She knew something else. Alberto was no superman, no superpoet. But he was both a man and a poet, and she could not, with all her rage, deny it. Nor could she ever have touched his inner conviction of what he was. Elegantly and patiently, he listened to the inner evidence and explored with constancy the possibility of himself. She called it his egoism. But her label was her envy at his knowledge and acceptance of himself.

Now, in Ponza, as they mouthed the worn-out phrases of their dialectic, she knew that, too, for what it was: their form of communion . . . what held them together.

“Everything revolves about what you want to do,” Alberto was saying, poking skeptically at the sole that was being served them. “I didn’t want to come here in the first place.”

True enough. It was Marguerite who wanted to be in Ponza. Alberto was happy to abstain from everything. The change had come after his heart attack and their subsequent return to Italy, as if the quasi-experience of death, following so soon upon Berto’s death, had frightened him back into the religious superstructure of his boyhood. She was excluded—both from that period of time in which she hadn’t known him and from the explicitness of belief she didn’t share. Only in polemics did they now join spirits.

The change had made her realize that their previous life together had not been all a desert. There had been companionship and tenderness. (Was she to forget his painted messages and love poems? The flowers and fruits and phone calls when he was away on one of his official trips? Once he had been gone three weeks; miserable at home with the children, pregnant with Berto, she’d gotten his call from Atlanta: “Margherita, cara, how are you? And the girls? Are you eating? Do you sleep well?” “Yes, Alberto, yes,” she answered wearily, only half listening. “I’ll be back tomorrow.” There was a long pause. “Tomorrow!” she cried out. “Did you say tomorrow?” And the joy in her voice was as much a surprise to her as to him.) Now, however, his silence and inner retraction stood between them. It bothered her that his new book would be on the nineteenth-century Catholic writer Tommaseo.

“Alberto,” she said in a conciliatory tone, “can’t we two be here in Ponza for a weekend together without Tina and Weezy and try to enjoy it? Angela Cambio, the Ecclis—everyone’s here.”

“Why couldn’t you have come with them? What am I here for?”