Shortly after Christmas, we discovered that Gionata’s fevers were caused by food allergies. By eliminating preservatives and processed foods from his diet, his fevers stopped—he only got sick if he was allowed to have these. The year and a half he’d been shut up in the apartment with his exhausted mother had been for nothing, since his illness wasn’t due to the cold or germs—he could have lived normally, gone outside. Now he did, he just couldn’t eat cheese or regular sweets. Daniela had bought some books on vegan pastry-making and for the first time in her life, she’d grown passionate about cooking. Since this new eating regime coincided with the birth of the twins, Gionata blamed them; he hugged them too hard, like he wanted to strangle them, and when his mother gave them a bottle, he shrieked with jealousy (sometimes, watching him suffer, I’d search—and not find—a way to explain that since his mother wasn’t breastfeeding them, that meant he was her favorite). He was mortified that he was being deprived of the tastiest foods, and he repaid this insult by sulking and hitting anyone who ate cake in front of him. I learned this from Daniela, whose love for her oldest son was so intense, I got the feeling, watching them when the three of us were alone, that I was a private witness to the force that drove the world.

Describing that “sweet girl,” Daniela, “the angel of the hearth,” after writing about Barbara and Eleonora, working women, who wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to handle a child, I find myself compelled to judge (like it’s an actual law of narrative physics, a gravitational pull), to decide which of them lives at a higher vibration: the mother or the woman with no children. And now we’ve come to the real point of the book: since it’s not up to me to decide, what’s left for a man to write when he’s writing about women? Is there anything left?