Massimo was there, too, on a splendid night made clear and fresh by drenching, cleansing afternoon showers. A great moon hovered benignly and solitarily in the rinsed sky and lit the angel-topped mausoleum on whose ramparts all the elite of the Italian cultural world were passing among stacks of Renaissance cannonballs with drinks in their hands. Everyone was there. Massimo greeted Marguerite and Alfredo briefly and then went off to shake hands among the crowd. The old courtyards on top of the castle were filled with splendid girls, already tanned; and one wondrous beauty with Antonioni looked like Botticelli’s Primavera with blue cornflowers twined in her long blonde hair. A superb champagne supper was served after the prize ceremony in the covered promenade of Pope Alexander VI. Looking out over the roofs of the city, Marguerite saw close by the white hulk of the Palace of Justice; the old palazzaccio was falling down. Here she was atop a two-thousand-year-old bastion, looking at the barely sixty-year-old courthouse where she had been separated from Alberto, empty now, evacuated because it was falling apart. And farther away in the night she tried to discern her own roof across the river, the roof that sheltered her and Massimo.

“Did you see a lot of people at the Fiuggi thing?” Marguerite asked Massimo when they met next. “I talked about your book to everyone I met.”

“Brava.”

“You’re sure to get the Strega, no one else is so handsome.”

“I don’t even think of it anymore,” he answered glumly. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.”

“Why do you say that?” she asked, her throat beginning to tighten with tears. It was then that she could sense the end. Angela would be back soon.

“You know I’m not attached to living—I’m indifferent. I feel alone, without a faith. There is nothing important to me.”

“Then that includes me,” she said after a moment’s silence. “Why do you say this? I love you. You aren’t alone—how can you be alone when there are two of us?”

“Ti voglio tanto bene,” he said. “But let’s not talk about this.”

“It’s something I’ve always known even if I wanted to hide it from myself. My coming into your life has resolved nothing for you, there’s nothing I can do for you. That’s what hurts.”

“Amore mio, you are precious to me. Each time we meet I am amazed at your freshness . . . at what being with you does for me. But deep within, my character is what it is. I have always been like this.”

“Always?”

“For the past ten years, anyway.”

“Because you couldn’t have that woman you loved?”

“That helped persuade me that nothing can change. But it wasn’t just that. It’s having the kind of family situation I have, the loss of youth, losing hope. I don’t believe in anything. . . .”