“Don’t Expect Love From Me,” He Warned the Barista—Until One Night in Sicily Made the Mafia Boss Beg Her to Stay

PART 1

The morning after Matteo Serrano came into the café, Cora Delvaux counted the money three times.

Not because she doubted the amount. She counted it because she was trying to understand what it meant.

Two hundred dollars. Under an espresso cup. At a table where the coffee cost four-fifty and the tip should have been a dollar, maybe two from someone generous.

She held the bills in the kitchen during her break and looked at them with the specific attention she brought to things she did not yet understand. Cora Delvaux had a graduate degree in French literature, which had turned out to be, in practical terms, a very sophisticated set of reading skills applied to texts that did not pay rent. She was good at reading people the way she was good at reading books: by attending to what they did not say as much as to what they did.

What the two hundred dollars said was: I noticed you.

What it said under the cup, without a note, without a name, was: I’m not explaining myself.

She put the money in her pocket.

She went back to the floor.

He came back three days later.

She had half-expected it and spent those three days deciding she was wrong to expect it. He was a man with bodyguards and a suit and a face that had shut down the conversation in the room just by walking through the door. Men like that did not come back to cafés.

He sat at table seven.

He ordered the same thing.

He watched the room with the same quality of attention she had identified on Tuesday: total, unhurried, recording.

This time, when she set down the espresso, he said: “I wanted to return something.”

He placed a bracelet on the table.

Cora’s hand went to her wrist before her mind registered what her body already knew.

The silver chain. The crescent moon charm worn thin at the curve from years of her grandmother turning it between her fingers when she thought. The clasp that had always been slightly difficult.

She picked it up.

“It was found near my table Tuesday,” he said.

“How did you know it was mine?”

He looked at her.

“I noticed you wearing it,” he said. “When you brought the coffee.”

She fastened the bracelet without speaking. Her hands were steadier than they had any right to be.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Your grandmother?” he said.

She looked up.

“It’s old,” he said. “The wear pattern at the charm. Someone wore this a long time before you.”

Cora looked at the moon.

“She raised me,” she said. “After my parents died. This was hers.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“My mother had one like it,” he said. “Different charm. Same era.”

She looked at him.

The information was small and specific and arrived without performance. She filed it the way she filed everything: as a sentence that said more in its margins than in its text.

“Is there anything else?” she said.

“The espresso is correct today,” he said.

“It was correct Tuesday too.”

“Yes,” he said. “But I was distracted.”

She left the table.

She did not look back.

The two hundred dollars had said: I noticed you. The bracelet had said: I pay attention to what matters to people. The espresso comment had said something in the space between a complaint and a compliment that she could not quite translate yet.

She kept the money and spent it on rent.

—

Marco called her over to the counter at the end of her shift, wearing the expression he wore when delivering information he was slightly afraid of.

“His name is Matteo Serrano,” Marco said.

“I know,” she said. “You told me Tuesday.”

“I didn’t tell you everything Tuesday,” he said.

He told her now. She listened. She had grown up in cities and in books and in the specific education of knowing things were more complicated than they appeared, and what Marco told her fit that education even if it was larger than she had anticipated.

“He wants to hire you,” Marco said, when he reached the end of what he knew. “Private barista. Events. Some regular schedule. He apparently—” Marco paused. “He apparently asked what equipment you preferred.”

“He asked you what equipment I preferred,” she said.

“He had someone call. Yes.”

Cora looked at the counter.

“How much?” she said.

Marco told her.

She thought about her rent and the student loans and the three books she’d had to return to the library unfinished because she kept falling asleep before the end.

“Tell him I have conditions,” she said.

Marco looked alarmed.

“Tell him,” she said.

—

The conditions were: her own hours logged separately from the café, a contract in writing, no assumption that the role extended beyond what the contract specified, and a clear delineation of what the work was.

She expected negotiation.

He accepted every condition before noon the following day.

Which was, she thought, its own kind of information.

—

The first event was a gathering of twelve men in a house on the North Shore that smelled of good whiskey and the specific quality of old arrangements.

Cora worked the coffee station in a kitchen that had clearly been designed by someone who preferred professional-grade equipment to personal comfort, and she made espresso for men who received it without making eye contact, which she found restful.

Matteo moved through the gathering with the economy of someone who did not need to perform authority.

Near midnight, when the last guest had gone, he appeared in the kitchen doorway.

“Drink with me,” he said.

It was not quite a question.

She looked at the kitchen, which she had mostly cleaned.

“For twenty minutes,” she said. “Then I have to finish here.”

He looked as though this was not what he had expected.

He said: “All right.”

They sat in a study with bookshelves and a fire that had burned down to coals. He poured two glasses of something she suspected was very expensive and handed her one without asking if she wanted it, which was consistent with everything else she had observed.

“You speak French,” he said.

“Fluently,” she said.

“I heard you on the phone earlier.”

“My cousin,” she said.

“And Italian?”

“Enough to understand what was said tonight.”

He went still.

“I don’t repeat things I hear at work,” she said. “That’s a condition I should have added to the contract.”

“You should have,” he agreed.

“I’m adding it retroactively.”

He looked at her for a moment.

“Agreed,” he said.

She drank the whiskey. It was, as suspected, excellent.

“You studied literature,” he said.

“French. Comparative.”

“And you’re a barista.”

“Literature doesn’t pay rent,” she said. “Good espresso does.”

“That seems like a waste.”

“It seems like a practical decision,” she said. “Which is different.”

He held his glass without drinking.

“What did you want to do with a literature degree?” he said.

“Translation,” she said. “Literary translation. Books that haven’t made it from one language to another yet.” She paused. “There’s a specific kind of loss that happens in translation when the translator doesn’t understand what the author was actually saying underneath the sentences.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means most people translate the words,” she said. “I’m interested in translating the meaning.”

He looked at her.

“Yes,” he said. “I imagine you are.”

She finished her whiskey and went back to the kitchen to finish cleaning.

He did not follow.

But when she came back through the study to leave, he was still there.

“My driver will take you,” he said.

“The contract includes transportation,” she said.

“I know,” he said.

She stopped in the doorway.

“Matteo,” she said. It was the first time she had used his name.

He looked at her.

“There’s something you want to say,” she said. “You’ve had it since I said the thing about translating meaning. Say it.”

A pause.

“Most people,” he said, “are careful around me.”

“I know,” she said.

“You’re not.”

“I’m being professional,” she said. “Professional doesn’t mean deferential.”

“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”

She waited.

He said: “Don’t expect this work to stay simple.”

“I never expected it to be simple,” she said. “I read the room Tuesday.”

“That isn’t what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” she said. “I’m telling you I have my eyes open.”

She left.

In the car, she thought about what he had almost said and what he had actually said and the space between them, which was where the meaning usually lived.

PART 2

The work was not simple.

She had known it wouldn’t be. What she had not entirely anticipated was the specific texture of not-simple that settled in around her over the following weeks.

It was not danger, not immediately. It was closer to watching. The sense of being, for the first time, inside a field of attention rather than passing through rooms unnoticed. Matteo noticed things. He noticed when she arrived early and when she had clearly not slept. He noticed when the espresso at a specific event was off by a fraction and he did not mention it but looked at her with the expression of someone filing information.

She noticed him noticing.

She was careful not to show that she noticed.

One afternoon, three weeks into the arrangement, she found him reading in the penthouse’s study when she arrived to set up for a midday meeting. He was reading in the original Italian, which she had learned he preferred.

“Calvino?” she said.

He looked up.

“The Invisible Cities,” he said.

“I translated three pages of that once,” she said. “As an exercise. The chapter about cities and memory.”

He set the book down.

“Which part?” he said.

“The section about Isidora,” she said. “The city you go to when you’re old and it’s the city you wanted to go to when you were young, except now everything you wanted is in the past.”

He held the book.

“And what was the translation problem?” he said.

“Calvino’s tense structure is doing something specific,” she said. “He uses conditional past to create a feeling of distance from desire. Most translators flatten it into simple past. It loses the sense that the desire is still present but unreachable.”

Matteo was quiet.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s the loss.”

“You’ve read translations?”

“And then the original to understand what had been changed,” he said.

She went to set up the espresso machine.

He said, without moving: “What made you stop translating?”

“Money,” she said. “Literary translation pays very little and takes a very long time and requires a publisher to care first.”

“And publishers?”

“Are not interested in translators they haven’t heard of,” she said. “Which requires them to have heard of you first.”

“A closed system,” he said.

“Most systems that require access are closed systems,” she said.

He did not respond to this directly.

She finished setting up.

The meeting arrived.

She made coffee and watched from the kitchen, which had sightlines into the dining room through a pass-through, and she translated the subtext of the meeting in her head the way she translated texts: attending to what was being communicated underneath the specific words.

What the meeting was actually about was a disagreement between Matteo and a man named Ferretti about whether certain old arrangements were worth maintaining. Ferretti believed they were. Matteo believed they were expensive and corrosive and produced diminishing returns.

The language they used was businesslike and imprecise.

The meaning was clear.

After, when Ferretti and his two men had left, Matteo came into the kitchen.

She was cleaning the machine.

“You followed that,” he said.

“The Italian was straightforward,” she said. “The subtext was straightforward too.”

“What was the subtext?”

“He’s afraid of you,” she said. “Not because you’re threatening him. Because you’re right and he knows it and being right means his world is changing.”

Matteo leaned against the counter.

“Most people hearing that meeting would have concluded I was threatening him,” he said.

“Most people were reading the words,” she said.

He looked at her with the focused attention that she had learned was his version of a response.

“Cora,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I should tell you something.”

“Tell me.”

He told her.

He told her the same things Marco had told her, with more precision and more context. He told her what the Serrano name meant in this city and what it had meant before him and what he was trying to make it mean going forward, which was different from its history in ways that certain people found threatening.

He told her that the work she was doing — the events, the meetings, the regular schedule — meant she was visible in his world in ways she might not have understood when she signed the contract.

“I should have told you before,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“I was thinking about it in stages,” he said. “What you needed to know when.”

“That’s deciding for me,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “I know that now.”

“What changed?” she said.

He looked at the book he’d left on the counter between sessions.

“Isidora,” he said. “The city you wanted when you were young.”

She understood.

“You didn’t want this,” she said. “When you were young.”

“No,” he said.

“What did you want?”

He looked at her directly.

“Something like this conversation,” he said.

She was quiet for a moment.

“All right,” she said. “Tell me things in sequence, not in stages. I’ll tell you what I can handle.”

“You can handle more than you should have to,” he said.

“Probably,” she said. “Tell me anyway.”

—

The threat arrived on a Thursday.

Not to her directly. To Marco’s café: a message left in a way that communicated someone had been inside the building after hours. Nothing taken, nothing damaged. The message was the fact of the entry.

Cora heard about it from Marco, who called her at seven in the morning with the specific tone of someone trying to sound calm.

She called Matteo.

He answered before the second ring.

“I know,” he said. “Marco already called me.”

“Is it Ferretti?”

A pause.

“No,” he said. “Ferretti is manageable. This is someone else.”

“Tell me.”

He told her.

The name was Luca Carrano. He had been a partner of Matteo’s uncle before Matteo restructured the family’s arrangements. He had lost influence and believed Matteo was responsible for the loss, which was accurate. He had been escalating in indirect ways for several months.

“The café was indirect,” she said.

“Yes,” Matteo said. “The café is mine in the sense that you work there.”

“You’re the target.”

“I’m always the target,” he said. “You’re the available angle.”

She sat with this.

“What happens now?” she said.

“I arrange for additional security at the café,” he said. “And at your apartment.”

“My apartment,” she said.

“If you’re willing,” he said.

The difference between what he used to say and what he said now.

“I’m willing,” she said.

“Cora.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “This is—”

“Don’t finish that sentence,” she said. “I read the contract. I read the room. I understood what I was stepping into. You told me clearly when I came in the door, so to speak. Don’t apologize for what I chose.”

A silence.

“Then what do you need from me right now?” he said.

“Tell me when something changes,” she said. “Before it changes, if possible. I’ll do the same.”

“Yes,” he said.

PART 3

She went to Sicily because she decided to.

This was the important distinction, and she spent the eight-day gap between Matteo’s invitation and her decision thinking carefully about it. She could construct a version of the decision that was about the money or about curiosity or about the specific afternoon light she’d heard coastal Sicily had in October. She could construct a version that made herself a passive recipient of an interesting offer.

What was true was simpler.

She wanted to go because she wanted to know what Matteo Serrano looked like outside the context of the city he operated in. Every text was different in its original language than in translation. She wanted to read the original.

She packed practically. She brought two books she had been meaning to translate as exercises.

She arrived to limestone and light and a villa that had the specific quality of places that had been loved for a long time.

The housekeeper, a woman named Elena who had the specific efficiency of someone who had run this house through several decades and had opinions about how it should be done, showed her to a room that faced east and the sea simultaneously.

“Mr. Serrano is in the grove,” Elena said. “He expected you on the later flight.”

“I took the earlier one,” Cora said.

Elena looked at her.

“He’ll be pleased,” Elena said, in a tone that communicated she was reserving judgment.

Cora set her bag down and stood at the window.

Below, the sea was doing what the Mediterranean did in October: making the color blue seem like something that had been decided upon carefully rather than arrived at by accident. The terrace below the window had a table with two chairs. One was positioned to face the sea. One was positioned to face the house.

She went to find the library.

It was at the back of the house, past the dining room and a narrow hallway where old photographs hung in frames that had been in the same place long enough to leave marks on the plaster. The library had floor-to-ceiling shelves on three walls and a window on the fourth that looked out onto the olive grove.

The books were in Italian, French, Spanish, English, and what appeared to be German. They were organized not by language but by something else — a logic she needed a few minutes to read.

They were organized by period of Matteo’s life.

She could see it in the spine wear and the margin habits. The oldest books were at the bottom left, heavily annotated. The more recent additions were at the top right, less marked, as though someone had stopped trusting his own responses in the years since.

She pulled one from the middle range.

Calvino.

Matteo was there.

He was wearing clothes she had never seen him in — the wardrobe of someone who was not currently being anyone in particular — and the effect was disconcerting in a way she recognized as meaning she had been reading a translation for months and had just encountered the source text.

“You came,” he said.

“You sent the address,” she said.

“I thought you might change your mind.”

“I nearly did three times,” she said. “But the logic kept holding.”

“What was the logic?”

“The same principle as translation,” she said. “If you want to understand the meaning, you have to go to the source.”

He looked at her for a moment.

“Come in,” he said.

—

The week in Sicily was the most interesting week she had spent in several years.

Not because of anything dramatic. Because Matteo, in the context of the villa, was the most legible he had been.

She found a library with his handwriting in the margins of old books and she read his younger self in the annotations — twenty-three and interested in Calvino, twenty-five and reading Borges in Spanish, twenty-seven and writing, in a margin next to a passage about the impossibility of perfect translation: *there is always loss. The question is only which kind.*

She showed him the note the second evening, over dinner on the terrace.

“You annotate,” she said.

“When I was younger,” he said. “It helped me understand what I thought.”

“What did you think here?” she said. Indicating the margin.

He read it.

“I thought that the goal was to choose what you’re willing to lose,” he said.

“In translation?”

“In anything.”

She put the book down and looked at the sea.

“You chose to lose the literary life,” she said.

“I thought I was choosing the family,” he said. “Later I understood I had been positioned to make that choice before I was old enough to understand what I was giving up.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m trying to build something that doesn’t require those kinds of choices from the people around me,” he said.

“Luca Carrano doesn’t agree,” she said.

“Luca Carrano believes that the old model is the only viable model,” he said. “He thinks reform is weakness.”

“Is he dangerous to you?”

“He is manageable,” he said.

“That’s not what I asked.”

He looked at her.

“Yes,” he said. “He is dangerous. He is the kind of man who becomes more dangerous as he becomes less relevant. I’m watching it carefully.”

“And to me?”

He held her gaze.

“I would not have brought you here if I believed you were in immediate danger,” he said. “But I want to be honest that there is no risk-free version of being connected to my name.”

“I understand,” she said.

“Do you?”

“I’ve been reading the subtext for months,” she said. “I’m not surprised by the text.”

He was quiet.

“What do you want?” he said.

She thought about the question.

“I want to finish the translation I’ve been working on,” she said. “The Calvino project. I want to do the work correctly, which means understanding what loss he intended versus what loss is unavoidable.”

“That’s the translation,” he said. “What do you want?”

She looked at him.

“I want to understand if what I’ve been reading in the margins of this week is what’s actually there,” she said.

“What have you been reading?”

“Someone who is trying to become something different from what he was made into,” she said. “And who is more uncertain about whether that’s possible than he lets on.”

He was silent for a long time.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s what’s there.”

“Then I want to know if that version of you has room for something that isn’t part of the old structure or the new structure,” she said. “Something that doesn’t fit either one.”

He looked at her.

“What doesn’t fit?” he said.

“This,” she said. “Whatever this is.”

—

They returned to Chicago because the city did not wait.

The return had a different quality from the departure. She understood more of the text now; the margin notes made sense.

Carrano’s escalation came two weeks after their return, and it came to the café again, and this time it was less indirect.

She was in the back room doing inventory when she heard the front glass break.

She stayed where she was, because staying was the correct thing to do and because she had read enough of Matteo’s world to understand which moments required stillness.

Marco came to find her.

His face told her the window was the least of it.

“Go,” he said. “Out the back. The car is already there.”

“Your staff,” she said.

“I called everyone before I came to you,” he said. “Matteo’s people are out front. The police are coming. Go.”

She went.

The car took her to the penthouse.

Matteo was there.

He looked at her with the specific relief of someone who has been calculating probabilities and is grateful to be wrong.

“Are you hurt?” he said.

“No,” she said. “Marco’s staff?”

“All accounted for. No injuries.” He looked at her steadily. “Sit down.”

She sat.

He sat across from her, which was the correct choice.

“Tell me,” she said.

He told her. Carrano had been escalating through intermediaries, using the café as a signal because the signal was clear without being direct. The most recent incident was intended to communicate that Matteo had a vulnerability.

“You’re the vulnerability,” he said.

“I know,” she said.

“I should have—”

“Don’t,” she said.

He stopped.

“I’m not a liability,” she said. “I’m a person. Carrano is the liability. His willingness to use people as signals is the liability.”

Matteo looked at her.

“Yes,” he said.

“What are you going to do?” she said.

“We have evidence sufficient to involve the federal investigators who have been building a case against Carrano for three years,” he said. “My lawyers have been in contact. The evidence from tonight adds to it.”

“You’re not handling it yourself,” she said.

“No,” he said. “I’m building something that doesn’t require that approach.”

She looked at him.

“Good,” she said.

“Cora.”

“Yes.”

“This isn’t going to resolve quickly,” he said. “It may get worse before it gets better. I can’t guarantee your safety in any absolute sense.”

“No one can guarantee anyone’s safety in any absolute sense,” she said.

“I’m serious.”

“So am I,” she said. “Tell me what you need me to do.”

He looked at her for a moment.

“Nothing you’re not already doing,” he said.

“Which is?”

“Being someone worth building toward,” he said. “Being honest with me when I’m wrong. Not performing patience when I make decisions without asking.”

“I don’t perform patience,” she said. “I correct you.”

“Yes,” he said. “That.”

—

Carrano was arrested four months later.

Not as a result of a single decisive event. As the result of a documented pattern that federal investigators had been building across three years, to which Matteo’s lawyers had contributed testimony and evidence, and to which the incidents at the café had contributed specific dates and witnesses.

The morning the news came, Matteo called her before she had finished her coffee.

“It’s done,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “I saw the news.”

“You were awake.”

“It’s six-fifteen,” she said. “I’m always awake.”

A pause.

“What are you doing today?” he said.

“Translation,” she said. “The Calvino project. I have a passage I’ve been stuck on.”

“Which one?”

“The chapter about Thekla,” she said. “The city that’s always under construction. The city where the inhabitants keep building because once it’s finished, they’ll have to start the story of why it was built.”

He was quiet.

“What’s the translation problem?” he said.

“The tense structure again,” she said. “Calvino puts the future and the present in the same grammatical space. Most translators separate them. If you separate them, the city becomes a project. If you leave them together, the city becomes a condition.”

“Which did he intend?”

“Both,” she said. “That’s the problem.”

Another pause.

“Come to the penthouse,” he said. “We’ll figure it out.”

“You don’t speak French,” she said.

“I speak Italian,” he said. “And I have the original.”

She thought about it.

“I’ll be there in an hour,” she said.

She arrived to find him at the desk in the study with the Calvino open and two cups of coffee — espresso for him, the pour-over she preferred, made correctly.

She sat across from him.

They worked through the passage together. He read the Italian aloud and she listened not to the words but to where his voice shifted, which was where the meaning was doing something different from what the grammar said. She made notes. He offered corrections from memory of other passages. They argued about one word for twenty minutes and both refused to concede and eventually agreed that the translation should contain the ambiguity rather than resolve it.

At noon, he set the text down.

“Cora,” he said.

She looked up.

“I want to say something,” he said, “and I’m going to say it before I decide not to.”

“Then say it,” she said.

“When I first came to the café,” he said, “I told myself I noticed you because you were attentive to the work. That was true. I also told myself that was the complete reason. That was not true.”

She said nothing.

“And when I hired you,” he said, “I told myself it was because the work was useful. That was true. And I told myself you were interesting in a professional sense. That was also true but not complete.”

“What was incomplete?” she said.

“That I wanted to be near someone who translated meaning instead of words,” he said. “That I had been in rooms for years where everyone was performing something and you were simply reading it. That—” He stopped. “That I wanted to know what you made of me.”

“I told you what I made of you,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “The margin annotations. The Isidora passage. The reconstruction.” He held her gaze. “What do you make of me now?”

She looked at the notes she had been making. At the text. At him.

“I think you are someone who chose the wrong translation of yourself for a long time,” she said. “And who is trying to find the source text.”

“And?”

“And I think the source text is interesting,” she said.

He looked at her.

“I love you,” he said. It came out the way she had begun to expect things from him: simply, precisely, without performance. “I don’t know the right way to say that in the context of everything that comes with my name.”

“There isn’t a right way,” she said. “There’s just the accurate way.”

“The accurate way is that I would like you to stay,” he said. “Not because I need someone. Because I want specifically you. The translation work. The incorrect readings I make that you correct. The way you ask for what you’re willing to accept.” He paused. “The fact that you know what’s in the margins and came anyway.”

She looked at the Calvino text between them.

She thought about Thekla, the city always under construction, where the future and the present occupied the same grammatical space.

“I love you too,” she said. “I have been reading it in myself for a while.”

“The translation work?” he said.

“The specific way I wanted to understand you better,” she said. “Which is what love usually is when it starts. The desire for a more accurate reading.”

He reached across the text and took her hand.

She let him.

—

They went back to Sicily in the spring.

The olive grove was in flower. The sea below the terrace was the color of old glass. Sophia had prepared the villa in the way of someone who understood that occasion did not require announcement to exist.

Matteo brought her to the grove in the late afternoon, when the light came in at the angle she had learned from the Calvino translation was the hour of available meanings.

He held something in his hand.

She recognized the ring before he spoke — she had been in the villa long enough, over multiple visits now, to have seen it in a box in the study where old things were kept. His grandmother’s. A stone the color of sea glass.

“I want to ask you something,” he said.

“Ask,” she said.

“Will you marry me,” he said, “knowing that I am not a completed translation. That I’m still finding the source text. That there will be passages I get wrong.”

“That’s true of everyone,” she said.

“It’s more literally true of me,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “I’ve been reading the margin notes.”

“Is that a yes?”

She looked at the olive trees and the sea and the ring and the man who had returned her grandmother’s bracelet because he had been paying attention, who had accepted every condition she had set, who had told her things in sequence instead of stages, who had asked her what she wanted.

“Yes,” she said. “With conditions.”

His mouth moved.

“Tell me the conditions,” he said.

“Everything in the contract stays mine,” she said. “The translation work. My own schedule. My own money.”

“Yes.”

“You tell me things before they change,” she said.

“Yes.”

“When you make decisions that affect me without asking, I get to be angry about it.”

“Yes,” he said. “I expect that.”

“And you read the translations before I submit them,” she said. “For the Italian accuracy.”

He looked at her.

“The Calvino project?” he said.

“And the next one,” she said. “There’s a Morante novel I’ve been thinking about for two years.”

He slid the ring onto her finger.

It fit, which she noted as significant in the way she noted everything: as information about what had been paid attention to.

“I have read Morante,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “I saw the annotations.”

“Was I right?”

“Partly,” she said. “We’ll discuss it.”

He kissed her in the olive grove with the sea behind them and the afternoon light at the angle of available meanings.

Later, on the terrace, she worked on the Thekla passage while he read Morante in the original.

The future and the present in the same grammatical space.

The city always under construction.

Both conditions, simultaneously.

She had found a translation that held them together without resolving them, and she read it back to him in the early evening, and he said yes, that was the meaning, and she made a note in the margin.

*The translation that doesn’t choose is sometimes the most accurate.*

THE END