After a concert, I said. Ah, after a concert, said Spadolini. Our lives are in the hands of God, he said. And naturally we don’t understand God. We don’t have the strength to understand Him. May God give you the strength to come to terms with your life, he said. All he wanted to do now, he said, was retire to his room, until the funeral. I’llprayfor the dead, he said, the dear departed. My sisters had expected Spadolini to spend the rest of the evening with us and were very surprised when he left them standing. Suddenly obliged to make do with me again, they proposed that we go up to the drawing room for a glass of wine. My brother-in-law was in favor of this, but I wanted to end the day my own way, without seeing any more of the family. I said I was going to my room, and left my sisters and my brother-in-law standing, as Spadolini had done a moment earlier. I went up to my room and locked the door but had no intention of going straight to bed, which would have been foolish, as there was no question of my being able to sleep. What Spadolini said about Mother was superficial, I thought. He described her as he wanted us to see her, from his point of view. This superficial view showed her as he himself wished to see her while he sat with us over supper, not as he had really seen her. He wished to see her as a woman who loved Austria and people and artists. I found this picture of my mother rather embarrassing, despite Spadolini’s presentation, but my sisters saw it differently. They took all he said seriously, but it was not to be taken seriously, I thought, though he had given a quite good account of the Etna excursion, being careful to describe it in a way that I could not really quarrel with and that would lead anyone who had not been involved, as I had, to regard it as a merely trivial episode. Yet I can still recall the sinister aspect of this episode, I thought as I sat in my chair, not turning the light on but surrendering myself to the darkness. He had described the Etna episode as though it had been trivial and insignificant, with nothing diabolical about it, but in fact it was utterly diabolical, I thought. What Spadolini had described as a harmless outing from Taormina to Catania and Mount Etna had in fact been anything but harmless. Their descent from the plateau on foot was a diabolical plot, I thought, hatched jointly by my mother and Spadolini. They took advantage of the snowstorm. They took advantage of the crevices in the ice. They reckoned with the drifting snow and deliberately ventured into the snowstorm, leaving me up there alone, not knowing what was happening, as they calculated. The pair of them were anything but harmless, I thought. With them calculation was an abiding principle. Over supper Spadolini had portrayed Mother as a harmless person who loved and respected him, but Mother was not like that, I thought. She was not a harmless person who would make a harmless excursion to Mount Etna with Spadolini. She was cunning, and her cunning was at least a match for his, far more than a match. Mother was always sly, I thought This ugly word seemed to fit her perfectly, and I did not recoil from it. The two of them were always sly. Spadolini described Mother as though she were a superficial woman with only good qualities, a woman who knew no evil, was on her guard against evil and would not allow it near her. But Mother was not at all like that — she was the epitome of evil, I thought. I did not shrink from pursuing this idea as I sat in my chair. Mother was evil personified, I thought. Spadolini must have seen this; he’s too intelligent not to have seen it, too well schooled intellectually, I told myself, borrowing one of his phrases. He had spoken as though Mother had been what they call a woman of the world, which she never was: she was a typical provincial, an upstart, I thought, and totally anticultural. This last term seemed more apposite than any other, for she naturally never loved Mahler or admired any composer. Music was just a means that she used to show off her latest tasteless clothes to the set she respected, though there was nothing about it to respect, I thought. It’s the most repulsive set there is, I thought, which has no time for any form of art and despises anything to do with art. Spadolini said Mother had imbued him with a love of Florence, but in fact it was only with reluctance that she went to this old city, only with reluctance that she visited its fine churches, only with reluctance that she attended concerts and exhibitions. And she never read a good book — which says a lot, I told myself. What Spadolini dished up was a completely bogus picture of Mother, I told myself. How distasteful his remarks suddenly seemed! Utterly hypocritical and mendacious, wholly tailored to the occasion, which he kept calling a sad occasion as he sat at the table, though without feeling any real sadness, for this was beyond his capacity. Mother suddenly became — this was not how he really saw her but how he chose to describe her — a woman of taste, full of the joy of living, a person who loved life, as he put it, interested in everything, a good mother, a born educator. And a born homemaker to boot, I thought. More than once he referred to her as the soul of Wolfsegg. As a profound observer of nature and a generous hostess; Spadolini spoke of someone who had turned Wolfsegg into a paradise for all of us, someone notable for her goodness and vivacity, whom we could not help loving, who was loved by all around her, because to love her was the most natural thing in the world. Your mother was goodness itself, he told us. She held the family together. He actually said, Your mother was a dear soul, and I am still wondering where he picked up that emetic phrase. In Spadolini’s speech one falsehood interlocked with the next, I thought. But Spadolini’s not really mendacious, I thought, just utterly calculating. The way he said a dear soul was quite inimitable. Nobody I know could have said it with such natural tenderness and nobility. Only Archbishop Spadolini, I thought as I sat in my chair and drank in the darkness. I took pleasure in going through Spadolini’s studied performance word for word, examining his vocal inflections, his verbal artistry. I can learn a lot from Spadolini, I thought, always something new. The way he pronounced the name Caecilia on greeting her, and the name Amalia, and the term brother-in-law, which came out with such unbelievably studied awkwardness, I thought. The way he turned around outside the Orangery, looked across at the house, and said, This magnificent building, this extraordinary work of art. The way he said to Amalia, Your mother told me many things about you, and always good things. And to Caecilia, Your mother always praised you. And to me, Your mother set all her hopes on you. He also spoke of Johannes, saying that he was a God-fearing man and the handsomest he had ever known, the purest character, the most restrained conversationpartner. Theselfless, reassuring brother. He had grown very fond of Johannes, as he had of my father; he had loved them both, right from the beginning. I once took Johannes on a tour of the Vatican palaces, he said, and presented him to the Holy Father.