And for what a short time we have them, she thought. After the loss of her son she suffered Tina’s departure—as if eighteen years of her own life had been whacked off when Tina departed on that Alitalia flight to New York. In fact, those years had gone: wrapped in an Indian scarf, jingling with gypsy earrings, clutching Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss in one hand and an Ingres poster in the other. And wearing, all unknowingly, the colors of the Italian flag, from her red underpants to her white shirt and green suit. Tina had left for college.

Aloud Marguerite said, “It’s not that the childless have missed an experience, it’s that they’ve had a different one.”

“But not the essential experience that leads to completion,” the doctor said complacently. “The whole principle of marriage—of life itself—is based on the establishment of a family.”

“Ah, it’s bound to change and for the better,” said Lalla, who was anti-family, anti-children, and anti-Italian cult of the male. Around her neck she still wore the familiar coral horn, the phallic horn of plenty that meant: Plenty of fucking, and so what? (“It’s all written in her last book,” Angela once told Marguerite; “Arnaldo knows, too. Lalla’s made no secret of it; it’s part of her sincerity and women’s lib. She and Arnaldo consider themselves permanent and everyone else their pastimes—they understand each other completely.”)

The doctor’s wife had been talking to the artist Marco Segre, just back in Rome after working some years in New York. “But you can’t say the Americans have made any real contributions in the arts,” she was saying, composed, wide-eyed, transparent in black chiffon pajamas.

Segre appraised her. “You know,” he said, “it’s embarrassing to talk to someone like you. I mean you’re so far out. I don’t know what to say.”

“Well,” she answered beatifically, “I meant they’ve done nothing important, the Americans, nothing really great.”

“Why, all the art of today, all the movement stems from there!” Marco exploded. “But not only in art—in life, too. All that violence and upheaval you read about—you must have read about it—that’s America’s giving birth to a new kind of person, one who’s open to all the new stimuli, the new ways of living and feeling. Believe me, you’re all dead over here! Even the hired help over in the States know more about what’s going on than your so-called intellectuals here in Rome. Italian intellectuals! They make me laugh. Americans are a new kind of human being, not afraid to create disorder, violence even, in order to create new life.”