“I don’t think that would be very successful in New York. People might lose their identity along with their edge.”

She laughed. “I give up.”

“He helps older women have babies.”

Andrew noticed her right eye twitch. How old was she, anyway? A faint latticework framed her eyes, fine as mesh. That was all. His mother, Judith, was much more lined, and she had been dyeing her hair for eight years at least. His mother was forty-nine.

They were approaching the large open market near the church of San Lorenzo. Andrew and his father had walked along these same streets over the weekend, on their way to see the Medici tombs. The neighborhood had been in a Sunday slumber then; now it was alive with stalls selling tablecloths and leather goods, scarves and stationery, T-shirts and belts, watches, coral necklaces, mosaic picture frames—a daunting unbroken panorama of stuff.

About fifteen stalls in, Costanza angled to the right and led Andrew to a building covered by a large glass roof that stood behind the market stalls.

“What is this place?” he asked as they walked up the stairs.

“The Mercato Centrale. It’s not on your father’s list.”

The way she pronounced Mercato Centrale suggested that she spoke Italian, or was Italian. Yet her English was perfect and had only a trace of an accent.

Andrew could have looked for hours at the meat cases alone. They were filled with things that were still half the creatures they had recently been. There were boars’ flanks covered in damp gleaming fur, chickens with untouched faces connected by plucked bodies to limp clawed feet. Pheasants were feathered, more asleep than dead. Cows were in possession of their heads, pigs their snouts. There were slack tongues, looping intestines, accordion ribs, and pink spongy brains. Andrew raised his camera, but he couldn’t find a way in.

Costanza led him around to the fruits and vegetables. They too let him know how they’d started on this earth. The oranges had leaves attached to them, the garlic their stems. There were berries he didn’t recognize—di bosco she called them, “of the woods”; they were small, blush colored, covered with little freckles and bumps.

The mushrooms were brown and wrinkled. They looked leathered like an old man’s skin and gave off a smoky, rich, strange smell. “When I was a girl,” she told Andrew, “we used to visit my grandfather in Tuscany. After he retired he bought a small farm there. He used to hunt for his own mushrooms and dry them on special racks.”

She leaned forward, closed her eyes, and inhaled. The scent evidently took her somewhere pleasant, somewhere far away.

Afterward she exchanged a few words with the vendor, who tossed several handfuls of mushrooms on the scale. “Is there a scent that takes you back?” she asked Andrew.

He shrugged. “I don’t think so.”