A Previous Life: Another Posthumous Novel

By Edmund White

"Elegant, filthy – and quite possibly the queerest thing you will read all year." -Guardian

"Intriguing and inventive." -Electric Literature, "Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Book of the Year"

"A dizzyingly enticing and kaleidoscopic take on the spectrum of sexual experiences." -Publishers Weekly, starred review
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A daring, category-confounding, and ruthlessly funny novel from National Book Award honored author Edmund White that explores polyamory and bisexuality, aging and love.

Sicilian aristocrat and musician, Ruggero, and his younger American wife, Constance, agree to break their marital silence and write their Confessions. Until now they had a ban on speaking about the past, since transparency had wrecked their previous marriages. As the two alternate reading the memoirs they've written about their lives, Constance reveals her multiple marriages to older men, and Ruggero details the affairs he's had with men and women across his lifetime-most importantly his passionate affair with the author Edmund White.

Sweeping outward from the isolated Swiss ski chalet where the couple reads to travel through Europe and the United States, White's new novel pushes for a broader understanding of sexual orientation and pairs humor and truth to create his most fascinating and complex characters to date. As in all of White's earlier novels, this is a searing, scintillating take on physical beauty and its inevitable decline. But in this experimental new mode-one where the author has laid himself bare as a secondary character-White explores the themes of love and age through numerous eyes, hearts and minds.

Delightful, irreverent, and experimental, A Previous Life proves once more why White is considered a master of American literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jan 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781635577280

Edmund White

<p>Edmund White is the author of the novels <em>Fanny: A Fiction</em>, <em>A Boy's Own Story</em>, <em>The Farewell Symphony</em>, and <em>The Married Man</em>; a biography of Jean Genet; a study of Marcel Proust; and, most recently, a memoir, <em>My Lives</em>. Having lived in Paris for many years, he has now settled in New York, and he teaches at Princeton University.</p>

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

The year 2050

She came back into the room where the fire was blazing and looked with admiration at the familiar face. Yes, he was in his seventies but still slender and handsome with his strong profile (big Italian nose, huge dark eyes, full lips still red).

She was laughing to herself as she sat on the taboret next to his high-backed tapestried chair.

What’s so funny? he asked, looking at once wary and charmed; was she laughing at him (which she sometimes did) or had she noticed some new, never-remarked-on-before endearing trait?

All evening I kept looking up from my book and wondering if you ever slept with anyone for money.

He stood, expressionless (this was how he showed indignation). Have you forgotten I’m a lord from Sicily? Why do you ask?

Calm down. You’ve always been so handsome. She was smiling now but not laughing. Surely someone must have offered you some money, if only to see your strong body. And you’ve always been—well, not amoral but a good sport. If you’re so attractive now, you must have been irresistible at thirty or forty. I’ve seen the photos. I know.

With each flattering supposition, he relaxed. He sat back down. He looked at her as if verifying her degree of sophistication. At last he smiled. Well, yes, once, when I was forty and still looked thirty, Edmund White, we were great friends but he was already in his eighties, paid me twenty symbolic dollars. I undressed though he kept his clothes on. He wrapped the bill around my member. The situation, unique in my experience, made us both laugh; he loved pretending. And I was, and am, as you know, such a narcissist that it made me hard.

And? she asked, after denying that he was a narcissist.

"Well, I don’t need to spell it out. I kept the twenty dollars. He loved to play—that night he decided he was a naïve American tourist in shorts with a camera around his neck and I a wily, not very clean scugnizzo."

She’d heard the word but forgotten what it meant.

"A street boy in Naples, always cheerful, looking like Caravaggio’s Bacchus, dirty feet, a hungover green color, who will do anything for a few lira. Of course I was the one who ended up with the expensive camera."

I’ve performed fellatio on you, she said, a bit too blunt for his taste. Did you like it when he did it? Did he?

"Remember we were great friends, and though I knew he was an invertito, we usually talked books. Or baroque music. He didn’t know as much about music as I did, but like most European writers he was widely cultured and a good conversationalist."

But he was American, she objected.

Yes, but he lived in France and Italy more than half his long life—so long, he told me, that he’d forgotten his Social Security number.

Didn’t submitting to his attentions make you a bit of an invert, too?

In those days, in that century, especially in the old Mediterranean world, our idea was that it was the part you played that determined your identity, not the gender of your partner.

She got up and poured them a bit of brandy, and while concentrating on her little task and not looking at him, she said, And were you always the active one?

He laughed. Guess.

You were always the active one.

He patted his crotch; the conversation was exciting him. I don’t mean to be crude, but with this I would never have been allowed to be passive. By definition, I suppose, with a woman a man is usually active unless she wears a strap-on or ties him up, and undergoing penetration or bondage never appealed to me. The few men I granted happiness to, once they saw Bruce—their nickname for his penis—"ils ont voulu chaque fois en profiter." Like his ancestors who spoke Latin when they said dubious things in front of the ladies, Ruggero reverted to French, the language of his nursery and his grandfather’s table, when he said anything off-color. She wasn’t as at home in French as he was (although she’d spoken a patois as a girl), but she knew he meant all the pederasts and most of the ladies had been eager to submit to that hard, giant member.

He sipped his drink and slouched slightly back in his chair. She could see the outline of his penis, held by his trousers in a bent position, which made it look even thicker. He said, But at the risk of being indiscreet, may I ask, did you ever take money for sex?

He was forty years older. She’d been married twice and he once and they’d both agreed soon after they met never to talk about their past lives; transparency had destroyed their earlier marriages. He’d said he detested nostalgia, but she thought that was just an indirect way of saying he wanted to avoid the penalties of frankness. Their avoid-the-past rule had led them into frustrating impasses. He’d begin, I knew a woman who traveled all the way to Shanghai in search of the perfect orgasm— and he broke off. Or she’d say My cousin dated a woman I myself had seen for a while— and again she had to nail the beak shut, as the French said. They strode past each other clothed in great black capes of mystery. If Ruggero was in one of his possessive moods, he could turn what she reported as one of her innocent little vacation romps into a major orgy; she’d learned to avoid such reminiscences. We all model ourselves, trying to be more agreeable, on what one’s partner praises or damns in a previous lover. In their case, they were flying blind, since they had none of the usual cues given by the other one’s recollections. Now, though, they’d found such harmony together that, though by nature he was secretive and compartmentalized, she liked to think he could be bullied into confessing. Her love for him was so all-consuming and her respect so great that she assumed he’d be honest about himself and accepting of her avowals. Which of his impulses would win out? she wondered. The secretive or the frank, the honest (she dared not repeat the troublesome transparent) or the retouched? He was too honorable to enter a contract he wouldn’t remain faithful to. Then she remembered he’d cheated on Edmund and left him for the substitute teacher.

You like to write, she said, touching his thigh, and I’d like to try. You’ve always said my emails were entertaining, especially when we were apart and writing each other five times a day. You read my silly little novel about my ex … Even then, when we met, you were in your late sixties and I would have imagined you would have already sussed out all your emotions, but I always felt your urgency, your questions, your intensity—which made our correspondence exciting.

Yes, well, I feel that way now, and though we’re absurdly happy all the time I’m never bored. It turns out happiness isn’t boring. We’re always discovering new things.

But once you said you were easily bored.

By ideas—even musical ideas—that unfold in an obvious way, a way I can easily second-guess, but not by the emotions of the woman I love; I feel I hang on your every word, as if every word will determine my fate.

But you must know by now, she smiled, that with me your fate has long since been sealed in your favor. She noticed that whenever she said something to him that was deeply felt, she could feel tears welling up at the back of her eyes. Why? Perhaps she was just expressing her own ardor, or maybe honesty about such serious, unchanging matters suggested their opposite, the transience of all things human. Nothing could last forever, not even the life of a beloved man already on the near end of his seventies, despite his taking such good care of himself, as he did partly out of vanity, partly out of consideration for her, largely because he hated leaving the party. Since he didn’t believe in the afterlife, he accepted that this was the only action in town. Like Achilles he thought it was better to be a living peasant than the lord of the underworld—and he was no peasant, but a Sicilian magnifico from Castelnuovo. His surname was Castelnuovo, his palazzo was called Castelnuovo, and he lived on Castelnuovo Street, something that the university registrar that time had thought must be a joke.

But what should we write? he asked with a slightly false respectfulness, as one might ask a child which color one should paint a room.

Our confessions, she said. In an edition of one, for each other’s eyes alone. To be burned after a single reading. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Of course we know the broad lines of each other’s life, but we’ve never been able to put in the fine shading. Oh, come on, don’t look so solemn. It will be fun.

Let’s shake on that. He extended his hand, which she grasped. And when will the delivery date be? We must present our confessions to each other on the same date. And read them out loud. I have to see your reactions to what I read.

In two months? At the New Year’s?

It’s a little unfair since I’ve lived so much longer.

But you’ve forgotten more, she said, keeping up the bantering tone.

Can we skip childhood? I find childhood so tedious and predictable.

But that’s the part I remember best, she objected, then said, afraid he’d back out if he had to write something that didn’t amuse him, All right. So we’ll begin with early adolescence.

"D’accord," he said, which she knew meant he agreed.

CHAPTER 2

Six months had gone by and the day was fast approaching when they’d agreed to read their memoirs in alternating chapters out loud to each other. They were in the Engadin, in the little town of Sils Maria. Around the corner, in a two-story house painted white with green trim, Nietzsche had lived briefly in the upstairs room. Now the Engadin was a costly ski resort, twice the site of the Winter Olympics, but in Nietzsche’s time, it must have been one of the most remote places on earth, reachable from Italy only by a steep, perilous road through the Maloja Pass in a carriage, then a sleigh pulled by six lathered-up horses baring their big yellow teeth around the bits, their breath visible in the cold mountain air (a sleigh ride was disagreeably called a Schlittenfahrt in German). The most famous village in the area was St. Moritz.

They had no visible servants there, though an expensive service washed the sheets, shoveled the roof and walkway, watered the plants, ran the sweeper, aired the rooms (throwing back the heavy duvet), turned up the heat a day in advance of their return, dusted everything (though there was no dust so high up in the mountains). The simple priceless side tables inlaid with split reeds and designed in the 1920s, the overhead lamp from the 1950s made in Milan, sprouting multicolored metal cups of light, the matronly restuffed 1950s couch from Paris in green velvet, the polished wood zigzag chairs, the huge painting of the naked, dagger-wielding artist himself with Italian words spilling out of his mouth—all of it materialized before their eyes as Ruggero turned on the track lighting and disarmed the security system. The room looked glaring and guilty as a police photo of a murder scene. Not one thing in it had Constance chosen. She had put up a favorite Chagall poster of a red rooster, but it had mysteriously disappeared and found its way into the unused maid’s room. She knew the house represented the high point of taste (she knew it because connoisseurs exclaimed over it and shelter magazines often asked to photograph it but were always turned down. Ruggero was worried about thieves and tax collectors).

This afternoon they’d arrived in their four-wheel drive, so suited for navigating through the snow. Ruggero had insisted on skiing right away. Constance didn’t really ski. She’d taken lessons but was afraid of heights, and even the mountain lifts made her sick. The only reason to ski was to keep Ruggero company, and after she discovered he found her ineptness annoying she abandoned the unpleasant effort. Whereas he had gone on ski holidays with his distant cousins every January since he was six, she had never even put on a ski boot until she was twenty-eight—and had promptly broken her toe and had to sit slightly drunk by the fire with a lap robe and a brandy snifter (how delightful!), watching through the windows the dying light illuminate the downhill racers.

Ruggero liked to be in control and reveled in his superiority—athletic or intellectual or social. As long as his partner wasn’t embarrassingly crude or dense, he seemed to think it normal that he’d outshine everyone around him. Of course he liked that his wife was beautiful and young enough to be his daughter, though he didn’t like it when people thought she really was his daughter; it didn’t matter she didn’t speak proper French or Italian or Spanish (no one spoke Sicilian and almost everyone spoke English). She wore clothes well, never put on too much jewelry or weight or makeup or perfume, had the perfect laugh and an unaffected, unobtrusive American accent. She’d learned about entertaining from him but never tried to exaggerate her origins and was quick to acknowledge how humble they were. She knew that the only acceptable thing to give a host at a dinner party was a small box of chocolates, that after-dinner drinks were vulgar, and that a thermos of hot herbal tea should be prepared in advance and left in the study. She knew not to serve raw oysters to Midwesterners and to avoid red meat with guests from the coasts.

That there should be no music over drinks, that candlelight gave people headaches, that too many forks or glasses looked forbidding.

She took a nap. In her dreams she was walking through a mysterious foreign city under windowed closed-in wooden balconies that protruded out over the sidewalks on either side (could it be a Turkish city?) when suddenly the telephone was ringing. It was like a huge black insect crouching beside the bed. She reached for the heavy Bakelite receiver and said hello, though she couldn’t remember for a second which language was appropriate (Pronto or J’écoute or Guten Tag) but then to her relief it was Ruggero, speaking in English: Don’t panic, darling, but I’m in hospital. I broke my leg skiing. I’m a hundred percent okay. She was suddenly wide-awake and wished she had a cigarette, though she’d given them up ten years previously.

He explained that he’d broken his promise to her and hired a helicopter to fly to the very top of the mountain, where there were no pistes, in fact nothing he could see but a line of wolf tracks. Once he’d moved from the flurry and commotion of the helicopter and it had glided away, he was all alone with the purity of the mountaintop, this pristine unmarked snow, no other skier in sight, the only other living creature a huge eagle floating by on motionless, extended wings. He found the solitude and the windless cold exhilarating as he slalomed down across the treeless heights. The snow was firm and trackless and his feeling of entitlement—of his sole possession of these unblemished slopes, entirely imperial, his lungs burning with the thin, chilled air—provided him with the acme of excitement.

Now, after ten or twelve minutes of the unsullied pleasure of heli-skiing he could spot the first other skiers getting off the lift—and suddenly his right ski struck something and he was flying through the air and he landed on his back and felt a terrible shooting pain scorching his spine as if it were no longer fretted bone but a single bolt of lightning. He thought, Will I be paralyzed for life? Better to be dead, he told himself, he who’d always been the fittest, most attractive example of whatever age he was passing through. But he banished that thought. Now he looked down on his splayed body as an angel might loom above a recently abandoned corpse. Was his leg broken? Back? Was he bleeding?

Fortunately he’d fallen within sight of the other skiers, one of whom was already most likely phoning for help. The helicopter was back, whipping up clouds of snow and deafening the silent slopes as it lowered itself like a fat woman on a skinny man, except here the skinny man was him … Ruggero was floating into and out of consciousness, but amidst the falling, thickening veils he thought he could see someone picking his way carefully down through the air on a floating ladder, like an angel on the scala paradisi. Ruggero had a brief lapse of consciousness, as if several feet of celluloid were missing from a restored film—and suddenly the sepia register had abruptly switched to blue. Here was a bearded medical assistant with a young, handsome face bending over him and speaking Swiss German, which Ruggero could understand but didn’t like to encourage. The medical assistant was listening to Ruggero’s faint voice; he spoke in real German if with his Italian accent, not so unusual in the Ticino or among Italian-speaking executives working near here in Zürich.

The man said in English, Don’t worry. You’ve broken your leg, that’s all. We can lower a stretcher from the helicopter and have you in a good Swiss hospital in minutes.

Ruggero whispered, At the mere cost of twenty thousand dollars, I suppose. Pity it didn’t happen on the Italian or German or French side of the country, where I would have been fully covered. He felt vexed again that Switzerland remained outside the European Union. Of course, he could afford it whatever it was, but the Swiss were so stubborn. And greedy (everything they did was primarily done to protect the independence of their banks). He’d rather buy a new Land Rover with the money—but at least he was alive and wouldn’t be receiving medical treatment in Zimbabwe, say, and with any luck his leg would heal properly and Constance could make him petits repas and they’d be cozy in their chalet, though in reality he despised coziness and preferred magnificence. Comfort was for cowards. The way Americans sought out their comforts so zealously struck him as obese and sexless. He hated the Swiss and the Americans, besides Constance, of course—and suddenly he realized he was in a disastrously foul mood.

I’m going to give you a pill so you’ll feel less pain during the transfer.

And be fooled into signing any document the hospital needs to bleed me dry.

You’re certainly being unpleasant and paranoid.

This isn’t the first time that the Swiss have drugged me and then asked me to sign documents to their advantage.

The medical assistant sat back on his haunches. Do you prefer we leave you here in the snow?

Bitterly Ruggero said, I’m freezing.

The young man gave him fentanyl sublingual, which made him instantly confused. Within seconds Ruggero, smiling and stoned, was tilting and teetering through the air on an airlifted stretcher toward the racket of the helicopter and its maw.

CHAPTER 3

Yes, he said to Constance, I’m fine except my leg will be out of commission for a month. Broken in two places. No pain … No, the ambulance will bring me—my leg wouldn’t fit in our car. They’re going to keep me here overnight so they can charge me another ten thousand euros … What? Then he was talking to a nurse: Schwester, when will I be going home tomorrow, do you know? She said something and he said, It will probably be in the afternoon. No, don’t worry. No, stay at home. Stay cozy, he said sardonically. I’m glad we bought those sausages for your dinner. And there’s some rice. And that bottle of Liebfrauenmilch from Rheinhessen—not the best, but something at least. I’ll go to sleep right away. They loaded me up on fentanyl. I’ll call you in the morning. Please don’t worry, darling.

She hung up and wondered how many men and women he’d called darling. She’d find out soon enough when he read his pages to her. Luckily they’d brought their memoirs along. Now they’d have plenty of time to read and absorb them. Tomorrow, after his morning phone call, she’d trudge the five hundred meters to the shop in the village and order lots of food and firewood to be delivered. Hot chocolate, too. And what he called pécul in French, as if toilet paper sounded too crude and carta igenica too pedantic. And lots of canned goods—and good rye bread.

After that moment of practicality she gave in to her emotions and began to sob and walk in circles in her stocking feet cross the polished wood floor, her hands stroking her flanks through her skirt. Luckily the floor was heated with, she supposed, miles of delicate wires under the surface. Everything here was up-to-date technologically but looked 1950s chic. Or seventeenth- or eighteenth-century rustic, like the oval primitive painting on the wall, one that shepherds would fix to their wagons when they led their flocks up to the high grazing fields in the summer and would cart back down and hang in their cabins in the winter—in this case a mountain scene of a waterfall and a grassy slope and two sheep with dirty haunches, a dog, and two lovers. She’d been told that Swiss collectors could pay half a million euros for one of these primitive paintings since, like rich Americans, they had nothing old and from their own country to buy except these daubs, the wood usually cracking, the colors fading (the Americans bought primitive portraits or eighteenth-century Pennsylvania copies of English furniture). This shepherd painting was rather sophisticated; a dealer had identified the lovers as the Persian princess Granida and the shepherd boy as Daifilo, characters in a seventeenth-century Dutch pastoral; how they had ended up in an Alpine village was a mystery no one was eager to explore lest it cast doubt on the panel’s provenance.

Constance wept, crouching down and wedging her narrow hips into a handpainted child’s chair, all tendrils and blossoms. Probably as Granida had wept until her old aristocratic fiancé released her from her vows and graciously let her marry the handsome, unsuitable young peasant Daifilo. The tragedy of age and youth in love was an image they lived with constantly. But the whole culture surrounded them with reminders of how absurd it was for someone old to expect love from someone young.

She was indeed panicking. Whenever the least thing befell Ruggero—an ingrown toenail or a bad cold or now a big thing, a broken leg—she immediately imagined his death and wondered how she could go on living without him. Oh, why had she ever fallen in love with a man in his seventies? As he pointed out, anyone could die at any age. Usually he was so witty and energetic and beautifully dressed, his memory so sharp, his body so lean, that she forgot their age difference unless they were among strangers. If they needed a cup or a knife from the kitchen, he was always the one to leap up.

Yes, that was her huge, latent fear, his death, his cruel abandonment of her. They had no children because he didn’t want more. They still had lots of sex. He had two grown sons who didn’t much like her and who were German businessmen; though they were called Gianni and Carlo, their mother was Bavarian. They were fiercely loyal to Brunnhilde (yes, she was actually named Brunnhilde!), and they had refused to attend Ruggero’s second wedding. Carlo had pointed out that Constance was his age and would be a more appropriate bride for him. Except, Ruggero said, she’d never marry you at any age. "Excuse … me," Carlo said in English; he could be rather camp in English. Everyone laughed.

Constance and Ruggero had met at the French consulate in New York when a gay man she knew invited her to a dinner for ten. The consul was a charming young screenwriter with a satirical eye and his wife a Brazilian beauty who’d studied philosophy with Bourdieu. But the guest who fascinated her was an Italian seated next to her named Ruggero. He said he was a harpsichordist from Sicily; when she complimented him on his English, he said he’d studied music for years in London. He looked at her diamond ring and said, Pity it’s not real. She replied, If it were real, I would have hocked it years ago.

Later in the conversation, after the cheese course, she was a little drunk on Bordeaux and whispered, You’re really good-looking, and he said, And you haven’t even seen the best part yet, the part below the belt. When she looked bewildered, he laughed and said, That’s something we say in Sicily. Under the heavy white damask tablecloth she took his hand but joined in on the conversation across the table. Ruggero said, Why do you speak French? She explained that she’d been raised by French speakers from Mauritius. When it turned out they both lived in Chelsea he asked if he could accompany her home in a taxi. In the car he started kissing her, and they went directly to his apartment (Driver, he called out, make that just one stop between Ninth and Tenth).

Constance thought it required a lot of courage to be in love—since, as someone said in that AIDS play The Inheritance, which she’d seen in a revival in London, All love ends in heartbreak, which must be true unless you both died in a car crash at the same instant, as her lucky parents had done. Courage because you had to accept every day that you were obsessed with him, that the burn across your solar plexus was the fear of losing him, that your heavy sigh as you stepped out of the shower was the anguish of mortality, as if you were wringing out a washcloth heavy with mercury. Logically she should be fearing his death (crossing the street the wrong way in London, a splinter from the broken femur slowly working its way to his heart, a sunstroke on the treeless, stony streets of Florence), but what she was really afraid of was her own death. She knew that we’re all alone at the moment of death—and Rilke wrote that you should embrace solitude, but she couldn’t. It horrified her that she’d be alone to die. He called it her fear of abandonment—maybe that nice young therapist he’d seen thirty or forty times had supplied the phrase; it didn’t sound like something Ruggero would have come up with on his own. It wasn’t abandonment she feared, it was death. His death or hers. She winced with pain as if she’d been branded. She leaped up and circled the room again; she went to the mirror over the fireplace to see herself crying, as if she had to have visible proof of the pain she was feeling.

She couldn’t bear the thought of his leaving her. Of course there was always the possibility he’d leave her for someone new, younger or prettier or just new, but she’d cried so hard on his beautiful chest as she confessed those fears and he’d reassured her so tenderly that now, at least on her sane days, she felt safe. She couldn’t forget that, famously, he’d dumped Edmund without warning. Ruggero, however, really did love her, sometimes so much he accused her of being a witch. She wished she were a witch able to cast a daily love spell on him. She didn’t think herself worthy of him—he was so much kinder, smarter, more cultured than her, sexier. And he ruled himself with such enormous self-discipline; he could account for every hour, every calorie, every word. He practiced his harpsichord for two hours every morning and two in the afternoon, though he could amp that up to seven unbroken hours if he was going to concertize. She loved the way he beat back the pages of the score as if they wouldn’t stay put unless punched. She loved the look of his long, narrow feet expensively shod that had no pedals to push but that he, nevertheless, kept poised as if on invisible starting blocks for a sprint. She loved his long, expensively veined hands with the pink, perfect cabochon nails. She loved the way he tossed his head back and to one side for slow, expressive passages or scrunched it forward between his shoulders in a perfect storm of concentration when he raced through a fiendish presto, forked veins on his forehead standing out. Unless he was actually reading the score, his gaze was fixed on some inscrutable point in the middle distance, a target he would reel himself in from and look, a moment later, as dazed and surprised as Heidegger at merely existing in the world. Heidegger said all useful experience begins with amazement—and Ruggero always looked amazed. He took nothing for granted. All his experiences were useful then, QED. He’d written a noted article on Heidegger.

It was strange sleeping alone in their big bed and she awakened five times, alarmed each time that he wasn’t breathing beside her, smelling of his delicate citrusy cologne, his breath like the abrasion of the finest cloth-backed diamond sandpaper on wood that was already smooth. All five times she was certain that she’d missed his arrival, that he’d rung the doorbell in vain, that he was hobbling around in the raincrusted snow, homeless, cold.

In bed she switched on the big TV, changed channels till she got CNN, thought guiltily that she should be watching France Inter to keep up her French, but finally settled for the warm bath of English over the cold shower of French. She let herself get absorbed in the catastrophes of the day (drought, floods, fires, mass shootings) but kept sensing that just behind the firewall of consciousness the blaze of panic was out of control over her absent Ruggero. If her grip on today’s soothing disasters weakened for a moment, if her attention to the comforting horrors slipped, then once again she’d be engulfed by the silence shouting, I’m alone. He’s not here.

Yes, it took courage to be in love. As if one were distractedly pretending to lead banal daily life, not tiptoeing out to the crater above the throat of the volcano and its boiling magma reservoir. Courage to call him sweet names, as if saying endearments to him were the most normal thing in the world, something taking place in a small dacha among aspens rather than