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here, he’ll talk some sense into her. She listens to him, you know.” She turns away. “Come, let’s get you unpacked. I’ve prepared minestrone. You must be destroyed after that long trip.” She heads down the hall. Clarissa shrugs at David and follows her.
    When they are both gone, he raps softly on the door again. “Zia Piera? It’s me, David.”
    A pause. Then she whispers, “God has answered my prayers.”
    â€œActually, Mom is the one who told me you would only speak to me,” he says. “God had nothing to do with it.” He recalls his aunt’s sense of humour — how in the midst of melancholy she can burst into absurdity and laughter.
    â€œYou think it’s a joke,” she says. “but they hate me. All of them.”
    â€œOf course they don’t. They’re upset,” David says.
    â€œHe was my brother!”
    â€œHe was their brother too.”
    The key turns in the lock, and she is in front of him, hair dishevelled.
    â€œ Davide ,” she says, making his name Italian. “Come in.” Her voice is rough, low, a rusty instrument. The weight of her pleasure plunges him into his childhood, smothers him.
    He takes her hand — long-fingered, manicured — and leans in to kiss her cheek. Her hair is thin, her arms pale under the short-sleeved nightgown. She is much smaller than David recalls, shrunk into herself, not the larger-than-life aunt from David’s childhood visits, who commanded attention and respect, who reigned over the household like a benevolent dictator.
    She pulls him into the room and closes the door. The television is on, but muted, its blue haze eerie. It is as if he has entered a tight dark cave, a small oppressive life. Her younger voice reproaches him: I’ve been too lenient with you. I shouldn’t have allowed this friendship to continue. He stares at the wooden shutters across the window, at the bookshelf of brown leather-bound classics bought in Milan, at her blue shawl draped over one of the four posts of the iron bed, at her round table full of medicines, paper, pens, phone cards, tubes of ointments, glasses, TV schedules, phone numbers, at the shadow slats across the ceiling. You’re too easily influenced. What had he done, but lost his small allowance in a game with Marco? You need to spend some time alone, and reflect on your behaviour. He sees a small barefoot boy in the garden below, feet immersed in the fountain, longing for home. “Zia Piera,” he says, and embraces her. The years dissolve between them; her ferocious love beats against his chest.
    Beyond the door, a corridor of empty, empty space. How different from what David remembers, the bustling household, the maids and housekeepers and cooks, the hushed reverence when Piera entered. She was a gyre of nervous energy who unsettled everyone with her constant needs, demands, and mercurial nature, an empress. Donna Piera . Ghosts flutter out of reach.
    â€œZia Piera,” he says, after he has helped her back to bed. “It’s not healthy, this not eating all day, you know.”
    â€œI’m fine,” she says, but sinks back pitifully against the pillows.
    â€œTeresa has made minestrone. Let me call her.”
    â€œNo, not her. I don’t want to see her. I don’t want to talk to anyone,” Piera says, her voice rising hysterically.
    â€œI’ll bring it then.”
    She closes and reopens her eyes slowly. “She’d be happy if I died.”
    â€œYou’re not going to die,” David says.
    â€œOr maybe,” she says, “one day that son of hers will come up here and kill me. It’s only a matter of time. I’ve seen it often enough on TV — ungrateful children who murder their mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers to steal money they would have gotten anyway, had they waited. But nobody waits anymore, not for anything. Patience has become a