There was something else. In the years after her father’s suicide, when she was old enough and distanced enough to try to learn about the subject, she came across an alarming statistic: the children of people who succeed in taking their lives have a sixty percent higher possibility of suicide themselves. Her great-uncle, her father’s uncle, made four attempts before dying of a heart attack at the age of sixty-four. Costanza herself had experienced some very dark periods, including one that she did not know how to talk about because it remained ambiguous even to her and therefore all the more disconcerting. The night her first adult relationship imploded after nearly three years, she went ahead with plans to attend a party in Testaccio at the home of one of her classmates’ parents. A lot of wine was on hand, and she drank it liberally. The party spilled out onto the terrace, which was on the third floor of the building and overlooked a large, lushly planted interior courtyard. Costanza remembered only a few details of that evening. One was that the courtyard had an old lemon tree growing in it whose trunk was covered by a vine that produced a sweetly scented flower, possibly jasmine. The way the vine clung to that trunk made her think of the way she had gone on clinging to Stefano long after she should have cut herself loose. If she had, then perhaps she would not have found him in his office that afternoon, stretched out on his sagging old tweed couch, his pants down and his penis buried in the mouth of Anna Carini, whom Costanza had, up to that moment, considered her closest friend at the university. She remembered that clingy vine, and she remembered that she had still been wearing a Moroccan bracelet that Stefano had brought her from Fez, and she remembered thinking that she ought to have eaten something before she began drinking. She did not remember having written in her datebook, “Next to my father’s death, this has been the worst day of my life”—which her mother, and not only her mother, took to be a sign of intentionality behind what happened that evening.

Certain facts were not in dispute: Costanza had drunk copiously, she had not eaten, and she was upset. She was not normally a clumsy person, but when she hoisted herself up on the parapet of the terrace, intending—as she maintained—to sit up on its little ledge, she misjudged the energy required and missed the ledge completely.

If the lemon tree had not broken her fall, she would surely have died, and with her death she would likely have been categorized among that sixty percent. Instead she came away with a broken arm, a fractured hip, and a scattering of bruises from which she recovered during a miserable three-month convalescence at her mother’s house in Recco.