Greetings from Budapest, sister and comrade! Al improviso this trip came up through the Party and I really couldn’t pass it up. Back in one week. The food is excellent and accompanied by music as passionate as the paprika. The toilet seats are of wood and much nicer on the ass than the capitalist plastic. This is a country to see—it seems to work so much better, healthier, and simpler than anywhere else I’ve been.

Love and kisses,

Weezy

Tina was furious; she thought of all the other cards she had received from her sister—from Trento, where she had gone skiing; from the island of Giglio, where she had gone to celebrate spring; even from Rome, where she had gone for the day to march in some protest. Tina was envious and sad. Weezy was on her own, she had a cause, she had convictions in the present. Is Weezy really right? she thought. Is this how life should be lived?

Meanwhile she roamed around Venice seeing all the churches and galleries, and came back when her father had finished work to sit at a caffè with him in the evening dusk.

“Tina mia,” he said to her one evening, “have you been working too hard this past year? You seem pale and tired, not your old self.”

“It’s not that, papà.”

“What is it then? Has it something to do with your companion from last summer? The Jowers boy you were going to go to Greece with? I never understood what happened on that trip. Do you want to tell me?”

“Oh, papà,” she said in a burst, “how can I talk about him?” Her face was furrowed with the effort to keep back tears. Alberto looked at her with concern as he sat back in his chair, sipping a Scotch.

“But you do believe in your work? You do know where you are going?”

“Oh, yes, papà. I’ve always been sure about that. I love the feel of the Renaissance—all those contradictions. It’s the tensions, you see; that’s why we who are in the Renaissance love it so. All creativity is the result of tension, the conflict between the world as it is and one’s imagination.”

“Già,” Alberto said, smiling at her. “I see you know your way.”

It wasn’t until her last day in Venice, before she left for Bologna to see Weezy, that he brought up the subject again. “Are you in love with that young man?” he asked as he accompanied Tina to see the church of San Paternian. An ex voto hung on the walls there, one of many primitive paintings, but this one recalled Sebastiano Morosini, a sea captain and Alberto’s great-grandfather, who in a tremendous storm off the Dalmatian coast in 1820 had been miraculously saved by a vision of the Virgin Mary.

But she countered with her own question. “What did you think of Jason, papà?”