“Gillo knows this, too. He feels his creative life is smothered, bottled up, by his having to make a university career for himself.” He looked at her again, his face showing a concern that wrinkled and crossed it. “But you—what are you doing in Italy alone?”

“I came to be with Gillo,” she started, and then stopped abruptly. “No—I would have come anyway. Catullus brought me here.” She smiled.

“Perhaps he is not too good an example for you. The true classic temperament is detachment, not passion. In any case he is a great poet. In the spring we can go to see his village, Sirmione, on Lake Garda. However, there is more for you to discover than Catullus. There’s all of Dante, Leopardi. . . .”

“And Alberto Morosini.”

“Well, maybe, but not so big as those others.”

“To be a poet is enough. What else is there?”

“One could hope to be a poet and a good man. Life is more important than art. If I had to choose, I would choose life over art; otherwise one becomes arid, a mere aesthete, un letterato. Yes, it is more important to do one’s duty to one’s family, to be loved. . . .”

Marguerite stopped listening. Alberto treated her like a child, as if the difference in age between them was the most significant thing about them. He fussed, he sorted and filed, he snorted through his big nose. He didn’t look or act like a poet—it was Gillo who did.

As she blew her nose mournfully, Alberto pulled out a big gold watch from his pocket and exclaimed, “Per carità! It’s almost time for dinner and I have two other guests coming.” He looked at her and then said, “If you want to use the bathroom, it’s just next door.”

Always alone, she thought as she looked into the bathroom mirror. She had come to Rome on Alberto’s invitation and now she discovered he had other guests, too. She thought she was Gillo’s while he was loving her, but now she knew she had been only a temporary replacement for him, the summer companion.

She dried her tears and refixed her face and hair. It was true; she looked like a schoolgirl. Solemn, apprehensive, wondering green eyes, slightly tilted like those of many Sicilians in whom Mediterranean races have crossed, looked out from a pale face. There was no sophistication, only vulnerability in her gaze.

Marguerite observed in silence as Aurelia Eccli, one of the guests, examined the dinner china, told Alberto how to dress for the opera the following night, pronounced a Boucher painting that hung in the room valuable but dull, and said that Americans were idiots and Russians beasts and she didn’t know which was worse. Her husband, Leone, was brilliant.