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they went toward the living room. We sat there, immobile, our hearts pounding.
    We had to get out of there, and it didn’t end well. When we got to the garden, my mother came out to ask when I would be back, and so she saw Luca. Then she said his name, in a kind of greeting, but animated by surprise and dismay—unable to add something, as she would have, on an ordinary day. Luca turned to her and said, Good evening, signora. He said it politely, in the most normal tone there is. We are very good at pretending. We left while my mother was still there, in the doorway, motionless, a magazine in her hand, her index finger holding her place.
    For a while as we walked, one beside the other, we said nothing. Entrenched in our thoughts, both of us. When wehad to cross a street, I raised my head, and as I was looking at the cars go by, I looked at Luca, too, for a moment. His eyes were red, his head bent.
    The fact is that it had never occurred to me that his father was sick —and the truth, however strange, is that Luca hadn’t thought anything like that, either: this gives an idea of how we’re made. We have a blind faith in our parents; what we see at home is the just, well-balanced way of things, the protocol of what we consider mental health. We adore our parents for that reason—they keep us sheltered from any anomaly. So the hypothesis doesn’t exist that they, first of all, can be an anomaly— an illness . Sick mothers do not exist, only tired ones. Fathers never fail, at times they are irritable. A certain unhappiness, which we prefer not to register, occasionally assumes the form of pathologies that must have names, but at home we don’t say them. Resorting to doctors is unpleasant and, when it happens, moderated by the choice of doctor friends, familiars of the household, little more than confidants. Where the aggression of a psychiatrist might be useful, we prefer the good-humored friendship of doctors we’ve known all our lives.
    To us this seems normal.
    So, without knowing it, we inherit an incapacity for tragedy, and a predestination to a lesser form of drama: because in our houses the reality of evil is not accepted, and this puts off forever any tragic development by triggering the long swell of a measured and permanent drama—the swamp in which we have grown up. It’s an absurd habitat,made up of repressed suffering and daily censorships. But we can’t see how absurd, because we’re swamp reptiles, and it’s the only world we know: the swamp for us is normality. That’s why we’re able to metabolize incredible doses of unhappiness, mistaking it for the proper course of things: the suspicion does not arise that it hides wounds to be healed, and fractures to be pieced together. Similarly, we are ignorant of what scandal is, because we instinctively accept every possible deviation betrayed by those around us simply as an unexpected supplement to the protocol of normality. So, for example, when, in the darkness of the parish cinema, we felt the priest’s hand resting on the inside of our thigh, we weren’t angry but quickly deduced that evidently things were like that, priests put their hands there—it wasn’t something you needed to mention at home. We were twelve, thirteen. We didn’t push the priest’s hand away. We took the Eucharist from the same hand, the following Sunday. We were capable of doing that, we are still capable of it—why should we not be capable of mistaking depression for a form of elegance, and unhappiness for an appropriate coloration of life? Luca’s father never goes to the stadium, because he can’t bear to be in the midst of so many people: it’s something we know and interpret as a kind of distinction. We are used to considering him vaguely aristocratic, because of his silence, even when we go to the park. He walks slowly and his laughter comes in bursts, as if he were making a