They ate sweets, took compacts out of their purses, ingenious new lighters. Margherita had the same expression on her face as when, in class, she managed to pass from one desk to the next a caricature of the nun teaching. If her husband had unexpectedly come in, she would have blushed as she had the day the nun discovered her and sent her out of th

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All children want to be ordinary, and she never was, and that had been difficult – but all adults want to be extraordinary, and now she amplifies her strangeness, delighting in her ignorance of worldly matters and her tendency to speak sometimes in a biblical cadence, telling men she meets that she was born in 1887 (this being the year they dug Bet

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