“There is no such thing as an artistic age,” said Marguerite confidently as she impaled a fresh fig on her fork, and leaning toward Alberto, began to peel it, wrinkling her forehead in concentration. “The real artist has always transcended his time and place.”

“And still I feel I was born a hundred years too late,” Alberto reflected, gazing morosely about the flower- and leaf-shaded dining terrace of their hotel in Ponza.

They were back in Italy. Berto, their young son, had died in Washington the winter before of complications from pneumonia, and Marguerite, rich with grief, had told Alberto she wouldn’t live there any longer. He gave up his post and took the editorship of a literary review in Rome. He was in his fifties. His glasses hung on a cord over his expanding paunch; his hair had receded and deep lines creased a face which, despite the August sun, still bore the pallor of winter. The vigor and enthusiasms of his American experience were past. He had had a mild heart attack just after Berto’s death. In his life and in his writing he was returning to the formal commitments of his boyhood Catholicism.

“Now everyone can write,” he was saying, “and well enough, too.”

“Don’t worry, Alberto, you’re still out of the general run of things. You’ve gotten yourself labeled a Catholic writer and that’s a bag just you and a few other reactionaries have all to yourselves. Now even Italians are better informed. Religion isn’t relevant anymore. The Beatles are more popular than Jesus Christ . . . and they aren’t the queer he was, either.”

Alberto looked up quickly, his face pinched in outrage. “You have no right to offend me in what I believe!”

“I’m only saying what’s true.”

“At a certain point you’re not even offensive, just ignorant. If you know so well what the world and times require of an artist, why aren’t you one?”

Marguerite wondered, too.

It’s true, she thought, that Alberto never encouraged me once we got off that bridge in Florence where he spoke of our creative life together, but if I had wanted to, couldn’t I have done it just the same? What happened? The children . . . translating his work . . . the years just went. Or is Alberto right? That it’s easier for me to be a victim than anything else?

Under the spectacular arbor of bougainvillea, she looked about at the other diners—slim, tanned, brightly dressed, laughing vacationers—and wondered: He has his belief, and what is mine? Art? And what is Art? A part of, or apart from, life?