans. Geoffrey Brock)

It was midafternoon, and my nephew Angelo stood on the tall kitchen table, gripping my hands up high. He had on a pink, long-sleeved jumpsuit, a gray onesie underneath, and white wool socks with no-slip soles. I sat on a barstool, facing him, while he tried out his muscles, his motions sometimes voluntary, other times reflexive. Angelo’s chubby knee would give, buckle, he lost his balance, almost fell backward or forward, and I’d save him. Reassured, he’d immediately try again.

Since I’d stopped working, I spent one afternoon a week helping my sister-in-law, Daniela, on her nanny’s day off. And over the weeks, I saw my features emerge on Angelo’s face: he sometimes felt like my son, with his big dark eyes, squashed nose, and the lovely hollow between his mouth and nostrils; the little hair he had was dark, sleek, and combed down—he looked like a mini fashion model; his forehead was twisted into three worry wrinkles; his skin was pink, with a few little red allergy bumps. The way he most resembled me and his father was that he had his grandfather’s same dignified sadness: lips pressed together, the downward slant to the eyes, the tension in the curved brow ridge, balancing some overwhelming, internal weight.

His twin brother, Giuseppe, resembled Daniela, so when we were together, the five of us—me, her, the three boys—we looked like the typical bourgeois family, with one son entirely his father, me, and the other two entirely their mother.

One cave-in after another, Angelo’s knees grew tired, and I sat him down on the table, legs dangling; worn out, he studied me with approval; then a look came into his eyes, some sad memory that made him withdraw into himself: he tilted his head and gazed off with a desolate expression, his chin beaded with sweat; he smiled, showing his gums, like his grandfather; a ghost gave him some bad news that pressed the corners of his mouth down so far I felt pervaded by pain; we looked intently at each other, and he grew calm; he reached out to pull my beard and his round eyes were soothing.

He received more bad news from deep inside: I figured he was about to vomit on me, so I grabbed him and leaned him to one side and watched the vomit spurt out of his mouth, onto the floor.