Crusades, to which they had gone when they were young, and of what they had seen at the 
fierce battle of Acre, or fighting on the island of Cyprus or Rhodes, and what life had 
been like at sea, and in many exotic ports where they had been the terror of the taverns 
and the women.
  My mother was spirited and beautiful, with brown hair and very green eyes, and she 
adored country life, but she'd never known Florence except from the inside of a convent. 
She thought there was something seriously wrong with me that I wanted to read Dante's 
poetry and write so much of my own.
  She lived for nothing but receiving guests in gracious style, seeing to it that the 
floors were strewn with lavender and sweet-smelling herbs, and that the wine was properly 
spiced, and she led the dance herself with a great-uncle who was very good at it, because 
my father would have nothing to do with dancing.
  All this to me, after Florence, was rather tame and slow. Bring on the war stories.
  She must have been very young when she was married off to my father, because she was 
with child on the night she died. And the child died with her. I'll come to that quickly. 
Well, as quickly as I can. I'm not so good at being quick.
  My brother, Matteo, was four years younger than me, and an excellent student, though he 
had not been sent off anywhere as yet (would that he had), and my sister, Bartola, was 
born less than a year after me, so close in fact that I think my father was rather 
ashamed of it.
  I thought them both - Matteo and Bartola - the most lovely and interesting people in 
the world. We had country fun and country freedom, running in the woods, picking 
blackberries, sitting at the feet of gypsy storytellers before they got caught and sent 
away. We loved one another. Matteo worshipped me too much because I could outtalk our 
father. He didn't see our father's quiet strength, or well-fashioned old manners. I was 
Matteo's real teacher in all things, I suppose. As for Bartola, she was far too wild for 
my mother, who was in an eternal state of shock over the state of Bartola's long hair, 
the hair being all full of twigs and petals and leaves and dirt from the woods where we'd 
been running.
  Bartola was forced into plenty of embroidering, however; she knew her songs, her poetry 
and prayers. She was too exquisite and too rich to be rushed into anything she didn't 
want. My father adored her, and more than once in very few words assured himself that I 
kept constant watch over her in all our woodland wanderings. I did. I would have killed 
anyone who touched her! 
  Ah. This is too much for me! I didn't know how hard this was going to be! Bartola. Kill 
anyone who touched her! And now nightmares descend, as if they were winged spirits 
themselves, and threaten to shut out the tiny silent and ever drifting lights of Heaven. 
Let me return to my train of thought.
  My mother I never really understood, and probably misjudged, because everything seemed 
a matter of style and manners with her, and my father I found to be hysterically 
self-satirical and always funny.
  He was, beneath all his jokes and snide stories, actually rather cynical, but at the 
same time kind; he saw through the pomp of others, and even his own pretensions. He 
looked upon the human situation as hopeless. War was comic to him, devoid of heroes and 
full of buffoons, and he would burst out laughing in the middle of his uncles' harangues, 
or even in the middle of my poems when I went on too long, and I don't think he ever 
deliberately spoke a civil word to my mother.
  He was a big man, clean shaven and longhaired, and he had beautiful long tapering 
fingers, very unusual for his size, because all his elders had thicker hands. I have the 
same hands myself. All the beautiful rings he wore had belonged to his mother.
  He dressed more sumptuously than he would have dared to do in Florence, in regal velvet 
stitched with pearls, and wore massive cloaks lined in ermine. His gloves were true 
gauntlets trimmed in fox, and he had large grave eyes, more deep-set than mine, and full 
of mockery, disbelief and sarcasm. He was never mean, however, to anyone.
  His only modern affectation was that he liked to drink from fine goblets of glass, 
rather than old cups of hardwood or gold or silver. And we had plenty of sparkling glass 
always on our long supper table.
  My mother always smiled when she said such things to him as "My Lord, please get your 
feet off the table," or "I'll thank you not to touch me until you've washed your greasy 
hands," or "Are you really coming into the house like that?" But beneath her charming 
exterior, I think she hated him.
  The one time I ever heard her raise her voice in anger, it was to declare in no 
uncertain terms that half the children in our villages round had been sired by him, and 
that she herself had buried some eight tiny infants who had never lived to see the light, 
because he couldn't restrain himself any better than a rampant stallion.
  He was so amazed at this outburst - it was behind closed doors - that he emerged from 
the bedchamber looking pale and shocked, and said to me, "You know, Vittorio, your mother 
is nothing as stupid as I always thought. No, not at all. As a matter of fact, she's just 
boring."
  He would never under normal circumstances have said anything so unkind about her. He 
was trembling.
  As for her, when I tried to go in to her, she threw a silver pitcher at me. I said, 
"But Mother, it's Vittorio!" and she threw herself into my arms. She cried bitterly for 
fifteen minutes.
  We said nothing during this time. We sat together in her small stone bedroom, rather 
high up in the oldest tower of our house, with many pieces of gilded furniture, both 
ancient and new, and then she wiped her eyes and said, "He takes care of everyone, you 
know. He takes care of my aunts and my uncles, you know. And where would they be if it 
weren't for him? And he's never denied me anything."
  She went rambling on in her smooth convent-modulated voice. "Look at this house. It's 
filled with elders whose wisdom has been so good for you children, and all this on 
account of your father, who is rich enough to have gone anywhere, I suppose, but he is 
too kind. Only, Vittorio! Vittorio, don't... I mean ... with the girls in the village."
  I almost said, in a spasm of desire to comfort her, that I had only fathered one 
bastard to my knowledge, and he was just fine, when I realized this would have been a 
perfect disaster. I said nothing.
  That might have been the only conversation I ever had with my mother. But it's not 
really a conversation because I didn't say anything.
  She was right, however. Three of her aunts and two of her uncles lived with us in our 
great high-walled compound, and these old people lived well, always sumptuously dressed 
in the latest fabrics from the city, and enjoying the purest courtly life imaginable. I 
couldn't help but benefit from listening to them all the time, which I did, and they knew 
plenty of all the world.
  It was the same with my father's uncles, but of course it was their land, this, their 
family's, and so they felt more entitled, I assume, as they had done most of the heroic 
fighting in the Holy Land, or so it seemed, and they quarreled with my father over 
anything and everything, from the taste of the meat tarts served at supper to the 
distractingly modern style of the painters he hired from Florence to decorate our little 
chapel.
  That was another sort of modern thing he did, the matter of the painters, maybe the