"A man will say, if you ask him how many children he has, two, proudly. Then you learn he has a daughter he didn't bother to count. Only the sons count. That's the Mani.”"I wonder if I'll ever see my apartment again," Del said. "I've been trying to reconstruct it in my mind. There are large gaps. It's like parts of my life have melted away.”"Death and revenge," Frank said. "A lot of the killing revolved around the family. The house was also the fortress. That's the reason for these towers. Endless vendettas. The family is the safekeeper of revenge. They keep the idea warm. They nurture it, they promote the conditions. It's like those family sagas of crime in the movies. People respond to Italian gangster sagas not just for the crime and violence but for the sense of family. Italians have made the family an extremist group. The family is the instrument of revenge. Revenge is a desire that almost never becomes an act. It's a thing most of us are limited to enjoying in the contemplation alone. To see these families, these crime families, many of them blood relatives, to see them enact their revenge is an uplifting experience, it's practically a religious experience. The Manson family was America's morbid attempt to make a stronger instinctive unit, literally a blood-related unit. But they forgot something. The revenge motive. They had nothing to revenge. If there's going to be blood, it has to be a return for some injury, some death. Otherwise the violent act is ghastly and sick, which is exactly the way we see the Manson murders.”"Frank's people come from Tuscany. I tell him why do you talk like a Sicilian.”"Look at her. I love that face. That dull empty perfect face. How right for today.”"Suck a rock.”"Self-created," he said. "It's a blankness she wills out of her deepest being. Vapid. Does vapid say it? Maybe vapid says too much.”"If Manson is ghastly and sick," I said, "what do we have here, with our own cult?”"Totally different. Different in every respect. These people are monks, they're secular monks. They want to vault into eternity.”"The same but different.”"Film is not part of the real world. This is why people will have sex on film, commit suicide on film, die of some wasting disease on film, commit murder on film. They're adding material to the public dream. There's a sense in which film is independent of the filmmaker, independent of the people who appear. There's a clear separation. This is what I want to explore.”It was a long dark room. A boy kept bringing pots of tea, ouzo for Frank. Del was watching an old man sitting in a corner, a cigarette hanging from the middle of his face."Film," she said absently. "Film, film. Like insects making a noise. Film, film, film. Over and over. Rubbing their front wings together. Film, film. A summer day in the meadow, the sky's full of heat and glare. Film, film, film, film.”It was only when she'd finished talking that she turned her attention to Frank, grabbing a handful of hair at the back of his neck and twisting his head so that he might see directly into her gray eyes. Their public affection was reserved for the times when they heckled and mocked each other. It was an automatic balance, the hands and eyes as the truth-tellers of love, the things that redeem what we say.We went to a restaurant two doors down. There was a handful of red mullet in a basket out front. We were starting to eat when the old man hobbled in, worn down to an argument with himself, a cigarette still drooping from his mouth. This made Del happy. She decided she didn't want to talk to us anymore. She wanted to talk to him.We watched her at his table, gesturing elaborately as she spoke, pronouncing words carefully, words in English, a few in Italian and Spanish. Frank seemed to be looking right through her to some interesting object fixed to the wall."She's not part of anything," he said. "She doesn't know yet whether she wants to grow up and assume responsibilities in the world. She had a miserable time most of her life. She has a tendency to give in to fate or other people. But we tell each other everything. There's an easiness between us. I've never known a woman I could be so intimate with. It's our gift as a couple. Intimacy. I sometimes feel we've known each other three lifetimes. I tell her everything.”"You told Kathryn everything.”"She never told me anything back.”"You told Kathryn more than I told her. It was a kind of challenge, wasn't it? That was the mechanism between you two. You dared her to be part of something totally unfamiliar. You wanted to shock her, mystify her. She found this interesting, I think. Something her background hadn't encompassed.”"Kathryn was equal to any challenge I could come up with. Not that I know what you mean by dares and challenges.”"Remember the shirt? She still has it. Your
carabiniere shirt.”"She looked good in that shirt.”"She still does. It still bothers me, how good she looks in that shirt.”"Finish your wine. This is the stupidest talk I've had in ten years.”Del, the waiter and the old man were talking. The waiter was balancing an ashtray on the back of each hand."She's beautiful. Del is.”"Christ, yes, I do love her face. Despite what I say. It never changes. It's eerie, how it never changes, no matter how tired she is, how sick, whatever.”We sat in the hotel lobby, in almost total dark, talking. When Frank and Del went upstairs I walked through the streets above the waterfront. A strong wind came up, different from wind in an open space. It went banging through town, disturbing the surface of things, agitating, taking things with it, exposing things as temporary, subject to a sudden unreason. There were wooden balconies, chicken coops. The walls were crumbling in places and cactus grew everywhere. Figures in the light, in small rooms, wall shadows, faces.They want to vault into eternity.I would conceal myself in Volterra's obsession as I had in Owen's unprotected pain, his songs of helplessness.