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life. I know, I know, you had a common-law wife in Mexico to console you for your exile—I picture her with fleshy dark thighs and enormous breasts, cooking huge skillets of refried beans, feeding him up, coddling him. Still, you left her, didn’t you, even though you’d had a child? And when you came back you had to change your name, and none of your films are remembered—not your coming-of-age novel either.
    Ah, yes that’s what makes great areas of my brain flash red. The pain centers all firing at once as if I’d touched a redhot pan. Ouch!
    I worry that no one will remember me.
    It’s different with my older brother, Mario. Mario will probably die as if he were going on an expedition to the North Pole—afraid but excited at the adventure. If there is a cliff that you have to climb to reach posterity, he did it. I console myself that, except for certain geniuses, the rest will gradually fade out, interesting only to people like the young wife—didn’t she say she was getting some kind of a degree at NYU?—peering with her large bright eyes into the murky past.
    Hannah took me to see a special exhibit of ephemera at the museum of the city of Rome, Palazzo Braschi. We went in a taxi and I noticed she kept fingering her cell phone. Though she hates technology—she still writes on an old Olivetti and refuses categorically to get a computer—the phone means she can go a little further afield and still feel comfortably in touch with the
Ospitale.
The show was brilliant, everything made out of papier-mâché, huge intricate creations all meant to be destroyed after the festivity. I spent much of my time looking at images of death, such as a crowned skeleton presiding over ruins.
    It was hard for me to imagine spending so much effort creating something that would be blown up a few hours after itwas finished. I’ve struggled all my life to make something that would last. Would it be easier to let go if I believed in God? We had a housekeeper once, a peasant woman from the countryside whose son was killed in a fight with a rival gang in Naples. Most people would be depressed and grieving for months, but Argelide—aptly named after a heroine in Ariosto’s
Orlando Furioso
—prayed for about a week, bringing her Bible to work and having murmured conversations with Lord Jesus and then resumed her serene expression.
    â€œSignor, I know he’s with our Lord,” she told me. “I know he repented and was forgiven.”
    I can get as far as imagining a supreme being, having passionate conversations with a loving Father, prostrating myself with a certain self-satisfaction on the floor of Santo Spirito. But Heaven is so insipid. There is no way I would want to be in such a place. Singing out of tune in the heavenly choir. Angels poking each other with their wings each time I hit a wrong note.
    Who am I fooling with my joking? Not myself certainly. I am terrified. Each flutter of my heart, incipient nausea, sweating on a cool day—any of these can convince me I am about to die. Since it happens to all of us, as the skeletons on the festival floats remind us, why this need to know when? To outwit the bony hand with its scythe?
    I did notice something that cheered me up. A papier-mâché replica of a huge arch that was put up by Carlo V, Holy Roman Emperor, to celebrate his conquest of Rome in 1527. It was built just at our corner on Governo Vecchio, right where the old men sit in the morning gossiping and reading their papers in the little café that has the best
cornetti.
How delightful it would have been to watch from our terrace as the king progressed along the cobbled street to visit the pope. That’s what I love about Rome. Every few feet there is a historical gem. I look at my watch. I’ve gotten through two hours of the morning. In another hour Hannah will put awayher manuscript and take me for a walk. I have the thought that if death