When I arrived back home, my mother was on the phone. After she hung up, she came into the kitchen, where I was pouring cucumber yogurt onto my rice. The ambassador’s wife just called, she told me. I froze, the stream of yogurt slowing to a drip as she continued. “For some reason she wanted me to know that she’s having a bad day today,” my mother said. “And then she asked about you.”

“Did she tell you I just ran into her?” I asked.

“You did?”

She leaned over and reached for a piece of chicken from my plate, her hair brushing against my arm. I could feel her eyes on me as she chewed, then swallowed. “Interesting.”

•

The Sacrifice introduced me to Agos from El Salvador. Agos was boyish and still had baby fat, and she was warm like a grandmother. When she introduced herself to the guys in my building and told them where she was from, they nicknamed her the Savior.

The Sacrifice, the Savior, and I quickly established ourselves as a trio, going for long lunches after class, riding to bars and nightclubs on the back of each other’s bike. We bought a pet hamster, Mr. Bandera. We got matching piercings through our upper ear cartilage, metal rods that all got infected within a month. We always knew where to find one another: at Caffè Giubbe Rosse, the coffee shop in Piazza della Repubblica where the Futurists used to congregate. Whenever I overslept I’d get there midway through class and attempt to read the paper in Italian, usually giving up in favor of the International Herald Tribune. I came to know the regulars, including an Iraqi playwright named Ahmed who’d fled his country after the war and was lucky enough to end up in Tuscany. We’d speak occasionally, sometimes in Italian, mine still rudimentary, and sometimes in Arabic. He asked me why I chose to live in Italy, and not Palestine or Jordan.

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling a pinch of guilt for being in Italy and not the West Bank, volunteering with refugees or resisting the occupation, or at least something related to my heritage. Every country outside of my own felt like a luxury, and at twenty-three, I wanted to indulge. In a way I felt I deserved to.

“I have no responsibilities here,” I said. “And no ties to anyone.”

He smiled, and his white beard spread like smoke. “You’ll find that having someone who has a claim on you, and who you can claim, it’s one of the greater things in life.”

•