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relaxed her inhibitions. A dark red stain remained on her lips.
    â€œShe was the one who did the talking,” she said. “I listened. She told me about Renato. She made him central to every conversation, as if he were still alive. I’m sure she talked out loud to him when she was home alone. She confessed that she still set the table for him after all those years. I always thought it was very romantic. Romantic and a little pathetic. But everything that’s very romantic is also pathetic, isn’t it?”
    We would have conversations like that almost every night, Nora and I, especially in the first few months following Mrs. A.’s death. It was a strategy that we had honed so as not to succumb to anyuncertainties: returning to them over and over again, until it seemed that nothing but crystal-clear air came out of our mouths. Mrs. A. was the only real witness of the enterprise we embarked on day after day, the sole observer of the bond that held us together, and when she talked about Renato, it was as if she wanted to suggest something that had to do with us, to pass along the instructions for a relationship that had been perfect and pure, albeit doomed and brief. In the long run, every love needs someone to witness and acknowledge it, to validate it, or it may turn out to be just a mirage. Without her gaze we felt at risk.
    _____
    Nonetheless, we were late getting to the funeral. We were ready on time, but then we got sidetracked by some stupid little tasks, almost as if what awaited us was just one more job among many we had to see to. Emanuele was particularly restless and constantly asking questions about what “going to heaven” meant exactly and why it was impossible for a person ever to come back. They were questions to which he knew the answers, an excuse to voice his excitement (his firstfuneral: isn’t that, too, just a source of wonder for a child?), but we didn’t feel much inclined to play along. We ignored him.
    On the way the disintegration of the family continued. Nora accused me of taking the longer route, and I started naming the pointless tasks she’d dawdled over before we left the house: putting on her makeup, for example, as though one had to show up at a funeral wearing makeup. If Mrs. A. had been there with us, she would have chosen one of her proverbs and put an end to it, but she was waiting for us at the ceremony, resting in the pine box, speechless.
    We entered the church with some embarrassment; there were more people gathered there than I had expected. I heard little of the homily, worried as I was about the car, which I’d hastily parked along a narrow side street. I imagined a vehicle, one of those buses that serve the province, stuck there waiting for us, the passengers having gotten off, wondering who the idiot was who had blocked them in there, but I couldn’t make up my mind to go out and check. We skipped the final farewells, since our presence could console noone and perhaps because we thought we ourselves had a right to be consoled.
    Emanuele wanted to follow the coffin to the grave site. We thought it was a whim, foolish curiosity, so we didn’t agree. A burial is not something for a child, and that one in particular wasn’t something for us. There are situations that should be left to the intimacy of family and close friends, and who were we to Mrs. A.? Employers, not much more than that. Death realigns roles according to a formal order of importance, instantly mending the sentimental rules that one allowed oneself to break in life, and it didn’t matter much that Emanuele was the closest thing to a grandson that Mrs. A. had known or that she’d liked to consider us, Nora and me, her adoptive children. We were not.

Orphans

    I t was her natural, nearly religious inclination to look after people that brought her to us in the beginning. When Nora’s pregnancy had proved unlike the marvelous experience we had envisioned